Proto-Protestantism: Helm on Vocation

27 July 2021

Helm on Vocation

https://banneroftruth.org/us/resources/articles/2021/the-christian-mans-calling/

Helm begins by arguing that Evangelicals have adopted an essentially gnostic view of Creation and Redemption and a non-Christian anthropology. These claims are regularly made by Dominionist-minded thinkers and yet I have yet to find anyone who actually holds to these views. For nigh on forty years the Christian Right has laboured to eradicate them – largely straw men to begin with – and they have been successful. The attack is against new straw men they have substituted for the real problems they face.

Evangelicals are not monastic. They're worldly and given over to the world and it is in fact the Dominionist doctrine that has created these conditions – conditions in which the Church is sold out to mammon. If Evangelicals are to some degree disengaged from the culture war and political struggle the Dominionists would have them wage, it's not because of leftover Fundamentalist-Separatist proclivities but because they are literally consumed with making money and with status – the kind of middle class values the Dominionist class has prized. People that are deemed 'respectable', people with status, people who live in the right kinds of neighbourhoods and houses are going to be the 'grass roots' movers and the shakers in society and its Dominionist transformation. The Church has affirmed these people in their quest to be 'successful' and thus it's no wonder they're worldly.

Church leaders have noted that some take it too far and these consumerist tendencies become self destructive but if anyone comes along and actually teaches New Testament doctrine concerning our status as pilgrims and foreigners, regarding money, wealth, ethics and the like, they will be called gnostic. This is a sad truth that testifies to the degenerate state of contemporary Evangelical and Confessional Christianity.

Vocation in New Testament terms refers to our calling as Christians. Vocation as used by Helm, Veith, and others refers to a notion foreign to the New Testament – an idea that our work is sacred in itself and as such contributes to the formation of a Christian social order or as it is commonly referred to – 'Christendom', a concept that has no basis in apostolic thought.

Individualism is indeed a problem and has certainly worked its way into the Church. It's part and parcel of the capitalist order and its libertarian ethics and imperatives. But rather than condemn this system in toto on Biblical grounds, along with its ideology, epistemological foundations and ethics, the advocates of Dominionism are caught on a carousel ride, a hamster wheel as it were. They go round and round, condemning the fruits and results of the system that they keep going back to and advocating for over and over again. It's not a Christian system, nor is it rooted in Christian ethics and so – surprise, surprise, it produces a non-Christian result. Something about a dog and vomit come to mind.

Faith and life are connected not by viewing occupations as some kind of 'calling' (as the world does) but rather by subsuming occupations and the concerns of the world to our primary concern – the affairs of the Kingdom and our callings (or vocations) as Christians. We worship, we testify against the world with our lives, we evangelise, and we live as pilgrim-martyrs. But for the Dominionist this New Testament-rooted Christian life isn't enough.

Helm quotes the Dominionist's foundational passage in Genesis 1 but then like the rest of his colleagues, he ignores the effects of the Fall and the fact that the land we all dwell in – East of Eden, is not the garden. It's no longer the holy realm but a present evil age under the auspices of the god of this world, subject to vanity, and doomed to burn in the fires of judgment. The garden only comes again when Christ destroys this world and all its works and creates the New Heavens and the New Earth – a Kingdom not of this world.

What Helm is suggesting is that we effectively ignore the Fall and its eschatological implications and that we instead embrace syncretism – we collaborate with the world and its thinking to build a better world – a world that we must emphasize once again is not holy as it will burn in the fires of the Parousia. So much for a better or redeemed world.

And why is it syncretism? Because the New Testament doesn't tell us how to build a Christian culture – because there's no such thing. Those that pursue this madness are forced to combine Christian principles with the world's knowledge about politics, economics, banking, science, architecture, aesthetics and the like and the resulting hybrid is by no means Christian – though they attempt to pass it off as so.

It is little more than an attempt to sanctify the profane. It fails in its task and it sows confusion in thinking, doctrine, and ethics.

We do our work as Christians to be sure and our ethics should shine forth. But in many respects there is no Christian way to solder a pipe, erect a column, build a bookshelf, sew up a wound, or tally a balance sheet. In fact many pagans can do these things as good or better than Christians can which again testifies to their non-holy nature. If there was a Christian way to do these things, in other words a way only accessible to those redeemed by the Holy Spirit, then it would follow that we would produce superior work. But that's not the case nor should we expect it to be. If my theology is 'gnostic' by Helm's estimation then we can safely say his is worldly and syncretistic – Judaized and Hellenistic, the same kinds of errors being opposed on the pages on the New Testament, errors that had crept into places like Corinth.

It's also telling that as one reads his article there is no Scripture. And why? He has none to support him. It's purely a philosophical exercise.

While I cannot agree with the Puritans and their Christendom project, I will contend that their views were better and to some degree more Biblical than what I find with modern Dominionists. Their understanding of the Sabbath reveals that in the end they made distinctions between secular and holy vocations – distinctions that today's Reformed community (weak Sabbatarians though they may be) cannot make and are in fact hostile to.

I even had to chuckle regarding his interaction with Calvin. The Genevan Reformer may have embraced usury (to his shame) and yet he was no capitalist, no liberal. Neither were the Puritans (not by a long shot) and thus how foreign many aspects of their thought are to those who see the world through the Post-Enlightenment lens of Classical Liberalism that is the foundation of the present social order – an order many champion as Christian and an outgrowth of its influence. It's laughable, absurd, and even tragic.

Helm's essay is in the end a case of non sequitir. He has not made the case and cannot. He assumes Dominionism (by quoting a single Scripture out of context) and it governs all his thinking. It is the epistemological lens by which he judges all questions. He has made a wrong turn and thus the entirety of his argument collapses. Failing to root his thinking in the New Testament and its eschatology, he has misunderstood the Christian calling and as a result his epistemology and ethics are compromised – something painfully on display in this highly defective essay.