Before the Expiration Date Runs Out

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

In my efforts to try to place Benedict XVI within contemporary Roman Catholic thought, I have been also trying to get a read on the Communio theologians and their affinities with Radical Orthodoxy. What apparently unites these different schools of theology is a fundamental critique of modernity. In her chapter on “Modernity and the Politics of the West” in Ratzinger’s Faith, Tracey Rowland describes Benedict’s brief against Martin Luther (not so much for leading souls astray with his doctrine of justification) for departing from the “classical-theistic idea of creation”:

While Bruno and Galileo represent a return to a pre-Christian, Greek, and pagan world, Luther went in the extreme opposite direction. He wanted to purge Christian thought of its Greek heritage, and the Greek element he found most objectionable was the concept of the cosmos in the question of being, and therefore in the area of the doctrine of creation. For Luther, redemption sets humans free from the curse of the existing creation and thus grace exists in radical opposition to creation. Developing an argument taken from Angelo Scola and Rocco Buttiglione, Ratzinger concluded that “without the mystery of redemptive love, which is also creative love, the world inevitably becomes dualistic: by nature, it becomes geometry: as history, it becomes the drama of evil. (109)

I am not all that sure what “the mystery of redemptive love” is, or whether Angelo or Rocco also have ties to the Italian mafia who bank with the Vatican, but I do think I’ll stand with Luther on this one, especially when he writes in the following manner (from a sermon from 1535):

The radiant sun, the loveliest of the creatures, gives only a little of its service to the saints. While it shines on one saint it must shine on thousands and thousands of rogues, and it must give them light in spite of all their godlessness and evil, and so it must permit its loveliest and purest service to the most unworthy, the wickedest and loosest knaves.

It is our Lord God’s good creature, and would much rather serve devout people; but the noble creature must bear it and serve the evil world unwillingly. Yet it hopes that that service shall at long last have an end, and does it in obedience to God who has thus ordained it, that He may be known as a merciful God and Father, who (as Christ teaches), “maketh His sun to rise on the veil and on the good” (Matt v. 45) For this reason the noble sun serves vanity and renders its good service in vain. But in His own time our Lord and God will find out those who have abused the noble sun and His other creatures, and He will reward the creatures abundantly. Thus the good St. Paul shows the holy cross in all creation, in that heaven and earth and all the creatures therein suffer with us and bear the dear treasured cross. Therefore we must not weep and moan so piteously when we fall on evil days, but must patiently wait for the redemption of the body and for the glory which shall be revealed in us; the more so as we know that the whole creation groans with anxious longing as a woman in travail, and sighs for the manifestation of the sons of God, for then the whole creation will also be redeemed. It will no longer be subject to vanity, to serve vanity, but it will serve only the children of God, and that willingly and joyfully.

For an account of the created world that takes the fall seriously, Luther should have much to say to both Roman Catholics and neo-Calvinists who may believe either in the glories of the pre-modern West or the successes of culture redeemed. If sin is in view, which it should be for the Protestants who put the T in TULIP, Luther’s interpretation of the world, not to mention his reading of Romans 8, makes a lot of sense.

Called to Call the Mother of God

Published on by D. G. Hart145 Comments

No news for anyone on line who is using more than Comcast’s news updates (all about cleavages at the Grammy’s, I’m afraid) that Benedict XVI has resigned the office of pope, effective February 28, 2013. What may be news, however, is the last paragraph of his resignation:

Dear Brothers, I thank you most sincerely for all the love and work with which you have supported me in my ministry and I ask pardon for all my defects. And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff. With regard to myself, I wish to also devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer.

It is an odd phenomenon for Protestants to think of praying (i.e., “implore) to Mary. For a recent convert like Christian Smith, Protestant discomfort is simply a symptom of evangelicals’ “allergy” to Mary. He goes on to write (How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic):

Evangelicals trust in the Bible, on which they say they base their beliefs. But, when it comes to things even only remotely and by association “too Catholic,” like Mary, the verses are read over and past and ignored. It is like Mary hardly matters, as if the verses were not in the Bible, as if Mary deserves no theological reflection. (48)

Never mind that Smith never cites any verses associated with Mary, or shows the theological reflection of the apostles (like Peter and Paul’s epistles) on the mother of Jesus. (He does get a lot of mileage in his case for Mary — wow! — out of the discovery that “Faith of Our Fathers” was a Roman Catholic hymn.) Never mind as well that even the Catholic Encyclopedia says of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, “No direct or categorical and stringent proof of the dogma can be brought forward from Scripture.”

