Ithilien

Back from diocesan convention

2011-10-15T18:34:00.002-04:00

I just returned from the second day of our diocesan convention, which this year featured the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori. I was personally impressed with the Presiding Bishop, who preached a thought-provoking sermon about St. Teresa of Avila and answered questions with grace and humor. However, I was confirmed in my belief that her understanding of the Church is radically different from mine.

The most frustrating part of the afternoon question-and-answer period was her discussion of the issue of property fights between the denomination and parishes that wish to leave the Episcopal Church. She has been criticized for allegedly preventing such congregations from purchasing "their" property, preferring (where necessary) to deconsecrate the property and sell it for some other use. She was asked about a recent WSJ op-ed piece on the subject, and criticized it as "more fiction than non-fiction." However, she affirmed that the Episcopal Church does not let property go without deconsecrating it.

The problem I see with this position is that it is proper only to someone claiming to speak for the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. It is the Church as a whole that consecrates or deconsecrates. To suggest that fellow Christians cannot use consecrated property is to suggest that they are no longer part of the true Church.

As far as I could tell, the Presiding Bishop's ecclesiology is one in which the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is made up of diverse, parallel organizations that both cooperate and (at times) compete with each other (she used the example of a healthy ecosystem in which there are many flourishing organisms). And yet, as her stance with regards to the Episcopal Church's property shows, she winds up in practice speaking as if the Episcopal Church simply were the Church. If she really valued the presence of many competing "organisms," why not let the departing parishes go, facilitate their purchase of the property they had been using, and celebrate the resulting diversity?

The basic problem here is that however much a denomination may claim to be only part of the universal Church, denominations don't seem to be able to stop themselves from acting as if they were the Church. And I think the answer is to admit that a denomination is not even a Church in any theological sense.

There are local churches, gathered around a local bishop, and there is the Universal Church.

Everything in between is just administration.

Landmarks of Early Film #1

2011-06-18T16:37:00.005-04:00

Over the past few years, I've been watching a lot of early movies in more or less chronological order. I started doing this fairly systematically in 2009, but the first early-movie DVD I got from Netflix was back in December 2007: Landmarks of Early Film #1. This is a collection of movies from the earliest days of the Edison company and the Lumiere Bros. through D. W. Griffiths and the Keystone Cops. It was a great place to start my exploration of movie history.

Most of the movies on this disc are of primarily historical interest. The earliest ones were primarily experiments, though an interest in storytelling develops early on. Many of the early films were "actualites"--essentially what we would now call documentaries, though very brief and with a stationary camera. People would set up a camera outside a factory or in a train station and simply film what was going on. (Of course, one has to suspect that pretty soon the filmmakers started manipulating events in order to get more interesting results.)

Slapstick comedy is one of the genres that developed very early. Much of it isn't very interesting, at least to me. The humor often seems heavy-handed.

The three most famous movies on this disc are "The Great Train Robbery" by Edwin Porter from 1903, sometimes called the first Western; "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902) by the Frenchmoviemaker Georges Melies; and "A Girl and Her Trust" (1912) by D. W. Griffith. "Robbery" is historically interesting and somewhat enjoyable. The most talked-about moment in the movie is usually shown at the end, when one of the robbers turns and fires his gun at the camera; this seems to have nothing to do with the story (the robbers have been caught by this point), and as I understand no one really knows when it was originally supposed to be shown. "A Voyage to the Moon" seems to be largely based on Jules Verne. It's the most famous movie by Melies, who began as a stage magician and is best known for his development of special effects. Melies doesn't do a lot for me--I recognize that his technical wizardry was impressive, and that he had a quirky imagination, and I have more respect for what he did than for the bloated CGI that audiences flock to see today. But there doesn't seem to be any heart in his films--they're all trickery and crude spectacle. Historically interesting, but not particularly meaningful on other counts.

Griffith's "A Girl and Her Trust," on the other hand (a revision of a movie called "The Lonedale Operator"), is great melodrama with a plucky heroine who saves a safe from a gang of bandits (largely, in the final climax, by simply hanging on to it as they drive off with it--and her--along the railroad tracks). It has one of the great early chase scenes in the movies, and a lovely final shot of the heroine and her boyfriend sharing a sandwich while riding on the bumper of the train that has rescued her. Watching this movie made me a fan of Griffiths--about whom more to come if I continue this series.

"Blog tour" for my wife's book

2011-06-15T11:30:00.005-04:00

It may seem somewhat improper to review a book by my wife, but hey, she asked me to do it and I'm being upfront about my "bias"!

With said bias in mind:

Jenn's basic argument is that Methodists who pushed for the use of non-alcoholic "wine" in the Eucharist in the late 19th century were doing so based on a coherent theological/philosophical point of view based in "common-sense realism." I'm no expert on commonsense realism, so I won't discuss the more technical historical-philosophical aspect of Jenn's argument. But she captures the American Victorian Protestant ethos brilliantly. The theologians, moral reformers, and authors of household advice manuals whose work she examines all shared the conviction that clear thinking about the world, based on reliable sense impressions and free from undue influence by passion or imagination, was key to personal morality, social welfare, and true religion. They were deeply suspicious of the irrationality and self-indulgence that they identified with Romantic poets on the one hand and with Catholic immigrants on the other. They believed sincerely that "cleanliness is next to godliness" (maybe even identical with it).

The most appropriate symbol for this view of the world was water. Jenn quotes a number of "temperance hymns" which extol the benefits of "pure, cold water" (see p. 62, for instance). Jenn is writing about Methodists, not Mormons, but it may be significant that Mormons (like some early Gnostics) substituted water for the "fruit of the vine" in their version of the Eucharist. Methodists and other mainstream Protestants were too attached to traditional Christianity to follow the Mormon example in this. Indeed, temperance reformers initially did not condemn all alcohol, instead arguing for stricter standards of purity in the production of alcohol and fighting against the distilling trade. Properly produced beer and wine could be consumed healthfully in small quantities (this was John Wesley's view). Hard liquor and the "adulterated" beer and wine often drunk by the lower classes were entirely evil. Benjamin Rush's "temperance thermometer" reflects this early view (p. 21). By the middle of the 19th century, however, temperance advocates had moved on to the condemnation of all alcohol. This brought them into apparent conflict with the Bible, which frequently speaks favorably of wine and seems to mandate its use in the Eucharist. Lacking the claims to additional revelation put forward by the Mormons, how were Methodists and other mainstream American Protestants to handle this apparent conflict? The answer lay in the "two-wine theory," which argued that "pure" wine was in fact non-alcoholic. One of Jenn's most interesting sources (about which I heard a great deal while she was writing the dissertation that eventually became this book) is Frederic R. Lees' Temperance Bible Commentary, which goes through every verse in the Bible discussing wine and argues systematically for the two-wine theory.

The central chapters of the book deal respectively with "Alcohol and Science," "Alcohol and the Overthrow of Reason," "Alcohol, the Ideal Worker, and the Poisoned Chalice," and "Alcohol and the Truth of the Gospel." A further chapter discusses how similar concerns about cleanliness and rationality underlay the move away from the common cup toward small individual cups.

The concluding chapter, beginning "This is the story of how grape juice became holy" (p. 121), is a brilliant summary of the argument of the book as a whole, focusing on the contrast between a contemporary "liturgical" sensibility valuing mystery, ecstasy, and passion and the theological views that motivated the temperance reformers. Jenn is formed by the liturgical tradition within Methodism, and this book is an impressive exercise in getting inside the heads of people with whose assumptions she fundamentally disagrees.

Obviously the book is useful for all grape-juice-using American Protestants (not just Methodists) who want to understand their heritage on this point, as well as for non-American Protestants, American non-Protestants, and even those who are neither American nor Protestant, who may wish to understand the weird practices of this particular tribal family. However, in a society increasingly divided along "culture-war" lines, where people on both sides routinely refuse to see any intellectual validity in the other, the seriousness with which Jenn takes her subjects' ideas may be the greatest significance of the book. (Jenn is not, I'm happy to say, unique in this respect--there are a number of young scholars of American religion who are doing this kind of thing.) It is common to hear liberal intellectuals claim (or more tragically, just assume) that the "great unwashed" of conservative American Protestantism do what they do for fundamentally non-theological reasons, usually because they are being manipulated by millionaires. In the present instance, it is often asserted that the Welch family promoted non-alcoholic Eucharistic "wine" for purely financial considerations. Jenn shows the abundant intellectual roots of Eucharistic grape juice (if juice can have roots), demonstrating that 19th-century American Protestants, right or wrong, had coherent reasons for their views. She also points out that temperance advocates saw themselves as "progressive," interpreting Scripture in the light of science and clearing away the fetid foliage of tradition to make way for the light of common sense and responsible democratic citizenship.

In summary, this book is an engagingly written, often wryly funny work of scholarship that sheds light on some of the basic underlying assumptions of the mainstream 19th-century American Protestant tradition, which continues to shape American society today. For those of us who come from that tradition, the book helps us understand ourselves better. Thanks to Jenn's work, I have a much better understanding of just what it is about my religious heritage that I reject, and why that rejection has brought me where I am today. I stand firmly on the side of mystery and paradox against common sense. And yet when I read this book, I hear the rippling of cool, clear water and I have a better understanding of the moral and spiritual vision that shaped my childhood than I did when I was under its un-enchanting spell.

(Final note: one of the big questions left to be addressed by this book is the role of emotion and even Romanticism in the Wesleyan tradition. Our mutual friend Chris Armstrong of "Grateful to the Dead" tends to emphasize this--he and Jenn have some disagreements on the subject. In my own case, I find that the "Romantic" elements of my heritage are the ones with which I am still most in agreement, while the "common-sense" elements are the ones I am most inclined to reject outright. But this is not a subject that can be addressed adequately within the limits of this review.)

Response to Kevin DeYoung, Part 1

2011-03-18T13:50:00.011-04:00

The most thorough and widely touted refutation of Love Wins is a lengthy review by Kevin DeYoung, a pastor in East Lansing. I applaud Pastor DeYoung for his thoughtful and substantive approach. He's done an excellent job of explaining why conservative Reformed evangelicals (and no doubt many conservative Arminians as well) find Bell's views so troubling. Pastor DeYoung clearly takes seriously his responsibilities to defend the faith once delivered to the saints and to protect the sheep of Christ from false doctrine, but he carries out this task in a respectful and charitable way. I in no way endorse the common attitude among "emergents" and other less traditional evangelicals that substantive theological definition and debate is somehow "un-Christ-like."

I disagree substantively with Pastor DeYoung on a number of points, with regard both to his interpretation of Bell and to the theological standards he is using to critique Bell. Since his review is very well organized, I will follow his arrangement of topics, noting agreements as well as disagreements with his critiques.

I will start with DeYoung's third "preliminary," which attempts to close some "escape hatches" found in Love Wins.

As you’ll see, the book is a sustained attack on the idea that those who fail to believe in Jesus Christ in this life will suffer eternally for their sins. This is the traditional Christianity he finds “misguided and toxic” (viii). But in one or two places Bell seems more agnostic.

Bell is agnostic not about the claim that all who do not believe in Jesus in this life will suffer eternally (he clearly rejects this), but about the question of whether there will be some who, in spite of God's persistent offer of grace, eternally choose to turn God down. DeYoung continues:

These are strange sentences because they fall in the chapter where Bell argues that God wants everyone to be saved and God gets what God wants. He tells us that “never-ending punishment” does not give God glory, and “God’s love will eventually melt even the hardest hearts” (108). So it’s unclear where the sudden agnosticism comes from. Is Bell wrestling with himself? Did a friend or editor ask him to throw in a few caveats? Is he simply inconsistent?

The answer is much simpler. Bell is describing a position he regards as a serious theological option, held by "an untold number of serious disciples of Jesus across hundreds of years," not necessarily the position he himself holds. Bell's position is not self-contradictory or dishonest. He is consistent from beginning to end about his "agnosticism" concerning the question of whether some will eternally persist in saying "no" to God. He considers universalism to be a live option within Christian orthodoxy, but he does not consider it to be unquestionably true.

Similarly, at the end Bell argues, rather out of the blue, that we need to trust God in the present, that our choices here and now “matter more than we can begin to imagine” because we can miss out on rewards and celebrations (197). This almost looks like an old-fashioned call to turn to Christ before it’s too late. When you look more carefully, however, you see that Bell is not saying what evangelicals might think.

You don't have to look that carefully. DeYoung is proceeding on the assumption that Bell is somehow trying to pretend to be a traditional evangelical. He isn't. DeYoung doesn't want to allow Bell to say that our choices here matter unless Bell says that they matter in the same way DeYoung thinks they do. This is not a fair way to argue. By all means disagree with Bell. Condemn him as a heretic if you think you need to. But don't try to argue that he's being shifty or dishonest when he simply doesn't accept the dichotomies that you wish to impose.

He wants us to make the most of life because “while we may get other opportunities, we won’t get the one right in front of us again” (197). In other words, there are consequences for our actions, in this life and in the next, and we can’t get this moment back; but there will always be more chances. If you don’t live life to the fullest and choose love now, you may initially miss out on some good things in the life to come, but in the end love wins (197–198).

"Love wins" for Bell because God respects human freedom, so if people do choose to reject Christ eternally (something Bell hopes they won't do but recognizes as a possibility) love still wins. This isn't too hard to understand. The fact that DeYoung and other critics are confused by it says a lot for how their theological commitments restrict their ability to understand those who differ from them. If you have a theology that tells you that people who differ on major issues are probably not real Christians and thus are spiritually blind, then you aren't likely to take the trouble to think in the unfamiliar ways necessary to understand them. This is not a personal judgment on the character of Pastor DeYoung or his theological allies, but a judgment on the general tendency of conservative Calvinist theology.

The same problem plagues the next section of DeYoung's review, "Not Your Grandmother's Christianity," in which DeYoung argues that Bell is deeply conflicted about his evangelical heritage, wishing to criticize it while remaining faithful to it. To which I respond: you make this sound like a bad thing! I've noticed that conservative Christians, especially Calvinists, frequently portray any kind of mediating position or any position including tensions or paradoxes as a dishonest compromise, and urge folks occupying such a position to be "honest" and go all the way. After all, it's easy to deal with someone who rejects orthodox Christianity outright. But someone like Bell is annoying because he persists in identifying himself as an evangelical. DeYoung insists that Bell is trying to "evolve out of" his heritage, when Bell would say that he is calling evangelicals to be faithful to the best and truest elements of their heritage while questioning some other elements.

I understand how traditionalist Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox find this kind of language objectionable. But how can any Protestant object to such an approach on principle?

DeYoung ends this section thus:

This [Bell's supposed desire to "evolve out of" his evangelical past] presumes, of course, that the Christian faith is not a deposit to guard or a tradition that must not change (2 Tim. 1:14; 2 Thess. 2:15). Much of Bell’s polemic fails if there is a core of apostolic teaching that we are called, not just to embrace as part of our journey, but to protect from deviation and defend against false teaching (Acts 20:29–31).

I agree to some extent with DeYoung here. Bell is prone to rhetoric implying that any drawing of doctrinal lines is wrong and that there is really no such thing as heresy at all. This is an untenable position. However, the point at issue with regard to Love Wins is whether the particular claims made by Bell are at odds with the "core of apostolic teaching." I do not believe that they are. That doesn't mean that I agree with everything Bell says, and I certainly think he is often not the best advocate for his own positions.

I will end my response here for now. I will continue, when I have time, with a response to DeYoung's historical criticisms of Bell (and as a teaser: this is the place where I'm most inclined to agree with DeYoung--Bell's history is often very sloppy).

OK--now that I've actually read the book. . . .

2011-03-15T23:49:00.008-04:00

Here's a review of Rob Bell's Love Wins.

First of all, I had never read any of Bell's books before this. I have never been a fan of Bell or of megachurch celebrities or of people who write books

with short lines

like this and

even this.

(For one thing, it seems really mean to trees--perhaps Bell really isn't a liberal after all.)

When my students mention _Velvet Elvis_ I want to shake my head and say, "Can we please talk about Aquinas?" I bought and read this book because the controversy about it promised to get evangelicals talking about some issues that I think we desperately need to talk about. And in order to join in that conversation, I figured I'd better read the book that was causing the hubbub. I did not expect to be impressed.

In fact, I was impressed.

So impressed, that I think I'll try to write like Bell from now on.

In short, simple sentences.

Each one taking one line.

Like this.

Seriously, while I doubt I'll ever wean myself from long sentences with lots of parenthetical nuance, I and other academics could learn a great deal from Bell's skills as a communicator. The book has a good deal more depth than I expected or than most reviews so far have indicated. I wonder if in fact people aren't misled by the simplicity of style and presentation and assuming that Bell's nuance is simply inconsistent mush. It seems to me that on the contrary he is arguing for a consistent position with a good deal of room for mystery and speculation but little doubt about the main outlines. (To avoid suspense, I'll say that I think this position could be best described as "hopeful universalism"--quite a different animal, theologically, than straight universalism in my opinion.)

I certainly have a number of problems with the book (in terms both of content and method), and as I have time I'll describe them. But primarily I want to lay out what I think Bell's basic points are and why I largely agree with what I believe he is saying.

First of all, the only fair way to deal with the book is to step back from the heaven/hell question and understand Bell's broader argument about the nature of salvation. Bell is willing to be somewhat vague and elusive about heaven and hell because his broader agenda is to question a view of salvation that is primarily about escaping hell and "making it" to heaven. If these broader points are right, then his position on the afterlife is easier both to understand and to defend. As I understand this broader argument, it works something like this:

1. Salvation is God's redeeming and transforming work in the world, overcoming our sinfulness and restoring us to a right relationship with God, one another, and creation.

This seems like it shouldn't be controversial to me, but certainly many evangelicals speak as if salvation was simply about having our sins forgiven and going to heaven.

2. This saving work is God's, not ours. God has already acted decisively to save the world in Jesus Christ. Thus, nothing we do (including "accepting Jesus" or even repenting of our sins) changes God's attitude to us. Any differentiation between those who accept Christ and those who do not, those who repent and those who remain in their sins, purely affects our side of the relationship.

Here's where things get more complicated. Bell is drawing on the Augustinian/Calvinist conviction that salvation is God's work, as well as on the standard evangelical claims that Christianity is all about accepting what Jesus has already done and that true Christianity differs from "religion" because it is about grace and not works. (See p. 11.) Of course, this appears to lead either to universalism or to the view that certain people are eternally reprobate. Furthermore, historically the Catholic Augustinian tradition has insisted that the predestined need to be brought into a state of grace through baptism, to remain in it through perseverance in good works, and/or to be restored to it through penance; while the Calvinist tradition has taken on board the doctrine of justification by faith, so that all who believe (in a carefully defined theological sense) are elect and the elect are not God's children until they believe. (I will not talk about Lutherans here, because they're weird and because talking about them would lead us too far astray from Bell, though perhaps Bell ought to read more Lutherans.) Thus, the Augustinian traditions retain a tension between the claim that God has already saved us and the claim that there are conditions that we need to meet for salvation.

Modern American evangelicalism, of course, is typically not very Augustinian. As Calvinists would agree, evangelicals have turned "faith" into a human work by speaking of salvation as dependent on a choice to "accept Jesus." In philosophical terms, most evangelicals believe in "libertarian free will" (though the Calvinist minority is quite large and exercises influence far beyond its size). It is by our choice to believe or not that we place ourselves either among those whom Jesus has saved or among those who are damned. As Bell points out (still on pp. 10-11), it seems contradictory to say both "nothing you do can save you" and "you will be saved if you believe and damned if you don't."

At this point in his argument, it appears that Bell is indeed heading for universalism. If God desires the salvation of all, and if nothing we do saves us, then it seems obvious that all are saved regardless of their actions. But it becomes clear later in the book that Bell affirms libertarian free will strongly. This is why some readers have suggested that his position is incoherent. Logically, it seems that Bell must say either that all will be saved or that in fact what we do makes the decisive difference between being saved or not. Because I'm more or less trying to follow his arguments in the order he makes them (though with a good deal of summary, compression, and interpretation), I'll leave the question there for now. Same with the question of atonement theology, which may be the main difference between Bell's position and more old-fashioned Arminian evangelicalism. I'll deal with that in a separate post.

3. "Heaven" is the realm where God's will is done; "hell" is the realm where God's saving purposes are stubbornly rejected. Thus, both heaven and hell may refer to states of affairs existing right now. However, only in the "age to come" will heaven be fully implemented on earth.

This part of the argument clearly owes a great deal to N. T. Wright (particularly Surprised by Hope, which Bell mentions at the end of the book). There are some differences, partly but not entirely due to the fact that Wright is a good deal more careful. While Wright speaks of salvation as a present reality, I don't recall him speaking of heaven or hell on earth in quite the way Bell does (58-59). Indeed, Wright resists speaking of human beings "going to heaven" and does not describe the coming Kingdom as "heaven." Wright does a better job of maintaining the distinction between this age and the age to come. Bell also gives the body relatively less importance than Wright--he speaks of the disembodied dead enjoying "heaven" now, and the reception of new bodies in the final resurrection almost seems like an afterthought (at least compared to Wright, for whom it's the other way round). However, in this Bell is actually more traditional than Wright, and I like his emphasis on enjoying the presence of God. Wright's afterlife (or excuse me--life after life after death!) seems terribly busy to me, and I think Wright's hostility to Platonism leads him to miss some of the more contemplative, mystical themes in the NT and in Christian tradition. I find Bell preferable in that respect, although on the whole Wright is (of course) a much more profound and rigorous thinker.

4. God's wrath and judgment are always directed against evil and not against persons themselves, and thus are always directed toward the final goal of repentance and restoration. Kevin DeYoung (author of a thorough review of Bell's book from a conservative Calvinist perspective), accuses Bell of denying God's wrath: "In Bell’s theology, God is love, a love that never burns hot with anger and a love that cannot distinguish or discriminate." This is plainly false. Bell says:

When we hear people saying they can't believe in a God who gets angry--yes, they can. How should God react to a child being forced into prostitution? How should God feel about a country starving while warlords hoard the food supply? What kind of God wouldn't get angry at a financial scheme that robs thousands of people of their life savings? (38)

(Note: the view that God literally feels wrath is just as marginal in Christian tradition as universalism, but clearly both Bell and DeYoung are treating wrath as synonymous with judgment, and we don't need to get into the "does God have emotions" question here.) What Bell denies is a "wrath" consisting of final retributive judgment that closes off the possibility for repentance. Bell insists that the door is always open on God's side. I understand that for conservative Calvinists and perhaps some conservative Arminians this is an unorthodox position, but it's one shared by C. S. Lewis and many others. DeYoung's review risks misleading readers who don't share all DeYoung's positions into thinking that Bell is farther away from the mainstream than he actually is.

When DeYoung says that Bell's God doesn't "distinguish or discriminate," that's certainly true in the sense that Bell's God not only desires the salvation of all (a view DeYoung no doubt finds erroneous but with which most evangelicals would agree) but desires the salvation of all at all times. (Again, we'll get back to this later.)

5. The historical person we know as Jesus Christ is the divine Logos incarnate. Jesus' death and resurrection inaugurate God's new creation and form the decisive act by which God saves the world. However, the Logos has always been at work in the world, so that human beings who have no explicit belief in and/or knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth may still be saved by this very Jesus.

This is the most important--and most difficult--theological topic in the book, as DeYoung recognizes. DeYoung has gone after Bell in the past for Christological fuzziness, faulting him (correctly, in my opinion) for speaking in an interview of "resurrection" in a general sort of way rather than the resurrection of Jesus. DeYoung finds in Love Wins confirmation of Bell's unorthodoxy, describing the book's Christology as a "Joseph Campbell 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' view of Christ" and as "classic liberalism." As with many of DeYoung's criticisms, this claim runs squarely up against what Bell actually says (when taken in context). Here's Bell's description of the resurrection in chapter seven, "Dying to Live":

It's the eighth sign, the first day of the new week, the first day of the new creation. The resurrection of Jesus inaugurates a new creation, one free from death, and it is bursting forth in Jesus himself right here in the midst of the first creation. The tomb is empty, a new day is here, a new creation is here, everything has changed, death has been conquered. (133)

DeYoung seems to assume that Bell regards the resurrection of Jesus simply as one manifestation of the "divine energy" present in the universe. (This is certainly a valid concern in the contemporary theological context: see the 2001 Vatican document Dominus Iesus, which criticizes versions of Catholic theology that reduce Jesus to "one of the many faces the Logos has assumed" (chap. 2).) But that's not what Bell says. Bell consistently speaks of the resurrection of Jesus in the terms quoted above--as an event that matters decisively for the entire universe. Bell's paradoxical claim that Jesus is "as narrow as himself and as wide as the universe" (155) is a claim about the centrality, not the relativity, of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Bell's point appears to be that this Jesus who walked around in flesh and blood is the eternal Logos present everywhere and at all times. This is not heresy. It's orthodoxy.

The claim that human beings who haven't explicitly believed in Jesus may be saved by Jesus is usually called "inclusivism." It's certainly controversial in evangelical circles, though generally not in RC or Eastern Orthodox circles. Bell is emphatically an inclusivist. I understand that some consider this heresy, but the issue has been around for long enough that no one is justified in treating this as some new, shocking claim by Bell, or in confusing inclusivism with universalism or pluralism, as some of Bell's critics have done. I won't go into that further here.

So what about universalism?

In chap. 4, Bell raises the question, "Does God Get what God wants?" Bell begins by pointing out the tension inherent in the claim by many evangelical Christians that on the one hand God is loving and desires the salvation of all, and on the other that God will damn those who do not believe in Jesus (95-97). Bell has gotten a lot of flak for this, but he's raising a point that Arminian evangelicals need to consider. If we really believe that God desires the salvation of all, then yes, it does seem that if some are damned "God does not get what God wants." That is, of course, a standard criticism by Calvinists. Bell then gives a range of Christian responses, from the argument that God respects human freedom (103-5), to the argument that those who reject God become "ex-human" (105-6), to a second-chance position (106), to universalism (107-9). Because of Bell's rhetorical style, it is easy to understand this section of the text as a progression from a position Bell wants us to reject to the one he wants us to accept. But he does not in fact say this. He says (109) that these are all positions that orthodox Christians have held, and that the tensions inherent in all of them are tensions with which Christians need to live (115). He appears to see strengths and weaknesses in all of them. On pp. 113-4, Bell affirms the key contention of proponents of the first position (see for instance Jerry Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation) that human beings might in fact choose damnation even in the face of heaven. And insofar as he gives a final answer to the question, it is that "we get what we want" (116ff). While I don't like this as a slogan, he seems to be getting it from Lewis's claim in The Great Divorce that there are finally two kinds of people in the universe: those who say to God, "your will be done," and those to whom God says the same thing. (I like Lewis's formulation better, because it makes it clear that salvation is a good deal more than "getting what we want.") Lewis says elsewhere (in the Narnia Chronicles) that "all find what they truly seek."

Bell's final position, then, seems to be that

a. we cannot know for sure whether anyone is damned;

b. if anyone is, it will be because they persistently refuse God's offers of grace; and

c. the door for return always remains open (see especially his interpretation of the open gates of the New Jerusalem on pp. 114-15).

To my mind, b is unquestionably orthodox. I would also defend a. I am less optimistic about this possibility than Bell appears to be, but I do not think it can be considered heretical. The most dubious claim is c. I like Bell's interpretation of the open gates, and I certainly agree with Lewis that "the gates of hell are locked on the inside." I agree with Bell heartily, in other words, when he says that God always stands open to forgive anyone who repents. The question is whether a person can become simply incapable of repenting. Bell seems unwilling to say this (though he doesn't rule it out), and he certainly doesn't seem to think that death ends the possibility of repentance. I'm unwilling to throw out the idea that this life is unique as a place where we can be converted from the way of death to the way of life. This traditional view, ironically, stresses the importance of this life, which Bell wants to do. I think there are good reasons for Christians to believe that death does in fact "fix" our spiritual condition in some way. And I wish that Bell had discussed this and many other issues more carefully and rigorously.

I have many other small disagreements with Bell which I won't go into here, since this review has become a monster already. All in all, though, I find this book to be a winsome defense of a "hopeful universalism" position, and a forthright challenge to the tensions inherent in conservative Arminian evangelicalism. Of course Calvinists hate it. Bell isn't really addressing Calvinism. He's calling Arminian evangelicals out on the ways in which we assume certain Calvinist theological positions while not thinking carefully enough about their implications. And that's a much-needed challenge.

In this respect the controversy has a lot of similarities to the open theism controversy. In both cases we see Arminian evangelicals taking certain Arminian presuppositions in directions that more conservative Arminians don't want to go. To my mind the open theist position is much more clearly in conflict with traditional Christian orthodoxy, and is generally flawed (especially in its more orthodox forms--the closer they get to process theology the less this is true) by an overly restrictive and insufficiently apophatic use of logic to limit theological options. The parallelism between the two controversies does not mean everyone who takes the "conservative" position on one will do so on the other, or vice versa (though generally open theists do not seem to be found among those completely rejecting Bell's position). But both controversies raise questions about the coherence of garden-variety Arminian evangelicalism. This tradition has historically been doctrinally amorphous. The greatest weakness of Bell and the emergents is their comfort with doctrinal fuzziness and their unwillingness to engage in rigorous theological debate. I consider this book a step in the right direction--it's still fuzzier than I'd like, but it makes substantive arguments and engages very serious issues in a readable but thoughtful way.

As I said in my earlier blog post, the big question lying behind this controversy (as behind the open theist controversy) is: what is our standard of orthodoxy? Bell's is too vague and loose, admittedly. But the standards being deployed by his critics are themselves questionable. When you have people claiming that Bell has abandoned the essentials of Christianity in this book, you either have people who are misreading Bell, in my opinion, or people who have the wrong definition of the "essentials" in the first place.

George MacDonald, Rob Bell, and standards of orthodoxy

2011-03-12T12:31:00.004-05:00

The evangelical world seems to be in a tizzy about a book that almost no one has yet read. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. That's how the world of the tweet works. As a guy who blogs about every year or so, I find it hard to keep up. I'm still trying to digest things that happened hundreds of years ago.

In a rare foray into modern times, I attended a talk last night about George MacDonald (1824-1905), an author who has played an important role in my life since I was about thirteen and discovered the wretched modernized versions of his novels available in Christian bookstores. And that got me thinking about how relevant Macdonald's legacy is to what shows some signs of becoming the next "big controversy" in evangelicalism.

MacDonald was kicked out of the Congregationalist ministry for suggesting that salvation might have a broader scope than traditional Calvinism allowed for. He eventually embraced a kind of universalism quite common in 19th-century "Broad Church" circles, though few expressed it as powerfully or as pungently as MacDonald. MacDonald believed that God was every bit as awesomely sovereign and terrifyingly holy as Calvinism taught, but that the consuming fire of God's love would eventually overcome human sin and rebellion.

The talk last night was under the auspices of the "C. S. Lewis and Friends" group at Taylor University, and focused on the well-documented influence of MacDonald on C. S. Lewis (who called him his "master"). Lewis never adopted MacDonald's eschatology entirely, but he devoted a good deal of energy to developing a doctrine of hell that took on board MacDonald's criticisms of traditional Western Christian ideas. Lewis's _The Great Divorce_, in which MacDonald appeared as a heavenly guide, explores just how it might be that a person could finally reject God's love and thus be damned eternally. When challenged by "Lewis" the character with the fact that he had been a universalist on earth. "MacDonald" the character responds that yes, it is possible that everyone will eventually be saved, but we cannot know this. What we know, _The Great Divorce_ argues, is that the action of God's mercy is endless and that we can only defeat it by ceasing to be in any meaningful sense human beings at all. And at the same time, we know that certain choices on our part close us off from God's love and drive us farther into the "outer darkness." That's all we need to know. (Jerry Walls has developed Lewis's views in a more systematic way, though without the hint of "hopeful universalism" found in Lewis, in his excellent Hell: The Logic of Damnation.)

Given Lewis's immense popularity in evangelical circles, it's disappointing that so many folks are responding to Bell as if Lewis's thoughtful reworking of MacDonald's ideas had never occurred. Certainly Lewis's name has been invoked in the blogs dealing with Bell, and a number of people have made the same points I've just made (like I said, I'm slow. . . . ). But there seem to be quite a few folks out there who admire Lewis while being willing to write Bell off altogether as a heretic. And one has to ask, why? One blogger suggested that Lewis was much more tentative in his positions than Bell, and that may well be true. But it doesn't seem to me to explain the disconnect.

John Piper, who has distinguished himself in an unfortunate manner by bidding "farewell" to Bell in a Tweet, has a thoughtful lecture available online addressing precisely this disconnect between how he views Lewis and how he views the "emergent" writers (this lecture was given last year, before the controversy over Bell's new book). Piper argues that Lewis is not a good source for "Biblical exegesis" or even doctrine, and that pastors should not rely on Lewis's writings as resources for their preaching. He claims that Lewis's "Mere Christianity" omits many points essential to the true Gospel. And yet, Piper invokes Lewis as one of the major influences on his life and work, because of Lewis's focus on "the unfathomable rock-solid objectivity of God and his Truth and his gospel as infinitely Beautiful and infinitely Desirable and, therefore, as the unshakeable ground of unutterable and exalted Joy." (Piper goes on to give more reasons, but this is the most "fundamental.")

I think one could make a case that there are serious internal tensions in such an attitude--how can Lewis really be so deeply rooted in the reality of God, on conservative Reformed terms, if he basically got the Gospel wrong? But whether that's the case or not, I think that this attitude is fairly common among conservative evangelicals and needs to be challenged. For me, on the contrary, Lewis was a powerful influence precisely because he drew me out of sectarian Protestantism into an appreciation for the breadth and depth of true Christian orthodoxy. Lewis is a conduit to the "Great Tradition" of Christianity. And that tradition has been wrestling with the questions raised by Bell for some time now, with productive results which conservative evangelicals would do well to take more seriously. (Note for instance the acceptance of "hopeful universalism" among fairly conservative Roman Catholics, and the explicit adoption of an "inclusivist" position by Vatican II.)

The deeper issue raised by the Bell controversy is this: is the Reformed tradition (as interpreted by "new Reformed" folks like Piper) to be accepted by evangelicals as the center of orthodox Christianity? Are Arminian evangelicals to go on attempting to justify their orthodoxy by appealing to standards set by the Reformed? I object to this approach not because it makes us "second-class citizens," though it does (that's an unworthy consideration when speaking of Christian truth), but because it puts the center in the wrong place. We ought to be asking how we would justify ourselves to Athanasius and the Cappadocians, not to John Calvin or even Augustine.

By all means, let's care about doctrine, as the new Reformed urge us to. Let's avoid fuzzy thinking. And let's first of all avoid the fuzzy thinking of taking a relatively marginal, dubiously orthodox strand of Christianity (Calvinism) as the standard against which new ideas (or not-so-new ones!) must be measured.

