A Word about Mr. Spangler

In which I sell my cloak to desperately hand Michael Spangler the swords he lost.

This gentleman must be Spangler’s distant cousin.

Welp, it’s never ending, is it? Internet drama because of some ridiculous reason, or some ridiculous person, is as regular as the Sun rising. A current fracas, however, has lodged itself in my mind because of what it touches on a larger societal level, which is the polarization and foregrounding of racial identity and consciousness. I am referring to the deeds of Michael Spangler. If you aren’t familiar with him, I wasn’t at first, as with many of these “New Christian Right” lolcows. However, I got some exposure prior to this recent debacle thanks to NOT_OUR_GUY, who graced my feed with posts mentioning that Spangler is a geocentrist, desires a “Protestant Hitler,” and believes that Nazi treatment of Jews was a “great act of Christian charity” (yet thinks you need to repent if you believe in the Holocaust). Real swell and mature guy. Most recently, though, he’s been making the rounds for sharing comments made by him in a sermon concerning how “our church is White.” This, of course, was received warmly in the sophisticated salon of erudition that is X (formerly Twitter). The responses have expressed varying kinds and degrees, whether in terms of acumen, relevance, wit, or whatever else. While, clearly, I have little regard for “characters,” both hirelings and those who live off drama, I do perceive, as I have alluded, that this is tapping into volatile energies in our society, and, moreover, these are themes which I have not estranged myself from in the past and indeed have wanted to talk about, though perhaps in a more refined context. Yet, the opportunity has arisen and I have felt it best to avail myself of it.

There are some who have responded to this drama so far that I feel have done well. Chiefly, though I am also feeling solely, this accolade goes to Joseph Spurgeon. I will reproduce his X post in full:

Michael Spangler (whose ordination was revoked by his former Presbyterian denomination) and his followers argue that the error of Peter in Galatians 2 was only about Judaizing and therefore has nothing to do with ethnicity. They argue that because the underlying heresy was justification by works, Paul’s rebuke has no application to modern attempts to divide Christians along racial or ethnic lines.

But this misses the point entirely.

No one denies that the Judaizers were teaching a false gospel. The question is how Peter participated in that error. Peter did not deny justification by faith with his mouth. Peter did not begin preaching salvation by circumcision. Peter’s sin was his conduct. He withdrew from Gentile believers and separated himself from them.

Why did Paul rebuke him so publicly?

Because Peter’s actions communicated something false about the nature of Christ’s church. His separation suggested that faith in Christ was not enough for full fellowship among God’s people. A dividing wall had been rebuilt where Christ had torn one down.

In his article on race realism, Spangler spends much of his time defending propositions that are not actually in dispute. Churches are often homogeneous. Churches are often shaped by language, nation, culture, and providence. Different peoples have different histories, customs, and strengths. None of that proves his point.

The issue is not whether churches are often homogeneous. The issue is whether race and ancestry may become a principle of ecclesiastical separation.

A church that happens to be predominantly one ethnicity is one thing. A church that is intentionally organized around ethnicity, and which directs otherwise qualified Christians elsewhere because of their race, is something very different.

Spangler appeals repeatedly to prudence. He argues that separation may be justified by social tensions, cultural differences, immigration, national concerns, or the preservation of a people. But the Judaizers also had prudential arguments. They wanted peace between Jews and Gentiles. They wanted continuity with ancient customs. They wanted to avoid scandal among conservative Jews. They wanted to preserve a distinct people.

Paul did not deny that tensions existed. He did not deny that practical concerns were real. He asked a different question: Was Peter’s conduct in step with the truth of the gospel?

That is still the question.

A nation may have concerns about preserving its culture, customs, language, and people. Families certainly have an interest in preserving their own heritage and lineage. But the church is not a nation, and it is not an ethnic association. The church is the assembly of those united to Christ by faith.

The New Testament recognizes nations, tribes, tongues, and peoples. It does not make ancestry a term of communion.

This is why Galatians 2 speaks directly to what Michael Spangler is teaching. While he is not repeating the Judaizing error in exactly the same form, he is repeating the same pattern. He is introducing a new boundary marker into the church that Christ never established. He is treating race and ancestry as relevant to ecclesiastical fellowship in a way that the gospel does not permit.

In one sense, this is even worse than the Judaizers. The Judaizers at least taught that a Gentile could become a Jew through circumcision and submission to the ceremonial law. Their solution was false and destructive, but it offered a path, however misguided, into the covenant community they envisioned.