Still, the allergy, if that’s what we want to call it, is the idea of praying to Mary. Praying to Mary is not something that should be surprising to Protestant observers. For instance, this is how Pius IX concluded Nullis Certe Verbis:

And so that God may incline His ear to Our prayers and yours and those of all the faithful, We ask first the recommendation of the Virgin Mary, who is our most beloved mother and most trustworthy hope and ever present guardian of the Church. Nothing is more powerful with God than her patronage. We also implore the support of Peter, then of his co-apostle Paul, and of all the heavenly citizens who reign with Christ in heaven. We do not doubt that in the light of your outstanding religion and priestly zeal, you will obey these Our prayers and petitions. Meanwhile as a pledge of Our burning charity toward you, from Our deepest heart and with a wish for all every true happiness, We lovingly impart Our Apostolic Blessing to you yourselves and all the clergy, and faithful laity committed to each of your vigilance.

And when Pius XI wrote an encyclical (Ad Caeli Reginam) which asserted the queenship of Mary over all other creatures, he closed with this:

Earnestly desiring that the Queen and Mother of Christendom may hear these Our prayers, and by her peace make happy a world shaken by hate, and may, after this exile show unto us all Jesus, Who will be our eternal peace and joy, to you, Venerable Brothers, and to your flocks, as a promise of God’s divine help and a pledge of Our love, from Our heart We impart the Apostolic Benediction.

But since Jesus taught his disciples to pray to God the Father (as in the Lord’s Prayer), the idea of praying to Mary is odd. I know apologists like Smith try to distinguish veneration from worship of saints. I also know that the CTCers have made their peace with Mary as Co-Redemptrix. But I am still wondering how praying to someone doesn’t give the impression that the entity to whom the prayer is being directed is anything less than divine. I also don’t understand why you wouldn’t simply pray directly to Christ, whose work as priest now is to intercede at God’s right hand. Is he too busy to hear?

Call or Shrug to Communion

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I have no doubt that if Bryan Cross were pope and the CTC converts were his Cardinals, the terms for ecumenical relations would be strict, clear, logical, and above all, paradigmatic. But I am not sure that the convictions and piety of CTC are dominant among those looking for greater harmony with Protestants. Just this morning I observed in our old home news weekly a notice for a series the local Roman Catholic parish was running on understanding the church’s teaching and faith. Father Robert Barron is teaching the series and he has a website and blog named very charismatically, Word on Fire. I took a look to see what he had written in his one post about Augustine and I found this:

St. Augustine, fifth century bishop of Hippo, held that original sin had produced a massa damnata (a damned mass) of human beings, out of which God, in his inscrutable grace, has deigned to pick a few privileged souls. Thus, Augustine clearly believed that the vast majority of the human race would be damned to hell. And though it makes me uncomfortable to admit it, my hero, St. Thomas Aquinas, followed Augustine in holding that a very large number of people are Hell-bound; he even taught that among the pleasures that the saints in heaven enjoy is the contemplation of the suffering of the damned!

But eventually along came Balthasar, who through the influence of Barth, found a way around such difficult teachings:

In the twentieth century, the Protestant theologian Karl Barth moved back in Origen’s direction and articulated a more or less universalist position on salvation. He maintained that the cross of Jesus had saved the world and that the church’s task was to announce this joyful truth to everyone. The Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar was a friend of Barth’s and a fellow Swiss, and he presented a somewhat Barthian teaching on this score, though he pulled back from complete universalism. Balthasar argued that, given what God has accomplished in Christ, we may reasonably hope that all people will be saved. The condemnation of apokatastasis compelled him to draw back from saying that we know all will be saved, but his keen sensitivity to the dramatic power of the cross convinced him that we may entertain the lively and realistic hope that all people will eventually be drawn into the divine love.

This lets us view Heaven as a party:

Think of God’s life as a party to which everyone is invited, and think of Hell as the sullen corner into which someone who resolutely refuses to join the fun has sadly slunk. What this image helps us to understand is that language which suggests that God “sends” people to Hell is misleading. As C.S. Lewis put it so memorably: the door that closes one into Hell (if there is anyone there) is locked from the inside not from the outside. The existence of Hell as a real possibility is a corollary of two more fundamental convictions, namely, that God is love and that human beings are free. The divine love, freely rejected, results in suffering. And yet, we may, indeed we should, hope that God’s grace will, in the end, wear down even the most recalcitrant sinner.