What I believe about the Church--a muddled manifesto

2010-07-27T16:28:00.006-04:00

A year or two ago, on my friend Chris Armstrong's blog (Grateful to the Dead), I got in an argument about whether there was such a thing as "mere Anglicanism." As a result, I started writing what I called "An Anglican Manifesto," laying out what I believe as an Anglican. A very disgruntled one, but as a Methodist theologian once said to my wife when she described me that way, "Is there any other kind?"

The problem was, though, that what I was writing didn't seem very Anglican. Well, that was the point in a way--that I don't think there is a coherent "Anglicanism." Still, this isn't so much of an "Anglican manifesto" as a "Catholic manifesto by an Anglican"--a statement of what I understand historic Christianity to believe about the Church, and the problems that poses for Anglicanism.

I've held this in the "drafts" section of my blog for a long while for various reasons. But here it goes:

1. There is one, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, to which all baptized Christians belong, but in which we all participate imperfectly due to our sins and errors.

2. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in the form common to Eastern and Western Christians (that is, without the Filioque), is the basic doctrinal statement of the Church. Those Christians who do not subscribe to this Creed may fairly be described as heretics.

3. The Seven Ecumenical Councils, and generally the doctrines and practices commonly accepted during the first millennium of Christian history (which coincides with the doctrines and practices agreed on by the Christian bodies commonly known as the "Catholic Church" and the "Orthodox Church"), flesh out the implications of the faith defined in the Creed and are rightfully binding on all Christians. This body of faith and practice can justifiably be called "the Catholic Faith." To reject such doctrines and practices, or to adopt others fundamentally incompatible with them, is to reject historic Christianity and to render one's participation in the Church more imperfect than it would otherwise be. I will refer to such Christians as "unorthodox," to distinguish them from non-Trinitarian heretics. (What I'm calling "unorthodoxy" is traditionally considered heresy, but there are degrees of heresy, which I'm indicating by using two different words.) Ambiguity about this point--which is the case within Anglicanism, with some holding the position I've just described and others rejecting it--makes a particular church's claim to the title "Catholic" highly dubious at best, even in the absence of other factors.

4. Since the Reformation broke with the consensus of the Church as defined above, it was an unorthodox movement. Churches who base their identity on the Reformation are to some degree cutting themselves off from historic, orthodox Christianity, and ought to repent.That doesn't mean that all the doctrines and practices of the Reformation were wrong by any means, or that the Reformation was not provoked by serious disorders within the Catholic Church of the sixteenth century. It means that the Reformation is to be judged by Catholic teaching as defined in the previous point, and not the other way round.

5. Although, as stated in point 1, all baptized Christians belong to the Catholic Church, the term "Catholic Church" or "the Church" is most properly used for that body of Christians which has preserved the Catholic Faith--that is to say, which has not rejected some part of it or adopted formally a doctrine or practice incompatible with it. Even within the Catholic Church as so defined, there will be much sin and error. Outside it, there are many holy Christians with much to contribute to the Church. (That's without getting into the question of non-Christians!) Nonetheless, there is a clear, qualitative difference between the Catholic Church in the strict sense and those Christian churches which have rejected some part of the historic Faith.

6. The consensus of the Christian tradition (as defined in point 3) holds that the Catholic Church can subsist only in one body of Christians. In principle, any division among Christians involves the sin of schism, and there is always one group of Christians not formally guilty of schism (even though many members of that group may have done much to provoke the schism, being sinful like everybody else). The only justifiable reason for separating from another group of Christians is heresy/unorthodoxy. If some part of the Church no longer teaches the historic Catholic Faith, then the rest of the Church needs to discipline the erring members. In the present state of the Church, that means that either the Roman Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church must be the body in which the Catholic Church (as defined in point 1) most fully subsists. Obviously there are a lot of problems with this conclusion:

a. Most obviously, there are good arguments pointing toward both possibilities (technically, there's also the "Oriental Orthodox" and the "Church of the East," but let's keep things relatively simple). So the poor ecclesiological inquirer is left in limbo, unless one just closes one's eyes and takes a leap, or finds a "smoking gun" to point in one direction or the other. For me, the importance of unity and communion, and the concrete evidence pointing toward the importance of communion with Rome, make the "Catholic Church" the most likely candidate for being, well, the Catholic Church. But on the other hand, the Orthodox seem on the whole to be far more, well, orthodox, preserving a theological method that is recognizably that of the Fathers, and free from the legalistic over-definition that plagues the Roman Communion.

b. Whichever of the two "candidates" one is inclined to choose, one is faced with the fact that "the Catholic Church subsisting fully in this communion" is a lot more abstract than one might like, to put it mildly. (Note: I'm using RC terminology throughout--the term "subsists" comes out of Vatican II--but the Orthodox, as far as I can see, use different language to say similar things, except for their ultra-traditionalist wing, which is admittedly much stronger than its RC counterpart.) Roman Catholics like to talk about "the fullness of the Faith." But it's pretty obvious to anyone not completely eaten away by triumphalism that there are plenty of legitimate expressions of the Faith not found in the Roman Communion, and that it would be pretty hard to introduce under present circumstances. While the Orthodox, in my opinion, have a much more compelling core set of beliefs and practices, they also have much less room for diversity (ironically), insisting that the Tradition hangs together in all its details. So the same problem arises--as my advisor put it, one can't be Orthodox and sing Charles Wesley (well, maybe a few "Western Rite" parishes do--I'm not sure). And whatever the fullness of the Faith may be, I'm pretty sure it includes Charles Wesley.

c. Similarly, on the negative side of the equation, while both the RCC and the EOs can make a case for infallibility (stronger for the Orthodox, but not completely unbelievable for the Roman Communion either, if properly nuanced), it's pretty obvious that both Communions, as historic institutions, have messed up royally on a number of occasions. And it's pretty clear to me that these failings aren't just the result of generic human sinfulness, but of attitudes and patterns of behavior characteristic of the traditions in question. The Orthodox do seem to have a particular propensity toward cultural idolatry, identifying the Faith with cultural traditions and giving far too much weight to civil authorities in Church matters. And the Roman Communion does seem to have a propensity toward "putting on the Ring," using the weapons of worldly power in its own right and putting the interests of the Church as an institution above the claims of the Gospel. Are either of these failings really compatible with being the Catholic Church in sense 1? Not just part of the Catholic Church, but the Catholic Church in a way that excludes and supersedes the claim of other Christian communities?

If Anglicanism has any place at all, it is the space that exists between the competing claims of Rome and the East. Anglicans have no business arguing for a "mere Anglicanism" or staking out even a modest claim to Catholicity. Rather, we witness through our very existence to the brokenness of the Church. We ought to devote our energies not to defending our own claims but to admitting our own historic idolatry and witnessing humbly to the grace of God that exists even in what Ephraim Radner has memorably called "the ruins of the Church."

This is why I find Anglo-Catholicism to be a fundamentally mistaken project. Anglo-Catholics claim to be Catholic, and traditionally condemn Protestantism in terms that would make a modern Pope blush with embarrassment. But when it comes to addressing the errors of the Reformation, Anglicans need to admit that we have met the enemy and he is us. The same is true when addressing the juridical obsessions of Western Christianity (the Episcopal Church's present attempt to function as a religious equivalent of modern American democracy is no improvement over the Roman "tyranny" we are so quick to criticize) or the cultural captivity of the Orthodox (the Episcopal Church is largely a club of Anglophile snobs).

Our only "advantage" over other Christians is that we do not have to claim an advantage. We can admit to being orphaned Catholics, rootless Orthodox, petrified evangelicals. Instead of being the folks who have it right, we should claim to be the folks who know that we have it wrong. And even that does not give us an advantage. It's nothing to be proud of. In our brokenness and our disunion we bear witness to the crucified Jesus. But let's not kid ourselves. We could be in union with Rome or in full continuity with the historic riches of Orthodoxy and still be plenty broken. Precisely because our brokenness is what we share most fully with other Christians, we should not turn our admission of brokenness into a further excuse for separation.

This is my Anglican manifesto, which is neither very Anglican nor much of a manifesto. But it's where I am.

Religion and art--followup to a Facebook discussion

2010-03-15T17:43:00.004-04:00

Yet again I return to this blog after a very long absence (the longest yet). I hope to post regularly, but we'll see what happens. At any rate, the occasion for this post is a recent Facebook conversation. One of my friends asked why Christians no longer produce great art. I replied that this wasn't entirely a fair generalization, but that the proportion of good art to "kitsch" probably is higher than it used to be, for the following reasons:

1. Both the Church and society in general are much more democratic and anti-elitist than they used to be, and
2. The elites are more secular than they were a few hundred years ago (maybe more so even than they were fifty or a hundred years ago, though that's a more dubious proposition.
So we have an elite "avant-garde" art that is largely secular; a pop culture whose movers and shakers are also largely secular but which has room for significant religious elements, often distorted and watered down by commercialism and the desire not to offend; and a Christian "subculture" (particularly among evangelical Protestants) that subordinates artistic standards to the demands of simple piety crossed with commercialism.

In this post, I'd like to expand and clarify what I meant by "kitsch" and how I think populism affects the production of art in modern Christianity (especially American evangelicalism).

First of all (not to rush in where angels fear to tread or anything), I'll define art. Art, as I use the term, anything produced by human beings which stimulates the imagination and thus causes us to experience reality in a different or more intense way. The peculiar virtue of art is its ability to transform our experience by uniting thought and feeling. The more radically it transforms our experience of reality, and the more profoundly it unites in itself the various other ways in which we experience the world, the greater it is.

A work of art is "bad" (aesthetically) insofar as it simply triggers an emotional or intellectual response without uniting and transforming our normal responses to reality. Both emotionally and intellectually, art can fail in two very different directions, either in the direction of excessive simplicity or excessive complexity. In both cases, bad art fails to stimulate the imagination in a transformative way, instead producing a response that owes its strength almost entirely to non-imaginative sources.

Emotionally, an excessively simple work of art appeals to one of the basic human emotions in a way that simply reiterates and confirms our non-imaginative response to reality. So, for instance, a bad love song does nothing to expand and transform the experience of romantic love. Someone who enjoys an unimaginative, artistically poor love song is doing so because the mere use of a crude formula pointing at romantic emotion is enough to awaken the emotion. Someone who enjoys a bad hymn or worship song, and feels closer to God as a result, does so because they already have pious emotions and enjoy feeling those emotions awakened and confirmed. As I use the term, "kitsch" is an excessively simple work of art that appeals directly to the emotions in this way.

Similarly, an excessively simple work of art may appeal directly to one's beliefs. Bad art is often didactic--that is, it simply reiterates what the hearers/readers/viewers already believe (or what they can be made to believe through non-imaginative means, including valid argument).

Therefore, a good rule of thumb is that art escapes the vice of excessive simplicity insofar as it can be appreciated by people not emotionally or intellectually well disposed toward its theme and/or argument. Great love poetry may be appreciated by people who have never been in love and do not want to be. Great religious art may be appreciated by atheists, or people of another religion, or simply people who don't agree with the particular theological claim being made. When James Weldon Johnson's God says, "I'm lonely, I'll make me a world," I recognize this as good art because I find it powerful and appealing even though I think I have very good theological reasons to reject the picture of God being offered.

But there is another kind of badness into which art may fall. An artist may seek so assiduously to evade excessive simplicity that he/she produces art which relies for its effect _solely_ on its complexity, on its failure to appeal to common emotions or accepted beliefs. Such art is in fact relying on the pride of its consumers: "this must be good because most people don't like it." In the case of religious art, a Christian with pretensions to sophistication may actually value a blasphemous or perverse work of art beyond what it deserves, even though it goes against the Christian's normal emotions and sincerely held beliefs. There may be atheists who similarly value religious art more than it deserves, but I have never met one.

Note that when I speak of "excessive simplicity" or "excessive complexity" I'm not claiming that there is some ideal level of complexity--indeed, I think simplicity and complexity are hard to define. I'm using the word "simplicity" to mean the direct appeal to emotion or belief, bypassing the transformative and unitive power of the imagination. And I'm using "complexity" to mean the avoidance of such a simple appeal--the deliberate choice of a tortuous path for the sake of an imaginative effect.

T.S. Eliot, reacting against what he rightly saw as the "dissociation" of intellect from feeling, attempted to reunite the two by means of deliberate obscurity, the use of unusual metaphors whose relationship to the emotions was remote and often paradoxical, and so on. C. S. Lewis ridiculed Eliot for comparing the evening to a patient etherized on a table. And in fact I agree with Lewis that this isn't one of Eliot's better choices. But Lewis was so hostile to Eliot that in my opinion he radically undervalued the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" taken as a whole. And Lewis himself was a much poorer poet than Eliot (not that this is a reason to discount his critical judgments).

The two errors--excessive simplicity and excessive complexity--feed on each other. The more anti-intellectual and simplistic the popular art of a culture is, the more deliberately obscure and self-referential and complacent its elite art will become, and vice versa. But kitsch and didacticism (using the word here for bad didactic art--in my opinion there is also good didactic art, but that's another conversation) are always going to be far more common than their counterparts. Not only are the cultural elites, who are prone to excessive complexity, by definition a minority of any society, but it is harder for even a member of the elites to fall into the vice of excessive complexity than it is for people who do not worship sophistication to fall into the vice of excessive simplicity. A highly sophisticated person may enjoy simple art more than its imaginative value warrants, although this will be experienced as a "guilty pleasure" (and really sophisticated people may make a point of enjoying "guilty pleasures" as a way of flaunting their sophistication, especially since the advent of postmodernism, since one of the perverse sophistications of postmodernism is the claim that artistic value is purely arbitrary). But most people are never going to be tempted to enjoy bad art that errs in the direction of perverse sophistication. The emotions awakened by bad art are emotions that even sophisticated people feel.

Hence, cultural sophistication does make it relatively easier to produce and experience great art. One of the purposes of a liberal arts education is to give people the tools (and habituate them to the effort) necessary to appreciate art that takes a somewhat roundabout path to the mind and heart (especially when the difficulty in appreciating a work of art arises largely from cultural unfamiliarity, as is often the case). And the more one learns to appreciate the great art human beings have already produced, the more likely it is (by and large) that one will produce great art oneself.

Therefore, even though plenty of good art has been produced by people who were not highly educated or among the elites of their society, a society that generally devalues elitism and sees democracy as a spiritual value is going to produce poorer art on the whole. And a religious community that deliberately crafts its worship to appeal to the "masses" will not, generally, produce great art.

I want to expand further on this concept of "deliberate crafting to appeal to the masses" and its relationship to commercialism and the mass production of popular culture. But this has already been a very wordy post on a defunct blog! It remains to be seen whether I'll get back to this later, and whether anyone will care to read my ramblings.

Which Church Father are you?

2008-01-22T13:17:00.000-05:00

You’re St. Justin Martyr!

You have a positive and hopeful attitude toward the world. You think that nature, history, and even the pagan philosophers were often guided by God in preparation for the Advent of the Christ. You find “seeds of the Word” in unexpected places. You’re patient and willing to explain the faith to unbelievers.

Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

Why does anyone vote for Romney?

2008-01-18T14:42:00.000-05:00

It seriously puzzles me. OK, he's no doubt a competent administrator. But who cares how competent he is if he's sold his soul?

Romney and McCain campaigned in Michigan on the issue of the economy and the loss of jobs. McCain was honest, Romney gave a lot of smarmy feel-good talk that didn't mean anything, and Romney won. Did people seriously believe that Romney could deliver his promise to bring back lost jobs? Why would they believe a thing like that?

Romney has consistently taken the more immoral of two positions whenever given half the chance. His refusal to condemn waterboarding should disqualify him in the minds of anyone with any sense of decency.

McCain is an honest and honorable politician who would make an excellent president. For that very reason, he's almost sure to lose.

This campaign has almost made me think there might be some hope for American politics. Things aren't as sewn up as usual and there arethree serious candidates (McCain, Huckabee, and Obama) who seem to be sincere idealists. If any of those three gets nominated for their respective parties, I'll be surprised and delighted. I think Obama probably has the best chance of the three--too bad he's so wrong on abortion.

And yes, I'm trying to get back into blogging after another of my long hiatus. (And yes, "hiatus" is the Latin plural for "hiatus.")

Bush was right to veto the Iraq withdrawal bill

2007-05-05T23:54:00.000-04:00

The war was stupid and wrong from the start. We (Americans, British, etc.) went into it on false pretences, and we have almost certainly done more harm than good. But we are there now. You can't just charge into a neighbor's house and make a mess and then run off. We have made ourselves reponsible for what happens. To withdraw unilaterally simply compounds the evil we committed by invading in the first place.

We must withdraw when and only when it is clearly the desire of the Iraqis as a whole that we do so. I would applaud Congress if it explored the question of whether Bush should be impeached for his dubiously constitutional actions in the conduct of the war, but it ought not and must not impose a timetable for withdrawal. Such an action will only embolden the insurgents. We had no right to invade in 2003, and we have no right to leave now. We can leave only when we are unambiguously told to do so by the Iraqis. It's no longer our decision.

Pope Benedict praises Origen

2007-04-25T19:50:00.000-04:00

After 1500 years, Origen gets a break. Pope Benedict dedicated his Wednesday audience to him, saying in part:

I invite you to welcome the teachings of this great teacher of the faith into
your hearts. He reminds us that in the prayerful reading of Scripture and in a
coherent way of life, the Church is renewed and rejuvenated. The Word of God,
which never ages or has its meaning exhausted, is a privileged way of doing
this. It is the Word of God, through the work of the Holy Spirit, which leads us
always to the whole truth (cf. Benedict XVI, international congress for the 40th
anniversary of the dogmatic constitution "Dei Verbum," in Insegnamenti, vol. I,
2005, pp. 552-553). Let us ask the Lord to enable us thinkers, theologians and
exegetes of today to find this multidimensional nature, this permanent validity
of sacred Scripture. We pray that the Lord will help us to read the sacred
Scriptures in a prayerful way, to really nourish ourselves on the true bread of
life, his Word.

What is Anglicanism?

2007-04-01T22:26:00.000-04:00

As the crisis in the Episcopal Church appears to be nearing a climax (but haven't we been saying this for years now?), one hears more and more virulent rhetoric on both sides. And the most common charge made by "reappraisers" and "reasserters" alike is that the other side has somehow betrayed what it means to be Anglican. These charges are made with great sincerity, and I think they are both correct--given the presuppositions with which each group is starting.

On the liberal ("reappraiser") side, the definition of Anglicanism is primarily methodological. Anglicanism is defined in terms of the "three-legged stool" of Scripture, reason, and tradition (a definition which I find either tritely obvious and common to all Christians, or completely ahistorical and false as a description of historic Anglicanism); or it is defined in terms of the independence of national churches (which I admit is a historic principle of Anglicanism, but which I believe has always been our Achilles' heel); or it is defined in terms of some vague principle of not being very assertive or confident about doctrine, and particularly not being fundamentalist (or anything that looks to a liberal Christian remotely like fundamentalism) in one's interpretation of Scripture. Obviously if Anglicanism is these things, then conservatives are betraying Anglicanism. That is to say, we do not believe that Scripture, tradition, and reason are equal and co-ordinate authorities for Christian doctrine (neither, of course, did Richard Hooker!). And we certainly treat doctrinal and Scriptural questions in a manner that seems too dogmatic and "fundamentalist" to the "reappraisers" (few if any American Episcopalians are anywhere near real fundamentalism, but by liberal standards many of us look fundamentalist). And it is certainly true that "reasserters" are becoming more and more convinced that the complete independence of national churches is fatal to any attempt to maintain a common Christian orthodoxy, and that we must have some structure of mutual accountability if Anglicanism is to be more than a gaggle of sectarian national churches each pursuing an agenda dictated by the local culture. (To the "reappraisers," I would hold up the Nigerian antigay legislation as an example of this--do you really think that Nigerian Christians should be allowed to support such legislation and still be part of the Anglican Communion? I don't.) Yes, this requires us to rethink the position taken by 16th-century Anglicans over against Rome. And apparently to some liberal Episcopalians this is the ultimate taboo. We cannot suggest that our spiritual ancestors might have been wrong in rejecting the concept of an international ecclesiastical authority. (Note--such a suggestion does not require us to accept every aspect of the RCC's understanding of that authority--papal infallibility, for instance. This is a common scare tactic used by liberals, and it's intellectually empty.) We can question every other doctrine of the English Reformation, but not this one. . . . .

Conservatives, on the other hand, see Anglicanism in terms of beliefs and liturgical practices. To "reasserters," it seems downright perverse to accuse people of being "un-Anglican" for wanting to develop new authority structures in order to defend traditional beliefs and practices. To conservatives, liberals appear to be fighting to keep the windowpanes intact while demolishing the building at its foundations.

Consider the very different way two retired bishops have been treated in the Episcopal Church. John Shelby Spong published "Twelve Theses" which rejected most of the things Christians have traditionally believed. He was never disciplined. But William Cox gets swift and speedy justice from the ecclesiastical courts for daring to administer the sacraments without the approval of the local bishop.

I have heard sermons in Episcopal churches implicitly comparing conservatives to the Pharisees of Jesus' day as described in the New Testament. But surely the privileging of questions of jurisdiction and canon over basic issues of faith and practice is as "Pharisaical" (in the traditional, pejorative Christian sense) as anything one can find on the conservative side.

That is not to say that the conservative flouting of canons is to be justified. There's something to the charge that the so-called "reasserters" are looking more and more like typical American Protestants out to start their own church. But they are doing this because the pursuit of theological, moral, and liturgical innovation by liberals has weakened or destroyed the hold of traditional Anglican structures and conventions on the volatile and individualistic minds of American Christians.

Thoughts on Tanzania

2007-02-25T17:15:00.001-05:00

Since every other Anglican blog has naturally been holding forth for the past few weeks about the Primates' meeting in Tanzania, and since I'm trying to get back into blogging, here are my thoughts:

I am encouraged by the fact that the Anglican Communion appears to be holding together and that it is moving toward some kind of structure of authority and accountability. But I can't get away from the question raised by liberals on the one hand and Catholics on the other: on what basis does the Anglican Communion claim authority to decide controversial questions? We aren't the Church Universal. We are an incidental outgrowth of the British Empire. Not that God couldn't use the British Empire to form His Church (one could, after all, describe Catholicism--that is, historic Christianity excluding the Nestorians and Monophysites--as an outgrowth of the Roman Empire). But we don't claim to be the Church.

So while it's good that we're struggling toward being Church, soberly we know that we are at best one fragment of the Church. In other words, I can't really take much comfort from the victory of "my" side--if we are really winning--not only because I have become increasingly sensitive to the pain that such a victory would bring to the "losers," but also because the controversy itself awakens the basic ecclesiological doubts that gnaw at me as an Anglican.

And, of course, it's quite possible that the communique won't mean much anyway.

Lenten message from G. K. Chesterton

2007-02-24T13:10:00.000-05:00

The two great parties in human affairs are only the party which sees life black against white, and the party which sees it white against black, the party which macerates and blackens itself with sacrifice because the background is full of the blaze of an universal mercy, and the party which crowns itself with flowers and lights itself with bridal torches because it stands against a black curtain of incalculable night. The revellers are old, and the monks are young. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts of happiness, and we who are its misers.

On Tuesday I was old--I ate pancakes and sausage.

For the past four days I have been learning slowly, painfully, haltingly to be young.
Every morning of Lent, if we are willing to receive the grace offered us, the winged messengers of repentance come to us from the fiery mountains of the sun and place in our mouths the fruit that takes away a little of our age. And when we have become as young as the child born yesterday, we will be ready for the dance of Easter.

The real problem with the "Christian Right"

2006-10-17T13:45:00.000-04:00

The catchphrase on the Left these days (and among many who see themselves as moderate) is "theocracy." Allegedly, conservative Christians are pushing for an explicitly Christian government ruled by Biblical law, in which those who offend Christian codes of belief or ethics will be persecuted. These claims are supported by copious citations from the more extreme writings of the small group of conservative Protestants known as "Reconstructionists," who are in fact working toward an explicitly Christian society based on what they see as Biblical law (although they admit that this probably won't happen for centuries at best). The easy way to respond to this claims is to point out the huge diversity of belief within the "Christian Right," and the minority status of strict Reconstructionists. Still, it does seem to be true that Reconstructionists have influenced some of the presuppositions of the broader "Christian Right," much as (in an earlier "red scare") hardline Communists exercised a certain influence over a much broader community of left-leaning intellectuals.

I would like to propose a more radical thesis than a simple denial that most conservative Protestants are going to the "extreme" of theocracy. Theocracy is not in any sense the logical outcome of what passes for the conservative Protestant political agenda. It is not even (despite their own claims!) the true position of the Reconstructionists.

No, the problem with the Christian Right is not that they are too theocratic. It is that they are not theocratic enough. It's not that they reject the separation of church and state, but that they have bought into a particularly vicious form of that particular piece of Enlightenment propaganda. And this is true even of the dreaded Reconstructionists.

I came to this conclusion while reading Greg Bahnsen's contribution to the anthology "Law and Gospel: Five Views." This is part of a series of books on various topics of interest to evangelicals, in which representatives of different perspectives (Reformed, Arminian, dispensationalist, etc.) offer alternative views and criticize each other's contributions. Bahnsen (recognized as one of the more thoughtful and moderate reconstructionists) rejects explicitly the claim that reconstructionists deny separation of church and state. According to Bahnsen, church and state are to be sharply distinguished according to their proper function. The Church is to teach doctrine, care for the poor, and proclaim the Gospel, while the state is to maintain order and punish the wicked. The state thus has a purely "negative" function of restraining human wickedness (according to God's Law) and dare not overstep these bounds.

Bahnsen explicitly contrasts his position to that of Richard Mouw, accusing Mouw of violating true church-state separation by advocating that the government engage in legislation on behalf of the poor (I haven't read the work by Mouw to which Bahnsen was responding, so I'm relying on Bahnsen's no doubt biased summary). This is not theocracy--Mouw is closer in this respect to true Biblical theocracy than Bahnsen (though of course Bahnsen claims that the Bible is on his side).

The problem with religion in American politics is not theocracy. The problem is that two different (but equally faithless) versions of church-state separation are being peddled by demagogues on the left and right respectively. The left doesn't want society to have any truck with Christian values that clash with the expression of individual freedom. The right doesn't want to have any truck with Christian values that clash with patriotism and capitalism and law and order and the nuclear family. Both are denying some part of the Gospel. The answer to both is not theocracy per se but an unashamed proclamation of what the Puritans (of whom the Reconstructionists would claim to be heirs) would call the "crown rights of King Jesus" and what Catholics used to call "the social reign of Christ the King." This doesn't mean what either the Puritans or traditional Catholics thought it meant, because both were too influenced by the world in their definition of kingship. Christ's reign is always a reign of the Cross. The reign of Christ may mean, for instance, that English-speakers cease to be dominant in the United States because our King has told us that in showing hospitality to the poor and needy we are serving Him. It may mean that we lose the "war on terror" because winning it would mean acting in a way unworthy of the Christ who refused to call legions of angels to defend Him. It may mean that married couples are unable to keep up a lifestyle suited to their education because doing so would mean neglecting their duties as parents (potential or actual).

It's not the purpose of this post to say just what recognizing the Kingship of Christ will mean. Indeed, nothing is healthier for us right now than a vigorous intra-Christian debate over just what it means. I am privileged to teach at a Christian college where such a debate is going on (painful as that often is). But the possibility of such a debate is short-circuited when one side plays the "theocracy" card and the other plays the "secularism" card, each arguing that the other side should be ruled summarily out of court because it is not making a genuinely Christian argument at all.

Those who consider themselves the spiritual heirs of Martin Luther King, Jr., should be ashamed of accusing conservative Christians of theocracy simply because they have a different view of what the public implementation of Christian values looks like. The quarrel is not over whether religion should influence politics. The quarrel is always and only over how religion should influence politics and what kind of religion should do so. And the sooner that is acknowledged on all sides the sooner we can get on to the real debate.

Or rather debates--for the final irony here is that the accusation that one side is illegitimately bringing religion into politics violates the church-state barrier that really counts, namely the methodological one. People with religious convictions have every right to try to enact their beliefs into law, and their opponents have every right to fight them with all the weapons in the arsenal of democratic politics. And at the same time both sides also have the right to engage in a public theological debate as to the religious merits of their respective positions. But because this is not a country with an Established Church, the two debates are independent of each other (though not unconnected with each other). Recent attacks on the "theocracy" of the Christian Right (at least those launched by Christians such as Randall Balmer) ignore this. They claim to be defending democracy when in fact they are engaging in a particular theological debate running parallel to the political debate. Whether or not gay marriage should be recognized or abortion made illegal--these are both religious and political questions. As political questions, they should be decided by the proper instruments of democractic politics. But the question of which side Christians should take, and whether Christians qua Christians should care about these issues it all, is a specifically religious question and must be treated as such.

A better article on the same subject

2006-10-10T22:43:00.000-04:00

I particularly like the point that the invasion of Iraq went astray in part because of its exclusively secular approach. A lot of people misinterpreted a perfectly normal (for any Christian) remark by Bush about seeking divine guidance as some sort of claim of divine inspiration for the invasion.

It's probably true that conservative Christianity leads to a rather dualistic mindset and thus tends to favor the demonization of enemies (this is one of the places where "conservative" and "orthodox" definitely don't mean the same thing). But the explicit reasons I hear from conservative Christians for their support of the war sound almost entirely secular to me. I don't think their problem is that their thinking is dominated by religion--the problem is exactly the opposite. They use Romans 13 to justify full support for whatever bloody actions the government may think necessary, and anyone who questions those actions is allegedly engaging in some sort of liberal utopianism that ignores human sinfulness.

In other words, the war in Iraq is not and has never been a holy war driven by Christianity. Like most modern wars, it's driven by perceived national self-interest, but it derives fuel from bad political theology that hands the job of moral reasoning over to the state, while lending the state's actions [purported] divine approval.

Interesting article on American Christianity

2006-10-08T22:57:00.000-04:00

This report by the Council on Foreign Relations was published in the New York Times. It's a relatively fair account of American evangelicalism, though the tone (as one would expect) is patronizing, and there are some silly mistakes (such as the characterization of fundamentalism as "ultra-Calvinist"). At least they don't think that evangelicals are pushing for a theocracy, which seems to be a common belief on the left these days. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, especially with the appearance of Randall Balmer's book Thy Kingdom Come. Balmer unfortunately has put his seal of approval on this nonsense.

I'm hoping to get back into blogging now that things are settling down a bit, and I want to write on this topic as well as on my usual ecclesiological subjects. I agree that there are a lot of reasons to be concerned with the Christian Right. But criticism of conservative Christians as "theocrats" gets the problem exactly wrong, in my opinion. Of course there are the Reconstructionists/Dominionists, and undoubtedly they have provided some intellectual heft to the generally not very thoughtful conservative evangelical political movement. It's probably true that many conservative activists are more indebted to these ideas than they realize. But the same could have been said of hardline Communism in relation to the broader left-wing movement of the twentieth century. And of course just this was said by McCarthy. The same vicious rhetoric is being used on the left today--a new "red scare" (with far less basis in fact than the old one, IMHO) that like the paranoia of the fifties tars an entire wing of American society with the brush of hardline radicalism. (And actually even the Dominionists believe in a form of separation of church and state, contrary to liberal propaganda.)

This is perhaps just part of the game of democratic politics. We always make our opponents out to be more radical than they are, so that we can position ourselves as part of the mainstream. But in times of great social tension this polarizing game can become an extremely dangerous form of self-fulfilling prophecy. We use the alleged radicalism of our opponents as an excuse to become radical ourselves, and thus prompt our opponents to follow suit, turning them into the monsters we thought they were all along (and so justifying further extremism on our part).

The CFR article, for all its faults, avoids this approach. Perhaps this isn't as surprising as I think. I don't know the political composition of the CFR--it claims to be nonpartisan and this may be true. Ironically, I heard it mentioned a lot on right-wing Christian radio stations as I was growing up--they were of the opinion that it was part of a vast conspiracy to bring about the "New World Order." So it's good to see that they don't return the favor (except for the silly label of "ultra-Calvinism").

Evangelicals against Bush

2006-08-08T15:16:00.000-04:00

Christianity Today reports that evangelical leaders including Franklin Graham and Rick Warren are criticizing the Bush administration's stance on North Korea. They call for open negotiations with North Korea rather than the current emphasis on containment.

How come? I thought evangelicals were supposed to be mindless toadies of the Bush administration. And of course we know that any humanitarian concern religious conservatives may display is a sham, because we're all just hungering for the end of the world.

How is helping the Koreans going to bring in the Apocalypse?

Lots of stuff has been happening

2006-08-06T23:58:00.000-04:00

I have recently gotten a job at a college in Indiana (Huntington University), and the past few months have been largely taken up with getting a house, planning the move, etc. Hence my inactivity here. I do want to maintain this blog, however, and I hope to be more active in the future.

Reformanda vs. renovanda

2006-03-21T22:02:00.000-05:00

Here I go again after another of my long lapses. I'm not going to become king of the blogosphere at this rate, but that's OK.

An online acquaintance of mine, Tim Enloe, asked me a few weeks ago to expand a remark I once made to the effect that the Church is not "semper reformanda" (always to be reformed) but rather "semper renovanda" (always to be renewed).

Here's what I mean by this.

"Semper reformanda" asserts that one must, from time to time, question the doctrines and structures that have already been established. They must be compared with Scripture (and/or previous non-Scriptural Christian tradition) and revised or even discarded as needed. The underlying assumption is that the Church progresses into a fuller understanding and experience of the faith by a continual process of questioning and reformulation. There's an intrinsic paradox here--on the one hand Scripture is the standard of perfection by which all tradition must be judged, while on the other hand a fully adult form of Christianity beckons from the future. Emphasize the first half of this paradox, and you have fundamentalism; emphasize the second, and you have liberalism. Mainstream, historic Protestantism stands in a fruitful tension between the two. Often, the Reformation of the 16th century takes a secondary place next to Scripture as the archetypal act of reform--in old-fashioned Protestant circles any attempt to "reform the reform" in the light of pre-Reformation traditions is likely to be met with outraged protest. Sometimes a similar status is given to the patristic era, or parts thereof; and sometimes even aspects of medieval Christianity are seen as important steps in the development of a fully mature, and hence fully reformed, Christianity (Anselm's atonement theology, for instance).

So the position I'm describing does not exclude a respect for the past and for tradition. In this it contrasts with the "restorationist" position which believes it can sweep away the past entirely and reconstruct the New Testament Church. (I'm sure my good friend thoughtspot is going to protest that this is a caricature, and maybe it is. I'll let thoughtspot make the case!) There's a lot to be said for the "semper reformanda" slogan. Clearly any orthodox form of Christianity must maintain Scripture as the norma normans, the ultimate standard that regulates all doctrine and practice. (And yes, that means that the Council of Trent is only orthodox insofar as it can be interpreted so as to allow Scripture to remain the norma normans.) And just as clearly, the Church does stray from time to time--even if it doesn't declare false dogmas, at the very least it tends to overemphasize one thing or another, or deemphasize some vital point of Christian discipleship, and has to be brought back.