Spangler’s system offers no such path. The dividing line is not circumcision, ceremony, or culture. It is ancestry itself. The marker he introduces cannot be adopted, acquired, or changed. It is permanent.

The gospel tears down dividing walls. Spangler rebuilds them.

The gospel makes Jew and Gentile one new man in Christ.

I’ve mentioned this, but I haven’t been silent about these themes in the past. Primarily, at the start of last year I published my article “Let’s Talk About the Nation,” which I consider to be one of my best works so far, and to date is one of my top 3 performing posts.¹ If I may summarize, while I abhor the modernist categorizing operant in “ism’s” I absolutely am a partisan of nations, and do believe that a nation is defined by a principle of homogeneity, irreducibly expressed in ancestry, language, territory, and law/custom. By-and-large, and straightforwardly, I do accept that this ought to mean that America was founded of, by, and for a people and it is best for that to be preserved. What my framework concerning these matters rely on, however, are completely in agreement with what Spurgeon says here. Indeed, Spurgeon taps into a critical Reformation distinctive that is essential to this entire discourse: the doctrine of the two swords.

This is what Spurgeon intimates when he says: “A nation may have concerns about preserving its culture, customs, language, and people. Families certainly have an interest in preserving their own heritage and lineage. But the church is not a nation, and it is not an ethnic association. The church is the assembly of those united to Christ by faith.” I’ve recently been reading more of Stephen Wolfe because I am not the type of person who draws conclusions based on caricatures, but before I had done that I was reading other people, such as Richard Hooker, William Beveridge, Alexander Forbes, Henry Bullinger, Thomas Aquinas, plus, among the more contemporary, Alasdair Roberts and Bradford Littlejohn. You know what I realized, by having read early modern writers completely disconnected from our contemporary context and ills, when I started reading through Wolfe? “Oh…this is just what Hooker [et al.] was saying.”² Consider what Hooker says at the end of the second section in the eighth chapter of his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’s Book VIII:

We hold, that seeing there is not any man of the Church of England but the same man is also a member of the commonwealth; nor any man a member of the commonwealth, which is not also of the Church of England; therefore as in a figure triangulary the base doth differ from the sides thereof, and yet one and the selfsame line is both a base and also a side; a side simply, a base if it chance to be the bottom and underlie the rest: so, albeit properties and actions of one kind do cause the name of a commonwealth, qualities and functions of another sort the name of a Church to be given unto a multitude, yet one and the selfsame multitude may in such sort be both, and is so with us, that no person appertaining to the one can be denied to be also of the other.

Hooker gives expression to something I’d been working out myself prior to reading this, viz., what we call “the Church” is in reality a colloquialism, and when more properly understood it’s to be realized that “the Church” is the inbreaking of the New Creation, in which is contained “a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure word of God is preached and the sacraments be duly ministered” (Art. XIX). However, it’s not just that, for, as a later article speaks to, there is a civil domain just as much as there is an ecclesiastical domain (Art. XXXVII). That there are these two (swords, domains, spheres), and that they have a careful balance between them, is here in Hooker, and there in Wolfe. There you have historic Christian political theology in nuce.

Now, returning to Spangler’s case, Spurgeon is drawing what I laid out above in response to it. While the Church, both as the inbreaking of the New Creation and the congregation of faithful men, incarnates itself into the particular sphere of nationhood, it, in being properly ecclesiastical, does not have the same expectations or structures as the civil. This is what Spurgeon clarifies by saying, “The New Testament recognizes nations, tribes, tongues, and peoples. It does not make ancestry a term of communion.” Most certainly! Ancestry is not a term of communion, baptism into Christ and maintaining a state of grace is. The English Church, so cognizant as it historically was of the national principle,³ never admitted into its Eucharistic Exhortation any criteria of ethnicity, but merely the criteria of “Repent you truly for your sins past: have a lively and steadfast faith in Christ our Saviour. Amend your lives, and be in perfect Charity with all men, so shall ye be meet partakers of those holy mysteries” (BCP 1662). Spangler, pretending to have a biblically rooted vision of ethnicity, indeed finds himself far afield of orthodoxy, and recapitulating the error of the Judaizers, the oldest heresy in the history of the Church and the first assault on the Scriptures that have been handed down to us.