Here's the question, though: does this re-centering of the Church around the Gospel take place primarily through the restructuring of institutions and the reformulation of dogmas? And does it involve the rejection of the past, even in a partial sense?

The "semper renovanda" position I'm arguing would answer no to both these questions. Yes, restructuring of doctrines and institutions is needed from time to time. But historically, these restructurings generally create as many problems as they solve. Real progress takes place, I believe, when Christians learn to live more deeply into what they have been given. Any restructuring necessary proceeds from this inner renewal, and when reformation works the other way around it doesn't work very well. Do away with the papacy and you deliver yourself into the hands of the civil government. Free the laity from priests and you subject them to the far worse tyranny of scholars. Reject indulgences and you wind up with a forensic doctrine of justification that describes Christ's redeeming work in terms of the same kind of account-book juggling engaged in by the indulgence sellers.

Insofar as the Reformation was a truly positive force in Christian history, it was a movement of evangelical renewal focused on the message of forgiveness through faith in Christ. But as Catholics are discovering today (Fr. Cantalemessa's sermon before the Pope a few months ago is the most striking example) , this is not necessarily incompatible with Catholicism. The evangelical message per se did not need to split the Church. (Indeed, David Bagchi and others have pointed out that the earliest opponents of Luther did not single his doctrine of justification out as heretical. Only after Luther had been announcing for years that justification by faith destroyed the structures of the Papacy did the champions of the Papacy start to believe him.)

I don't fault Luther for linking the evangelical message to a reform program. Reform was indeed needed. Indeed, I don't have the heart to blame Luther and the other early Reformers. I understand why they saw the Papacy as a foul parasite on the Church's life. I understand why they saw the material piety of the later Middle Ages as rank superstition. I understand why they thought true renewal could only come through sweeping away scholasticism and pilgrimages and all the paraphernalia of late medieval Catholicism. But I think history has proven them wrong. Indeed, some aspects of Catholicism began to creep back as early as the 1530s. Scholastic philosophy was entrenched once again in Protestantism by the later 16th century. The "tyranny" ascribed by the Reformers to the Papacy was nothing compared to the tyranny exercised by civil authorities over the Church--often because the Protestants had handed over control to the "magistrate."

This is why "semper reformanda" is a trap when it becomes the central program of the Church. Sweep the dust away and it will start settling again immediately. Dusting is one of the duties of life (though I do it far too seldom). But if we spend all our time dusting the house we will never enjoy it. And our problems will only get worse if we decide the furniture is bad every time it gets covered with dust. We'll bankrupt ourselves and fill our lives with chaos trying to get new furniture all the time. The sensible approach is to dust as needed and accept the fact that cleanliness will never be perfect. We need to _live_ in the house rather than always trying to make it perfectly clean.

Erec et Enide

2006-01-22T22:49:00.000-05:00

In my last post I referred briefly to the medieval courtly romance "Erec et Enide," which I read this past year. I had intended to write a response to it on this blog some time ago, but never got around to doing so. Since I've brought it up, I might as well describe it in somewhat more detail, for those who were mystified by my brief reference to it yesterday.

Erec, the hero of the poem, is a young knight in King Arthur's court who becomes romantically involved with a poor (but "well-born") young woman, Enide, in the course of avenging an insult to Queen Guenevere. After defeating an arrogant knight in a tournament, Erec brings Enide back to the court and they are married. They have a rapturous wedding night and are clearly besotted with each other in every respect. Chretien emphasizes their complete equality, in social rank, in good looks, and in character. Their married life appears to be off to a good start--but their wedded bliss itself becomes a problem, because Erec has no further desire to do noble deeds and maintain his status as a valiant knight. This means that his vassals (he's a prince) don't win any glory (or booty) either, and they become restive. Enide realizes that she has ruined Erec's career, and she blames herself. Erec overhears her and becomes angry. (Chretien doesn't explain exactly why he is angry with her. Tennyson, in the Idylls of the King, has Erec--actually called Geraint in Tennyson's version--misunderstand Enide's words as a confession that she is in love with someone else. This is more plausible as a reason for his anger, but it is rather contrived and less psychologically subtle than Chretien's more mysterious version. I think it makes sense psychologically that Erec would make Enide the scapegoat for his own obsession with her, and that he would be provoked to do so by her obvious distress. He's sacrificed his career for her, so from his point of view the least she can do is be grateful. Footnote 27 of the online edition to which I've linked from the title of this post agrees with my interpretation, noting that the "jealousy" interpretation is found in the Mabinogion's version of the story. Since the hero of that version is called Geraint, that would seem to have been Tennyson's model, so I'm wrong in blaming Tennyson for what I find a less interesting spin on Erec's treatment of his wife.)

Erec rides off with Enide (much to her relief--she thinks he's going to abandon her at first) into the forest to have knightly adventures. Much of the rest of the poem consists of the usual knight-errant stuff--Erec fights off various marauding knights, evil giants, etc. But throughout these adventures, Enide repeatedly saves the day by warning Erec of approaching danger (against his explicit orders). This of course further wounds his pride--the point of the exercise is for him to demonstrate that marriage has not lessened his prowess in any way, and being dependent on his wife's scouting abilities spoils the whole thing.

At one point, Erec and Enide find hospitality with an apparently friendly count, who becomes enamored of Enide and offers to marry her and make her the lady of all his domains. Enide, of course, rejects his advances, even though he's being much nicer to her than Erec. The count then threatens to kill Erec if she doesn't give in to him, so Enide pretends to agree to his advances, asking him to come back later and overpower Erec. Then she warns Erec of the count's plans and they ride off together. The count comes after them with a large army, and once again Enide disobeys her husband and warns him that they are being pursued. Erec kills the count's foremost warrior and knocks the count off his horse, wounding him badly. The count comes to his senses (morally speaking) at this point, and praises Enide's cunning as well as her honor: "The lady who outwitted me is very honourable, prudent, and courteous."

Erec doesn't repent quite so quickly--it takes several more adventures before he can bring himself to "forgive" Enide for her criticism of him (i.e., her lament that she was causing him to lose his knightly honor). At the same time, he promises to return their relationship to that of lover and lady, in which the lady gives commands (in contrast to his imperious, indeed tyrannical behavior to her throughout their adventures): "From this time on for evermore, I offer myself to do your will just as I used to do before." Erec and Enide's trials thus end with Enide's complete triumph. Through her modest and loyal behavior, but also through her quick wits and her willingness to disobey her "lord" when necessary for his own good (though always with great reluctance), she has regained Erec's favor and put both him and her various would-be suitors to shame.

The poem doesn't end here. Erec and Enide have one final adventure, the "Joy of the Court." On his way back to King Arthur, they come to a castle where a knight named Mabonagrain waits in a garden with a beautiful lady. The knight challenges all who come into the garden to single combat, and up to this point he has defeated them all, killing them and putting their heads on poles. Erec, of course, defeats Mabonagrain after a suitably ferocious duel (bringing about the "Joy of the Court"). It turns out that the lady is a cousin of Enide's, who has made her lover promise to stay with her in the garden and kill every knight who came against him until a knight came who was able to defeat him. Mabonagrain and his lady have had a clandestine relationship--rather than asking for social sanction for their love they eloped from her father's court. Enide, in contrast, pointedly describes her relationship with Erec as a respectable courtship having the full approval of her family: "Fair cousin, he married me in such a way that my father knew all about it, and my mother was greatly pleased. All our relatives knew it and rejoiced over it, as they should do. Even the Count [Enide's uncle and the other woman's father] was glad. For he is so good a knight that better cannot be found, and he does not need to prove his honour and knighthood, and he is of very gentle birth: I do not think that any can be his equal. He loves me much, and I love him more, and our love cannot be greater. Never yet could I withhold my love from him, nor should I do so. For is not my lord the son of a king? For did he not take me when I was poor and naked? Through him has such honour come to me that never was any such vouchsafed to a poor helpless girl."

Mabonagrain and his lady are a foil to Erec and Enide. Their enclosed garden, complete with the rotting heads of good knights, is an image of romantic love turned in on itself, destructive both to the lovers and to their society (hence the rapturous "Joy" that follows Erec's defeat of Mabonagrain). "Erec and Enide" is a story about the social ramifications of erotic love. Erec's winning of Enide is only the beginning--the real conflict in the story is not between Erec and his various opponents in battle but between the couple's romantic relationship and Erec's social duties as a knight and a prince. Erec and Enide are model lovers because they are able to achieve happiness with each other without being false to their social duties.

If I've given the impression that Chretien is Jane Austen in chain mail, it's because that's the impression I received from reading the poem. I didn't expect it to read quite so much like a nineteenth-century novel. The experience has, I'm afraid, destroyed my already sagging confidence in the accuracy of Lewis's _Allegory of Love_ as an interpretation of medieval romance literature, and it's vastly increased my appreciation for the sophistication and wisdom of medieval culture.

Narnia in the Spotlight, Part 2

2006-01-21T20:14:00.000-05:00

A more interesting critique of Narnia than Toynbee's (not focused on the movie, BTW) is the article "Prisoner of Narnia" by Adam Gopnik. Gopnik is himself a children's writer (his books sound interesting and I'd like to read one of them). He appreciates Lewis's imagination, but he clearly resents the fact that Lewis insisted on trying to "imprison" his marvellous fantasies within the "straitened and punitive morality of organized worship." The power of Lewis's fantasy, Gopnik argues, is that his imagination liberated him (if only partially) from his self-chosen dogmatic prison. Fantasy, in Gopnik's view, should exist in its own right. It is harmed rather than helped by being associated with any actual system of belief. It is an escape for Christians just as much as for materialists, since in Gopnik's reading Christianity is intrinsically hostile to myth and imagination.

Gopnik supports his claim by invoking none other than Lewis himself, in the _Allegory of Love_. Lewis argues that the writers of Renaissance romantic epics--Ariosto, Tasso, and Edmund Spenser--could exploit pagan mythology for imaginative purposes because it had been "disinfected of belief." Gopnik sees this as a brilliant insight into the nature of imaginative writing, an insight belied by Lewis's later attempt to "reinfect" his mythopoeitic imagination with Christian belief.

It's an ingenious argument, and I'd have to reread _Allegory_ in order to respond to it adequately. I read it more than ten years ago, and it shaped my views of medieval courtly love literature until quite recently. But the more actual medieval literature I read, the more I think that _Allegory_ is nearly as wrong-headed as it is brilliant. For instance, Lewis says that courtly love was intrinsically adulterous, incompatible with marriage (i.e., married people cannot possibly be courtly lovers of each other), and anti-Christian. Perhaps that's true in some original "ideal type" sense. But I'm not sure even about that. Erec and Eneide, the first known courtly romance of Chretien de Troyes (one of the earliest and greatest masters of the genre) is a romance about how courtly love relates to marriage. The hero and heroine fall in love and marry in the first part of the poem. Being married to one's lady does turn out to have some problems for a courtly lover--most notably that since you can stay in bed with her all day you have less incentive to do noble deeds in her honor. And later on Eneide's loyalty to her husband is tested when she encounters an amorous count who offers her the kind of courtly homage that Erec no longer gives her. But the conflict between courtly love and marriage is precisely what refutes Lewis's thesis. The two things are not kept in separate compartments. One does not drive out the other. The problem of the poem is how to relate them to each other successfully. And the far more Lewisian (though still not adulterous) courtly love couple who appear at the end of the story are presented as a dysfunctional foil to the (ultimately) successful relationship of Erec and Eneide.

True, Erec and Eneide is a very early courtly romance, but that's the point. Lewis says that the attempt to reconcile courtly love with marriage came much later, and if I remember correctly he attributes it to Protestantism (though I think he acknowledges that it's prefigured in Chaucer--at least I hope he does). But what we find in Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale," or even in Spenser, is not radically different (it seems to me) from what we find in Chretien.

I'm not sure that Lewis's argument about Renaissance mythological poetry fares much better. After all, the pagan gods were invoked in a very similar way throughout medieval literature. (Erwin Panovsky--at least I think that's who it was--in an article I once read on Renaissance art made the point that what was new in the Renaissance was the combination of pagan themes and classical style; both of these things had occurred separately at various points throughout the Middle Ages.) How does poetry "spread its wings" less freely in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" than in Tasso or Ariosto? And Spenser's use of pagan mythology is wound together with a copious use of Christian imagery. Lewis argues that since Spenser is a Protestant, this use of Catholic imagery is equally part of the "machinery" and is not related to Spenser's actual beliefs. But I don't think it's that simple. Protestant though Spenser was, he is clearly drawing on a tradition of Christian chivalry that he thinks has a very real relevance for Elizabethan courtiers. And I'd argue that the same is true of his use of pagan imagery. Spenser doesn't worship pagan gods, but he does believe in the realities symbolized by the "Garden of Adonis" in book 3 of the Faerie Queene. (Lewis, I should add, does not suggest otherwise.)

Insofar as the Renaissance writers do use pagan imagery purely for its own sake with no relationship to what they actually believe, I think that it weakens their art. I tend to agree with Tolkien to some extent that there is something very flimsy and superficial about much of the mythological machinery in Renaissance poetry (and still more so in the 17th and 18th centuries). Where Renaissance mythological writing is strongest--as in Spenser--it is strong precisely because it is trying to bring pagan and Christian (and, in Spenser, Catholic and Protestant) visions of life together rather than keeping them in separate compartments.

All of this is to say that insofar as Lewis and Gopnik agree, Lewis is wrong. And he was wrong on a lot of points in the Allegory of Love precisely because he was only recently converted and still suffered from his pre-conversion habit of keeping truth and imagination separate. (I'm not just talking about Christian truth here, but reality of all sorts. Lewis admitted after his experience with Joy, for instance, that he had been wrong in the "Allegory" when he treated courtly love as a purely literary construct. Gopnik makes a great deal of Joy's impact on Lewis. But part of that impact was the final erasure of the schizophrenia which Gopnik rejoices to discover in _Allegory_.) This was the subject of Lewis's "Great War" with Owen Barfield in the 1920s. Gopnik is absolutely right in suggesting that for Lewis Christianity was an escape from that separation. But Lewis was not guilty of "bad conscience" in trying to bring truth and imagination back together. Rather, he was struggling toward imaginative maturity--that complete fusion of intellect and intuition which his youthful atheism had made impossible.

Owen Barfield's criticism of Lewis is far more insightful than Gopnik's, I think. Barfield claimed that Lewis refused to discuss the subject matter of the "Great War" after his conversion and showed signs of great emotional distress when Barfield tried to bring the matter up. Certainly the relationship of imagination and truth continued to be a sore spot for Lewis. Insofar as the _Chronicles_ are too didactic (and naturally, as a Christian, I find this to be the case far less often than Gopnik does), it's because Lewis had not yet fully achieved that maturity. Few of us ever do. But _Till We Have Faces_ (didactic as it is) comes even closer than _Narnia_, I think. And there's reason to think that Lewis was still struggling with the issue at the end of his life.

Among the papers found after Lewis's death was the beginning of a novel set after the fall of Troy. Lewis took as his starting point a Greek tradition that the "real" Helen had never gone to Troy at all. Rather, a simulacrum of her had suffered and aged through the long years of the siege, while the real woman remained in Egypt, magically preserved in all her beauty to be reclaimed by her husband after the war. Lewis's manuscript ends with Menelaus face to face with the dilemma: which is the real Helen? The faded, middle-aged woman whom he found at Troy, or the radiant vision presented to him by the Egyptian priests?

This is the dilemma that we all face, not only in religion but in love, in work, in every aspect of our lives. Gopnik makes a great deal of the contrast between the magical world of Lewis's imagination and the humdrum reality of Christian church life. (To people like myself who came to Anglicanism from low-church evangelicalism, Gopnik's apparent contempt for Anglicanism as a source for imagination and beauty seems extremely odd. But Gopnik may be on target here as regards Lewis; Lewis showed little appreciation for liturgy and usually describes his experiences of church-going as more of a cross to be borne than anything else.) But the local church is important precisely because it is here that the magical world we encounter in imagination invades the world of our daily lives. In bread and wine, in hymns sung by creaky voices, in uncomfortable pews and sermons of varying quality, in the reading of a Scripture that took shape over centuries in the gritty heart of sordid human history--it is then that I hear the gulls crying over Cair Paravel, and feel on my face the air of Narnia on a midwinter night. (These are two of the moments Gopnik singles out as particularly beautiful in the _Chronicles_.)

Gopnik's division between imagination and mundane reality is poisonous. It is the easy way out, a way made increasingly easy by the proliferation of technological shortcuts to the world of imagination. Sex and religion and adventure--they are all only a click away. To bring our deepest longings into the world of daily life is a constant struggle--precisely the struggle to "keep one's belief going" which Gopnik observes and mocks in Lewis's letters. It is, as Steve Taylor remarked (paraphrasing Flannery O'Connor), "harder to believe than not to." The easy way is to "toss away the cloak that you should have mended." But this is not only true for Christians. It is true for every relationship, every achievement, every genuinely human act. To be human is to bring image and reality together. That is what we were made for, hanging in agony between heaven and earth, between angels and beasts. Lewis continues to be relevant, continues to delight and enrage, because he was a bold and articulate modern spokesman for this classical view of human nature--a view at once truly pagan and truly Christian.

Narnia in the Spotlight, Part 1

2006-01-14T21:12:00.000-05:00

It's been a long while since I've blogged, as happens from time to time. I keep intending to blog more regularly, but it's probably best not to make promises!

I have been meaning to post a review of the Narnia movie for a while. By now most folks have said their say, and there' s little to add. There were certainly things one could object to, but the main effect the movie had on me was to remind me just how central Narnia has been to my life and to the way I view the world. The Chronicles of Narnia have done a lot to keep me a Christian. My concept of God is shaped in large measure by Aslan. And my uneasiness with most conventional political positions in contemporary society derives in part from my intuition that a really healthy culture would look a lot like Narnia. In the absence of an Old Narnian Party, I generally find myself saying "a pox on all your houses."

One of the most amusing (though also irritating) aspects of the attention Narnia has been getting in the media is the response from secularist critics, mostly British, who are clearly outraged by the fact that anyone still takes Lewis seriously. What these critics lack in numbers they make up for in shrillness--and, it must be said, in the ability to articulate their views in a pungent manner. Probably the most notorious of these reviews is the one by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian. The vitriol of British secularism often baffles me. Secular Americans express paranoia about the "Christian right," but generally seem to have less sheer hatred of religion itself. I can't think of an American to match Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman, or Christopher Hitchens (though Hitchens comes closest since he's lived in the U.S. for years). British secularists wax eloquent about the historical evils of Christianity, and certainly there's plenty in European history to cause them to do so. But after all, this stuff happened hundreds of years ago, and much that is nasty has occurred since for which Christianity is not (at least not primarily) responsible. The atrocities of the 20th century were driven for the most part by secular ideologies (though there are people who try to tell the story differently). The real villain of modern European history has been the secular state, not the Church. Yet somehow British public opinion seems to have become convinced that religion is responsible for everything bad in Western culture from Constantine to Margaret Thatcher. And since British intellectuals are, on the whole, less restricted by canons of courtesy and political correctness than their American counterparts, they pull no punches in saying this. I find the outspokenness of British secularists admirable. But the cogency of what they have to say doesn't match the vigor and (I believe) honesty with which they say it.

Toynbee is sickened by the idea of sacrifice. Well not really. It's OK for Arthurian heroes and people in prisoner-of-war camps to give up their lives for others. But not for Jesus. We didn't ask him to. What that really means is that, in Toynbee's view, we don't need salvation. Jesus performed an unwanted service. The Church has been dinning into our heads that we should be frightfully grateful for being saved, when there is nothing to be saved from. She doesn't say this, but this appears to be the gist of her remarks about the evil nuns who tormented her mother by saying that not eating greens drove nails into Jesus' body. Edmund, she says, is made "to blame for everything."

I think here we see the reason why British secular intellectuals are so obsessed with the evils of Christianity, even though (as they proudly proclaim) the influence of Christianity seems to be diminishing rapidly in Britain. If the evils of past and present can be blamed on a sinister, unnatural institution that has warped people's minds, then we don't need to look within. Making Christianity a scapegoat for social evils is a brilliantly self-affirming practice. We are bad because we have been warped by Christianity (and other, related institutions of the Bad Old Days, such as the monarchy), which means that we are not inherently bad, and so don't need Christianity.

It would be easy to speculate about the historical roots of this attitude--the Tudor monarchy's brilliant move in blaming the Catholic Church (especially the religious orders) for the injustices of early modern society, creating in the process a more docile national church that would do what it wanted; Lockean empiricism with its fantasy of the "tabula rasa" morphing into the Enlightenment dream of the naturally virtuous human being corrupted by culture and tradition (given vivid and heart-warming life by 19th-century writers such as Dickens); or simply the strong cultural and political tradition in Britain of freedom as the art of being left alone. The British may be deferential to authority, but in my experience (I'm technically British myself but have lived in the U.S. since I was six, so my experience doesn't amount to a great deal) they don't trust it much. (This attitude was, in fact, shared by Lewis. One of the most grotesquely false notes of Toynbee's criticism of Narnia is her characterization of it as a "neo-fascist" society where authority is worshiped for its own sake. But more on that in a later post.) As Pullman shows so dramatically in His Dark Materials, Christianity is, or can be seen as, ultimate Authority. Toynbee is, it seems, angry with Christianity because it won't leave her alone. It tells her she needs a salvation for which she feels no need. It lays unwanted claim upon her life.

I don't mean this as a dismissive ad hominem. Toynbee presumably thinks she has good reasons for supposing Christianity false. That being the case, she's quite justified in being angry with its claims. But what's interesting is the way Toynbee and other opponents of Christianity make the claims themselves seem self-refuting. Toynbee objects that the notion of Christ taking on our sins is "repugnant." Presumably she thinks this because she doesn't accept the idea of sin, or because she thinks there is a better way of dealing with it. But she doesn't say that. (Nor does she have to, I hasten to add. I find her comments distasteful, but not unfair. Her review doesn't claim to be an argument against Christianity.) Apparently, in her world, the non-existence of sin can be taken for granted. But for those of us who find the concept of sin convincing as a description of the evil that we find (to our horror) existing within as well as around us, the idea of being saved from sin is anything but "repugnant."

My Christian name is Edwin, one of those wonderful Anglo-Saxon names revived by the Victorians but not particularly in fashion these days (I inherited it from my grandfather, who was named after his uncle). People have frequently called me "Edmund" by mistake. So I have a tendency to identify myself with Edmund. (I'm somewhat like him in personality too--if I were a great king I'd be a lot more likely to be called "the Just" than "the Magnificent.") And this, of course, is what Lewis wanted us to do (something the secular critics find brazenly manipulative). The treachery and cowardice and snivelling hunger for power that characterizes the "unconverted" Edmund is within us all. How we respond to Narnia depends, in large measure, on whether we are able to believe that.

In defence of Rowan Williams

2005-11-13T20:55:00.000-05:00

++Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, occupies one of the least enviable seats in Christendom at this moment. Arguably even the Pope might not want to trade places with him. When ++Williams was chosen as archbishop, the evangelicals in the C of E wore black armbands in protest. Just a few weeks ago, a poster on another blog denied that ++Williams was a Christian because of his speculation regarding the possible legitimacy of same sex relationships.

But the left is no kinder. Most recently, Williams' wise and eloquent responses to a question and answer session in Cairo (to which I linked in the title of this blog post) have incurred the wrath of a blogger named Anglican Scotist. Scotist is one of the more thought-provoking Anglican bloggers (at least in my limited acquaintance), and he is an eloquent and provocative defender of the recent policies of ECUSA. Scotist has repeatedly attacked conservative Episcopalians as right-wingers who have embraced an essentially fundamentalist hermeneutic. He has no use for any appeal to a "plain sense" of Scripture, and he argues that conservative Episcopalians are in fact "liberal individualists." In this latest post, however, Scotist has revealed his own deep commitment to liberal individualism, and even what could be called liberal fundamentalism (not as much of an oxymoron as it might appear).

Williams' central point (in the remarks to which Scotist takes exception) is that his private views as a theologian are not determinative of the Church's position. "The Church," Williams reminds us, "is not Williams' personal political party, or any particular person's." To this Scotist responds that the Church is the party of a particular person, Jesus Christ. Williams' deference to the Church is, Scotist argues, a deference to some other Church than the Church headed by Christ. The Church headed by Christ follows the mind of Christ, and this mind is not subject to the fickle whims of a "super-majority" (Scotist's term for what Williams calls a "consensus").

The problem with this, of course, is that such a Church is reduced in effect to the private judgment of individual Christians. If the individual Christian may know the mind of Christ directly and with certainty, then what becomes of the "epistemic humility" Scotist recently vaunted as a linch-pin of ECUSA's position (see Scotist's blog for Nov. 6)? If the individual Christian does not have certainty, but must act according to her best discernment of the mind of Christ (even if this contradicts the Church's consensus), then this amounts to liberal individualism of the most radical kind. I'm genuinely surprised by this argument coming from Scotist. Given Scotist's track record for brilliant and thought-provoking insights (with most of which I disagree!), he probably has a formidable rebuttal to this objection. But his recent posts seem (from my perspective) to contradict each other in the most direct manner possible.

If one claims to be a Catholic (as I believe Scotist does), and if one claims not to be a liberal individualist, then one surely must allow the community some role in one's decision-making. Yet this is exactly what Williams does, and exactly what Scotist's attack on Williams explicitly excludes. Williams says (rightly) that neither the Church of England, nor the Anglican Communion, nor the Christian Church as a whole today, nor the historic tradition of the Church supports the validity of same-sex (erotic) relationships. Scotist denounces Williams' deference to this combination of authorities as unfaithfulness to Christ. I challenge Scotist to tell me how one arrives at the mind of Christ without any reference to the consensus of the Christian community.

My understanding of Anglicanism--the understanding that drew me to Anglicanism and has kept me precariously Anglicanism in spite of my many misgivings--is that Anglicanism affirms catholicity as the consensus of the entire People of God, ordered visibly according to the historic polity of the Church (i.e., the threefold order of bishops, priests, and deacons) but not vesting authority in any particular institution or organ within the Church. Bishops do not have the authority to invent their own faith. Their responsibility is rather to lead God's people in discerning the mind of Christ on the basis of Scripture, interpreting Scripture through the lens of the Church's traditions but always remaining open to the possibility that Scripture may correct tradition.

This, it seems to me, is exactly the understanding of the Church that lies behind Williams' remarks at Cairo. Scotist speculates that Williams' "church" is led by "bishops" rather than by Christ. This is a particularly risible criticism, because Scotist's real beef with Williams is that Williams refuses to act as if he is the head of the Church. We long for bishops who will act with modesty and humility, and when we get one we revile him! Williams knows that neither he nor any other bishop, nor any caucus of bishops, is the head of the Church. As Scotist affirms, Jesus Christ is the only head of the Church. But Christ speaks to and through the actual, visible, organized, sinful, fallible community of Christians existing throughout space and time. To hear Christ means to hear the Church--not because the Church is infallible and not because it does not need to be challenged by prophetic voices, but because in the end prophetic voices are validated by the wisdom of the entire People of God. As a theologian, Williams has challenged Christians to think more carefully about many issues, including same-sex relationships. But as a bishop, he no longer has the freedom to voice his own views but rather those of the entire body of Anglican believers (with respectful attention to the broader community of believers throughout time and space) engaged in the common task of discerning the mind of Christ.

Scotist's attack on Williams is the cheapest form of fundamentalist polemic. Scotist assumes (like a good fundamentalist) that the mind of Christ can only be known by an individual, and he dismisses the consensus of Christ's Body over against the pristine intuitions of the lonely believer. This is the only way I see to read Scotist's argument. Without such an appeal to radical individualism, he has no case. (I'm sure Scotist will accuse me of caricaturing his position, and indeed I'm being deliberately provocative in reponse to his equally provocative attack on the Archbishop. I hope to draw from him one of his usual eloquent and thought-provoking arguments, and I await such an argument eagerly.)

I don't deny that it is possible for a moral issue to appear to the conscience with such clarity that one can no longer defer even to the consensus of the Church. (I'm dubious that this has been the case as often in the history of the Church as many would claim. The abolition of slavery, for instance, did not contradict anything in the Church's historic teaching as far as I can see, although that teaching had not gone nearly far enough in condemning slavery.) Whether a bishop in such circumstances should press his/her understanding of the issue or should rather step down and resume a purely prophetic role is something I'm in no position to decide. But clearly Williams does not see the legitimacy of sexual relationships between members of the same sex as a matter of such complete moral clarity.

This brings us to Scotist's specific criticism of Williams' remarks about same-sex relationships. Williams distinguishes implicitly between respect for gay people (which is a self-evident moral duty of the first importance) and approval of sexual relationships between members of the same sex (which he regards as something not yet supported by the consensus of the Church). Scotist denies that such a separation is possible:

What kind of viscious abstraction conceives a human person apart from the love of that person, that designs to separate person and character? Can this be done with the divine persons without violence? How can we abstract the homosexual from the love in which that homosexual lives his or her life? Yet this is what Williams would have us do in consigning their love to mere sin while prescinding from demeaning them--the person left over after the sinful love is removed is somehow pristine and whole.

Scotist's position is incomprehensible unless he rejects entirely the Augustinian tradition that fallen human beings are characterized by distorted loves of various kinds. We are called to love and respect all human beings, gay or straight, without necessarily approving of all the forms in which they express love. Most of all, we are called to do this to ourselves. The crying shame and scandal of "conservative," heterosexual Christians today is our lack of self-examination concerning the many ways in which our own loves are disordered and distorted. And yes, of course traditional Christian teaching places a far larger burden on gays (i.e., persons who for whatever reason experience exclusively same-sex attraction) than on most others, at least with regard to sexual desire. This is something that we must not treat glibly, but must reconsider constantly and prayerfully. It is possible (in my view) that the traditional teaching is wrong in this respect. Certainly many aspects of Christian sexual teaching throughout the centuries have been mistaken (though again, I would say that the extent of this is often exaggerated; indeed, the Augustinian teaching of the taint placed by original sin on all sexual desire may have something to say to "conservative" Christians today who blithely assume that heterosexual desire between a husband and wife is entirely innocent). But the case must be made theologically. Unfortunately it cannot simply be reduced to the self-evident moral necessity of treating all persons with respect. This begs the question of whether same-sex desire is morally neutral (and hence ontologically good) or itself a distortion of sexual love as God intended it. Scotist's blanket claim that one cannot distinguish between a person and the way the person loves is simply indefensible. We do this all the time. Furthermore, Scotist also fails (or rather refuses) to distinguish between love and the sexual expression of love. Only the sexual expression is controversial. Love between men or between women is certainly not sinful in itself, and arguably one of the problems in this entire controversy is that same-sex friendship is no longer considered (by many) a form of love.

The obvious question to ask is whether I, as a heterosexual, would be willing to make these distinctions with regard to my own sexuality. Obviously, I don't think that this is in fact necessary. I think that my sexual desires are disordered in many ways, but I don't think that the fact that they are primarily ordered toward the opposite sex is one of those ways. So an affirmative answer that is purely hypothetical will not carry much conviction in the face of the actual experience of gay people. But for what it's worth, I can certainly give an affirmative answer to that question. When I read early Christian texts that condemn all sexual activity as in some way sinful, or even the relatively pro-marriage Augustine who regards all sexual desire as sinful, I disagree with these texts, but I do not think that they demean me as a person. I could imagine growing up under the influence of such texts and believing my sexuality to be fundamentally sinful. (Indeed, while I was always taught in principle that sex was a good creation of God, the practical teachings I received about sexuality growing up tended to convey the opposite impression--so to some extent this is not an imaginary exercise for me!) I would agree that such an experience is/would be damaging in many ways. But I certainly do not think that those who inculcate such a view fail to respect human beings as persons. Rather, they fail to understand the implications of human personhood correctly. (I would say the same of those who reject women's ordination but are not explicitly and directly misogynistic.) Again, it may be that Christians have traditionally failed to understand correctly the implications of human personhood for same-sex relationships. The speculations of theologians and the lived experience of gay people may yet teach us better. But if that is so, we must be taught how to integrate this new insight into what we already know in Christ about human personhood. We must be taught how the legitimacy of same-sex relationships flows from the essential givens of orthodox Christianity rather than conflicting with them.

In my view, this is what has happened/is happening with regards to women's ordination (though I must confess that there too there is hardly an "overwhelming consensus" among Christians today that the new understanding is correct). And of course there are many other issues on which the Church's position has developed or even changed significantly. In this process, the Church needs prophets who are willing to be condemned as heretics in order to lead us to a fuller understanding of the truth. But we also need bishops--that is to say, we need shepherds who keep us from following every tempting bypath suggested by the cultural norms of our particular place and time. Bishops are not, either individually or collectively, the head(s) of the Church. They do not need to lead every new trend. They do not need to be the guides into a bold new future. They exist as visible, personal links among local churches united by Christ but separated in space and time. Their task is to keep us faithful to the faith once delivered to the saints. Williams understands this; Scotist does not (or rather refuses to understand it).

I believe that it is something close to a miracle that a figure of Williams' wisdom and (as far as I can tell) holiness sits in the seat of Augustine of Canterbury during the present crisis. Williams has made and will make many mistakes. But his fundamental humility with regards to his own office is not one of them. On the contrary, it is what we desperately need (and so often sadly lack) in a bishop of the Catholic Church. Williams is condemned as a timeserving "politician" precisely because he refuses to be one. He offends everyone because he refuses to serve any party but Christ's. And thus, it is fitting (in an ironic sort of way) that Scotist should accuse him of failing to serve the Church whose head is Christ. If the Church as a whole does, some day, come to a new understanding of the legitimacy of same-sex relationships, the principled moderation of Williams will be one of the major factors in that change. He points the way toward a liberalism that does not simply put the stamp on the spirit of the age, and an orthodoxy that does not accept blindly the cultural assumptions of other ages. Somewhere in this radical balance, I believe, lies the true mind of Christ, and we the people of God must seek it together.

Priesthood of all believers

2005-10-30T17:59:00.000-05:00

One of the central slogans that's come to be identified with the Reformation is the "priesthood of all believers." For a long time I found this phrase very off-putting, because I associated it with the radical denial of any hierarchy or sacramentality in the Church. In my experience, Protestants used the slogan to turn the Church into a religious counterpart to modern liberal democracy. And I was (and am) convinced that that's simply a sell-out to modern culture.

Furthermore, as I became more acquainted with modern Catholic theology, I realized that Catholics do not deny the priesthood of all believers. They see the relationship between the universal and ministerial priesthoods as a both/and rather than an either/or. This has been more clearly affirmed by Vatican II and post-Vatican-II theology, and while Catholics are still debating the exact direction this reaffirmation nees to take, it's clear that some form of the priesthood of all believers is orthodox Catholic teaching.

The two contemporary issues that have forced me to give traditional Protestant arguments more of a hearing are the sex abuse scandal and women's ordination. Women's ordination deserves a post of its own, and I'll address it later. For now I'll just leave you with this teaser: I think that the priesthood of all believers is the central issue in the women's ordination debate (as it takes shape in Catholic and high-church circles).

I don't want to get involved in the horribly complex and sensitive arguments surrounding the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Of course other churches have scandals of their own, and indeed all large care-giving institutions have some pretty horrible instances of abuse, and have a tendency to try to protect the good name of the institution even at the expense of those they are allegedly trying to serve.

But at the risk of being accused of anti-Catholic bias, I can't help but think that a culture of clericalism played a large role in giving the Catholic scandal its shape and scope. I see no way around the conclusion that most bishops saw priests as belonging to the "family" in a way that the victimized young people did not. The long history of church-state battles over jurisdiction in cases of clerical wrong-doing, going back to the Gregorian Reforms of the 11th century at least, shaped the episcopal response in ways that have proved disastrous for all concerned.

The Gregorian Reforms have a lot to be said in their defense. The early medieval Church was tied up in the structures of civil society in ways that severely hindered its ability to proclaim the Word of God and speak authoritatively to social evils. But the measures taken by the reformers widened the gap between clergy and laity and created a set of parallel ecclesiastical power structures that became prey to the same corruptions and temptations as the secular hierarchy (and some of their own).

The Protestant Reformation undid much of the work of the Gregorian Reforms and placed the Church squarely under the authority of the state--at least in Anglicanism and Lutheranism. In some ways this resulted in the worst of all possible situations, with the Established Church benefiting from the coercive force of the state but not having the power to act independently. The "priesthood of all believers" too often translated into the domination of the Church by those who ruled the world of the laity.

Nonetheless, the positive message of the Reformation in this regard was that all baptized Christians are fully members of the Church, and whatever relationship to civil society is possessed by baptized laity is also the lot of the clergy. I think the Anabaptists had some important insights into what that relationship should be, and that the rest of us should pay attention to what they have to say. But the principle as I've stated it is common to Anabaptists and "magisterial" Protestants. Too often we have not lived by this principle. You hear even Protestants talk about being "just laity." And at the same time, I agree that the priesthood of all believers is often translated into a religious equivalent of secular democracy.

The priesthood of all believers does not necessarily mean that the Church should model its polity on secular democracies--though some degree of democracy is desirable, I think, and I certainly cannot see that a top-down structure is uniquely holy either. Nor does it mean that all baptized Christians should be able to perform all sacramental functions (though I think it does mean that in cases of emergency any baptized Christian can do anything any other baptized Christian can do). Ordination is a sacred rite within the Church (I have no problems calling it a sacrament) which sets aside certain men (and, in the traditions in which I participate, women) to carry out certain special functions of the Body. I bow when the priest passes me in procession, because the priest is the bearer of a particular sacred function of the whole Body.

The priesthood of all believers, as I understand it, means this: that ordained clergy are particular organs within the Body, but are not in any sense more fully members of the Body than laity. I recognize that Catholics would be unlikely to disagree with this, but the structure and daily operation of the Catholic hierarchy gives the lie to such a claim, except in the most spiritualized way. The abuse scandals were simply the most glaring example of a clericalism that pervades the Catholic Church.

While the current Pope is in my opinion a very holy man and is unquestionably a brilliant theologian (perhaps the finest theologian now living), he has a rather spiritualized conception of the Church which paradoxically leaves the over-centralized bureaucracy of the Catholic Church in a position above criticism. Unquestionably he is right that a merely structural reform is useless. But I am driven to the conclusion that many of the traditional Protestant criticisms of Catholic clericalism are borne out by the facts. This is not simply an external, political critique. The Protestant claim is that a vital spiritual principle is compromised when the Church proceeds as if only the clergy count. Insofar as Catholic structures have been built on this attitude--and I think it's clear that they have--they must be reformed, precisely as a part of the genuine spiritual renewal for which the Pope calls so eloquently. To oppose structural reform to inner renewal as if they had nothing to do with each other is to fall into a spiritualism incompatible with orthodox Christianity.

All organs of the Body of Christ are mutually accountable to each other. This does not have to be embodied in institutions analogous to those of modern liberal democracy, but it does need to have some institutional embodiment, or it will become a piece of pious rhetoric.

Insight for the day from Wendell Berry

2005-10-13T14:39:00.000-04:00

"There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places."

Thanks to la nouvelle theologie for the quote (the whole poem is over there).

For Dave Armstrong: on development and ecclesiology

2005-10-09T22:27:00.000-04:00

Dave,

Here at last is my piece defending the development of Protestant ecclesiology, which I've been promising you for several years now. I've been sitting on it for nearly two years now--finishing it turned out to be easier and quicker than I'd anticipated. Perhaps I really will get a lot of things done now the dissertation ordeal is drawing to a close . . . .

This may not be exactly the kind of dialogue you want to have. That's OK. Writing this has helped me clarify my own views on many points. Here it is:

Newman’s Essay on Development has given Catholic apologists perhaps their favorite argument. Traditionally, the primary strategy of Protestant polemicists was to fend off the claim of “innovation” and revolt by pointing out the clear differences between Catholic teaching of their day and the teachings of the Fathers. The same tactic is employed by some conservative Protestants today—witness William Webster’s The Church of Rome at the Bar of History. Such Protestant polemicists are generally unwilling to question their own views in the light of the Fathers, but employ the argument of historical change negatively, to show that everyone believes differently from the Fathers and therefore that the argument from tradition has no weight against Protestantism.

Against this attack, the doctrine of development is the most effective response. Catholics usually have little difficulty showing that modern Catholic doctrine has important points of continuity with that of the early Church, and that patristic teaching contains many ideas that foreshadow later developments and can plausibly be argued to contain the principles of those later teachings. So for instance Irenaeus’s claim that Mary is the new Eve points toward the Immaculate Conception and other Martian doctrines, and Ignatius’s simple affirmation that Christians eat and drink Christ’s Body and Blood points toward transubstantiation. Furthermore, Catholics can show that Trinitarian Protestants also hold doctrines that have developed historically, and that the negative argument as employed by Webster and his predecessors can equally be used against orthodox Protestantism (and indeed antitrinitarians do use such arguments). So when used purely defensively, the argument from development is effective. If the claim is being made that the Immaculate Conception cannot be true because it is not taught in the early Church, then it is legitimate to point out that the kernel of the idea is found from very early on, and to appeal to a theory of development to account for the later doctrine. If Protestants claim that the Catholic claim of infallibility and authority is made void by the changes in its doctrine, then again, development is a valid and relevant concept to invoke.

But this is only part of the Protestant argument, and not the strongest or most important part. The main use of the “innovation” argument for Protestants is to level the playing field. It is a response to Catholic claims of Protestant innovation. And all too often Catholic apologists appear to be using a double standard—holding Protestants to a close, literal reading of patristic texts to support their position, while invoking “development” when similar arguments are turned against them. Because conservative Protestants have a tendency to think in fairly literal terms and to have a proof-texting approach to Scripture, this is both maddening and effective in an argument with them. Also, the more radical forms of Protestantism clearly are unjustifiable on the basis of Scripture. And finally, development can easily work in tandem with a claim to authority. The argument can be made that we should trust the historic, institutional Church to interpret Scripture rightly, and that the doctrine of development refutes claims that the Church has manifestly failed to do so. I myself would entirely agree with this argument. (Exactly where and how authority is to be located within the historic Church is another issue, about which my opinions waver and which I’d like to try to keep out of this discussion.)

I believe, however, that development is of limited usefulness as an argument against Protestantism, if abstracted from an appeal to authority. On a number of points, a good argument can be made for moderate, traditional Protestant teachings as developments of early Christian doctrine—the same kind of argument on which Catholics rely to justify their own developments. I am not arguing that Protestant doctrines are as clearly or explicitly found in the Fathers as their Catholic counterparts. In some cases that may be true, but that’s not what my argument rests on. Nor am I arguing here that the Protestant teachings are true. I am simply arguing that an appeal to antiquity, bolstered by a theory of development, does not conclusively refute all versions of Protestant teaching on several key points: ecclesiology, the authority of Scripture vs. tradition, and sacramental theology. I argue that no concept of development can be found that justifies Catholic developments without also justifying Protestant developments, unless one simply appeals to the decision-making power of the Church.

For now, I’m going to make this argument with respect to ecclesiology, particularly the doctrine of extra ecclesiam nulla salus and the various definitions of the limits of the Church on which that doctrine depends for its practical meaning. The Protestant ecclesiology I’m going to defend is one held by many orthodox, ecumenical members of mainline Protestant denominations today. Many of my colleagues and professors at Duke Divinity School, for instance, would hold some form of this view. The more traditionally-minded and intellectually sophisticated evangelicals (many of whom are in fact members of mainline denominations) would also hold something similar.

In this view, there is a visible universal Church made up of all local churches that hold to the Christian faith as divinely revealed. This faith is understood to consist in certain essential teachings, best summarized in the Creeds; in acceptance of Scripture as the divinely inspired source of Christian truth and life; the practice of the two sacraments of the Gospel, baptism and the Lord’s Supper; and the moral teachings of Scripture as summarized in the Ten Commandments. I’m aware that Catholics have many questions about how this list of essentials is arrived at, but I’m not concerned to defend this particular list here. I’m giving it only to provide some indication of what the Protestants I’m speaking of would think are the doctrinal limits of the visible Church. Any religious body that denies the divine inspiration of Scripture (as opposed to a particular theory thereof such as inerrancy), or doesn’t practice the two evangelical sacraments (again, as opposed to holding faulty theories about it); or denies a central creedal doctrine such as the Trinity, is not part of the Church and is not, theologically speaking, Christian. (I myself have found this hard to apply in certain places, such as Quakers or Oneness Pentecostals; but again some of my friends at Duke would be quite willing to apply it strictly and say that such people are not Christians.) People outside the Church may be saved, by being judged according to their light, or by baptism of desire, or by some way known only to God alone. But normatively speaking there is no salvation outside the Church.

Division within the Church is seen as tragic but inevitable as long as we live in a fallen world. The full visible unity of the Church will probably only occur at the coming of Christ, just as its members will only be completely holy then. We can however work toward that goal and get much closer to it than we are now. Division among Christians who hold to the essentials of the Faith, however, is seen as division within and not away from the Church, although the parties responsible for such division (in most historic splits this is held to be both parties, at least to some degree) are guilty of a serious sin against charity.

I argue that this way of understanding the Church, whether or not it is true, is defensible as a development from patristic ecclesiology in the same way as (even if not to the same degree as) the ecclesiology of Vatican II. Both ecclesiologies have major points of continuity with the teaching of the Fathers; both attempt to apply patristic principles to a very different set of circumstances; and both find themselves obliged to depart from some things accepted as true during the classic period of patristic theological activity.

I should probably summarize what I think Vatican II’s ecclesiology is, since we may differ on this point. As I understand it, Vatican II taught that the Catholic Church of the Creeds subsists uniquely in those churches in communion with the Pope, and that full participation in the Church is possible only for members of that visible body. Other Christians are still members of the Church, but in a more or less imperfect way. They are united to the Church by baptism, by much orthodox doctrine, by the Holy Scriptures (even if in truncated or interpolated form), and most of all by the grace of the Holy Spirit present among all who truly believe in Christ and endeavor to live a Christian life as best they know. The extent to which non-“Catholics” are united to the Church varies greatly, ranging from the separated Eastern Churches, who are “almost there,” over to non-sacramental or non-trinitarian forms of Protestantism.

The common roots of these two ecclesiologies lie (after the NT) in the second and third centuries of Christianity--the period in which certain people who believed in Christ were coming to see themselves as members of the “Catholic” Church, in opposition to other groups claiming to be Christian. These other groups fell initially into two main categories—on the one hand, those who denied basic elements of the deposit of faith (Marcionites, Valentinians, Sabellians, and later Arians), and on the other, those who separated from the “Catholic Church” on the grounds that it was insufficiently rigorous in its treatment of sinners or otherwise corrupt (Montanists, Novatianists, and eventually Donatists). As Newman has shown (this has been supported by later scholarship with very different ideological biases), early Christianity did not present the unified front of later legend, but was a bewildering chaos of sects not entirely unlike the Christian world today. Then, as now, one particular body of Christians claimed to be the true Church over against all the others (unlike the current situation, it appears that in the early Church all the other groups also made exclusive claims). The picture was not always clear-cut, of course. Some heretics remained within the body of the Church and their status was the subject of some debate (I’m thinking particularly of the Pelagians, a little later than the period I’m discussing). In other cases, such as St. Hippolytus, someone could form his own schismatic group, denounce the reigning Pope as a heretic, and nonetheless go down in history as a saint and martyr (it does appear that Hippolytus and the Pope were reconciled while in exile together). But by about the third century the teaching of “extra ecclesiam nulla salus” was clearly formulated by Cyprian. Here, if anywhere, one can find a solid Catholic affirmation of the unity of the visible Church and the complete illegitimacy of all schismatic bodies.

The problem, of course, is that Cyprian’s position was no sooner formulated than it was rejected by Rome. Rome insisted that Cyprian was wrong to deny the validity of heretical or schismatic baptism. By saying this, the Pope was taking the first step toward the ecclesiology formulated at Vatican II, which allows for varying degrees of membership in the one true Church. (Diane Kamer informs me that Fr. Stanley Jaki has made this argument.) But the Roman position appears, on the face of it, to be nonsense. If baptism is the sacrament of initiation into the Church, then how can a body separate from the Church possess valid baptism? Since the early Church did not want to affirm any kind of “branch theory”—or even the position of Vatican II—this presented a serious difficulty in Catholic ecclesiology for centuries.

Augustine’s treatise on baptism against the Donatists is one of the most thorough attempts to deal with this difficulty. Augustine formulates an ingenious theory whereby baptism administered by Donatists initiates the convert into the true Church, only to be immediately nullified by the fact that the convert has (in that same act) joined a schismatic sect. The grace of baptism thus remains latent until the Donatist reconciles with the Catholic Church. This theory allows Augustine to separate the grace of baptism from the act of baptism itself, keeping the former the exclusive property of the Catholic Church.

Augustine’s position is, as far as I can tell, the standard position of Western Christendom until the Reformation. It allowed little if any hope for the salvation of schismatics and heretics, while nonetheless preserving the objectivity of the sacraments. During the Middle Ages, the major challenge to this ecclesiology was the reality of the East-West split. The fact that East and West were two separate churches seems to have dawned only gradually on both sides. But by the 13^th century there are plenty of treatises “against the Greeks,” which seem to hold (from the little I know of them) that the “Greeks” are schismatics in the full Augustinian sense. (I’m open to correction on this point.) Whether this was the official teaching of the Church I’m not sure. Some learned Catholic writers such as Louis Bouyer maintain that the two Churches were not necessarily seen as fully separate until the 19^th century—and he maintains that they are in fact one Church. There does appear to be a good deal of ambiguity about the Catholic position toward the Orthodox—and I’d argue that this was precisely because the Augustinian model didn’t fit the reality of the East-West split, and that something like the “Protestant ecclesiology” I’m defending was needed. (Bouyer’s position is in effect the “Protestant ecclesiology” except that it applies only to Catholics and Orthodox, not to Protestants.)

Eugenius V at the Council of Florence sums up the medieval Catholic tradition in a particularly uncompromising way. Florence’s Decree on the Jacobites (actually referring to the Copts) is worth studying because the situation of the “Jacobites” is in many respects similar to that of contemporary Protestants. That is to say, in the Copts the Catholic Church confronted a church that had been in schism for centuries—a church whose members in the 15^th century bore no direct responsibility for the schism of their ancestors. Yet Florence declares unequivocally that all members of such a church are damned if they do not unite with Rome before they die. (The one thing that gives me some pause here is that Eugenius speaks warmly of the zeal and piety of the Coptic Patriarch, and of the other eastern Patriarchs, and refers to Mother Church rejoicing that her “sons” were united. But I don’t think this implies that the Easterners in any way belonged to the Church, or were destined for salvation, before the reunion. Rather, they showed their genuine piety by the fact that they worked for reunion.)

Anti-Protestant polemic during and after the Reformation is forthrightly Augustinian—or even Cyprianic. Protestants are seen as in no way part of the Church, having completely separated themselves from it. Given the fact that many Protestants rejected the Catholic doctrine of baptism, Catholics in fact regarded Protestant baptism as dubious at best until the 20^th century. By the 19^th century, the Catholic Church was willing to grant that those Protestants who were “invincibly ignorant” could be saved, but I’m not aware of any expression of this view on the Catholic side during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Indeed, in the late 17^th century one work of Protestant apologetics (a fictional dialogue between a “Papist” and a Protestant) presents the “Papist” as arguing that Catholicism is the safer choice because Catholics regard Protestants as necessarily damned, while Protestants do not reciprocate. The Protestant has to argue that while theoretically members of the Catholic Church can be saved, in fact the errors of Rome make this practically impossible. (I regret that I don’t have the reference to this—I came across it at Duke and did not write down the specific information. I believe it was by Richard Baxter but I could be mistaken on this point.) I think this is a reliable source (or would be if I could find the reference again) because the Protestant writer seems to regard the somewhat more inclusive Protestant view as a liability, and the alleged Catholic claim to be a dangerous argument the Papist would be likely to use. Thus, it’s unlikely that this is a misrepresentation of the contemporaneous Catholic position. But I’m sure there is better evidence one way or another. I’m just citing something that I happen to remember (without of course any illusion that this would pass muster in an academic context).

Meanwhile, Protestants themselves initially tended to adopt a more or less Augustinian ecclesiology themselves. As late as the end of the 17^th century, even a relatively irenic Lutheran like Philipp Jakob Spener could refer to Lutheranism as “the true Church out of which there is no salvation.” However, the divisions and confusions of Protestantism made this sort of position untenable for most Protestants fairly early. Contrary to what is commonly believed, the Protestants did not substitute an “invisible Church” for traditional claims concerning the visible Church. If we take Calvin as representative (he isn’t, exactly, but he is extremely influential) of classical Protestant thought on this point, we find that he affirms the visible Church to be our mother out of whom there is no salvation. Calvin, however, doesn’t identify the universal visible Church with an institution but with the sum of local churches where the Word is preached and the Sacraments are administered. This gave Protestants a good deal of flexibility—when it suited them, they could open the arms of brotherhood to Christians with whom they differed, while at other times taking a narrower view.

Modern ecumenism, then, was born from the practical realities of Christian division. The ecclesiology of Vatican II is a thoughtful and reasonable response to the reality of Christian piety among Protestants and to the development of Protestant ecumenism. But it is not, on the face of it, obviously continuous with patristic or medieval ecclesiology (with regard to EENS at least) in a way that Protestant ecclesiology (as I’ve defined it) is not. On the contrary, as my Duke colleague Roger Owens once pointed out to me, Protestants can maintain EENS more straightforwardly than Catholics.

Neither orthodox Catholics nor (most) Protestants maintain the strict Cyprianic view. Nor does Vatican II lend itself to Augustine’s view as originally expounded, although it builds on that position. We agree against Cyprian that validly baptized people exist in more than one Christian communion. And we agree against Augustine that such people may (while still being separated) receive grace from their baptisms and lead lives of Christian holiness. This is a major break from pre-Reformation ecclesiology.

Yes, ecumenical Protestants go further than Catholics inasmuch as we deny that the Church subsists fully and uniquely in any one communion. But we are more traditional than Catholics inasmuch as we hold that the Word and the Sacraments have no saving efficacy outside the bounds of the visible Church. You modify the traditional view by allowing that communities separated from the Church can receive grace from Word and Sacraments; we modify it by defining the visible Church as existing wherever the Word and Sacraments are present. Granted, Vatican II tries to avoid a break with the tradition by saying that separated communities have some degree of union with the Church. And some doctrine of degrees of communion is necessary for both ecclesiologies. Again, I’m not trying to compare which ecclesiology is more traditional as a whole. Rather, I’m saying that if we contradict the Tradition, then so do you. The only way (to borrow a metaphor from The Pilgrim’s Regress) that you can cross the drawbridge while keeping us from crossing it is to invoke authority to define just how much change constitutes a genuine break with Tradition.

I apologize for the length of this argumentmost of which dates from nearly two years ago. If I were starting from scratch now I’d keep it briefer. But here it is. Reply to it when and how you wish.

The dissertation is in the hands of the committee

2005-10-09T21:21:00.000-04:00

My defense will take place on Oct. 17. Assuming all goes well, a major phase of my life will be over, and a great burden will be off my shoulders.

Now, presumeably, I can do all the things I've been putting off till the dissertation was done. I can write novels and poetry and blog every day and argue with Dave Armstrong and keep in touch with all my friends. . . .

Of course, I also have to find a full-time job!

But right now, while still very nervous about the defense, I do feel a great relief. I celebrated today by going to see the movie Serenity (I haven't darkened the doors of a movie theater for a while). I strongly recommend it. As with many movies (especially science fiction), the ending is not quite up to the promise of what has come before. (The same was true, for instance, of Minority Report.) But I still think it's one of the best science fiction movies I've ever seen. Like all the sf I really like, it's deeply theological. I suspect that Joss Whedon (the director) thinks he's made a movie that criticizes the religious right. But in fact he's made a great anti-Pelagian movie. The film is a robust condemnation of what the Catholic Catechism rather inaccurately calls millenialism--the belief that human effort can bring in the Kingdom. As the main villain (definitely one of the great movie villains of all time) puts it: "I believe in a better world; a world without sin."

Christians, of course, believe in a world without sin. (And thus I suspect that Whedon thinks he's attacking Christianity, or at least some forms of Christianity.) But we do not believe that social engineering will bring about such a world. And the history of Christian attempts to create a righteous society (along with the far more horrifying such attempts made by secularists, not to speak of Islamic examples) bear out the premise of Serenity that the result of any such endeavor is death and monstrous evil.

In its own way, Serenity can take its place alongside the Passion of the Christ as a way to introduce people to Christian ideas. Gibson's much-criticized Pilate could be an agent of Whedon's Alliance. (Or more accurately, the Alliance is the 26th-century equivalent of the Roman Empire.) When you are trying to create a peaceful world through force, you have no room for truth. You crucify it. When people see the brutality of the Passion and complain that Gibson doesn't show the reason for it, one answer might be, "Go watch Serenity." It's as good a way as any I know to start a discussion about the pervasive nature of sin and the inadequacy (far worse than inadequacy, in fact) of any political or social cure for human evil.

And it's just plain fun, for all its darkness. I laughed out loud repeatedly while watching it.

Note that this is not to say that the film doesn't contain some objectionable elements. There are always better ways to spend one's time. . . . But if you watch movies in general, then don't pass this one up.

Authority and truth--reply to Binx

2005-09-04T23:33:00.000-04:00

I've been carrying on a conversation in the comments section with a poster named Binx, who posed some excellent questions relating to my last post. So I decided to move t into a new blog post (in part because it's late Sunday night and I haven't made a new post this weekend). As I have time--probably next weekend--I hope to move on to the priesthood of all believers, and from there to women's ordination--so stay tuned!

Binx initially raised three objections to my post (you can read his full arguments in the comments section of my previous entry):

1. James contradicts what I am saying. I responded that I don't think James and Paul are speaking of the same kind of "faith," and my evidence for this is that James identifies the dead faith that cannot save as the faith of demons, which cannot be a gift of God and which even Aquinas distinguishes from the "lifeless faith" of sinful Christians.

2 (this was the third point he made, but I'm leaving the most important issue for last). The practical flaws in Catholicism result not from Catholic doctrine but from a failure to proclaim said doctrine. They are therefore simply the results of sin and do not constitute a reason to continue in separation from the Church. I responded that when any Christian body consistently shows certain weaknesses, these weaknesses derive from some flaw in its teaching. This applies to Protestants as well. It's not that we are better than Catholics or that we are unwilling to be in union with Catholicism, but rather that (in view of the flaws of Catholicism) we cannot make the act of unconditional submission that Catholicism requires.

3. Most significantly, Binx raised the issue of authority. I'll put his argument in his own words:

the objective aspect of faith, the 'what is held to be true', is just as integral a part of faith as the act of 'holding as true'. And this is where dogma and authority are indespensible and yet absent from evangelical Protestantism. It is why 'faith' in the Jehovah's Witness sense or the Mormon sense is not faith in Christ at all. It is why Arianism is not Christian. And gnosticism, Donatism, Albegensianism, etc. Faith has an objective element that the Authority of the Church protects and that is necessary to salvation. . . . The Dogma and Authority of the Church are not the heart of Faith but they are the divinely instituted means of protecting the very fullness of the Faith.

To this I responded that the objective aspect of faith is indeed integral, but this faith is primarily faith in Christ rather than faith in whatever-the-Church-proposes-as-true. What distinguishes Arianism from authentic Christianity is its failure to proclaim the true Christ, not its failure to conform with the pronouncements of the Magisterium.

In his most recent post, Binx began by responding to this argument. I will quote snippets of his post here, but you can of course read his arguments in their entirety (which they well deserve) in the comments section of the previous blog entry.

Binx wrote:

Actually I think I would formulate the relationship between the Church (and her God given Authority to bear witness to the Truth) and Christ as integral and inseperable.

Sure. But as a matter of fact there are many Christians out there who believe in Christ but don't accept this "integral" connection. Vatican II describes us as imperfectly connected with the Church, but still in some sense members of the Body. I can live with that. But that of course means that the full authority of the Magisterium is not the same thing as union with Christ (though it may be necessary for perfect union with Christ). Some "hierarchy of truths" is necessary. Some things are believed for the sake of other things. And it seems important to me that Jesus Christ crucified should be the one for whose sake we believe in the Church, not vice versa. Of course the Church is necessary as a _witness_ to Christ. (This I think is what Augustine meant in his famous statement about not believing the Gospel if not convinced by the Catholic Church.) But a witness is decidedly secondary to the truth to which he witnesses.

So it seems to me it can't boil 'down to...our faith is in Christ, not in a doctrine or a church', because implicit in faith in Christ is faith in Christ's message necessarily mediated thru the Church. Yes?

Yes. I was not trying to create an either/or, but rather a hierarchy of importance. My problem with much Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant (I'm not necessarily holding up the Orthodox as models here, just leaving them out because I'm less sure about them), is that we have exalted the methodology of belief above the content of belief itself (or rather Himself). William Abraham has some good things to say about this in his book Canon and Criterion, though I don't agree with all his arguments.

But I would immediately feel compelled to qualify the statement by an equally important addendum so that it only makes sense to read it as "...not fully divine and thus not the true Christ as understood and proclaimed the Church, whom the Lord gave his Authority to bear witness regarding Himself" ('He who listens to you listens to me; he who rejects you rejects me; but he who rejects me rejects him who sent me.')

But during the Arian controversy it wasn't clear what the Church proclaimed. The Church was divided. Even Rome wavered at one point, though it never sided with the Arians. Athanasius and others defended what they believed to be true based on Scripture and the writings of earlier Christians and the analogy of the Faith. They believed what they believed passionately because they were convinced it was true, not because it came stamped by proper authority.

Otherwise who can tell us who the 'true Christ' is? That is precisely what the Arians claimed to be doing, defining the true Christ. Who has the Authority to say?

Well, that's radically different from how Athanasius approached it. And I think it's a dangerous, even deadly attitude to take (however tempting in confusing times like ours). The answer to the question is that the Church has the authority, and the Church is made up of all believers. The Church has proper authority structures, but that doesn't (or shouldn't) shortcut the messy process of actually thrashing out the issues based on what we (not just I, but not just the Pope and bishops either) believe to be true.

Clearly we need authority if this process is not to be totally open-ended and hence incapable of resolution. But that's not the same thing as saying (as you appear to be saying) that we can't even talk about why the Arians are wrong until we have heard from some Qualified Authority that they are wrong. This is the attitude that has torn the Western Church apart (not, as many Catholics will tell you, the rejection of this attitude--of course this is a matter of perspective). Medieval Catholicism took in the poison of Roman law and fell prey to its legalistic, authority-driven approach to the world. (I'm often tempted to agree with the late medieval apocalypticists and the Protestant Reformers who thought that at this point Antichrist in some way entered into the Church.) This has nearly destroyed Christianity by distracting us from the older, more orthodox, ontological approach. (In other words, is truth primarily a matter of obeying the rules laid down by competent authorities, or of participating in Ultimate Reality? Of course it doesn't have to be an either/or, but one or the other tends to be in the driver's seat, and I think it matters a lot which.)

I think this all flows from the doctrine of the Incarnation and the Church's foundation on Christ and his nature as determined by the Incarnation. The human and divine nature of Christ are inseperable, even tho they can be considered in their seperate aspects. Yes?

But Jesus' humanity was sinless. The Church is not (although she can be defined as such if you play elaborate word games that identify the mystical reality of the Church with the earthly institution enough to sanctify the latter but whisk the mystical reality back up to heaven as soon as the threat of earthly pollution becomes imminent). The Church errs--at least the institutional leaders of the Church err. The Church as an earthly institution errs. (Not perhaps in dogmatic definitions, but in the many other decisions it makes every day.) In this world the Church cannot simply be identified with Christ. This is to confound the "already" with the "not yet," and it is the fundamental error of Catholicism. When all is said and done, this is the reason I'm not a Catholic. (Although when a more extreme version of this was expounded by Touchstone's S. M. Hutchens, I responded critically in my blog post "The Ecclesiology of Limbo." Read that post, if you like, for a balance to what I'm saying now.)

(Luther and Calvin both wounded forever the Protestant movement with their inbalance regarding the Transcendence of God).

Calvin yes, with his conception of idolatry. I'm much less sure about Luther. It's hard to find someone who proclaimed the Incarnation with all its consequences as boldly as Luther. I think it's a mistake to assume that because Luther wasn't sure the Church was most fully incarnate in ecclesiastical hierarchies that he therefore had a spiritualized view of the Church. The case can be made that he did--but it's not an obvious one. (And Calvin arguably spiritualized the Church even less than Luther, although he had a more spiritualized view of the Sacraments than Luther.)

She has the promise that the Gates of hell will not prevail against her.

And she defines this to mean that certain ecclesiastical officials can't err on matters of doctrine in very narrow circumstances. In my more Protestant moods, I'm tempted to say, Who cares? (I know that's a silly and insufficient response. But it's an appropriate response to the careless way some Catholics throw the "gates of hell" passage around as if it were sufficient to wipe out all the very obvious failures of the institutional Church throughout history.)

If the Catholic Church (or the Church whose true identity is that of the original church, as Newman would say I think) has not 'preserved the fullness of the Faith', then the Scripture is not true that proclaims she is the 'pillar and ground of truth', and indeed the 'gates of hell have prevailed against her'.

Why? Why is a failure to achieve perfection part-way through one's earthly pilgrimage a total defeat by the gates of hell? What if the fullness of the truth is not something that can be preserved but something that must be achieved, and will only be achieved in Glory? Perhaps a better term for the deposit of faith the Church preserves would be the integrity of the truth. I'm not disputing the importance of preserving the deposit--I'm questioning that (by Newman's own standards, recognizing the reality of development as he did) the "fullness of the truth" is the right term for what the Church preserves.

"the members of the Church, due to the effects of original sin and actual sin, are always in need of reform. The Church’s teaching, however, is from God. Not one iota is to be changed or considered in need of reform." [Alice von Hildebrand, as quoted by Binx]

And this is the disjunction that I'm not sure I can accept. Indeed, in a way this very disjunction is anti-incarnational. I agree that the Church is more than the sum of its members. I'm not sure you can use "the Church" in a proposition whose content is diametrically opposed to any true statement whose subject is "the Church's members." In other words, I don't think you can say, "The Church is sinless; the Church's members are sinful," unless of course you are very explicitly talking about the eschatological reality of the Church, toward which we are presently in pilgrimage.

I recognize that you quote Dr. von Hildebrand as saying not "the Church" but "the Church's doctrine." This is a more defensible position, but as I said it seems somewhat gnostic to me. And of course there's a huge difference between defined doctrine and normal, everyday teaching. I'm quite willing to keep open the possibility that the Catholic Church's defined dogmas may in fact all be true (due to divine protection). I hope this is the case, because I deeply long for the unity of the Church and I doubt that the See of Rome will ever back down from this particular claim. But clearly the actual, day-to-day teaching of the Catholic Church is deeply flawed in all sorts of ways. That I'm sticking to, and I think most Catholics would agree with me, however reluctant they might be to put it quite this way.

I am not sure what you mean by 'unconditional submission', could you explain.

I mean that I would have to accept without qualification not only that all the currently defined teachings of the Catholic Church are true, but that the Holy Spirit is so guiding the Church that any future definitions would also be true. I would have to accept that to separate from the "Roman" Catholic Church is (if done with full and sufficient knowledge) to separate from Christ, so that if in the future I came into conflict with the Church, I would never be in the right to push that conflict to the point of separation.

Also, whatever this means, the Church, I think, teaches that one should always follow the dictates of one's conscience. That surely has to be balanced with what unconditional submission means (I will try and find that in the CCC if you like).

I've read quite a bit on this, and I think (though I could be wrong) that I understand it. Catholics are required to follow their consciences, but they are also required to be willing to form their consciences according to the Church's teaching. And they are required to submit even when they cannot agree, unless some practical action were required that went against the conscience. In other words, I assume that if I lived in the 13th century and knew that reporting on my Albigensian or Waldensian neighbor would lead to said neighbor being burned at the stake, I would be justified in the eyes of the modern Catholic Church in defying the decree of Lateran IV authorizing the bishop to order me to report on said neighbor; whether that would help me much back in the 13th century I'm not sure.) I'm not arguing that this kind of submission is unworthy or conflicts with intellectual honesty. I respect those who make it, because they believe it is the right thing to do. My problem is that, as an outsider to Catholicism, I don't see evidence that the Catholic Church (as an institution) is trustworthy enough for me to make that kind of submission. (The policies of the high medieval Church toward heretics are one good reason for this--I'm pretty sure the Church won't do such a thing again, but it did do it once, and I can't be sure that it isn't doing or won't do something equally stupid and wicked.)

I thought Bouyer in Spirit and Forms does a marvelous job in pointing out that the insights that Luther came to were always the heart of Catholic Doctrine and that it was the decadence of the time and of a corrupting Nominalist Theology on which he was standing that caused him to fail to perceive it. If you get the chance I would love to hear your perspective on his argument.

It's been a while since I read that book--I was at least somewhat persuaded at the time, although as someone who's studied nominalism to some extent as a grad student I'm wary of blaming everything on nominalism. (Martin Bucer, the subject of my dissertation, was trained as a Thomist; and to take one of Bouyer's examples, Bucer had no problems understanding that the same action could be wholly of God and yet fully human; but Bucer still embraced Protestantism.)