Against the historic, confessional standard of political theology represented from Hooker⁴ down to Wolfe, Spangler represents the opposite error. That is, he’s not just a neo-Judaizer (Europizer?), but an Ultramontanist, too. If we carefully invert the language of Article XXXVII to speak to the Church’s power and limitations, we’d get something like “when we attribute unto the Church the authority committed unto her by Christ our Lord, we mean not thereby that bishops or pastors should assume unto themselves the governance of kingdoms, the making of civil laws, the levying of taxes, the commanding of armies, or the administration of temporal justice; but only that spiritual power which Christ has given unto his Church, namely, to preach the Word of God, to minister the Sacraments, to exercise ecclesiastical discipline, and to bind and loose according to God’s holy ordinance.” The ecclesiastical can certainly exhort the civil to full, proper, and virtuous execution of its appropriate duties, and vice versa, which all sides grant (especially progressive Christians, who often say that the Church has a responsibility to be a “prophetic voice” to the culture/State). However the ecclesiastical cannot exercise the civil’s duties, and that vice versa, too.⁵ So, a church, even the national Church, cannot refuse communion to someone unless they violate the spiritual criteria for communion. Being a criminal could certainly mean that, insofar as committing a civil crime ordinarily relates to a grave sin, but it would be because such a person is a sinner that they’d be discommuned, not because they are a criminal.

However, it is not a crime to be non-White, even if a nation ought to be of, by, and for its people, and thus Spangler would again find himself without any justification for what he’s doing (other than the fact that he’s not a real pastor). Even if the Church was called to speak to a context of anarchic immigration, it would, again, not presume to enforce such, and it could not discommune non-native persons as such, but only insofar as they failed to meet spiritual criteria.⁶ Thus, I draw further from Spurgeon: “The position for which [Spangler] is actually known is that race and ancestry should function as meaningful organizing principles within the church. Yet when that claim is challenged, he retreats to examples that are not actually the point in dispute: language barriers, national churches, immigrant congregations, historical circumstances, and other prudential considerations.” This “motte-and-bailey argument” Spurgeon accuses Spangler of is more particularly this oscillation and obfuscation between the civil and ecclesiastical domains. To possibly psychoanalyze a bit, I think Spangler is a man who realizes that he cannot change government policy as easily as he can pretend to shepherd a congregation, and so out of his desire for civil change confuses it with the ecclesiastical and messes everything and everyone up as a result.

There still remains something to this discourse, however. And that’s how some of those adverse to Spangler have been responding. For this I have another representative post, one made by “Link”:

“These men are all the same. Almost every major Christian institution has exclusively racially based programs.

The second a white man starts one, they begin condemning him for something they have been doing all along. The cognitive dissonance is amazing.”

Now, firstly, let us highlight the glaring equivocation: “Link,” too, is conflating the ecclesiastical and civil. By “every major Christian institution” he is mainly referring to seminaries, particularly denominationally affiliated ones, but these are civil institutions, not ecclesiastical ones. Again, it doesn’t matter if something is run and owned by the “congregation of faithful men,” but whether it is the congregation of faithful men. However, where “Link” is correct would be in him implicitly pointing out how many of the people opposing Spangler don’t have the categories we’ve established above, and thus have no basis upon which to oppose one case but not another.⁷ There have been a number of posts made in the context of this discourse that drive this point home (e.g., here and here), emphasizing denominational bodies that have ethnically-focused ministries,⁸ or bodies that as a whole or in particular congregations are meant to be ethnic. These people point out “how could White ministries or White congregations be wrong, then?”

My response to this would be neither wholly supportive nor opposed. I do not oppose it for the same reasons I do not support it, and clarifying this will bring us back again to our political-theological principles (you can perhaps ascertain by now, then, what’s fundamental to this discussion). I don’t support a church being ethnically exclusive because the Church is not such, but rather a congregation of faithful men, not faithful White men. If you would, for a moment, imagine with me a port city in medieval France. Near the docks, there are enough, say, Greek sailors disembarking and floating around that they constitute a standing, though rotating, population of Greeks, and let’s say they’re concentrated in a particular ward of the city. These Greeks are concentrated, numerous, and faithful enough that they want a chapel so they can worship the same God as the native Frenchmen in between their voyages.⁹ Would the diocese over this city be wrong for establishing a chapel here with Greek-language services? No.¹⁰ Now, if one day in particular a busy French longshoreman realizes he’s gone overtime and missed Mass, but knows that the Greeks have a later Mass, could he not attend the Greek chapel? Again, no.¹¹ While the Church may be established by a magistrate for a nation, constitutional establishment entails more of the magistrate than it does the Church, whereas the Church continues as it always has been—the catholic assembly of disciples from all nations, living out that catholic mission through prudence and circumstance.¹² On the civil side of things, however, the matter would be different. The Church’s obligation is to minister faithfully to those within its cure. It would actually have to be the magistrate itself that would bear the fault if it were neglecting its duty to its people and creating an environment where such ethnic tensions could proliferate. Civilly, it’s one thing to have a standing, rotating population of foreigners, it’s another to have a standing, resident one.