On the whole, though, I've tended to embrace Bouyer's approach. That's precisely what I was trying to address in my post. I have identified an issue where I think Luther had a definite insight that did contradict Aquinas at least (the more I look at Aquinas on this, the less certain I am that his position represented the previous consensus--and that's true on a bunch of other issues as well).

How does Luther's rejection of the unformed/formed faith distinction either constitute an affirmation of Catholic orthodoxy or an unfortunate misunderstanding due to "decadent nominalism"? It seems to me that there is something more than that going on here, and that's exactly why I focused on this issue.

Justification by faith: the real issue?

2005-08-28T20:50:00.000-04:00

It's common for Protestants to claim that justification by faith is the single major issue separating Protestants from Catholics. Coming from a Wesleyan background, this has never loomed as large for me. Sure, I was taught that Catholics thought they were "saved by works," but when I came to understand what the Catholic Church actually taught (as opposed to what many Catholics may believe or have believed), I couldn't see that it was such a big deal. I had always been taught that justification involved actually being changed and not simply imputation (my tradition used "justification" pretty much synonymously with "regeneration"--at least that's the impression I got growing up). I was dubious about the whole notion of imputation, and even if it was true I couldn't see how something that abstruse could be the point on which the Church stood or fell. The living presence of the Holy Spirit in the heart--that was what I had always been taught was the main thing, and nothing I have learned in adulthood has persuaded me differently.

However, as I've been involved (on both sides!) in Protestant-Catholic discussions over the years, it's become clear to me that there is some significant difference regarding justification, not only between Lutherans or Calvinists and Baptists and Catholics, but between _all_ evangelically minded Protestants and Catholics. Unquestionably Protestants and Catholics alike experience God's grace. But evangelical Protestants have a particular way of speaking about grace that enables them to testify to it in a way rare among Catholics. And for all the faults of evangelicalism, this way of speaking about grace and salvation clearly speaks to many ordinary people in a way that Catholicism doesn't. Whatever explanations and excuses and qualifications we may make, the fact remains that thousands, maybe millions of people have failed to hear the message of grace in Catholicism and have heard it in evangelicalism. Believing as I do that to break communion with Rome is always tragic (whether or not it can be justified), I think it's important to understand why this happens rather than explaining it away. Poor catechesis may explain a lot. But then one has to ask why Catholicism so routinely fails in this particular department? The people who don't seem to have understood free grace are far more numerous than the people who didn't understand transubstantiation or the Church's moral teachings (numerous as those are these days).

For a while now I've been mulling on a possible answer. It isn't something that I hear stressed a lot in discussions of justification, at least not in quite these terms. I think the key difference between all evangelical Protestant theologies (I'm using "evangelical Protestant" with deliberate looseness--feel free to pin me down!) and Catholicism is the Catholic belief in sola fide. Not, of course, that faith can save on its own, but that it can exist on its own. Protestants generally deny this. At least, orthodox Protestants (another loose term) deny that the "faith" that can exist without charity is the same thing as the faith that saves. We furthermore deny that this loveless faith, this faith of demons, is a supernatural gift. Rather, we see it as just another opinion about religious matters, no more a gift of God than any true opinion is. A true opinion about God has more importance and dignity than a true opinion about onion soup, but they are both human opinions. The faith that God gives, the faith that is supernatural, is faith that transforms the soul and causes us to bring forth good works through love.

It is, of course, common to say that Catholics and Protestants define faith differently, and that this leads to a lot of misunderstanding. Or more polemical Protestants may say that "Rome" has no conception of what faith really is, and this is the root of its horrible errors (this is basically what Luther himself said). I'm saying more than the first statement and less than the second. Certainly this disagreement is a matter of definitions. Christians experience the grace of God no matter how they define it, and a matter on which so many wise and holy people are found on both sides cannot be one of the essentials of the Faith. And yet it may be important.

Catholics, it seems to me, think of saving faith as a composite act: first you believe (which is a gift of God) that God is God and that the things proposed by the Church for belief are true. But this faith remains dead unless it has added to it (which again is only possible by God's gracious gift) the infused habitus of charity, which lives only as long as you persevere in cooperating with the grace of God working in you. Thus, when Catholics are exhorted to believe, they are exhorted to accept truths intellectually (though, as St. Thomas said, this requires an act of the will which gives the certainty of knowledge propositions that on a natural level have only the nature of opinions). They are then exhorted to do certain things in order to make and keep that faith "living."

This division is one of the things to which Luther objected most profoundly. And I think he was right (though not in the vitriol with which he condemned the Catholic position). The real issue is not so much imputation vs. infusion, or exactly in what sense human beings can be considered to cooperate with God's grace (on both of which points I am in more sympathy with the Catholic view than with Luther). To me, the profound insight of the Reformation (with regard to soteriology) was that living faith is a single and simple act. (Simple in the technical philosophical sense: uncompounded, non-composite, irreducible.) It is not "belief in everything God has revealed" plus charity. Or more precisely, this way of defining it may be correct in a sense, but it is pastorally and psychologically false, because it divides what must (in our experience if not in our theology) remain utterly indivisible.

I don't buy the idea (even though Aquinas taught it) that there are certain doctrines you can only believe by a special gift of God. Human beings can believe just about any theoretical proposition, if circumstances favor credulity. But to place one's whole trust in Christ's grace and love (to quote the 1979 Episcopalian baptismal liturgy); to accept the searing, transforming, renewing power of grace; to throw oneself on God's mercy as a forgiven sinner and at the same time rejoice in the dignity of being a son or daughter of the King of Heaven; this is only possible by a grace that perfects our nature.

That means that evangelicals can proclaim the grace of God with a clarity and simplicity that traditional Catholic doctrine makes impossible. (Or at least normally so: I take Pontificator's point that many Catholic saints, such as St. Therese of Lisieux, have expressed this simplicity of faith. But post-Tridentine doctrine does not make this easy.) It isn't that Catholics don't experience the same thing Protestants do. Indeed, Catholics have spiritual resources at their disposal of a richness and depth that far surpass those normally available to Protestants. But these resources are of use only if you have gotten the basic message. And the indisputable fact is that very many Catholics simply don't. The simplest and most reasonable explanation is that something in Catholic doctrine obscures the message of grace. It doesn't deny it, but it makes it harder for many Catholics to grasp. When faith and charity are separated out and you are told that faith can exist without charity, but charity must be added to faith, it is harder to experience just what the phrase "believe on Jesus Christ and you will be saved" means. Furthermore, it is easier to be at least somewhat complacent about a faith that does _not_ work by charity. After all, you have _part_ of the formula. You just need to work on the charity part--and that is only a good confession away. Hence the indisputable reality of widespread antinomianism among Catholics, which goes straight against the stereotype of anxious Catholics trying to work out their own salvation. Perhaps antinominanism is too strong. I don't mean that Catholics think (as the more heretical Baptists do think) that you can be saved while clinging wilfully to serious sin. But it seems hard to question the fact that traditional Catholic societies contain large numbers of people who see themselves as devout Catholics while also admitting that they are probably not in a state of grace much of the time. On a cultural level there are certain advantages to this (it allows for a heavy permeation of the culture with Christianity even if most people are not willing to try seriously to live a holy life). And it's certainly better than a genuine antinomianism that doesn't recognize the seriousness of sin. But it's hardly surprising that to people used to that kind of culture, the message of evangelical Protestantism often seems like a light in the darkness, because (if it is not the genuinely heretical version taught by some Baptists and quasi-Baptists) it teaches the necessity of a habitually holy life. By denying any spiritual value to faith that does not work by love, it forces people to make a stark choice: either they are not really Christians at all, or their lives must habitually show the fruit of living faith. (This should, of course, be a matter for self-examination, and even then one should be reticent to make final judgments. Catholicism is absolutely right that we have no business trying to figure out someone else's state of soul, and some forms of evangelicalism have gone horribly wrong here.)

This, I think, is at the core of all the fights over justification. Is faith essentially assent to what God has revealed, to which charity must be added? Or is it a single, living, simple act, consisting of a total reliance on the grace and love of God in Christ, overflowing into the love of God and neighbor? I believe that Scripture, as a whole, teaches the latter, and that the recovery of this understanding was one of the few genuinely positive aspects of the Reformation.

Pope Benedict and ecumenism

2005-08-21T17:37:00.000-04:00

For non-Catholics, perhaps the most interesting part of World Youth Day was Pope Benedict's address to an ecumenical meeting on Friday, in which he laid out more fully than anywhere else so far his plans for furthering Christian unity. It's not that much of a plan, really. Indeed, if I read him correctly, he doesn't put a lot of stock in schemes and programs and agendas. He affirms that we mustn't pursue ecumenism at the expense of truth, which is to be expected (and quite right, of course). And he reaffirms that the unity of the Church subsists in communion with Rome, "without the possibility of ever being lost." Again, however dubious we non-Catholics may find this, it was only to be expected.

Then comes the interesting part:

We cannot “bring about” unity by our powers alone. We can only obtain unity as a gift of the Holy Spirit. Consequently, spiritual ecumenism – prayer, conversion and the sanctification of life – constitute the heart of the ecumenical movement (cf. Unitatis Redintegratio, 8; Ut Unum Sint, 15ff., 21, etc.). It could be said that the best form of ecumenism consists in living in accordance with the Gospel. I see good reason for optimism in the fact that today a kind of “network” of spiritual links is developing between Catholics and Christians from the different Churches and ecclesial Communities: each individual commits himself to prayer, to the examination of his own life, to the purification of memory, to the openness of charity.

Of course a number of issues remain for those of us who belong to separated "ecclesial communities." What about the means of grace of which we are deprived? What about the struggle of living in ecclesial communities whose orthodoxy we cannot trust (even on those matters believed in common by the Reformers and the sixteenth-century Papacy)? In a sense, Benedict's recommendations sound alarmingly "pietistic." Is it really just a matter of individual piety?

That of course is not what he's saying. The individual piety for which he calls must be placed at the service of (and be nourished by) both the "ecclesial communities" to which we belong and the universal Church toward which we yearn (whether or not that Church already subsists in any existing body). What I think he is saying is what a number of my Catholic friends (including at least two priests) have been saying to me in different ways for years. The search for unity can easily become a matter of programs and theories. At the heart of our quest for unity is a quest for union with the living Christ. And for most of us, as lay Christians with little or no power to bring about grand schemes of union, it is only as our own spiritual life deepens that we can contribute to the unity of the Church.

And, as I suggested in last week's post, there are means of grace that are at our disposal as Protestants that might not be available (or not as readily available) in communion with Rome. "Spiritual ecumenism" surely involves using those means of grace to the utmost and making them available to Christians of other traditions. If, as Pope Benedict affirms, each tradition has gifts to offer, then perhaps the best thing we Catholic-minded Protestants can do is to develop those gifts within our own traditions and offer them to the universal Church.

Of course I have no way of knowing what the Pope would say to someone like me, who has come within a hairsbreadth of conversion to Catholicism and still struggles with the possibility that this is what God is calling me to do. Perhaps he would say that for someone who has felt that tug, "spiritual ecumenism" needs to include a trip through RCIA. But I think I can claim some support from the Pope's words for the views I expressed in my previous post. The conversion for which the Pope calls is clearly not, at least not primarily, a conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism. It is, as any evangelical would insist, a conversion to Christ. And the Pope is quite stunningly sanguine that this will bring about unity among Christians. He is furthermore encouraging the development of the gifts peculiar to our respective traditions. And as I argued in "The Case for Protestantism," this may not practically be possible in the context of an individual "conversion to Catholicism."

Pontificator has written a very kind and thought-provoking response to my previous post. He recognizes that indeed conversion to Catholicism involves a "radical humility," but he considers this to be necessary given the fundamental flaws in the "DNA" of Protestantism. My argument, though, was precisely that all Christian bodies have Catholicity in their DNA. By virtue of baptism, by virtue of our submission to Holy Scripture, by virtue of our claim to be members of Christ's Body, we (that is, all Christian churches) have a Catholic DNA that supersedes all the sins and heresies of which we are guilty. Our identity as members of the Body is more fundamental than our identity as divided Christians. That is the affirmation that makes ecumenism possible.

Pontificator raises two other issues that deserve separate treatment. One of them is the objective validity of Protestant sacraments. I've held forth on this in the comments section of Pontifications, but I should probably write about it here as well. The other is justification by faith. I don't have any disagreement with what Pontificator writes, and I think that my brief comments may have misled him as to exactly what I was criticizing. I will lay out my views in more detail in a subsequent post.

The case for Protestantism

2005-08-14T20:42:00.000-04:00

First of all, I'm sorry I've been away from the blog for so long. I worked for two weeks at a summer program at Duke University, the "Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation." I strongly recommend this program, by the way, to any of you who know (or are) intelligent, serious Christian young people who will be either rising juniors or rising seniors (in high school) next summer. I've also been trying to finish up the dissertation (at last!) and have agreed with my advisor on a target date for the defense (as soon after Oct. 15 as we can get the committee together). So it's been quite a full summer.

In my last post, I outlined the case for the "breakdown of Protestantism." In this one, I'd like to sketch a case _for_ Protestantism--specifically, for why those of us who are currently Protestants are justified in remaining so. I am not trying to persuade Catholics or Orthodox to become Protestants (God forbid!). I am not even trying to persuade Protestants not to become Catholic or Orthodox. I am trying to outline a rationale by which those of us who are not convinced that we should leave Protestantism can nonetheless be faithful to our vision of the unity of the Church, and can hold ourselves accountable to the Universal Church throughout space and time.

I've said in previous blogs that I think the norm for all of us should be faithfulness to the tradition in which we were raised. This is the normal way in which human beings reach truth--not because every tradition is equally true, but because as a rule we are only able to challenge our traditions if we submit ourselves to their discipline.

All religions contain what Justin Martyr called the "seminal Word" (logos spermatikos). As a Christian, I believe that submission to the discipline of the Logos in non-Christian religions naturally and ultimately leads people to Christ (this is not a judgment on the fate of those who do not get there in this life). Christians are able to respect those who, like the Tartar king in Chaucer's Squire's Tale, "keep the law to which they are sworn," while believing that faithfulness to the seeds of truth in that "law" ultimately tends to lead such people beyond it.

So obviously when Muslims come to the point where they recognize Jesus Christ as the eternal Son of God, they are no longer Muslims. When Hindus come to accept the uniqueness of Jesus as the Incarnation of God, they are no longer Hindus. When Buddhists accept that personal union with God in Christ is the ultimate goal of human beings (rather than a penultimate end for those not yet ready for nirvana), they are no longer Buddhists. These other religions are, in fact, other religions. Whatever points of contact they have with Christianity, they propose other ends for human existence than those proposed by Christianity. Conversion is therefore (we Christians must affirm) the ultimate goal which we desire for members of other religions, however much we may respect their faithfulness to the "law to which they are sworn."

The various traditions of Trinitarian Christianity are, however, _not_ different religions. Whatever their differences, they all propose that the ultimate end of human beings is union with the Triune God through the revelation of that God in the human being Jesus of Nazareth. The particular things they claim for themselves, and the particular doctrines they espouse, are (by their own hearty confession) subordinate to that ultimate goal. Furthermore, whatever the peculiarities of their reading of history, they all claim that Jesus Christ has been confessed for the past two thousand years, and that Christians today are part of that continuing story and claim unity with all who have truly called on Christ throughout space and time.

That means that (to take a tradition with which I strongly disagree) a Baptist who becomes convinced that baptism confers grace and that paedobaptism (however undesirable) is valid is not in the same position as the Muslim or Hindu who comes to believe in Christianity. While this person's belief is in contrast with the historic beliefs of his tradition, that tradition holds as one of its central principles that no human tradition has ultimate authority. Therefore, in a sense the Baptist is becoming more fully a Baptist by rejecting the errors of his tradition.

But enough of hypothetical cases. I am myself a scion of the holiness movement. My great-great-uncle and my great-grandfather left the Methodist Episcopal Church because they believed that it was apostate and that all true Christians should "come out" from existing denominations to form a holy community faithful to Christ. My grandparents, in turn, left the church in which they had grown up in order to minister to Christians who were outside that community. I grew up in what amounted to a house church, steeped in Scripture and in a piety focused on personal dedication to Christ. I was told over and over that we should be simply "Christians" rather than giving our loyalty to any human tradition. I was taught that we should seek for an experience of the Holy Spirit that led to our total consecration to God and hence to freedom from sin.

I now believe that much that I was taught was wrong. Our belief in the "invisible Church" led us to downplay the importance of actual, organized Christian communities. More seriously, our commitment to entire sanctification and "keeping ourselves unspotted from the world" led us to look down on the flawed and worldly Christians who make up practically every actual Christian community. Our belief that the Church had historically compromised with the world led us to despise much of the tradition of Christianity (especially since Constantine), hence insulating ourselves from the challenges posed by that tradition.

I have had to reject much of what I was taught. And yet I have only been able to do this because I was trying to be faithful to the things that I was taught were absolutely central. I was taught that above everything else I should follow Jesus Christ. I find that this leads me to treat with respect every manifestation of the Christian tradition in history, however compromised with the world it might be. I was taught that the pursuit of holiness is the only thing that really matters; I have found that the sacramental and liturgical traditions of Christianity kindle in me the desire for holiness. I was taught that the Church should be countercultural and challenge the world; I find that the Roman Communion often does so more effectively than Protestantism.

None of this is, on the face of it, incompatible with conversion to Catholicism or Orthodoxy. Such converts (especially to Catholicism) often claim that they have simply come into the fullness of what they were always taught. But from my perspective this is true only in a highly theoretical sense. Allegedly all the good things of Protestantism are implicitly possible in Catholicism (leaving Orthodoxy aside for the moment). But that is not the practical reality I find. I find that the traditions of Wesleyan Protestantism foster holiness and Christian faithfulness in ways that the structures and traditions of the Roman Communion do not (the reverse is also true). The priesthood of all believers (with a consequent tendency toward democracy in church polity), the evangelical conception of saving faith as an inseparable unit (as opposed to the Catholic compound of faith and charity), the vernacular hymn-singing tradition, and the stress on the study of Scripture as a central means of grace are all valuable aspects of Protestantism to me. Perhaps everything true in them can be reconciled with Catholicism (this is more obviously true of the latter two items than the former two). But for a convert to do so implies that one is converting to a tradition in order to change it.

Conversion, by its very name, implies a radical change of heart. It implies that one's priorities have been radically reoriented, however much continuity one may experience. It requires a radical humility toward the tradition one is accepting. That is not to say that the convert has nothing to offer from her former tradition--but all such offerings must be made humbly and tentatively, subject to the new rules by which one is playing. This requires an act of ultimate trust in the integrity of the tradition to which one is converting.

It is this act of trust which I have so far found impossible in the case of Catholicism. Because it is precisely the central elements of my Wesleyan tradition that have led me toward Catholicism, I am only capable of considering conversion to Catholicism _if_ those elements can be preserved within Catholicism. I would therefore be coming in with a set of mental qualifications. I can accept the hierarchical priesthood _if_ it does not violate the underlying primacy of the universal baptismal priesthood. If I found that in practice the ministerial priesthood did not serve the universal priesthood, I would be compelled to question it. I can accept the equality of Scripture and Tradition _if_ it does not make me regard Scripture with less reverence or see it as a less central means of grace than I have heretofore done. I can possibly accept the doctrine of unformed faith if it still allows me to place my trust in Jesus Christ with the same confidence and simplicity that my evangelical tradition has taught me to do.

On the face of it, judging from the behavior of the average Catholic and the life of the average Catholic congregation, it looks as if all these things would be very difficult. Not impossible, but working uphill at every step, against the inertia of centuries and against many of the cultural and devotional patterns that have become ingrained in Catholicism. I see many converts who are doing just that. I wish them well, but I'm not sure it's an enterprise I should embark on.

In conversion stories (or stories about switching traditions, which in many cases should not be called conversion) one often finds a pattern like this: the convert tried for some time to practise his newly discovered truths within the confines of his own tradition, only to decide that this somehow violated the integrity of that tradition. But one has to question this. If the practices or beliefs in question were matters of personal taste (even if they were genuinely superior in ways that are theologically and devotionally significant), then the "conversion" or shifting of allegiance was (however understandable) frivolous and ultimately indefensible. I may prefer Gregorian chant to praise choruses, but does that justify my abandoning one group of Christians for another?

But if the newly discovered beliefs or practices _are_ necessary to a fuller incorporation in the mystery of Christ, then surely talk of respect for one's old tradition is rather disingenuous. As I said earlier, all Christian traditions claim before all else to be faithful to Christ and the Word of God. If this faithfulness involves abandonment of praise choruses for Gregorian chant, or institution of weekly communion, or adoption of prayer for the dead, then so be it. Methodists (to take the tradition I will probably embrace if I remain Protestant) claim that being Christian is more important than being Methodist. Why not take them at their word? That is to show true respect for a tradition--to challenge it to be more fully what it claims to be, rather than stuffing its good points into a metaphysical suitcase and packing oneself off to an allegedly fuller tradition (which one nonetheless finds the need to improve in myriad ways).

In this post and the previous one I've tried to outline the two sides of the dilemma that confronts me. I have no doubt that Protestantism cannot function as an autonomous expression of Christianity. What I do not know is whether it has so completely broken down that I am obligated to abandon it, or whether (as I've been suggesting) faithfulness to my own heritage and to the Universal Church requires me to remain within my tradition (a tricky point for me owing to my nondenominational upbringing) and try to coax it toward greater faithfulness (even as I submit to its disciplines and hear the voice of the Universal Church through it, however distorted by local traditions and the poisonous heritage of schism).

By posting this I am of course asking for arguments on both sides, and yet I'm tired of the whole struggle, which has gone on for ten years now. I'm less and less confident in the possibility of big answers. I think grace comes to us through the cracks in our paradigms rather than through the harmony of a grand, consistent system. A hymn here and a prayer there, the taste of God's blood in the winecup and the handclasp of an old WWII veteran whose hair has fallen out from chemo--these mean more and more to me, and confident answers mean less and less. All I ask is enough certainty to enable me to live with faithfulness and joy, enough confidence to keep me from continually second-guessing my motives (and I will tend to do this do this no matter which path I take--I can make an excellent case that either remaining Protestant or becoming Catholic is fundamentally selfish and cowardly).

I welcome your arguments and comments, but I crave your prayers.

The "breakdown of Protestantism"

2005-06-12T20:32:00.000-04:00

"John Student" asked in a comment to my last post why I thought Protestantism had broken down. Well, that is precisely the question for me. Has it? To defend the affirmative response to this question, I could refer John to Pontificator's eloquent posts over the past year or two, but then I don't agree with everything Pontificator has said by any means (he's coming from an Anglo-Catholic point of view in which Protestantism is not really a live option). So here goes:

Protestantism as a coherent form of Christianity is untenable for me because of the vital importance of the unity of the Church in both Scripture and Christian Tradition. I believe with all my heart that salvation means incorporation into Christ's Body. To be saved is to be brought into a living relationship with God through Christ, and this means that each individual believer forms an organic part of the mystical reality called the Body of Christ. So far, I think few if any Christians would disagree.

But here's the catch--this Mystical Body cannot _simply_ be thought of as an "invisible" reality. To do so is to deny both the full meaning of the Incarnation and our own nature as embodied creatures. It is not enough to say "as a Christian I have spiritual unity with all other Christians." This unity must have _some_ practical consequences for how I live my life and how I worship on Sunday morning.

It follows that any particular Christian body is a true church only insofar as it connects me with the universal Body of Christ. It must therefore either claim to be the universal Church or have a plausible account explaining how it is related to the universal Church as a part to the whole. And it must have some way of being accountable to the universal Church. For an intrinsic part of the visibility, the concrete reality, of the Church is that we can be held accountable to each other. This is one of the reasons why "spiritual unity" is so radically insufficient. (Another is that it allows us to continue to despise one another and see ourselves as superior--but that's actually just another facet of the lack of accountability.)

For many Protestants, the claim to be the universal Church (made by any particular Christian body) is an intrinsically absurd one. Of course such a claim must be nuanced, along the lines of Vatican II's clarification that non-Catholics participate to a great measure in the reality of the Church. And historically confessional Protestant churches (Lutheran and Reformed) have made such claims. Confessional Lutherans traditionally saw themselves as the one true visible expression of Christ's Church on earth. Similarly, many Reformed will say that the true Church in its fullness is the Church that holds Reformed doctrine. This approach is different from the Catholic one insofar as it makes doctrine primary--the true Church is just the Church that holds true doctrine (and administers the sacraments truly). But like the Vatican-II approach, this Protestant ecclesiology allows imperfect churches to have a measure of reality without participating in the fullness of the Church in the same way that doctrinally correct churches do.

I do not find the claims of confessional Protestantism in this regard persuasive. I do not believe that either Reformed or Lutheran theology, in their coherent, developed, confessional forms, represent the fullness (or even the fullness as it has been understood up to now) of God's revelation in Christ. Catholicism and Orthodoxy are, from my point of view, possible candidates. Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism are not. (Lutheranism is basically orthodox but wacky and idiosyncratic; Calvinism is more balanced but is seriously heterodox at several points.) None of the other forms of Protestantism can make a better claim in this regard--most, as far as I see it, don't even try.

The only tenable form of Protestantism for me, then, will be a form that can give an account of itself as a _part_ of the universal Church. But this means that the part must understand itself in relation to the whole, and it must have a way of being accountable to that whole. This is where Protestantism completely collapses, as I see it. The two forms of Protestantism with which I currently have some connection--Anglicanism and Methodism--speak of being part of the one holy Catholic Church of the Creeds, but do not in practice seem to have any way of living out this claim. This has become most glaringly obvious in the Episcopal Church since General Convention 2003, but the current crisis is just a symptom of a much deper problem.

This is what I mean by the "breakdown" of Protestantism. At the Reformation Protestants believed (with some reason) that they were accomplishing a much-needed reform of the Church that would lead to the collapse of the Papal "Antichrist" and the restoration of true Christianity in its purity. This clearly is not what happened and not what is going to happen. Again, in the 18th and early 19th centuries evangelical, revivalistic Protestants believed that through revivals and missions true Christianity was going to spread around the world, once again bringing about the collapse of false religion and ushering in the reign of Christ on earth. This too has not happened. Then, in the 20th century mainline Protestants (I'm thinking of solid, orthodox theologians like Lesslie Newbigin) believed that through ecumenism and mutual understanding Christians could get beyond their historic differences and discover the historic core that underlay their particular expressions, recognizing in each other the gifts missing in their own traditions. This too seems a failure now.

Of course Christ can bring success out of failure--it's his job description. But I see no reason to believe that any of these projects are rooted in any promise of Christ. I can see why Protestants during the heyday of each of the movements I mentioned (the Reformation, revivalism, ecumenism) saw a rationale and a purpose for Protestantism. But I can't. The earlier forms of Protestantism that saw Catholicism as an enemy were (I believe) clearly wrong, and the more ecumenical approach is incompatible with the dogmatic claims of Catholicism, and seems in practice to be fatal to orthodoxy even within a Protestant framework.

I could make a case on the other side. But this is the pro-breakdown case as I see it. I'm happy to elaborate on it further as needed.

Two extreme alternatives

2005-06-05T22:50:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I said that I saw two basic ways of approaching the question of tradition and truth. Actually, I don't think that either of these is tenable in their "pure" form--but I'm going to describe them in that form in order to lay out the issues clearly. I will refer to them as "rationalism" and "traditionalism," recognizing that both of these terms can be used in very different ways from the ways I'll be using them.

The first alternative, "rationalism," is to see truth as something wholly outside oneself, which one can apprehend by reason and then has the duty of following regardless of consequences. In this view, our powers of apprehending truth are essentially passive receptors of the evidence presented to us by various claimants to our allegiance. Any bias on our part, whether resulting from our personal temperament or circumstances or from the shaping of the tradition in which we were raised, is seen as an irrelevant or harmless distraction. An honest and intelligent person will try to disregard such influences, or at the very least will be thoroughly on guard against them.

The other alternative, "traditionalism," sees truth as something that is only achievable by means of the tradition in which we were formed. To step outside that formation is to abandon the only framework that we have for getting at religious truth. Truth, particularly in matters of religion, is not something that we can determine by weighing evidence, or for that matter by following the promptings of our hearts (emotionalism is, from my point of view, just another form of "rationalism"--the Mormons being an excellent example of this). The framework from which we approach a question largely determines the kinds of answers we will find, and this framework has been inescapably shaped by tradition.

Of course these are not the only two possible alternatives. One could hold with the traditionalist that the framework of the mind largely determines how one approaches truth, while holding with the rationalist that this framework is (or ought to be) essentially independent of the shaping we have received from our respective traditions. But for my purposes this is either functionally identical with rationalism (since it posits a universal framework that allows us to receive truth in essentially the same way regardless of our respective traditions), or it dissolves into a useless and despairing subjectivism (as does much postmodernism--but not the forms of postmodernism that I find at all interesting or convincing).

Ecclesiastically speaking, my dichotomy results in some surprising alignments. Conservative Protestants of nearly all stripes are thoroughgoing rationalists. Liberal Protestants were at one time largely rationalistic, but these days tend to be more or less traditionalist (although they think that we can and should question and shape our respective traditions from within, often in radical ways--cynically, one could say that they tend to be rationalists about their own traditions and traditionalists about other people's!). Liberal Catholics tend to be much more thoroughly traditionalistic, though not completely so. Conservative Catholics of the kind one tends to meet on the Internet (Catholic Answers being an excellent example) are as rationalistic as any Protestant. They view tradition as authoritative--but they think that we have to determine which tradition is authoritative in a fundamentally rationalistic manner. (Catholic Answers has an astonishing tract that purports to prove the authority of the Bible from the authority of the Church, and the authority of the Church from an empirical, un-traditioned reading of the Biblical and historical evidence.) But cradle Catholics generally tend to be traditionalists (one Catholic scholar of medieval philosophy expressed to me her great puzzlement at the whole concept of conversion--it seemed obvious to her that you stick with the religion you were born into). This may be "liberal," but it seems extremely widespread even among Catholics whose basic piety and beliefs are quite conservative. Finally (lest you think that I'm simply twisting terminology around and labelling conservatives "rationalists" and liberals "traditionalists"), the Orthodox are solidly traditionalistic, except for converts and a few others. Many Orthodox take it for granted that Westerners will be Catholics or Protestants and see this as perfectly OK, while still believing that Orthodoxy is the true religion.

From my previous post, it should be clear that I find rationalism radically unsatisfactory. I do not believe that the influence of tradition is, generally and fundamentally, something to be resisted or disregarded (in fact, I don't think we _can_ disregard it, and I think resisting it is futile and silly because we will simply react against it based on the paradigm it has given us).

So what about traditionalism? I confess that I have moods in which I'm tempted to take a completely traditionalist position. I like the fact that there are multiple religious traditions in the world. I revel in the flavor of these traditions, and I almost always find something to respect in people who are deeply rooted in them. People like me, on the other hand, who float aroundseeking for the truth (granted that my floating has been done within Christianity), seem to lack depth. A rolling stone gathers no moss. And unless one simply roots oneself unquestioningly to one's tradition of origin, it's hard for a thoughtful person in this pluralistic world to avoid becoming such a rolling stone. Furthermore, converts almost always seem to go on thinking and acting based on the paradigm from which they have converted. Cradle members of the tradition attracting the converts often complain about this (at least in more "traditionalist" traditions such as Catholicism and Orthodoxy).

But there's one obvious problem with such a position for a Christian--it is fundamentally and irredeemably pagan. (In fact, insofar as Catholics and Orthodox do tend to be traditionalists, this is the strongest piece of evidence for the claim of some Protestants that these forms of Christianity have been paganized.) In fact, many works of early Christian apologetics (the _Octavius_ of Minucius Felix, for instance) oppose a Christian "rationalism" to a pagan "traditionalism." As Robert Wilken pointed out (in _The Christians as the Romans Saw Them_), many spokesmen for late ancient paganism defended a "conservative" approach to religion in which truth is fundamentally unknowable, leaving the traditions of one's society as the only reasonable and proper way to approach the divine mystery. This is not so different from the approach of many people today. But it's obviously self-contradictory for a Christian. How can we say that it was a good thing for our ancestors to convert to Christianity, but a bad thing for us to consider the possibility of conversion (whether away from Christianity, or more likely to a different tradition within Christianity)? Furthermore, even those who want to revive paganism are still caught within the same paradox, since they must convert to this revived paganism (and largely construct it anew). Complete traditionalism is not really an option for Westerners (with the exception of Jews--though we could claim that the adoption of monotheism was a kind of conversion itself). That means, of course, that the Catholics and Orthodox whom I've defined as traditionalists are either not thinking very carefully and consistently, or are not thoroughgoing traditionalists at all. (At the very least, they would have to admit that their ancient ancestors were right to be somewhat "rationalistic.")

I am probably arguing with myself here. Most likely no reader of this blog is tempted to thoroughgoing traditionalism. But I am, so this train of thought is necessary for me.

The question before me, then, is twofold: how much of a traditionalist can/should I be, and how should I apply my views to my particular situation? (I think that the way I ended my last post was misleading, since the more dubious point for me is really the practical application rather than the decision between rationalism and traditionalism itself. But I've only figured this out by the process of planning and writing this post.)

Let me sketch a brief response to the first question, which I'll go into in more depth on a later occasion.

I believe that the default option for all of us should be the tradition in which we were raised. Most people throughout human history have lived and died without seriously questioning their traditions. They were not foolish or slothful or (in the matters that really count) ignorant. They were doing exactly what they ought to have done (or at least one can reasonably assume that many/most of them were--of course folly and sloth and ignorance are real possibilities for all of us!). This is the normal condition for human beings--it is the normal way in which we become wise and good and holy.

Conversion, then, whether individual or collective, is and ought to be a rare and abnormal event. It occurs in one of two cases: when the existing paradigm has irretrievably broken down, or when a new paradigm presents itself that breaks through our previous assumptions and calls us to a new allegiance (in other words, when divine revelation occurs, or what we are persuaded to believe is divine revelation). Even in that second case, we will be drawn to the new paradigm only insofar as it addresses already felt problems with our current paradigm. So it's better to say that these two cases are two sides of the same coin rather than two separate alternatives.

Furthermore, as traditionalists point out, one necessarily carries over the questions of one's previous tradition into one's new allegiance. This is not necessarily a bad thing. As Stanley Hauerwas has pointed out, we need to be taught what questions to ask. But I would say that to some extent this must be a pre-conversion matter (Hauerwas would most likely disagree). Unless we already have learned to ask some of the relevant questions, the new paradigm will have no hold on us. And having adopted the new paradigm, we will continue to pursue the questions we have already learned to ask, even as we learn to ask new ones.

That means that Pontificator and other Anglicans are quite right to look for a new tradition because our own is in deep trouble. It's true that there must be more than that--but an awareness of the problems of one's current paradigm is the appropriate starting point for a journey of conversion. Pontificator had no business spending his life in some kind of ecclesiastical no-man's-land dispassionately considering the merits of various traditions. He did exactly what he ought to have done--served to the best of his ability within his own tradition.

Whether I can follow him, however, is another matter. I am not at all sure that Protestantism has irretrievably broken down. As I've said in a previous post, I waver on this point in a quite alarming manner (at least to me--from the point of view of my friends it is better described as wearisome and annoying).

Tradition and truth

2005-05-04T12:54:00.000-04:00

One of the positive intellectual developments of the past few decades has been an increasing appreciation of the role of tradition in our apprehension of truth. This awareness has even affected our understanding of scientific progress. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has argued that science proceeds not by an obvious and inevitable overcoming of error by objective truth, but rather through a series of "paradigm shifts" in which previous frameworks for interpreting the universe undergo crisis and are replaced by new paradigms. The old paradigms are not necessarily false--they may explain certain things better than the new paradigms do. Scientists abandon one paradigm for another in an often wrenching process which Kuhn describes as a "conversion." They experience more and more phenomena which the old paradigm cannot explain, and if these are frequent enough and important enough (for their particular purposes) they eventually feel the need to "convert" to the new paradigm, even though this may mean losing the ability to explain certain other phenomena.

This understanding of intellectual development fits in well with the view I've been defending in my previous discussions of "relativism" and "soft rationalism." It does not claim that there is no ultimate truth--simply that our access to that truth is necessarily limited and contingent. We only have access to the truth via certain paradigms which necessarily limit our perspective. Yet we cannot escape into an unlimited, unmediated vision of the truth--not in this life at least.

It follows further that we have access to the truth only via particular traditions, and that we come closer to the truth the more deeply we root ourselves in the understanding of the world given us by our particular tradition.

But it follows further, if we adopt Kuhn's basic approach and apply it to religious truth, that it is possible for us to undergo a "conversion" to a new paradigm. It may be that our former paradigm becomes unworkable and we find ourselves compelled to take the wrenching step of abandoning it for some other way of approaching the Truth. This is precisely the question faced by those of us who are concerned with the current direction of the Episcopal Church. Is the crisis faced by ECUSA, and by mainline Protestantism generally, sufficiently acute that we are obligated to abandon our current paradigm?

Of course, there are various ways of defining a "paradigm," and for many of us denominational affiliation may not be the primary source of our religious paradigm. The paradigm under which I've been operating for the past few years is best described as "ecumenical Protestantism." That is to say, I see myself as a member of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, and I see all baptized Christians as being similarly members of that Church, although in varying degrees. I acknowledge the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, but I do not believe that he or any other office or structure within the Church enjoys the charism of infallibility. I am unwilling to say, as both Catholics and Orthodox say, that Protestant sacraments are in some qualitative way less valid than those of the churches enjoying apostolic succession. At the same time, I do not see myself as identifying with some unified reality called "Protestantism" over against Catholicism and/or Orthodoxy. Indeed, on most specific issues where Catholicism and Orthodoxy agree over against Protestantism, I believe Protestantism is wrong. (This is Pontificator's Somethingth Law--I forget exactly which but I think it's Third.) The major exception to this, of course, is ecclesiology. Catholicism and Orthodoxy agree in denying Protestantism full ecclesial status. This is the primary issue that marks me as a Protestant, however "Catholic" I may be in other respects.

And, of course, it is this understanding of the Church that is currently threatened. Because of the impending (or should I say current?) split in the Anglican Communion, I find myself in a situation of radically conflicted loyalty. My denomination, ECUSA, has taken a step condemned (rightly, as I believe) by the Anglican Communion as a whole--a step that furthermore increases our isolation from the tradition of the Church and from the majority of Christians worldwide (in particular, from both Catholicism and Orthodoxy, without one or both of which there can be no meaningful reunion of Christians). And yet, to side with one of the conservative Anglican bodies angling for recognition by the international Communion not only involves me in a local schism, but requires a deep loyalty to Anglican identity which I do not feel. I am not a cradle Anglican, and joined ECUSA because, from where I then stood (as an unaffiliated, nondenominational Christian of Wesleyan Holiness extraction), such a step was a movement closer to the heart of the Christian Tradition.

The current situation of ECUSA thus highlights my existing misgivings about the ecclesiological paradigm under which I've been operating. I am compelled to act in some way--to remain in ECUSA under current circumstances is an act equally radical as the act of leaving the denomination. My personal "via media," which has sheltered me for seven years, has collapsed over my head. I am forced to choose between reaffirming my commitment to my ancestral Protestantism (probably by joining the United Methodist Church), or taking the leap I've avoided so long and converting to Catholicism (or less probably Orthodoxy).

This choice presents itself to me in the form of two different approaches to the relationship between tradition and truth. I will explore these two options in subsequent posts.

Habemus papam!

2005-04-20T13:26:00.000-04:00

This week, as everybody knows, the Christian world got a new Pope. I say "the Christian world" deliberately. Whatever we "separated brethren" believe about the Papacy, we are related to it by virtue of our baptism. The Pope is the successor of Peter and the rightful leader of all Christians. Of that I am certain, whatever problems I may have with some of the papal claims.

I've been an admirer of the theological work of Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) for years. I generally say that my three favorite living Catholic theologians are Ratzinger, Avery Dulles, and Aidan Nichols. However, I've also been influenced by the prevailing stereotype of Ratzinger as a hardline conservative. I've read parts of his early Introduction to Christianity, which I found extremely moving. And I've read bits of his more recent work. But when I think of recent Ratzinger I've tended to think of Dominus Iesus and the Ratzinger Report. Both of these documents contain a lot of wisdom, and I've defended Dominus Iesus to fellow-Protestants (and even some Catholics) on many occasions. But as prefect of the CDF, Ratzinger has spent much of the past 24 years laying out the limits of orthodoxy. And this has led many people--including myself--to assume that he has changed significantly from his early years.

Since his election, I've been reading more of his work--some of the essays and addresses found on the EWTN website for one thing, and the book of conversations God and the World for another. And I've become increasingly convinced that the stereotype has been seriously mistaken. Ratzinger's job has been to preserve orthodoxy, so most of us have only paid attention to him when he was wagging a finger at someone. Yet all the while he has continued to produce (as a theologian) thoughtful, creative reflections on the Christian life and the role of the Church.

The central and consistent theme of Ratzinger's thought is communion. Not authority, not law, not order, not even tradition. Human beings are created for communion with God and one another. The Church is the fellowship in which this communion takes place--a fellowship that sums up God's work of creation throughout the aeons, and God's work of revelation throughout the centuries. The purpose of doctrine and liturgy and discipline is to shape this fellowship of communion. All the history of the universe and the human race is pointing toward the eschaton, in which the creation to which God has given freedom will freely return to communion with Him. The Church exists as a sign of that final goal of all creation. This is the context which Ratzinger's critics repeatedly miss. And without it nothing he says or does makes sense.

The new Pope's abhorrence of relativism stems from its threat to this doctrine of communion. If the truth is changing and uncertain, then the history of the universe lacks a goal. Communion is not simply a matter of warm feelings or of tolerance. It involves a deep spiritual unity, and this requires a shared vision of the truth.

This does not mean that the Church's grasp of the truth does not change or develop. In _God and the World_ Ratzinger makes this clear: "It is never the case that we can say, Now we know everything; now the knowledge of Christianity is complete. There are unfathomable depths both in God and in human life, so that there are always new dimensions to faith." (God and the World, 38.) "What has at least been vouchsafed to the Church," he continues, "is a certitude about what can not be reconciled with the gospel."

Benedict XVI is a "conservative" not because he wants to return to an earlier era, and not because he thinks progress is impossible, but because he understands that for progress to take place it must build on what has already been learned rather than rejecting it. Progress implies a goal. And as Chesterton pointed out more than a century ago, you can't have progress if the goal keeps moving. We live in a society that has glorified change for its own sake. Suggest that a given change might possibly be bad, and you find yourself branded a "conservative." And in a society that has abandoned a shared vision of truth, slurs and labels are our most powerful weapons, because rational disagreement has become impossible. Ratzinger complains in Conscience and Truth: "In many places today, for example, no one bothers any longer to ask what a person thinks. The verdict on someone's thinking is ready at hand as long as you can assign it to its corresponding, formal category: conservative, reactionary, fundamentalist, progressive, revolutionary." (In all fairness, Ratzinger himself sometimes falls prey to this tendency--like many German academics, he's too prone to sum something up with a generalizing label and act as if he's adequately described it. But even his worst enemies cannot accuse him of not bothering "to ask what a person thinks.")

The accusation of hardboiled conservatism, while mistaken, at least has some basis in truth. But the other major accusation against Ratzinger--that he defines the Church in terms of power and authority rather than love or communion--is pretty nearly the opposite of the truth. Throughout his writings, the Pope has insisted that the power of the Christian faith is the power that flows from the Cross of Christ. He has made it clear that the Papacy's detour into temporal power was a terrible distraction from its true ministry, which is one of martyrdom in all the senses of the word.

Benedict's marvellous sermon at the Inauguration Mass this morning expresses this with eloquence and clarity:

The symbol of the lamb also has a deeper meaning. In the Ancient Near East, it was customary for kings to style themselves shepherds of their people. This was an image of their power, a cynical image: to them their subjects were like sheep, which the shepherd could dispose of as he wished. When the shepherd of all humanity, the living God, himself became a lamb, he stood on the side of the lambs, with those who are downtrodden and killed. This is how he reveals himself to be the true shepherd: "I am the Good Shepherd . . . I lay down my life for the sheep," Jesus says of himself (John 10:14f). It is not power, but love that redeems us! This is Gods sign: he himself is love. How often we wish that God would make show himself stronger, that he would strike decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world. All ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of humanity.
We suffer on account of God's patience. And yet, we need his patience. God, who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him. The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man. One of the basic characteristics of a shepherd must be to love the people entrusted to him, even as he loves Christ whom he serves. "Feed my sheep," says Christ to Peter, and now, at this moment, he says it to me as well. Feeding means loving, and loving also means being ready to suffer. Loving means giving the sheep what is truly good, the nourishment of Gods truth, of Gods word, the nourishment of his presence, which he gives us in the Blessed Sacrament.

"It is not power, but love that redeems us." These are not the words of a doctrinaire authoritarian. These are the words of a man who truly loves Christ, and who has grasped with his whole soul the heart of the Gospel. In his recent diatribe, Fr. Matthew Fox claimed that a canon lawyer had told him that to understand Ratzinger he had to understand that Ratzinger was not a Christian. Unless everything I have read and seen and heard of Ratzinger/Benedict is false, Fr. Fox and his unnamed source have it exactly wrong. To understand Pope Benedict, we must first understand that he is a Christian. One would think that this would be easy to grasp. Yet most criticisms of him seem predicated on the idea that he can't really believe what he says. He can't really think that all of history is summed up in the Gospel of Christ, as historically preserved (though unworthily) by the Catholic Church. This must really be a mask for something else, something secular people can understand and account for.

This failure to understand what Benedict is all about has led to misunderstanding of one of his most provocative remarks (repeated in several different contexts in recent years): that the Church may have to become smaller in order to witness effectively to the Gospel. Coming as I do from a "Holiness" background in which "a big church" was more or less synonymous with corruption (indeed, my family believed that the Catholic Church's sheer size alone testified that it couldn't be the true Church), I find this vision rather appealing. But again, it has been interpreted as a sign of authoritarianism--that Ratzinger wants to get rid of all those who won't bow to his yoke. In fact, it is the reverse. Ratzinger's vision of the Church is the antidote to triumphalism. It does not glorify smallness in itself, and it is certainly not dour and pessimistic. But it calls on the Church to be faithful without counting the cost--to give up the quest for worldly power in order to testify to the God who reigns from the Cross. If this should lead to a revitalization of Christian Europe, then Ratzinger clearly welcomes that prospect. (Indeed, he seems quite optimistic that eventually secularism will pall, and that a revitalized Church will become attractive once again to jaded Europeans.) But that is not the Church's goal in itself, and the Church must not (as she has done in the past) compromise her message in order to establish a "Christian" society.

This vision of the Church is surely linked to Ratzinger's choice of a papal name. Alasdair McIntyre closes his masterpiece After Virtue with the somber pronouncement that we face a situation much like that of Christians at the time of the fall of the Western Empire. The barbarians, McIntyre warns, have been ruling us for some time. This "barbarism" expresses itself in a loss of the conception that human life has a telos, a final goal. Such a rejection of teleology also involves a rejection of the traditional distinction between human beings as they are and human beings as they should be. (See for instance Sidney Callahan's reaction to Ratzinger's "Conscience and Truth.") We attempt to construct ethics on the basis of empirical observation of human behavior, and the result is that we can find no convincing rationale for many traditional values, and when we face major ethical debates we have no common ground on which to discuss (much less resolve) our differences.

McIntyre's answer to this dire predicament is to form communities of people who do practice the virtues, within which a conception of human life as ordered toward a "telos" remains living and effective. "We are waiting," he proclaims, "not for Godot, but for a second, no doubt very different, St. Benedict." These words of hope have taken on a new meaning this past week. Whether the new Pope will turn out to be a saint is not for me to decide (or for anyone to decide yet). But he has already proclaimed himself to be a Benedict.

Requiescat in pace JPII

2005-04-03T22:46:00.000-04:00

I've spent much of the past day and a half watching coverage of the Pope's death. It's still sinking in. Karol Wojtila has defined the world in which I live more than anyone else--which is ironic, given how often he opposed what seemed to be the dominant culture of our era. I was four years old when John Paul II became Pope, and Popes weren't really on my radar screen except as mythical monsters. It took me years to overcome the prejudices I'd inherited and recognize just how saintly and wise he was. And now he is gone. We will not soon see his like. He was not perfect, and as an Episcopalian (though a relatively conservative one) I obviously differ with some of his beliefs and actions. But he taught the world what a Pope could be. The office has had its share of scoundrels, and far more mediocrities. But in John Paul the spirit of the Apostles stood up and roared. This was a man unquestionably, devotedly in love with Jesus Christ; a man fervently convinced of the existence of truth, and committed to the proposition that all truth ultimately led to one source. His outreach to other religions (criticized by conservatives) and his defense of traditional Christian sexual morality (criticized by liberals) reflected a unified Christian humanism that his critics rarely seem to have grasped. It was easier to portray him as a man of contradictions than to face the possibility that he saw what we did not. He was standing on top of the mountain while we threw stones at him from opposite valleys. For John Paul II, all goodness and truth and beauty in human culture came from Christ, and for him there was no radical discontinuity between the dignity given us in creation and the new nature restored in Christ. Christ is the goal of all creation, the lens through which every human aspiration gains its nobility. The religion of John Paul was one that set demanding standards, but had room for deep compassion with human weakness. The popular faith of our culture does exactly the opposite--it cheapens forgiveness into tolerance and then has no true forgiveness left for those who need it.

John Paul's motto, from the beginning, was "Be not afraid." I used to find this rather superficial, as if all the problems of the world could be brushed away with an exhortation to buck up. But the older I get, and the more deeply I delve into my own fears, the more I realize that this was the one truly profound thing that could be said to our cowardly age. The great sin of our era is not that we are cruel or lustful or unjust or unbelieving. We are all those things, but there's nothing new in that--people have had these vices since the beginning of recorded history. The great sin of our age is that we are afraid. In our heart of hearts, many of us do not believe that there is any life beyond this one, that there is any transcendent value worth living and dying for, that there is any truth that can satisfy our souls like bread and wine. And so we dare not risk our lives by daring to believe, to hope, to love. We fritter ourselves away in little deaths, because we fear death so much. We browse the Internet, we watch TV, we read self-help books, we eat fast food. We spend our last days in a coma (if our relatives don't starve us to death), and we die and are reduced to ashes. And we call ourselves great and enlightened and civilized.

We are a culture of death because we are a culture of fear. Far from being irrelevant, John Paul was feared and hated because his message was exactly the message we needed to hear. We said that he did not understand us, because he understood us too well. He did not accept our heroic vision of ourselves, so we said he was blinded by his archaic prejudices. But in fact, like all prophets, he saw through our false images of greatness. He saw our pitiful souls, made for holiness and contented with mediocrity--he saw us and he loved us, as his Master loves us. And we could not stand it.

May he rest in peace, and may light perpetual shine upon him. And by his prayers, may we obtain the grace to follow his example. May we love without fear, and hope without shame. May we never rest content with anything less than the full humanity that is ours in Christ. And may we be gathered together, with Karol Wojtila and all the faithful departed, in the presence of our Lord who bought us with his blood.

Good Friday in Florida

2005-03-25T22:29:00.000-05:00

I don't really have anything to say about the Terri Schiavo case that hasn't been said already--by Kathleen Parker, for instance, in two excellent recent articles in the Orlando Sentinel. For that matter, President Bush has summed up the core of the matter--we should always err on the side of life. Schiavo is being killed slowly by a legal system so dedicated to privacy and self-determination that it allows a husband now living with another woman to end the life of his wife against the protests of her parents. A case like this shows that something is rotten with our approach to questions of life and death.

I don't know if Schiavo's parents are right in thinking that she may recover. I don't know if there are any brain cells left in her cerebral cortex. I don't know if her apparent interaction with visitors is an illusion. I don't even (as many supporters of Schiavo claim to do) know what kind of a person Michael Schiavo is, or what his motives are. I don't know if she really expressed a desire not to be kept alive or not. But even a slight shadow of doubt on any of these issues is enough to make the withdrawal of her feeding tube a damnable act of murder.

Suppose all the things claimed by Michael Schiavo and the judges who have sided with him are true. Suppose Schiavo really isn't "in there" any more. What horrendous evil is being committed? A human body is being kept in some sort of functioning biological state even though (in traditional religious/philosophical terms) the soul has fled. If this were true, it would be a waste of money, and it would hinder Michael Schiavo's plans for the rest of his life. But neither of these things is the end of the world.

Killing an innocent human being, however, is the end of the world--for that person at least. (Hence the Jewish maxim that saving one life is equivalent to saving the whole human race, with its corollary that killing one person is equivalent to wiping out the human race. Life and death are not subject to arithmetic.) There's a kind of Pascal's wager here. If Terri is still a living human being (however disabled) then what is being done to her is murder. If she is not, then keeping her body "alive" is foolish but hardly wicked.

This is very similar to the logic that leads me to oppose the death penalty. I don't think that it is wrong to execute someone who has deliberately killed another human being. But neither do I believe that society has a moral duty to do so. Therefore, given the fact that it's almost impossible to be absolutely sure whether an accused murderer is guilty, I see no moral justification for imposing the death penalty unless leaving the murderer alive would put innocent people in imminent danger. Again, we should always err on the side of life.

It is often claimed that pro-life people are inconsistent if they don't oppose the death penalty. I don't think this is true (although I oppose both abortion and the death penalty), because the distinction between innocent human life and the life of a murderer is a consistent one, even if you don't agree with it. But the reverse _is_ true, in Schiavo's case as with regard to abortion. If the danger of executing an innocent person is a powerful reason for opposing the death penalty (as it surely is), then all those who use this argument or rely on this as a reason for their anti-death-penalty stance should be lining up in support of Schiavo. That many of them are not doing so is a witness to just how far _they_ (rather than Schiavo's supporters) are the ones motivated by political considerations.

I'm particularly disappointed with Jim Wallis of _Sojourners_. I agree with his position as often as not, and was very impressed with his open letter to Chuck Colson a few weeks ago. But the most recent _Sojourners_ email newsletter contains two articles which contrast sadly with each other. One of them praises (rightly) the U.S. Catholic bishops for a new statement against the death penalty. The other takes a rather mealy-mouthed stance with regard to the Schiavo case, saying that we should indeed be particularly careful to protect the rights of vulnerable people like Schiavo, but at the same time claiming that issues regarding withdrawal of life support are difficult ones and there are no clear-cut answers. I applauded Wallis when he claimed (against Colson) to be the supporter of a consistent ethic of life, challenging both the major parties wherever they depart from this ethic. But this most recent newsletter confirms my suspicions that Wallis does not live up to his claims in practice. He is far more concerned with the ways political conservatives support the culture of death than with the ways liberals do.

On this Good Friday, we are reminded that we are a people whose King reigns from the Cross. The answer that the Church has to give our conflicted and confused society does not lie in the use of power, even though power has its legitimate uses to defend the innocent. It is our calling as Christians to take our stand on the Cross with our Lord and with all those throughout history who have suffered at the hands of the powerful. It is not our job to make compromises in order to get things done. It is not our job to choose the lesser evil to avoid the greater. We are called not to side with the winners in the political game, but with the victims for whom the game has a deadly seriousness. We should indeed call on those in power to use that power on behalf of Schiavo and those like her, and we should hold them accountable if they do not. But we should not be surprised when they let us down (and more importantly, let the Terri Schiavos of the world down, and Christ in them). We must speak out on behalf of all the victims, not just those whom our favored political party chooses to champion. We must suffer with them, weep with them, and if necessary die with them. God knows that I have done little in this regard. I am far more concerned with ecclesiology and liturgy and history (important as all these things are) than with the sufferings of Christ in those whose humanity He shares. May God forgive me. May God forgive us all, and as Easter morning dawns, may our victorious Lord grant us the strength to do better.

And may God grant deliverance to Terri Schiavo, unjustly condemned to death--and if not, then may He grant rest to her soul, and repentance and forgiveness to those who are killing her.

Two kinds of relativism

2005-02-13T15:39:00.000-05:00

"Relativism" is one of those words that gets thrown around in our culture a lot, but we don't always clarify what we mean by it. In particular, it gets used by conservatives as a slur--often to discredit a view that seems too fuzzy: "That seems dangerously relativistic to me." On the other hand, I've talked to at least two people in my life who did claim to be thorough-going relativists (one was a philosophy Ph.D. student at Duke, the other was an eccentric elderly gentleman, also with a philosophy background but not a member of the academic establishment, whom I met in Barnes and Noble). Neither of them gave what seemed to me like a convincing answer to the objection that their position undermined any kind of moral judgment. They both (particularly the guy in Barnes and Noble) appeared to endorse a code of ethics that relied primarily on leaving one another alone and respecting the rights and privacy of others. But neither of them seemed to be able to answer (to my satisfaction at least) my objection that if there are no absolutes then this code itself has no valid basis. Furthermore, any thorough-going relativism exposes itself to the old stand-by: if there are no absolutes, then it is absolutely true that there are no absolutes.

Precisely for this reason, I think we need to take more seriously a much more modest kind of relativism (one could call it "relative relativism") which fulfills the need felt by relativists (for acknowledging the limitations of our viewpoint as limited human beings) without falling prey to the charge of self-refutation. An old friend of mine in college put it best: in this kind of relativism, what is being claimed is simply that everything we know or affirm to be true is known and affirmed from a particular standpoint, influenced and shaped by particular circumstances. (I'm paraphrasing him, not quoting him.) This does _not_ deny that there are absolute truths. Nor, in a sense, does it deny that we have access to those absolute truths. But our access is not itself absolute. We know the absolutes, but we do not know them absolutely. This, it seems to me, is true to the Thomistic maxim that knowledge exists according to the mode of the knower, and to the far more important Pauline saying that we "see through a glass, darkly" in this life.

This results in a paradox. I can see with utter conviction that certain things are absolutely right and wrong, while remaining aware of the fact that I am speaking from a particular perspective, shaped by particular influences. I can be at least somewhat self-aware in this regard, and will naturally be more confident of the absolute relevance of what I'm saying insofar as my perspective appears to be that of the human race as a whole, or at least of a large cross-section thereof. From a purely rational point of view, it is far more certain that cruelty is wrong than that democracy is the best way to govern human beings, and it is far more certain that a God of some kind exists than that God is Three Persons in One, and that the Second Person of the Godhead became man for our salvation. This is primarily relevant in terms of our attitude toward those with whom we disagree. Contrary to what both thorough-going relativists and some Christian advocates of "total depravity" would argue, the Nazis for instance were aware that what they were doing to the Jews was cruel (or, as they would have said, apparently cruel) and went against certain basic human moral intuitions (they argued these moral intuitions away, but the very arguments they made showed that the intuitions were not simply absent). Absolute monarchy, on the other hand, was regarded as a positive good by many people throughout history, and we should be very cautious about judging those who accepted this belief, even if we strongly believe otherwise.

As I suggested in a comment to an earlier post of mine, this is somewhat relevant to the old story of the blind men and the elephant. We do in fact see only in part, but that does not mean that our knowledge is purely subjective, or that all knowledge is equally valid. One poster, "Basil," objected in a further comment that this leaves out the fact of revelation. If the "elephant" has revealed Himself to us, then the analogy no longer works. I don't think this is true, because of the Pauline and Thomistic principles I've already mentioned. Even revelation is received according to the mode of the knower. This is why certain Protestant understandings of the perspicuity of Scripture are simply false to reality. A certain kind of Catholic apologetic rightly points this out, but then lands itself in the trap of trying to eliminate the limitations of the "through a glass" perspective via an infallible magisterium. As I've already said on this blog, I'm simply not convinced that this epistemological strategy works.

Christianity is necessarily rooted in particularity. We believe it either because it was taught to us from infancy or because at some point, due to particular circumstances, it commended itself to us as true and good. (For most of us it's some combination of the two.) This does not negate the universal claims of Christianity. But it should affect how we express those claims, and how we regard both non-Christians and adherents of forms of Christianity other than our own. We have no direct access to some kind of God's-eye perspective from which to evaluate our own beliefs vis-a-vis other ways of seeing the world. This should not be a reason for discouragement or cynicism. This is the way God made us to know the world--through eyes of flesh and with a brain made up of little gray cells, subject to headaches and chemicals and hormones. To try to transcend this perspective is to try to transcend our humanity.

Subjectivism

2005-02-12T23:37:00.000-05:00

Yet again, I'm provoked to blog by the discussion over at Pontifications, where some of the issues that most concern me are being hashed out in some very thoughtful ways. There's been some discussion recently about Eucharistic theology and practice among Protestants, and I have been defending the view that Christ is truly present (whatever the true meaning of that presence may be) wherever the Lord's Supper is celebrated, whether or not the proper minister (i.e., an episcopally ordained priest) is presiding. This is obviously subject to criticism on a number of fronts. There are two objections that most concern me.

The first is that this position contradicts the historic stance of the Church. I'm not sure this is quite as evident as is often claimed. Most of the insistence on proper ordination of the minister of the Eucharist can be interpreted as referring to proper order rather than necessarily to validity (in Catholic terminology, to the licit or illicit character of the sacrament). Occasionally there are positive bits of evidence that validity is not the issue at stake. For instance, William Durandus's Rationale Divinorum Officiorum tells the story of two shepherds who said the words of institution over some bread which they had placed on a rock. As a result, the bread was miraculously transformed into flesh. Granted, Durandus adds that they were immediately struck by lightning for their blasphemy. But the clear implication is that the words _themselves_ have power irrespective of the person using them. This isn't particularly the view of the sacrament I'm trying to defend. But neither is it what passes for Catholic orthodoxy today. Yet the Catholic Encyclopedia, that bastion of pre-Vatican-II respectability, informs us that Durandus is "one of the most important medieval liturgical writers." http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05207a.htm
The pre-Reformation Church's position was not as clear-cut as it is made out to be. Of that much I'm certain. And when you throw into the mix St. Jerome's well-known denial that bishops were more than presbyters given a certain preeminence of jurisdiction for pragmatic and historical reasons, I think the case for some kind of emphatic, universal consensus on this question looks rather shaky.

In the second place, I have found myself accused of "subjectivism." In other words, my view allegedly amounts to saying that Christ is present where He is believed to be present. Well, that isn't entirely true, since I believe that Christ is present sacramentally even where no such presence is believed in. But it's certainly true that for me the fact of Protestant sacramental piety (however vague and insufficient by Catholic standards) is a strong argument for the reality of sacramental grace among Protestants. I myself came to believe in the Real Presence largely through my experience of weekly communion in Plymouth Brethren assemblies in Romania (about as "low church" and anti-sacramental as you can get, except for the fact that they celebrated the "breaking of bread" every Sunday). One poster on Pontifications asked me if I would similarly say that Muslim piety must have some objective correlation.

I've been thinking about that, and my answer is yes. That doesn't mean that I accept all the things Muslims claim about their religion, of course. I don't believe that the Qur'an is divinely inspired (except insofar as any book containing truth and goodness is divinely inspired), for instance. But I would never say that Muslims (or, for that matter, Hindus) are worshipping a God who exists solely in their own minds. Insofar as there are elements of truth in what they believe, their piety _does_ in fact relate to something "objective," something outside the psyche of the worshipper. There are forms of "spirituality" that do appear to be almost entirely subjective. But I certainly would not bring this charge against Islam.

Similarly, I am not claiming that everything Protestants claim about themselves is true. Clearly, for instance, many evangelicals, especially Pentecostals and charismatics, are deceived when they claim special revelation from God--this is an almost unavoidable conclusion, given how mutually contradictory and often self-refuting many such "revelations" are. More broadly and relevantly, many Protestants claim a kind of perspicuity for Scripture, and an ability to determine its meaning with certainty, for which I can see no warrant. I do not even accept the versions of inerrancy upheld by many conservative Protestants. So I'm very far from maintaining the ridiculous proposition that because good and pious people believe something, it must be true. Rather, I'm saying that the existence of a form of piety that produces fruit is an argument for the existence of something real giving substance to that piety. Not an irrefutable argument, but an argument nonetheless. I would have to see very strong arguments indeed to be persuaded that Christ was not sacramentally present in Plymouth Brethren, Restorationist ("Campbellite"), and Methodist Eucharists (the three non-episcopal traditions among whom I've most often partaken of the Lord's Supper--leaving aside the question of Anglican Orders!). And so far I have not seen such arguments--rather, I've seen a lot of assumptions and jumping to conclusions, built largely on the assumption that since Protestants don't believe in the kind of sacramental grace Catholics/Orthodox (and Anglo-Catholics) do, therefore denying validity to their sacraments is doing them no injustice.

Response to Dave Armstrong

2005-01-30T17:24:00.000-05:00

I apologize yet again for being so slow to blog. I'm currently teaching three sections of Western Civ at a local state university, besides trying to finish my dissertation (at last!). Also, I've been working on two essays which will eventually find their way to this blog: a discussion of women's ordination in the format of a Thomistic "quaestio," in response to challenges from several people on the Crowhill discussion board and the comment section of Pontifications; and a long-delayed piece on the development of Protestant ecclesiology which I promised to Dave Armstrong in some antediluvian era.

Today, though, I want to try to respond to some of the comments regarding my previous posting, and I'll start with Dave's lengthy response on his blog "cor ad cor loquitur," to which I've provided a link (scroll down to last Wednesday's posting). Dave, please accept this as a temporary payment in lieu of my long-in-arrears discussion of development! If I have time, I will then try to respond to some of the many comments my post has generated, some of them here but far more of them either at Dave's blog or at Pontifications.

I appreciate Dave's courtesy in quoting my entire post. I trust he will not be offended that I don't respond in kind, in order to keep the volume of text a bit briefer. I will quote the relevant sections to which I'm responding--you can read the rest on Dave's blog. Any quotes from my original post are in blue--Dave's words are in red.

Dave wrote (in response to my argument that unity and authority are the principal reasons someone would convert to Catholicism):

I am a Catholic in part precisely because I see Catholicism as the "unchanging" faith. I see it uniquely holding to ancient Christian morality in areas such as divorce and abortion. I see it acknowledging a papacy, which certainly seems to be a strong motif in the Fathers (with even current-day Orthodox and many Anglicans agreeing that papal primacy in some form was the norm throughout Church history). In areas where Catholicism appears, at first glance, to be significantly different from earlier Christianity, I think this is able to be sufficiently explained by development of doctrine (the factor that was most important in my conversion).

And here we run yet again into the need for some kind of dialogue on development. As I said above, I've been trying to put together an argument concerning ecclesiology specifically. Our most serious attempt to discuss development, if I remember rightly, ran aground on questions of definition. Development is a vast and tricky subject and I don't claim to have a good handle on it. But it seems to me that its primary usefulness for Catholics is simply in establishing internal consistency. I don't see how it can be used to overcome the a priori impression that Orthodoxy is more like the early Church in most respects than Catholicism. If one is convinced on other grounds that Catholicism is truer--if for instance one decides that the existence of a papacy is more important than changes in how the papacy functions--then development is a legitimate explanation for the fact of considerable apparent change.

I wrote, with regard to the Papacy: a unique role does not have to mean a necessary role.

No (strictly logically speaking), but I maintain that Church history in the first millennium shows that both the papacy and ecumenical councils were permanent aspects of ecclesiology. The fact that both Orthodox and Protestants either have neither, or in theory only, is quite telling and a good argument for the Catholic position.

I agree. It is _one_ good argument, which has to be weighed as part of a complex set of arguments on both sides. It is not decisive in and of itself _unless_ one has decided already that the question of legitimate authority is the dominant question.

I wrote: It may be that Rome has in fact fallen into heresy,

Dave resonded: Who would authoritatively decide that?

If that is the first question that comes to mind, then the answer is clear--and it's the answer you've chosen. But something can be true--and can be known to be true--in the absence of some kind of formal and final judicial authority for determining it. The fact that I said "it may be" is an admission that I do _not_ think that this can be known with certainty at this point. Again, if one is putting questions of authority in the forefront, that settles the issue there and then.

I am not a Catholic in part because I don't believe that the consent of Rome is sufficient to make a group of bishops an Ecumenical Council. But I am firmly convinced that it's necessary.

Then it seems to me that Catholic ecclesiology is closing in on you . . . you can hold such a view, but you will always be an odd duck in Anglicanism or Orthodoxy. The logic here leads inexorably to Rome, where there is a consistent, coherent position on such matters (agree or disagree).

Well, there are many such "odd ducks" among Anglicans, and even a few among the Orthodox. I don't see anything incoherent or inconsistent about my position. It is not inconsistent with high-church Protestantism (it may or may not be inconsistent with Orthodoxy), and it is inconsistent with Catholicism. So I don't see that my logic leads to Rome. A sense of intellectual comfort leads to Rome, true enough. It's a delicate balance holding the position I do, and that's the single biggest argument against it--one Diane Kamer has pressed on me in the past. Can orthodox Christianity really depend on intellectual gymnastics? My response would be that in my ecclesiology, ecclesiology itself is not vitally necessary to the Christian life. Most Catholics don't understand the nuances of their own Church's position (does anyone?), but they hold to it nonetheless by implicit faith. In much the same way, most Protestants hear the Word and receive the Sacraments, and in my view this is sufficient for them to participate in the reality of the Church, even if they have what I think are muddled or downright mistaken views of what the Church is.

One can't speak of "the Church" when speaking of dogmatic definitions without speaking of Rome. Any non-Roman ecclesiology is going to find its style a bit cramped when it comes to fighting heresy and laying down the boundaries of orthodoxy.