It would seem, then, for Christians who want to religiously respond to this, their quandary is over how, when, and if the Church ought to prophetically speak to a civil magistrate letting replacement migration transpire. I, personally, feel like at that point I’ve said enough. However, outside of the Church, in the realm of civic engagement, faithful men temporally resident in their particular nations clearly have the warrant to do so. For nations that have not established Christianity as their faith the matter may be strategically and rhetorically different, but that would really only amount to different means for the same end. Wolfe, in historic continuity, exposits how the natural ends of the civil are perfected by the grace of the spiritual, not destroyed. At any rate, just to finish up with Spangler, the Ultramontanist neo-Judaizer is unfortunately a lolcow who has twisted up all his theology for a pitiful, misguided, poorly judged attempt to politicize his Gospel and commercialize his ministry to gain attention online. Could we but only have faithful, shameless preachers! What a fantastic notion.¹³

1. Controlling for “What Does it Mean to be ‘Reactionary’?” which I feel received disproportional, though welcome, attention due to my mention of Chris Burnet in it, who subsequently restacked it to his massive audience. That’s also an article, come to think of it, that fits the bill of what I’m talking about today.

2. I still have my reservations about Wolfe, and they can be summed up by what NOT_OUR_GUY says: “I think Wolfe is a thomist (dumb) and infected with internet brain worms but he’s not a Corey Mahler or whatever.” Thomism is often received as a rather modernistic framework, and Wolfe’s categories are emphatically those of the Schoolmen. Falling in line as I do with a Radical Orthodox theological methodology, it’s not what I’d prefer, but I can appreciate him expressing, as I’ve highlighted, the historic-catholic standard.

3. Bradford Littlejohn conveys this well in his article “The Reformation and the Quest for National Freedom.”

4. Representatively, particularly as a retrieval of the foregoing catholic consensus.

5. Wolfe also grounds this (Report on Reformed Christian Politics, 32-37).

6. So, given what I said above about what would discommune a criminal, a nonnative as nonnative couldn’t be rightfully discommuned, nor a migrant as migrant, but a criminal alien would be. Their sin would be defined in Rom. 13, flaunting of the magistrate’s laws designed for the public good. Moreover, even if a foreign population might be recognized as wrongfully disproportionate in reference to the native, that would not spiritually disqualify them—they themselves have done nothing wrong (though it may be held that their situation ought to be pastorally guided). What could is if such were inflamed to possess an attitude of pride or hatred toward the natives or their rightful self-advocacy, being works of the flesh prohibitive of the means of grace.

7. Indeed, his post is expressly directed toward such a person with hypocritical values.

8. In my province of the ACNA we have some dioceses equipped with “cross-cultural ministries,” for example.

9. Thus, let’s assume this is in 11th century France, where/when the Schism is still confined and recent enough that peripheral and mundane relations between Western and Eastern jurisdictions is status quo.

10. Note that Article XXIV was written contemporary to Latin editions of the prayer book, Latin primers, and a Latin text of the Articles themselves. For many learned men, or seminarians in a time when Latin was still the diplomatic and academic lingua franca, Latin was indeed the “tongue…understanded of the people.” However, with an eye toward the 90%+ of English peasants living on their farms, that tongue was clearly English, hence it is the language we see most Elizabethan religious material published in.

11. To this point, as some have pointed out in turn to the defenders of Spangler, Korean Methodist or Spanish Pentecostal churches would not turn away White Christians, though all interested parties would be cognizant of the language and culture barriers.

12. I will note that I’ve designed such an interesting example as this because I feel like so much of what we talk about is polluted by our ill-gotten modern context, and so by appealing to a context where much of our ills are removed from I feel we can gain more clarity.

13. I could add Article XXIII to the formularies referenced so far in the article, but I think wading into Anglican polemics would be far afield of this article!