Why is this? I would like to see this developed a bit, and reasons given why. If the reason is lack of central authority, then I would ask why it is that many people have a hard time grasping what you see as rather obvious? And, conversely, how and why do you see it as obvious, while they don't?

If the validity of my views depended on explaining why learned and devout people disagree with me, I would never have time to have any views at all. Briefly, I think that most Protestants do recognize that this is true in some sense. For some it's not a problem because either total tolerance or what I characterize sectarianism seem desirable to them. For others, reasons other than the rejection of Rome are responsible. Others would say that it is a problem but is more than made up for by other virtues peculiar to Protestantism. Quite a few would agree with me that it is a problem that we may have to live with for now but should not cease lamenting. Witness the position of Canon Heidt to which Pontificator recently referred. There are more of us "papal Protestants" than you might think. My wife had to read _Veritatis Splendor_ in her ethics class in seminary, and I think this attention to JPII by many Protestants isn't _just_ a matter of recognizing him as an important Christian thinker of our time (though it may be largely that), but also acknowledges implicitly or explicitly that his office as such demands some regard from us. Increasingly, I think would-be orthodox Protestants are being pushed in that direction.

I would also like to make the caveat that I think the problem is the lack of an authority Christ ordained for the Church--not necessarily "the lack of central authority," which is the kind of generalized epistemological argument I'm rejecting.

For me, a large part of my decision wasn't authority per se, but simply looking to see who held most closely to the Ancient Christian Faith as I understood it (through study) to be. It was more a matter of (historical) factuality than of epistemology and authority (though the latter played a
role, too). In other words, for me, the question, "What [or, Which] is the Church?" was one of plausible historical continuity, not a matter of which claimant had the best or most coherent functioning authority. Truth was paramount in my mind, not authority (which doesn't always coincide with truth).

Interesting. But why would you regard the line of development leading to Rome as more plausible than the line leading to Orthodoxy, _unless_ you saw Rome's claims of authority as decisive? I know that the contraception issue is important for you--was that (and divorce) the deciding factor?

From our previous discussion of development, I don't recall where we left this issue (which I'm pretty sure I did raise--in fact I think this was the initial claim on my part that drew you into the discussion), but one of my criticisms of Newman is that he really seems to have thought that development was some sort of discernable pattern that you could in some sense predict beforehand. In other words, he seems to be arguing that there is some sort of discernable philosophical necessity for Christian dogma to develop in the forms it did in Catholicism, and that this is a decisive reason to choose Catholicism over other forms of Christianity. His argument about the Virgin Mary being parallel to the Arian view of Christ is a prime example of this--but his belief that erroneous doctrines also have "corruptions" as opposed to "developments" is a more fundamental one. I don't think "development" can be meaningfully distinguished from "corruption" except in the case of true ideas. In other words, a development of an idea is linked to it by the fact that they are both true. Otherwise "development" is simply another word for change.

I raise this point because, as I said, in my view development is _only_ useful as an apologetic tool once one has other reasons for suspecting that Catholicism may be true. "Development" is a legitimate response to the claim that Catholicism (or, hypothetically, some other system one believes in) can't be true because it has changed over time. A theory of development shows the continuities lying underneath the change. But I think that such a claim can be made for most religious systems that command the loyalty of significant numbers of people. I don't think it's a useful way of distinguishing a true belief system from a false one--only for refuting objections to a system one is inclined to accept on other grounds.

It was the intersection of historical truths and ecclesiological claims which fascinated me and ultimately drew me in, via Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. In fact, my strong tendency was away from centralized or infallible authority, since my biggest beef was with infallibility. I fought that with all my might in the year preceding my conversion, utilizing Dollinger, Kung, Salmon: many of the most-used anti-infallibilist tracts. Cardinal Newman overcame my objection through the force of reason as applied to history, and the argument from analogy.

Interesting. Are you saying that you were inclined to become Catholic on other grounds, and Newman simply cleared away your objection to infallibility by showing that it was compatible with a theory of development? Or are you saying that Newman gave you a decisive reason to become Catholic by proving that infallible authority was necessary? If the latter, then my argument stands. But it seems that you are saying the former, in which case my critique doesn't apply to you (and since frankly you're one of the pillars of what I think of as "authority-based" Catholic apologetics, this is a major issue).

For the authority-minded, everything tends to boil down to epistemology. How do you know that you are in possession of the truth?

Yes. I think this is very important, and it is a major reason that I am an apologist. Part of our job is to try to provide answers to such questions for (in my case) Catholics, and Christians generally, in areas where we all agree. I would argue that this question, in relationship to Christianity, inevitably becomes an historical one. That's how the system was designed. The resurrection was historical. So was the Crucifixion and Ascension and Post-Resurrection appearances. How and why we believe in those things is determined by legal-historical types of evidence; eyewitness testimony and so forth. Miracles which lead us to accept Christianity are matters of historical testimony.

I recognize that there are sincere and intelligent people who become Christians on these grounds. Given that I was brought up to believe, it's a different sort of issue for me and I can't really comment. But those arguments have _never_ been primary in keeping me a Christian. Rather, arguments about the historicity of the Resurrection are in my view sufficient to make it not unreasonable to accept the Resurrection. I don't think they would convince me if I were not a Christian, and if asked why I was a Christian they would not be the answers that would first spring to mind--certainly not the answers that would lie closest to my heart. The Resurrection and the Christian story generally speaks _first_ to the human condition as I experience it. It is a story that makes sense of my life and of the world around me, and one that I receive experientially as having the ring of truth and goodness. Then I look at the evidence to make sure that I'm not fooling myself. And when I find that the evidence for the Resurrection is quite remarkably good compared to other claims of supernatural events, and when I see other assorted bits of historical evidence for the truth of Christianity, then that helps settle my faith over against arguments purporting to show that Christianity _can't_ be true. But if Christianity did not make sense of the universe as I experience it, the existing evidence would be hopelessly inadequate to convince me. You can call this post-modern or subjectivistic or whatever, but I don't know any other way to proceed in these matters.

The same is true of Catholicism. I think the historical argument for Catholicism is quite enough to permit people to remain Catholics if they are inclined to do so on other grounds. Whether it is strong enough to convince me that being Catholic (in the sense of submitting myself unconditionally to the teaching and authority of the Roman Communion) is a necessary consequence of being a Christian--that is precisely the question with which I've been struggling for years. It certainly would not, on its own, convince me if I were not already a Christian, or if I were a Christian for whom questions of ecclesiology were not primary.

Catholic online apologists jump all over this kind of thing, with great glee.

As they should, because if that is the argument, it is circular reasoning, and the heart cannot accept what the mind rejects as false. The Orthodox have to prove their "case" from history just like everyone else does. They can try to make such a case, and sustain it over against Catholicism. I think it fails, and won't withstand scrutiny, but in my opinion, this is the argument that they must make if they are to establish their own ecclesiological preeminence over against Rome.

I don't reject circular reasoning as false. Most positions wind up with some kind of circularity. (In my opinion Biblical arguments for Catholicism are completely circular, and the attempt of one Catholic Answers tract to make a non-circular argument by relying on historical evidence for the basic accuracy of the NT fails completely, because the evidence just isn't strong enough to bear that kind of weight.) Circularity isn't self-refuting, but it's not going to convince someone who doesn't accept the necessary presuppositions. The Orthodox position is not circular because it doesn't rest on this kind of argument at all. Converts to Orthodoxy discern that Orthodoxy is uniquely continuous with historic Christianity based on a whole complex of factors. Sorry to bring in Abraham again, but I think he's made the case well--everyone has _different_ epistemological reasons for accepting whatever set of canonical authorities they do accept. A standard apologetic is not a necessary part of a religious system, as you seem to be demanding.

Abraham can make the argument he does because he is philosophically what he calls a "soft rationalist" (a wonderful term which excited me when I discovered it, because it described the position I'd come to years before but hadn't had a name for). A soft rationalist holds (in contrast to a fideist) that religious truth is based on rational evidence, but (in contrast to what Abraham calls a "hard rationalist") that you can't necessarily quantify the evidence. In other words, one decides to believe in one religious view rather than another based on a whole set of converging factors--experiences of saintliness or beauty or the presence of God, historical arguments, internal consistency of teaching, and so on. There is no fideistic "leap of faith" except in the sense that at some point one says "OK, all of these things add up to enough certainty that I'm ready to make a commitment." One can't point to certain specific arguments and say "these alone are necessary and sufficient reasons." I think that's what you and many other Catholic apologists are asking for, and I don't think it's a reasonable thing to ask with regard to religious commitments.

I agree of course with your rejection of anti-Catholic Orthodoxy. Any view that depends on caricaturing another view is flawed from the start (my first encounter with this was a schoolteacher in Romania who assured me that Catholics believe that God "remains parallel to the world"; I may have misunderstood a Romanian metaphor, but this has always stuck in my mind as particularly bizarre, though I can see what she was trying to say).

A unity-minded person with no concern for the authority issue may well become Catholic without worrying about infallibility--but with a deep allegiance to the concrete reality of the Catholic community. Indeed, some such people become Catholic while disagreeing flatly with certain Catholic dogmas. This is much decried by conservative Catholics, but it happens.

It happens, but it is not in accordance with the Catholic system as it actually is. Part of what it inherently means to be Catholic (and, I think, Orthodox, as well) is to fully accept what the Church teaches, not to pick and choose. Why even be a Catholic if one thinks that way? Protestants have the right to private judgment (within denominational parameters). They can choose this from this tradition and that from that (this is what I did myself: very much so). To try to be a Catholic with the same approach is to simply be a Protestant-in-disguise. In a word, it's dishonest and deceptive at worst, and wrongheaded and misinformed at best.

Well, that's an argument that I'm afraid is going to have to take place within your own Communion. As an outsider, I can certainly judge that many Catholics have views that don't correspond to official Catholic teaching. But I am in no position to acquiesce to the view that they "aren't really Catholics." Certainly I doubt that you are willing to grant that John Shelby Spong "isn't really an Episcopalian," even though he clearly contradicts defined teaching of our Communion. In my opinion the Catholic claim that Protestants are in a different category because we have "private judgment" is a cop-out. We have looser teaching than you do, true. But I don't think we can reify "private judgment"--it's a vague and not very useful slogan used by many modern Protestants, but I don't think it's the kind of Basic Principle of Protestantism Catholic apologists claim it to be.

All churches have definite teaching of some sort, and all churches I know of have members apparently in good standing who don't accept every aspect of what appears to be the definite teaching of their communion. Certainly Catholics have a particular emphasis on this, and the Catholics I have in mind are indeed in a difficult tension between their belief that Catholicism is the necessary center of unity and their inability to accept some of its current teaching. But of course if such people remain Protestants they're in just as much tension. I choose to do that precisely because it seems the more honorable course. But I can sympathize with those who persuade themselves otherwise, and believe for whatever reason that things the Vatican teaches as defined are not in fact defined. They (the ones I know anyway) are intelligent and sincere people--argue with them, not me. As I said, it's an issue you're going to have to deal with within your own communion, and you can't blame me for observing what I see.

A unity-minded Catholic could submit quite happily to a church that got things doctrinally wrong, occasionally.

If they didn't believe in infallibility, sure. But then that gets back to my earlier point: such a perspective is not Catholic, by definition. You could only have such a view when you accept some form of non-binding, non-infallible Tradition, and still hold on to sola Scriptura as the rule of faith. In other words, Anglicanism (or "high" Presbyterianism or Lutheranism) fits the bill perfectly.

But as you pointed out earlier, if one believes in the need for unity and the historic role of the Papacy, then Anglicanism or other forms of high-church Protestantism do _not_ "fit the bill perfectly." Granted, the tension is probably less, and certainly doesn't reach the point of dishonesty. Which is why I'm still a Protestant, however uncomfortable a one . . . .

Between the difficulty of interpreting all the Magisterial documents, the questions about what is and is not infallible, and the propensity for the Vatican to demand and conservative Catholics to give a high degree of assent even to non-infallible teaching, it all got very confusing.

But that is for the Church to do! This is one big reason why God wanted there to be the Church in the first place. When an individual tries to do this himself, he is still operating within the paradigm of sola Scriptura and private judgment -- precisely the things that the Catholic system disallows. One could reject Catholicism by using Protestant epistemological methods, but it would not be an examination of the system as it views itself internally. In other words, Catholic epistemology and self-justification is not made or broken by Protestant epistemology and self-justification (this is a somewhat subtle point, but an extremely crucial one, especially when talking about conversion).

The first quarrel I have with this is the meaning of the word "Church." Even granted that it doesn't include me, as an Anglican--nonetheless I observe Catholics wrestling with the same issues. And even Catholic bishops (let alone priests) clearly do not always come to unanimous conclusions on this point. So when you mean "Church" you mean in fact "the Magisterium" as defined in modern Catholicism--the Pope and those bishops (and in some sense also those priests and laity) who agree with him on any given point. The Magisterium and _only_ the Magisterium has the right to speak; all its pronouncements are authoritative; and everyone else must simply listen. This would seem to mean that authority in Catholicism _does_ (as anti-Catholic polemicists claim) boil down to "what the Pope says." Or, as one of my best friends (a Christian Church pastor) put it, "add Pope and stir." If it doesn't simply mean that--if a lay Catholic, or even a priest or bishop, sometimes has to interpret a document and figure out just how authoritative it is--then my point stands and what you're calling "private judgment" exists within Catholicism.

It seems pretty evident to me that this is not how Catholicism functions. What you are calling "private judgment" when I do it is done routinely by all Catholics I know. (By Catholics who believe in the death penalty, for instance--they have to make the determination that the Pope's views on that subject are not in fact authoritative in the way that other teachings are.)

The Protestant methodology of critique described above involves circular reasoning in the following way: The Protestant presupposes private judgment and the rule of faith of sola Scriptura, and also assumes that all Christian belief-systems must be subject to it. But of course, this is one of the very things in dispute between Protestantism on the one hand, and Orthodoxy and Catholicism on the other (with Anglicanism betwixt and between, as so often).

I don't think Protestantism as a whole presupposes anything. I don't know if I presuppose private judgment, because private judgment can mean all sorts of things (as does sola scriptura). If private judgment means that the individual Christian has to make decisions about which things presented to him/her for belief are true and which are false, then yes, I presuppose "private judgment," and I observe all Catholics exercising it. Indeed, it seems axiomatic that everyone exercises it all the time.

If you mean by "private judgment" that the individual's decisions are ultimate, in such a way that having decided X I would never change my mind to Y because of ecclesiastical authority, then no form of Protestantism to which I belong presupposes any such thing. Certainly you find Protestants and Protestant churches who teach this. But it is not a necessary consequence of Protestantism.

If you mean that the individual's decisions are ultimate in the sense that submission to an authority depends on a prior decision that the authority is valid--a decision that might be reversed if more evidence of some kind turned up--then again, I think everyone exercises this, except those who simply believe what they believe because the religion or culture or nation in which they were educated teaches it (a position that I think has more merit than modern people recognize except when it rests on mere subservience to political power). If for instance you found _convincing_ reason to believe that all documents and artifacts of the history of Christianity before the Middle Ages were forged, you would almost certainly reexamine your commitment to Catholicism, I suspect. Of course, there is no probability that this will happen--something like it is maintained by some crackpots, but neither of us take them seriously. That, however, is the point--we both make a _judgment_ of our own that they are not worth taking seriously.

Finally, you may mean that the individual is responsible for more than simply determining the validity of an ecclesiastical authority (such as the Catholic Magisterium) and the degree of weight the Magisterium _itself_ intended a given pronouncement to have, but rather must analyze each decision of the Magisterium against a background other than its own pronouncements and expressed intentions. This probably _is_ what you mean, and it is a meaningful distinction. But I don't think I'm presupposing it. I'm saying that anything else seems hopelessly circular in a way that really _does_ vitiate Catholic claims (in a way that the alleged Orthodox circularity doesn't vitiate Orthodox claims, because they aren't resting so much on it). If the Magisterium is the only interpreter of itself, then of course you wind up theoretically with internal consistency, because the current Pope can always explain away any conflict. As a matter of fact, the problem you face is that the Pope _doesn't_ choose do to this. He allows Cardinal Ratzinger to say that Ordinatio Sacerdotalis is infallible instead of saying it himself, for instance. He allows apologists and historians to speculate about the intention of Boniface VIII and reconcile it with Vatican II, instead of issuing a pronouncement himself (as far as I know). The relative reticence of the Papacy (which I find commendable and a strong argument for its claims) makes necessary the kind of private judgment you're arguing Catholics find superfluous.

When you believe Ratzinger that OS was infallible, and another Catholic doesn't, you're both making an act of private judgment, in the sense you seem to be using the term.

But this has to itself be established in order for the criticism to have any force. The Protestant can't simply presuppose all this stuff, analyze Catholicism by using it and then declare victory.
And that is because Catholicism operates on a different rule of faith and a different epistemology than does Protestantism.

I'm not declaring "victory." I'm simply saying that the kind of logic games we get involved in when the issues are put in this way are totally unconvincing to me. Of course if I accepted your presuppositions it would all make sense. The purpose of my blog was to try to sketch why I _don't_ accept your presuppositions.

So immediately the question becomes, rather: "why does Catholicism disallow these beliefs and this epistemology? And why does Protestantism accept them?"How is that resolved? Well, it's resolved in the usual way that all such disputes are: by recourse to Scripture, Church history, reason, and (I would add) practical workability. Sola scriptura and private judgment (as an epistemological approach inexorably tied to sola Scriptura) fail on all four counts. These notions cannot be found in Scripture (despite many near-ingenious attempts to do so from our esteemed Protestant brethren). They can't be found in history, either (ditto to my last parenthetical comment). Both history and Scripture also offer tons of directly contrary evidence. Nor are they reasonable or workable.

I don't find that the kind of Catholic position you're outlining (one that attempts to exclude "private judgment" in sense 4) meets these tests, frankly. I think it fails historically and it's not workable. You can say that that's because I'm working with Protestant presuppositions--of course I am. Similarly, you're analyzing Protestantism with Catholic presuppositions. One obvious example--Protestantism fails from history if one assumes that there must be an infallible ecclesiastical authority. But if ecclesiastical authority is fallible, then those teachings of the Fathers that point toward infallibility may themselves be mistaken. I don't think this is any more circular or self-serving than the Catholic position--maybe less.

Getting back to the larger question at hand: one can believe that it is difficult to interpret all these magisterial documents, and wonder about some things, yet accept the Church's authority on faith, based on a number of various criteria, which taken together, and cumulatively, convince one that the Catholic Church is what it claims to be.

I agree. That's not what I'm arguing about. My claim is that the need for an infallible authority is not _itself_ a convincing reason to become Catholic. At least I have not found it so.

As C.S. Lewis said, "the rules of chess create chess problems." Catholics can easily look at all these alleged "historical difficulties" the way a Protestant approaches alleged "biblical difficulties."

Absolutely. The analogy here is with a Protestant (there are many such) who should use a claim of Biblical inerrancy as a reason to become a Christian (the Bible is free from error, therefore Christianity is true). This seems patently wrong-headed to me.

But it now seems to me that the Church can live relatively well (though not perfectly) without the kind of authority offered by Rome.

On what basis? How does this overcome the necessary factors that you yourself outlined above?

I'm not sure how one could go about answering this. One judges the problems raised by lack of papal authority to be insuperable or not. I judge them to be not. Grave, but not fatal, given that I'm not committed to a view of the Church's perfection like that of your Communion.

It's no longer clear to me (if it ever was) that doctrinal certainty is so much more important than some of the practical issues with regard to which the Roman Communion is manifestly imperfect.

I contend that this viewpoint cannot be squared with the biblical one, where it seems to me that all doctrine is considered to be highly important and non-negotiable (we especially see this in St. Paul's writings).

I don't recall anywhere where St. Paul says that all doctrine is non-negotiable. I can find plenty of places where right doctrine is considered highly important--but I can find at least as many (probably more) where holiness of life is considered highly important. I think it's harder to prove from Scripture that infallible doctrine is a necessary mark of the true Church than it would be to prove (from the Pastorals especially) that uniformly holy bishops are a mark of the true Church. Of course this second view is false--we both agree there. I don't see why the first is any truer. Bishops are _supposed_ to be characterized by certain moral qualities. They are also _supposed_ to maintain the deposit of faith without the slightest error. I don't see anywhere in Scripture where divine assistance is promised to the latter more than to the former. Neither holiness nor truth will fail utterly from the Church--that's about as much as I can see in Scripture.

A serious, troubling line is crossed when one argues in this fashion. It's one thing to be an agnostic and say that one isn't personally sure what is true about doctrine x or competing doctrines of x. It's quite another to reach the somewhat-despairing conclusion that doctrinal certainty can be softened in such difficult areas, and that this is how things should be.

The Church reached this conclusion long ago with regard to morals. There's no doubt that modern Catholicism has nothing like the moral rigorism of early Christianity. Why is that any less damning to Catholicism than our relative doctrinal laxity is to Protestantism? With regard to morals, we have clearly discovered that even horrendous shortcomings do not compromise the validity of the Church (because _all_ churches have moral shortcomings, though small sectarian churches sometimes manage to do a little better on some fronts). What reason can you give for resisting a similar conclusion with regard to doctrine?

BTW, I don't take offense at the "liberal" charge.

You may arrive at the Catholic position by any number of doctrinal and intellectual and faith avenues which have little to do with infallibility (in my case, I started with the moral issues and questions about internal inconsistencies in Protestantism), but once you get there and have decided to swim the Tiber, you must accept this in faith, and grant even internal assent to it.

I wasn't questioning that. I'm sorry if I gave a different impression. My point was simply that infallibility is not what _drives_ me any longer. Of course it's part of the package.

That's right. They were accepted in the same way that most Christians accept the existence of God. It was on a pre-rational basis, based more on intuition and faith. It is an innate thing. Choice of a church is not quite like that, but there are certain things (the whole body of dogma and moral teaching) that are accepted on faith, and that was what it meant to be a Catholic, through the centuries. Therefore, it would have been meaningless and not an option to sit there and pick and choose what one thinks the Church got right and what it got wrong. The fathers would have said: "the Church decrees thus-and-so. Who are you to disagree, and on what basis? You don't decide these things. The Mind of the Church does."

True enough, but there was a lot of give-and-take involved in this. Origen, for instance, sorts out very carefully which Christian beliefs of his time he understood to be part of the Rule of Faith, and which were open for speculation. Eventually many of his speculations were seen as contrary to the Rule of Faith, but that took centuries.

The reasons why any given individual chose to believe the Christian faith might vary, and were not themselves part of the Faith.

Yes. I agree. But then, does this not nullify much of your own analysis above? If you say you agree with this, then it wipes out much of your contention that you can decide as an individual what you will accept and not accept. You're doing epistemology while claiming that you deny that it is ultimately decisive in matters of faith and ecclesiological adherence.

I'm not sure I get your point. First of all, I'm not sure where I said that I "decide as an individual what I will accept and not accept." I wouldn't say I decide "as an individual." I would say that I decide as a member of the Body of Christ. But yes, I do think (as I indicated in sense 4 of "private judgment" above) that I have to judge that the doctrines presented to me are the authoritative doctrines of the Church. In many cases this is a latent, implicit judgment, and in times when the Church was more unified it would have been far more so (the bishop said this in his sermon and it didn't raise any red flags in terms of what I know already, so I assume it's what the Church teaches--as a matter of fact, most Christians of whatever church proceed this way even today). But at times it has to be explicit, even for Catholics. How this relates to my claim here I'm not sure. I don't deny that I'm doing epistemology. I deny that epistemology is itself part of the content of the Faith. I deny that the Faith must itself deliver to me a valid epistemological framework in order to be true. Of course every attempt to decide what is true is epistemological by definition.

If Abraham is right, then the Catholic internet apologists who chase the Orthodox round the Golden Horn asking them "how do you know a Council is ecumenical" are pursuing a red herring.
I strongly disagree. It was crucial to know which council was orthodox and which wasn't.

The point is that it was decided on an ad hoc basis, not because of a predetermined criterion.

Otherwise, you have a situation where, e.g., the "Robber Council" of 449 in Ephesus is orthodox, and heresy is promulgated at the highest conciliar levels. But it was not orthodox, and that was determined authoritatively by Pope Leo the Great.

The evidence seems to be that Chalcedon accepted Leo's teaching because it judged it to be true, not just because it came from Leo. Leo's word was not enough. Rather, Leo took the lead in making the theological argument that showed why and how Ephesus was wrong. That is what Protestants and Orthodox are objecting to--a view of papal authority that makes _convincing_ the rest of the Church unnecessary. And this is what we see Catholic apologists trying to short-circuit by lumping a diverse collection of epistemological positions together as "private judgment" and condemning them.

I contend that the papacy is a divinely-instituted office (biblically-based) for the purpose of maintaining unity and doctrine both.

I don't dispute this. I dispute the claim that the papacy is _necessary_ and/or infallible.

449 offers a sterling example of why it is necessary. 1968 and Humanae Vitae offers another. If Athanasius contra mundum was necessary way back when (over against Arians),

But, of course, Athanasius was not the Bishop of Rome. Indeed, the bishops of Rome didn't take the forefront in that particular fight, though on the whole they came through fairly well.

then Paulus VI contra mundum was necessary in our own age of sexual revolution.

I see no logic to this argument. The fact that a bishop of Alexandria was necessary in fighting heresy in the 4th century proves nothing about whether the bishop of Rome was right about this particular issue in the 20th. I will say this--the fact that the bishop of Rome takes the position he does is a very strong reason for _questioning_ the shift in Protestant doctrine on this subject (the same is true of women's ordination, on which I'm much more inclined to support the liberal view). But not for rejecting it automatically.

It either is a grave sin or not. If one claims that it isn't, then they have to explain why all Christians until 1930 got this wrong.

I don't think that would be a difficult task at all. There are plenty of social and theological reasons why Christians thought birth control was wrong. Of course, explaining is not refuting. The question is simply irrelevant.

If it is, on the other hand, then one must explain why almost all Christians except Catholics have gotten it wrong in the present age.

I don't think that's very difficult either. Certainly explaining why Catholics maintain a traditional position that Protestants abandon is very easy. The Orthodox wavering on the issue is more interesting, but the different authority structures and relationships to secular society (and possibly even the fact that celibacy goes much further down the Catholic hierarchy) provide pretty good explanations.

Or one simply gives up moral and doctrinal certainty, and that opens up a whole 'nother can of worms (and is unbiblical, and even illogical, for my money).

And I think this is one of my main points. I don't think a lack of certainty is illogical or unbiblical. we see through a glass darkly. Christ will never abandon us or let us fall hopelessly into error, but there may be (and clearly are) a lot of uncertain moments along the road. Furthermore (and this really opens up epistemological cans of worms) I think that a word like "certainty" really is relative. In other words, it may be perfectly right for a Catholic to be certain about contraception, but equally right for me as an Anglican (given the different stance of my ecclesiastical authorities) to be uncertain. That doesn't mean that there is no right or wrong, only that our access to absolute truth is not always immediate or obvious.

That doesn't follow. If a council denies crucial doctrines, such as christology (which the Robber Council did, being Monophysite), it is heretical; therefore, the reason it was rejected had directly to do with the Faith itself, and its maintenance.

I didn't deny that the reasons have to do with the Faith. I denied that they were _part_ of the Faith.

To resist heresy one doesn't need to have an authority one knows beforehand to be infallible. One simply needs (as Abraham has argued in his more recent book The Logic of Renewal) to have the will to exercise discipline.

You can argue that, but you still need the authority, and no one but Catholics have a sufficiently powerful and authoritative figure to do that.

That is patently false. In fact, many churches have much stricter systems of discipline than Catholics so.

You can say he isn't infallible, but unless he is authoritative enough for his decree to be binding (which, practically speaking, is scarcely different than being infallible), then Christians can always simply dissent, and the problem remains.

No, binding authority is not the same thing as infallibility. When the will to discipline is present, then dissenters (on serious issues) will have to leave. Granted, this is where unity and authority come together (something I never denied, and in fact affirmed in my initial post), since in the present state of Protestantism schism is often taken not very seriously. But it's taken a lot more seriously than Catholics realize--as anyone following the current debates in ECUSA and the UMC realizes. Evangelicals are the worst offenders here
If certain structures of authority are necessary, they are necessary simply because they are part of the tradition. They are not necessary on a priori philosophical grounds.

I say that they are necessary on biblical and practical grounds. That would be my argument. We can pursue that in due course if you like.

And that is not the kind of argument I was addressing.

After quoting part of my post "The Ecclesiology of Limbo" Dave wrote:

I must confess that I don't fully understand this perspective, inasmuch as it causes you to remain Anglican, with this more-or-less despairing attitude towards Anglican claims (whatever they are, historically and today). It seems to me that you would almost of necessity (I use the word lightly here) have to convert to Catholicism, because (so it seems to me; perhaps I have misread you) you think it has more truth than Anglicanism.

I think you've answered the question yourself above, when you said that a failure to accept certain authority claims makes conversion to Catholicism dishonest.

You could also convert to Orthodoxy, but I have seen you write that you are a "westerner," so presumably that would tip the scale (rightly or wrongly) Romeward.

And while the Orthodox don't make the kind of epistemological claims Catholics do, their practical claims of authority, and in particular their claims about dogma and liturgy, are in some ways stricter. Also, the lack of the papacy is an issue. If I'm going to give up communion with my wife and parents and all the other things I'd be giving up, I at least want to be in communion with the See of Peter . . . . (This is not a glib answer, but a subject I've thought about a lot in the year and a half since August of 2003 and the beginning of the present crisis in ECUSA.)

I find this dilemma that he describes difficult to comprehend because I was always fairly happy as an evangelical and didn't have this ongoing conflict within me. We tend to understand less those things which are further from our own experience.

Yes, that's true enough. I certainly wouldn't wish on anyone the kind of conflict I've been through in the past ten years. But I'm sure God had some reason for letting me go through it, wherever I end up . . . .

This post has taken a very long time for me to write, and if you respond quickly (as is your custom) it may be quite a while before I respond in turn. And at that point I'll try to keep things briefer. But I appreciated your in-depth critique and wanted to try to respond adequately. Thanks for keeping me accountable to thinking through the implications of my position!

Two reasons for converting

2005-01-20T10:35:00.000-05:00

In following the stimulating discussions over at Pontifications, I've become increasingly convinced that there are two rather different reasons why people convert to Catholicism--unity and authority. By this I don't mean that the same person can't be concerned with both--probably most converts are. Indeed, it would be hard to follow the one impulse into Catholicism without also finding oneself in the wake of the other. But I think on the whole one or the other is likely to be more important, and if you listen to people talk about their reasons for converting (or for considering the possibility) you can usually figure out which.

I'm also not denying that there are many other reasons for considering Catholicism, of course. But in the absence of one of these two concerns (or of personal reasons for choosing Catholicism), any other reason is as likely as not to lead the seeker elsewhere. For instance, someone primarily concerned to recover sacramental piety and the beauty of the liturgy is likely to end up Anglican or Orthodox. Someone concerned for a coherent, logical theology with well-defined boundaries between truth and error may well become Reformed. Someone whose deepest desire is for an ancient, unchanging faith that is clearly reflected in the writings of the Fathers is likely to become Orthodox. And so on, and so forth.

The desire for unity and authority, on the other hand, can be fully and legitimately satisfied (for the Christian) nowhere else but in the Roman communion. As a Protestant (unless one adopts a purely invisible view of the Church), one is continually yearning for a unity that is not fully expressed in one's own denomination. That just comes with the territory. And even the Orthodox, while they try to avoid the fact, have stubborn bits of evidence in their own beloved Tradition that the See of Rome has a unique role in the preservation of unity. That doesn't mean that the Orthodox position is incoherent--a unique role does not have to mean a necessary role. It may be that Rome has in fact fallen into heresy, and can only fulfill its historic role through repentance and reconciliation with Orthodoxy. But meanwhile there is a vacant place in the choir--and it's the place of the conductor. The choir, being Orthodox and knowing all the chants anyway, can probably get on OK without a conductor. But it's still not quite the same.

Similarly, I think it's impossible to deny that the Church cannot speak with full and final authority if the voice of Rome is lacking. I am not a Catholic in part because I don't believe that the consent of Rome is _sufficient_ to make a group of bishops an Ecumenical Council. But I am firmly convinced that it's _necessary_. One can't speak of "the Church" when speaking of dogmatic definitions without speaking of Rome. Any non-Roman ecclesiology is going to find its style a bit cramped when it comes to fighting heresy and laying down the boundaries of orthodoxy. It's going to have strong temptations to slide into either a sectarian orthodoxy that makes certain local peculiarities (such as the Protestant view of sola fide) Dogmas of the Church, or a barren swamp of tolerance that cannot name any heresy except whatever the broader culture of the given time and place considers offensive.

People for whom either or both of these issues are desperately important are going to find it very difficult to resist the pull Romewards. But depending on which issue is more important to them, they will experience that pull in quite different ways.

For the authority-minded, everything tends to boil down to epistemology. How do you _know_ that you are in possession of the truth? How can you believe X and reject Y without having a theory in place that explains why one is true and the other is false? This is one of the issues that most clearly separates those drawn to Rome from those drawn to Constantinople. The Orthodox can never answer these questions in a very satisfactory way. They believe what they believe because it's been handed down. And they believe that the Church that handed it down is the true Church because--well, because it's the Church that has handed down the truth. Catholic online apologists jump all over this kind of thing, with great glee.

For the unity-minded, on the other hand, the primary issue is one of allegiance. How can I live out the Christian life without having unswerving allegiance to the actual Christian community in which I participate? Nothing less than the Universal Church can demand that kind of allegiance. Therefore, one can only live out the Christian life in a community with a credible claim to universality. A unity-minded person with no concern for the authority issue may well become Catholic without worrying about infallibility--but with a deep allegiance to the concrete reality of the Catholic community. Indeed, some such people become Catholic while disagreeing flatly with certain Catholic dogmas. This is much decried by conservative Catholics, but it happens.

To some extent, clearly, these two categories correspond to the labels "conservative" and "liberal." Certainly it's hard to imagine a liberal Catholic being "authority-minded," but the reverse is not necessarily true. "Liberal" is of course a relative term--a primarily unity-minded convert is probably always going to look "liberal" to the authority-minded. But such a person will most likely see the need for authority and dogma, and submit to all the teachings of the Magisterium. At bottom, however, the unity-minded person is not motivated primarily by the need for settled, authoritative dogma. (In the same way, authority-minded converts are usually acutely concerned for unity--my point is simply that the issue of authority tends to come first, with the need for unity being a consequence.) A unity-minded Catholic could submit quite happily to a church that got things doctrinally wrong, occasionally. The fine points of ex cathedra vs. ordinary magisterium, vs. non-infallible statements that demand submission of will and intellect, are not going to bother such a person all that much.

Now the way I've put this probably tips my hand. In fact, my first interest in Catholicism was highly authority-driven. I wanted a haven of certainty, to preserve me from liberalism while rescuing me from fundamentalism. I didn't (and don't) trust myself to make up my own religion.

Yet the more I explored Catholicism the more problems and contradictions I found with this approach. Between the difficulty of interpreting all the Magisterial documents, the questions about what is and is not infallible, and the propensity for the Vatican to demand and conservative Catholics to give a high degree of assent even to non-infallible teaching, it all got very confusing. There came a point where it seemed to me that so many of my issues were at a high level of abstraction and had little to do with the problems I faced in actually living the Christian life. As the years passed, while my interest in Catholicism never went away, I gradually moved over from the "authority" to the "unity" side of the scale. Side of the scale, be it said, not end of the spectrum. I always have been and am concerned with both issues. But it now seems to me that the Church can live relatively well (though not perfectly) without the kind of authority offered by Rome. It's no longer clear to me (if it ever was) that doctrinal certainty is so much more important than some of the practical issues with regard to which the Roman Communion is manifestly imperfect. If I do become Catholic some day, it will not be because I'm convinced that we _must_ have an infallible authority. It will be because I'm convinced that I cannot in good conscience give my heart to any Christian body not claiming to be the Universal Church. Infallibility would, in that case, simply be one of the things that came with the package.

Pontificator, on the other hand, seems to me to be primarily authority-driven. Not of course that he isn't concerned for unity as well. But in recent posts he seems increasingly concerned with issues of epistemology. He's been reading a lot of Newman and seems convinced by Newman's view that the only real alternative to skepticism and individualism is the infallible authority of the Catholic Church.

For me, the coup de grace that fully convinced me to abandon this approach was William Abraham's book _Canon and Criterion_. I disagree with significant parts of Abraham's argument, largely because I think he ignores the distinction I've been making in this post and assumes that the only basis for being (let alone becoming) a Catholic is the concern for an authoritative epistemology. But I find his basic premise thoroughly convincing. Abraham argues that the importation of epistemology into Christian dogma (in the West) has been thoroughly disastrous. For the early Church, according to Abraham, the norms of belief and practice (making up what he calls the "canonical heritage") were simply given. On the dogmatic level, they didn't need to be justified. They just needed to be accepted. The reasons _why_ any given individual chose to believe the Christian faith might vary, and were not themselves part of the Faith.

If Abraham is right, then the Catholic internet apologists who chase the Orthodox round the Golden Horn asking them "how do you know a Council is ecumenical" are pursuing a red herring. Such decisions are made on an ad hoc basis. This Council is ecumenical for one reason, and that Father is a Doctor of the Church (to use a Western term) for another. The reasons are not themselves part of the Faith. To resist heresy one doesn't need to have an authority one knows beforehand to be infallible. One simply needs (as Abraham has argued in his more recent book _The Logic of Renewal_) to have the will to exercise discipline.

This does not dispose of all concerns with authority, of course. The See of Rome _is_ clearly part of the canonical heritage (this is one of the things I don't think Abraham recognizes adequately), even if its current claims are not. Rather, what Abraham's argument demolishes (if we accept it) is the _epistemological_ argument for authority. If certain structures of authority are necessary, they are necessary simply because they are part of the tradition. They are not necessary on a priori philosophical grounds.

The need for unity, however, remains intact. How can we speak of the canonical heritage if we cannot claim full membership in the historic bearer of the canonical heritage? This is, for me, the great issue. I'm going to try to lay out a possible Protestant answer to this question in subsequent posts. I welcome comments (or even anathemas).

Why do I change so often

2005-01-06T23:36:00.000-05:00

Those unfortunate persons who have taken the trouble to follow my posts on various Internet message boards over the past few years have noticed (and sometimes gently remarked on) my frequent flip-flops with regard to Catholicism. This instability of mind cannot be more painful to others than it is to myself, but it seems to be incurable. When the fit is on, it seems clear to me that it is my duty to become Catholic and everything else is a cowardly evasion. Then, often in a matter of days or even hours, I find myself strongly inclined to believe that it's my duty to remain Protestant and work for a deeper appropriation of Christian tradition within Protestantism. Some convictions don't change--that we are called to work for unity, that Christian tradition as a whole is authoritative, that the papacy has a divinely ordained part to play in maintaining the unity and orthodoxy of the Church; or, on the other hand, that the papacy has taken on far too much power in the past millenium, that Protestants are in some sense part of the Church, and that wherever I'm called to be I will always try to preserve many elements of my Wesleyan heritage.

My blogs so far have mostly expressed my more "Catholic" moods. In the past couple of weeks I've swung in a more "Protestant" direction yet again. In the following days and weeks I will try to explain on this blog just why I find it so difficult to leave Protestantism (theologically speaking, that is--there are also personal issues that I don't necessarily want to discuss here), and what kind of Protestantism I am willing to defend. I welcome comments.

My old cyber-acquaintance "Secret Agent Man," whose views I have always found thoughtful and stimulating, has done me the honor of noticing my blog and commending it to his own readers. He has also encouraged me to post more often. I will endeavor to comply. Meanwhile, I wish everyone a blessed Feast of the Epiphany and a very happy New Year.

The ecclesiology of limbo

2004-12-05T22:45:00.000-05:00

S. M. Hutchens (of Touchstone magazine) recently reviewed Joseph Pearce's _C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church_ for _Books and Culture_. In fact, Hutchens devotes little time to Pearce's book itself. His essay is primarily an explanation of why Lewis remained Protestant, drawing largely on Lewis's 1933 _The Pilgrim's Regress_. An attempt to explain Lewis's theology on the basis of his earliest Christian writing is rather dubious from the start. But more to the point, Hutchens's lengthy central quotation from _Regress_ is taken completely out of context, and in fact constitutes an ironic commentary on his entire argument. In the passage Hutchens quotes, the venerable "Mr. Wisdom" is informing the pilgrim "John" that the world of absolutes exists forever beyond our grasp--on the other side of the "Grand Canyon." We will never be able to attain it, and this is precisely why it is ultimately desirable. "Abandon hope," advises Mr. Wisdom; "do not abandon desire. . . . Let us conclude then that what you desire is no state of yourself at all, but something, for that very reason, Other and Outer. And knowing this you will find tolerable the truth that you cannot attain it. That the thing should be, is so great a good that when you remember "it is" you will forget to be sorry that you can never have it. Nay, anything that you could have would be so much less than this that its fruition would be immeasurably below the mere hunger for this. Wanting is better than having. The glory of any world wherein you can live is in the end appearance: but then, as one of my sons has said, that leaves the world more glorious yet." Hutchens understands this passage to be an expression of an unrealized eschatology that refuses to identify (among other things) the true Church with any earthly reality. People with Lewis's eschatology, Hutchens argues, don't make good converts because they refuse to give ultimate loyalty to any tangible expression of the Church in this world.

The problem with this interpretation is that Mr. Wisdom is not a Christian, and the end of the novel finds him not in heaven (the "Island") but in limbo, trapped for all eternity in the hopeless desire to which he has so eloquently condemned himself. Mr. Wisdom represents not Lewis's beliefs as a Christian but the Neo-Platonism in which Lewis found his last and most sophisticated refuge from the Hound of Heaven. Lewis presents Mr. Wisdom's philosophy as attractive and noble but ultimately unsatisfying--his "children" pretend to be satisfied with the spare nourishment he provides while nocturnally gorging themselves with goodies drawn from other sources.

It could be argued of course that Hutchens's point remains intact even though his quotation is wrong. Mr. Wisdom denies that the Island is attainable at all--Hutchens and Lewis (if Hutchens is right) simply deny that it is attainable in this life. In Lewis's allegorical universe, the Island is indeed attainable only through death, and this is an uncontroversial truth. Mr. Wisdom denies the attainability not only of the Island but of the land on the other side of the Canyon, which John _does_ reach in this life through baptism, although he is then sent back across the Canyon to reach the Island in the West by going east (since the world is round and the Island is one with the mountains in whose foothills he had grown up). But that is not the passage Hutchens is quoting. Mr. Wisdom's words, while ultimately false, could conceivably be true in the narrow sense in which Hutchens is applying them. Perhaps Lewis's Christian Platonism--his stress on the gap between the heavenly reality and the earthly "Shadowlands"--does lie at the root of his rejection of Catholicism. I find that thesis fairly plausible.

What interests me in Hutchens's article, however, is the ironic implication of his use of Mr. Wisdom as an exemplar of Protestant ecclesiology. By Hutchens's own account, Protestants such as himself (leaving Lewis out of it for the moment) embrace an ecclesiological counterpart of the unbelieving neo-Platonism which Lewis abandoned for theism and which in Lewis's account leads (when applied to religious matters more generally) to damnation. Hutchens would have us (as regards the Church) keep alive our desire but extinguish our hope, contenting ourselves with a tentative and conditional loyalty to fallible Christian communities, while keeping one eye cocked for signs that the vision of the Island beckons us elsewhere. Hutchens was, until recently, an Episcopalian. I am still a member of the Episcopal Church, only because I have not yet decided in what direction to jump. We both agree that Anglicanism cannot command our ultimate allegiance. Can any earthly church do so?

There is no easy answer to that question. But Hutchens's provocative article has struck deep into my conscience, in a way that Hutchens certainly did not intend. I am in no position to judge anyone, but I know and confess that I have lived for some years now in limbo. I have known since before I became an Episcopalian (in the spring of 1998) that my desire for truth and communion would never be satisfied in Anglicanism. I have persuaded myself that it would not be satisfied anywhere on earth. I have spoken (like Hutchens but far less eloquently) of the unity of the Church as an eschatological reality. I have scorned those who thought they found it in the all too earthly confines of the Roman Communion. And yet I have yearned unceasingly for precisely what they said they had found, for precisely what I claimed was unattainable on earth. To remain a Protestant means, for me, continually pruning the buds of hope while keeping alive the desire that feeds them. And this attitude has poisoned my entire Christian life. By stifling hope I have stifled faith and love as well. I live in a state of continual frustration, always desiring what I have forbidden myself to grasp. And yet I cannot turn away from that desire. As a Christian, I am compelled to desire the unity for which our Lord prayed. Yet the simplest step I could take toward that unity--entering into communion with the Bishop of Rome--is one from which I have turned away. (I do not believe that communion with Rome exhausts the meaning of our Lord's prayer, by any means. But without it such unity can never be other than an empty dream or a Gnostic sham.)

Whatever role Lewis's Platonism played in his ecclesiology, I cannot believe that it was determinative. I think he had more tangible reasons for disagreeing with Rome than either Hutchens or Pearce are willing to grant him. Quite simply, he was not convinced that the See of Rome had any special authority. He was not convinced that it had preserved the Faith, or that it could be trusted to do so in the future. Apparently Hutchens is not either. Both of them are far more learned and mature in the Faith than I. It is not for me to judge them. But in the absence of solid and specific reasons _not_ to trust Rome, a general commitment to the ecclesiology of limbo is not only insufficient but pernicious.

Feast of Christ the King

2004-11-21T22:25:00.000-05:00

This is the day when Episcopalians and Methodists celebrate a 20th-century Roman Catholic feast by singing a hymn (All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name) written by a particularly obnoxious Baptist (Edward Perronet--ex-Methodist and all-out dissenter who launched vicious attacks on John Wesley). In other words, a truly ecumenical occasion.

The feast of Christ the King, celebrated on the last Sunday of the liturgical year, was first proclaimed by Pope Pius XI in 1925. In the shadow of growing totalitarianism, Pius proclaimed that Christ alone was the supreme ruler of the world, to whom all honor and obedience was due. In the post-9/11 world, the reminder is no less needed. Christ the King is a wonderful way to end the liturgical year, paying tribute to the glorified Christ even as we prepare to celebrate His first coming in the humility of the Incarnation. But of course the two can't be separated. The only Christ we worship is the Christ of the manger and the Cross, and His kingship can only be understood in that context.

This is a particularly appropriate time to reflect on the nature of the Church as a political society. This is language used by theologians as different as Stanley Hauerwas and Oliver O'Donovan (Hauerwas once, in my hearing, called O'Donovan "the alternative to me"--i.e., to Hauerwas--so I'm not coming up with this juxtaposition out of my own head). I'm not sure which of them is right--I don't claim to be familiar enough with their work (especially O'Donovan's) to make an intelligent judgment. But where they agree, I think they're both on to something. This recognition of the political nature of the Church stands over against any notion of the Church as merely a dispenser of grace, a sort of sacramental or didactic vending machine. This may seem like a caricature, but something very like it can be found everywhere from liberal Episcopalianism to conservative evangelicalism. On the one hand, the Church is described as the vehicle for sacramental grace and the Gospel of God's all-inclusive love; on the other, it is seen as a mere engine for bringing people into a personal relationship with Christ by preaching the Gospel of human sinfulness and faith in Christ's atoning blood.

The Feast of Christ the King, without contradicting any of these emphases, reminds us that the Church is the society of which Christ is the ruler; a society which coexists with the kingdoms of this world but which has independent and frequently rival claims to theirs. Of course it's easy to point to ways in which these claims have been turned into a particularly vicious form of tyranny. C. S. Lewis called theocracy "the worst of all governments," and his opinion has plenty of historical backing. In my first-semester Western Civ class, I've been teaching about the Crusades, and while I don't think they were as thoroughly and irredeemably evil as my textbook implies or my students believe, they clearly involved some pretty horrendous stuff, and I see no way to avoid the conclusion that on the whole they did a lot more harm than good. (Maybe--just maybe--they helped prevent a Muslim conquest of Europe, but that's highly speculative; what is not speculative is that they ratcheted up Christian intolerance toward Jews, hastened the destruction of the Byzantine Empire, and seriously worsened the condition of Middle Eastern Christians; not to speak of the thousands of people killed on both sides.) The entire history of the High Middle Ages, while in many respects glorious, leaves me no choice but to believe that in some sense the Western Church of that era put on the Ring (to borrow a metaphor from Tolkien that would no doubt enrage him on several levels). Yet this is probably the era of human history in which the project of enthroning Christ as King was embraced most enthusiastically. Many of the evils of the Middle Ages can be traced to the Gregorian Reforms and their project of setting up the Church as an independent source of authority over against civil monarchs. This meant that the Church lost much of its moral edge precisely as it tried to gain the authority to proclaim moral and spiritual truths in the often cynical and ruthless environment of feudal politics.

The lesson of the Middle Ages, however, is not that the Church should abandon the claims made by Gregory VII and Innocent III. The Church has indeed been set over kingdoms to pluck down and root up, to build and to plant. But the instruments she has been given to carry out this mission are not the instruments of war and death, or even of democratic legislation (though the Church can and should urge its members to support legislation that corresponds with the moral law). The Church's weapons are proclamation and witness, and the worst punishment she has the right to impose is excommunication.

Even this much, of course, is regarded by our society as intolerable presumption. In this past year, we have seen a presidential candidate announce that he believes life begins at conception, but that this belief cannot affect his policies because it is "religious" and hence bracketed off from his actions as a politician. This incredible hypocrisy (not to speak of muddled thinking) may have helped lose him the election (at least I hope so). But in the process his own Church has been reviled for its intolerance and arrogance because some of its bishops declared that Kerry should not receive communion. If the Church dares to suggest that it is a real society with the ability to declare who is and is not a member, it is accused of launching new Crusades and reestablishing the rack and the stake as instruments of ecclesiastical policy.

To continue the Tolkien metaphor--yes, Gandalf put on the Ring, and the results were terrible. But centuries ago Saruman cut the Ring from Gandalf's finger, and the results have been far more terrible. And now, wherever Gandalf the Nine-Fingered wanders, the messengers of Saruman precede him, whispering in every ear that Gandalf's message of hope and resistance is only an excuse for taking up the Ring once again. Or even, where they find particularly receptive and ignorant listeners, they claim that Gandalf still has the Ring. Saruman would be glad to take from Gandalf the one Ring he does possess--Narya, the Ring of Fire, given him long ago to rekindle hearts in a world grown cold.

We must, as Gandalf, resist the temptation to seek the power of the Ring once again. But we must also resist the temptation to give up the fight against Saruman just because we have made disastrous errors in the past. The Ring--the corrosive force of power--is the ultimate enemy, and whoever holds or attempts to hold the Ring must be fought with all the strength we possess. That is the mission we have been given--to model for the world a different kind of kingdom, one ruled not from a throne but from the manger and the Cross.

Catholicism vs. Orthodoxy

2004-11-11T17:34:00.000-05:00

There's a discussion going on over at Pontifications regarding the relative merits of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The good Fr. Kimel, host of Pontifications, has finally (after many clear hints) delivered himself definitively of the view that lay Episcopalians should get out without further ado ("Fly, you fools!"). To help us make up our minds where to go, he's invited two ex-Episcopalians, one currently an Orthodox priest and the other a Catholic priest, to explain their respective choices. The Orthodox priest. Fr. Freeman, wrote a wise and eloquent account of how he came to Orthodoxy. The Catholic, Fr. Hart, shocked everyone by announcing that he wasn't really that thrilled with Catholicism but it was the "default." It is in continuity with the early Church, and papal primacy allows Catholicism to adapt itself to various cultures while retaining its integrity.

Now perhaps it's a measure of just how jaded I've become that all of this seemed quite sensible to me--indeed I found Fr. Hart's candor refreshing. Too many people choose Catholicism or Orthodoxy as one takes up a hobby, because it's exciting and enjoyable. If the claims of either of these Churches are true, then whichever of them is true is not a hobby but a home, not a mistress but a mother. If the Catholic Church is the true Church, then it is the sinful, wandering people of God (yes, thank you Vatican II). I love Orthodoxy, but at times there seems something a bit docetistic about it. Yes, the Liturgy should be heaven on earth--at least it should be a glimpse of heaven. But there is also a "not yet." Catholicism has messed up far more spectacularly than Orthodoxy, but some of its failures have come precisely from its attempt to be the People of God rather than simply a dispenser of sacramental grace (I'm thinking of the Gregorian Reforms, for instance).

Goodness, it's been more than a month

2004-11-08T23:19:00.000-05:00

since I last posted. I've been very busy with a number of projects: an article for _Christian History_ on Wibrandis Rosenblatt (wife of no fewer than three Protestant Reformers, though not at the same time); a paper for Sixteenth Century Studies Conference on Martin Bucer's concept of heresy; the fourth chapter of my dissertation; a talk on Anglican hymns which I gave at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia; and my two Western Civ classes at William Paterson University.

I've also been thinking a good deal about the Windsor Report, to which I've provided a link for those who don't already know what it is. Essentially, it's an attempt to provide guidelines for resolving the current dispute among Anglicans about homosexuality, as well as other disputes that may arise in the future. Our basic problem is that we developed as an outgrowth of the Church of England--the religious arm of the British Commonwealth, essentially. And we never really developed structures for deciding disputes and maintaining unity.

Some people worry that the Windsor Report's attempt to create structures to preserve unity will produce an "Anglican Pope." I think that's a lot of twaddle. One can have structures of accountability without a Pope. One can have a Pope, for that matter (in the sense of a figure with ultimate responsibility for the communion as a whole), without having all the apparatus of the modern, post-Vatican-I Papacy. The more relevant point, really, is that creating an Anglican Pope would be presumptuous and silly, since there is already a Pope sitting in Rome with a perfectly good claim to succession from Peter. Of course, he also claims a lot of other things--infallibility when he speaks ex cathedra; "submission of will and intellect" (whatever that means) even when he doesn't; the right to appoint bishops throughout the world (at least in the Western Church) and interfere in their dioceses; and so on, and so forth. Furthermore, corporate reunion with Rome is (IMHO) a pipedream. And personal conversion would involve denying the validity of my wife's orders, no longer being able to receive communion with her or with my parents, and numerous other things. If I'm convinced that I must do it, then I will. But not unless, and not until. Since I twiddled my thumbs about becoming Catholic for years before I met Jenn (my wife), this may be a very long "until."

TV, the deductive method, and megachurches

2004-09-22T21:28:00.000-04:00

The other night I watched an episode of the show _Seventh Heaven_, which I hadn't done for a couple of years. When my wife and I started dating, she was a fan of the show and I watched some episodes with her. But this happened to be the season that all the kids were dating a different person every week (and as likely as not getting engaged to boot, and then breaking up the next week), and I thought it was a bit too ridiculous. It's good when a show is clean and wholesome, but the titillation of a new boyfriend/girlfriend every week is just a G-rated version of the usual dreck. So, at least, I thought at the time.

But the episode the other night was quite interesting. Simon (the fourth of the seven children) is a rather annoying college freshman who has been having sex with a young woman from what appears to be a liberal megachurch, the "Chapel of Renewed Faith." She boasts to his parents Eric and Annie that her church has a class on teen sex that is "accepting," and taunts Eric (the pastor of a small community church of undefined denomination) with the fact that young people from his church are joining hers.

Now my impression of Eric's church has always been that it's decidedly mainline. It's quiet and respectable and generically Protestant. So the impression that the show gives (at least this episode) is that the lively, bustling megachurch with lots of teenagers is liberal about sexual issues, while the quiet mainline community church is conservative (Eric is clearly and decidedly opposed to sex before marriage, and encourages his daughter Lucy to start teaching a class on abstinence at their church). This makes a lot of sense, from an abstract, deductive point of view. You would think that in fact quiet old-fashioned churches that have trouble hanging on to their young people would be conservative, while bustling churches with titles like "the Chapel of Renewed Faith" would be liberal. This, after all, is what prophets of modern enlightenment like Bishop +Spong are always assuring us. If you want to attract the rising generation, you can't hang on to outdated notions of either theology or morality.

But in fact, as most people (but apparently not the writers of this episode) know, the reality is almost exactly the opposite. Far more likely than not, the megachurch with oceanic parking lots and Napoleonic armies of youth is trumpeting the virtue of chastity. The graying mainline church is probably more likely to avoid such a subject altogether, and hence to be condemned as "irrelevant." (Although my wife, who knows far more about mainline Protestants than I do, has just pointed out that in fact youth programs are frequently the most conservative part of a mainline church. Which reinforces my point.)

This is not particularly a criticism of _Seventh Heaven_. I was impressed with the episode, if only because Eric actually used the name of Christ, which respectable pastors in fictional TV shows rarely do. (He tells Simon something like, "You can't go from one casual relationship to another, because you have more than a casual relationship with Christ.") It's quite possible that the writers of the episode are in fact Christians, and that their blunder about the nature of obnoxious megachurches arose from an insider's bias rather than an outsider's ignorance. If I were writing a TV show, I'd be tempted to portray things that way as well. To me, a conservative mainliner with traditional tastes, the contemporary combination of conservative theology and morals with a total distaste for traditional style (particularly in worship) is acutely distressing. Lex orandi lex credendi. If your approach to the Christian faith is fundamentally pragmatic and driven by marketing forces, then you are not truly orthodox, however many conservative doctrines you proclaim. Fortunately, while there are relatively few churches like the Chapel of Renewed Faith, there are in fact a number of churches like Eric's.

The fact remains, though, that churches are far more likely to attract new members, especially young ones, if they are _less_ permissive. This has been shown well by a number of sociologists of religion such as Rodney Stark and Roger Finke. People are paradoxically _attracted_ to a church with high "costs," because it seems worth belonging to. I should add (as Stark and Finke generally do not) that churches can in fact grow and prosper without being conservative in moral and doctrinal teaching. Boldly liberal churches also seem to flourish. (I'd argue that such churches offer different kinds of "costs," and different kinds of rewards. The beloved and successful Methodist campus minister at Duke University, for instance, is an unabashed liberal and inspires college students by challenging them to work for social justice instead of earning millions as corporate lawyers.) The real losers, in our religious economy, appear to be churches that are too "mainline" to be brash about orthodoxy and too timid (or too orthodox) to be flagrantly liberal. In other words, the Chapel of Renewed Faith really might exist somewhere. It just isn't typical. Eric's church, on the other hand, which loses its young people because it is too embarrassed and respectable to talk about sex at all, is a fairly accurate and typical picture.

Stabat Mater

2004-09-15T11:28:00.000-04:00

The seven sorrows of Mary, traditionally, are the following:

the prophecy of Simeon (a sword will pierce your soul);
the flight into Egypt;
having lost the Holy Child at Jerusalem;
meeting Jesus on his way to Calvary;
standing at the foot of the Cross;
Jesus being taken from the Cross;
the burial of Christ.

However, when we think of the sorrows of Mary we think primarily of her standing at the foot of the Cross. One of the most beautiful hymns of the Middle Ages commemorates this, and I've provided a link to it. You can read the hymn in Latin and English, and also hear it sung.

Sept. 15--the Sorrows of Mary

2004-09-15T10:51:00.000-04:00

Today is the day after the Feast of the Holy Cross, and in the Catholic tradition this is, fittingly, the commemoration of the Sorrows of Mary. Historically, this feast originated in 1668, although it drew on a longer tradition of devotion to Mary as the sorrowful mother of the suffering Christ. In the 13th century, a religious order, the Servites, made this devotion the focus of their existence as a community, and the September commemoration was a gift to the Servite order by the Pope. Mary's sorrows had also been commemorated in Germany and other areas of Europe since the late Middle Ages on a Friday during Eastertide. This commemoration was later moved to the Friday before Palm Sunday, and in the 18th century was established as a universal feast of the Catholic Church. Today, as far as I know, this commemoration is no longer celebrated in the Catholic Church (with the possible exception of the small number of parishes and missions that still use the old Mass), leaving Sept. 15 as the only commemoration of the Sorrows of Mary.

All this liturgical detail can be mind-numbing, and non-Catholic readers may wonder why I'm wasting time on it. I am, after all, an Episcopalian, and my own denomination doesn't celebrate Sept. 15. However, in my opinion this failure to embrace Marian devotion is a bad thing. Without getting into the question of whether all forms of Catholic Marian devotion are healthy, I think it's altogether to the good for us to be reminded frequently of the close link between Jesus and His Mother. This is important not because Mary is a semi-divine figure in between us and Jesus, but because she isn't. She is, like us, a believer who followed Jesus but often did not understand what that involved. She was confused and hurt by Jesus, as we are. And yet she shared in his sorrows and in his saving work, as we are all called to do. Whenever we think of Jesus we think of Mary, and whenever we think of Mary we think of Jesus. As with love and marriage, you can't have one without the other.

So when we have just celebrated the triumph of the Cross of Jesus, it is important for us to think of the woman who stood at the foot of the Cross, weeping for her beloved son who hung there dying for reasons she did not yet fully understand. Most of the sorrow of this world does not come from deliberate, heroic sacrifice. It is the sorrow of victims, caught up in tragedy against their will and without their comprehension. And yet, Christian tradition tells us that Mary rose to the occasion, offering herself fully to God and offering back to God the son she had received as a miraculous gift. Mary shows us the only way in which we can follow Jesus--by standing at the foot of his Cross, weeping for the suffering of the world. And yet, as we learned yesterday, the Cross is also the place of triumph, where the powers of evil have been defeated forever. And Mary, the Queen of Sorrow, is crowned by Christ as the Queen of Heaven. As St. Paul put it, if we suffer with Christ, we will reign with him. This is the heart of the Christian life.

Today is also Wednesday of Ember Week. Traditionally the Church has set aside four weeks in the year as times of fasting and prayer at each of the four seasons of the year. These "ember weeks" are celebrated on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and the autumnal Ember Days fall after the Feast of the Holy Cross. These are not frequently celebrated today, but they are a good way of marking the four seasons of the year. Traditionally, they are a time to pray for vocations to the priesthood, and they are a good time for all of us to think about our calling as Christians, whatever that may be. In my case, my calling is to write my dissertation (instead of writing this blog) and to teach a class on Ancient Egypt and another one on European encounters with Africa and Asia in the 16-17th centuries. Which I shall now proceed to do (after posting a link to the Stabat Mater, the traditional hymn associated with Mary's sorrows).

Late entry--Feast of the Holy Cross

2004-09-15T10:11:00.000-04:00

I didn't manage to get a post in yesterday, but it was the Feast of the Holy Cross. This is one of those feasts that commemorates an important element of the Christian Faith but is not part of the regular yearly cycles. For those readers (assuming I have any readers so far!) who are not familiar with the traditional Christian liturgical year, there are basically two cycles--one of them based on the celebration of Easter in spring, preceded by the forty days of Lenten fasting and followed by the fifty days of celebration; and the other based on the celebration of the birth of Christ on Dec. 25 and following the events of Christ's life (and, in those traditions not pared down by the Reformation, the life of the Virgin Mary) throughout the year. So we get the feast of the Circumcision of Christ (or the Holy Name of Jesus, or the Motherhood of the Blessed Virgin) on Jan. 1, the Epiphany (commemorating the Visit of the Magi) on Jan. 6, the Baptism of Christ the next Sunday (or, in the Eastern tradition, on Epiphany itself), the Presentation of Christ in the Temple on Feb. 2 (forty days after Christmas), the Annunciation on March 25 (nine months before Christmas), and so on.

Obviously, in this system the commemoration of Jesus' crucifixion comes on Good Friday (and to some extent on Palm Sunday). So why do we have another feast in September to celebrate the Holy Cross? Actually, the story of this feast begins in the reign of Constantine, when Christianity had been made a legal religion of the Roman Empire (not yet the one official religion, though it was heavily favored), and new churches were going up everywhere, sponsored by Constantine and his pious mother Helena. Helena took a particular interest in the (supposed) site of Jesus' crucifixion, where she built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In the process, she discovered what was believed to be the Cross itself on which Jesus was crucified. (According to the legend, three crosses were discovered, and the one that had healing properties was recognized as the True Cross.)

As a matter of fact, though, this feast does not only commemorate the finding of the Cross in 326. There is in fact another traditional feast of the Invention (i.e., finding) of the Cross on May 3, although this is no longer widely celebrated. The date of Sept. 14 actually derives from the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 335, but the celebration of this feast became popular largely because of an incident in the history of the Byzantine Empire (i.e., the Eastern Roman Empire) three centuries after Constantine. In the reign of the emperor Heraclius, the Persians invaded the Empire, captured Jerusalem, and carried off the relics of the Cross as a trophy. In 626, Heraclius managed to defeat the Persians and recover the Cross, which was then solemnly "elevated"--that is to say, displayed publicly in Jerusalem for the people to venerate.

So what does this feast mean for us, in a world where most of us are rather suspicious of Constantine and the legal establishment of Christianity? Why are we celebrating this ancient notion of the Triumph of the Cross--the pomp and ceremony of Imperial Rome mustered to celebrate the torture and death of a Galilean peasant? Isn't this ironic and even hypocritical? Furthermore, both the story of the finding of the Cross and the historical incident of its recovery by Heraclius are marred by anti-Jewish violence. According to the legend, Helena imprisoned all the learned Jews of Jerusalem and coerced them into helping her find the cross. One of them agreed to cooperate, and eventually converted to Christianity as a result. In the reign of Heraclius, the Jews had sided with the Persian invaders, and in retaliation Heraclius tried to force all the Jews in the empire to become Christians. (This of course failed, and it was more or less an anomaly in the history of Christian treatment of Jews, sorry as that history is.) So aren't we simply perpetuating the legacy of Christian intolerance and triumphalism by celebrating the Exaltation of the Cross?

No, I don't think so. However we have distorted the meaning of the Cross, it remains at the heart of what we believe as Christians. And although we have succeeded in perverting the Cross into a symbol of our desire to rule and dominate, its presence at the center of our faith remains a witness against that perversion. There is always an intrinsic conflict between the symbol itself and the way we have used it. The Triumph of the Cross does not mean that the Cross becomes a golden trophy of empire. The Cross (however much we may try to hide the fact) always remains a bloody symbol of torture, a reminder that the Kingdom of Christ is never the same thing as the empire of the world. To follow Christ is to give up the desire to dominate and coerce. Reigning with Christ means reigning, like Christ, from the tree of the Cross. It means identifying ourselves always with the victims, with the sufferers of the world, never with the conquerors.

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you,
Because by your Cross you have redeemed the world.

Welcome!

2004-09-13T14:25:00.000-04:00

After years of hanging out on message boards and engaging in endless (and usually fruitless) religious discussions there, and a couple years of reading and commenting on other people's blogs, I've finally decided to launch my own. It turned out to be very easy, using the Blogger software. The name "Ithilien" is probably self-evident to anyone familiar with _Lord of the Rings_. Ithilien is the border province betwen Gondor and Mordor. It's a beautiful place, still unspoiled by the ravages of the Orcs. But it's also a place of warfare--if Sauron wins, Ithilien will become a smoking wasteland like Mordor. And already the filth of Mordor is beginning to seep out into the forests of Ithilien.

If all the words spilled on the Internet every day by me and other fools like me are to accomplish anything, then it must be this--that occasionally something we say weakens in some slight measure the forces of Mordor; reclaims from filth and stench some grassy spot beneath the trees; or perhaps gives aid and comfort to a pair of straggling hobbits, on their way to Mordor with a heavy burden.

The name I have chosen to sign my posts is from that other mythology we call the history of the Church. Cardinal Gasparo Contarini was a Venetian diplomat chosen cardinal in 1535 as part of an attempt to reform the Catholic Church. He was involved (behind the scenes) in negotiations with the Protestants at Regensburg in 1541, which proved to be the last best hope of bringing about a reconciliation. (They reached an agreement on justification, but this was rejected by both Luther and the papacy; and Contarini refused to allow compromises on the Eucharist, which doomed the negotations.) He was one of the few figures of that time whom just about everyone on both sides were forced to respect. He loved the Catholic Church deeply, but was aware of the value of some of the Protestant critiques. He had an experience of God's forgiving grace after going to confession on Holy Saturday, 1511, and this shaped his reforming activity. In other words, he embodied the kind of evangelical Catholicism that I believe to be the heart of the Christian tradition. And so I like to use his name as an alias on the Internet, as a way of declaring where I stand.

I am, of course, not a cardinal or a Venetian diplomat (the former you had no doubt already dismissed as unlikely, and the second is now impossible--at least in the sense of "diplomat for the Republic of Venice"). I am not even a Catholic, in the sense of being in communion with the See of Rome. I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Religion at Duke University, writing my dissertation on Martin Bucer's interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. More on that perhaps in a later post. For now, suffice it to say that Bucer was one of the leading Protestant Reformers, although he's hardly a household name. I am a member of the Episcopal Church, but my background is in the "holiness movement" within the Wesleyan tradition (again, I will explain more about this another time). I am currently living in New Jersey and attending Episcopal and Methodist churches simultaneously, since my wife is United Methodist. (We go to the Episcopal church at 8 and the Methodist church at 10--yes, this makes for a busy Sunday morning!) I am also teaching Western Civ part-time at a local state university (and need to cut this short so I can go teach my class!)

This blog will be mostly devoted to religious subject, with occasional forays into literature, politics, and any other subject that takes my fancy. I will post some links to other websites as I have the time (and as I figure out how to manage this thing).