My suspicion is that relations with Protestants are a lot easier if Father Barron is leading the discussion instead of Bryan Cross. The loss of the threat of hell as the place where schismatics go also sure helps to grease the skids for dialogue and communion. But I am not sure it is much of a call to communion.

If Church Officers Were Angels

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Kevin DeYoung is channeling yours confessionally with a post about the U.S. founders’ view of human nature. He cites a remarkably Augustinian (though he attributes it narrowly to Calvinism — why can’t he be as generous as I?) passage from James Madison’s Federalist #51, which I happened to be teaching yesterday:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attach. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of man must be connected with the constitutional right of the place.

It may be a reflection of human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

And if this understanding of human nature is good for the goose of temporal authorities, it is just as applicable to the gander of spiritual authorities (since the charism comes and goes like the wind-blowing Spirit). That is one reason why Reformed Protestants prefer councils to bishops. It’s not simply a preference for committee meetings. It is a recognition that shared rule prevents absolute authority from resting in the hands of one man (or if you’re a mainline Protestants, one woman). During the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, the conciliar movement tried to correct the abuses of Renaissance popes who made claims about being the highest power on earth (e.g. Unam Sanctum). It failed within Roman Catholicism (until Vatican II maybe) but prevailed among Presbyterian and Reformed communions who even acknowledge that committees err.

I wonder if the guys at CTC ever consider this after being awe-struck by papal audacity.

Hyper-Calvinism and Common Grace — I Mean — Providence

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I always get nervous — better, agitated — when folks who do not belong to Reformed Protestant communions weigh in on Calvinism’s boundaries and definitions. It is a little like Canadians telling U.S. citizens about what the United States stand for — though, given our provincialism in the U.S. I often learn from Canadians, not so much with evangelicals.

Anyhoo, Justin Taylor linked to a post that alleges to spot the telling features of Hyper-Calvinism. I am less interested in the 5-point list than I am (all about me) in what Phil Johnson writes about denying common grace — a tell-tale sign of Hyper-Calvinism. Here is what he says but consider the thought experiment of using “providence” instead of “common grace”:

The idea of common grace providence is implicit throughout Scripture. “The Lord is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works” (Ps. 145:9). “He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18-19). “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven” (Matt. 5:44-45).

The distinction between common grace providence and special grace closely parallels the distinction between the general call and the effectual call. Common grace providence is extended to everyone. It is God’s goodness to humanity in general whereby God graciously restrains the full expression of sin and mitigates sin’s destructive effects in human society. Common grace providence imposes moral constraints on people’s behavior, maintains a semblance of order in human affairs, enforces a sense of right and wrong through conscience and civil government, enables men and women to appreciate beauty and goodness, and imparts blessings of all kinds to elect and non-elect alike. God “causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45). That is common grace providence.

The doctrine of common grace providence has a long history that goes all the way back to Calvin and even Augustine. But type-4 hyper-Calvinism denies the concept, insisting that God has no true goodwill toward the non-elect and therefore shows them no favor or “grace” of any kind.

Does this make (all about) me a Hyper-Calvinist? Or what exactly is gained by using a novel phrase for one that has a long tradition in Reformed confessions?

More Lumping and Splitting

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Word on the web is that Rome is opening up ecumenical conversations with confessional Lutherans. At the First Things blog, Matthew Block describes some of the activity and rationale for these discussions.

While dialogue between Roman Catholics and mainline Lutherans continues, a desire has arisen among Roman Catholics to begin looking to confessional Lutherans for more fruitful dialogue. The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, while still under the presidency of Cardinal Walter Kasper, contacted the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church in Germany (SELK), Dr. Klän reported, to “fathom the chances of having something like a dialogue established between the two church bodies, the Roman Catholic Church in Germany and [SELK].” Dr. Klän and SELK’s Bishop Hans-Jörg Voigt were subsequently invited to visit the Unity Secretariat in Rome to meet with Cardinal Kasper and Msgr. Dr. Matthias Türk (responsible for the PCPCU’s Lutheran relations). This consultation led to the six-part discussions in Germany.

“One cannot deny that the church is influenced and affected by worldly societal trends,” said Dr. Klän in his report to the ILC. “The challenges that Christianity is facing today are not restricted to one church body. And that is why it makes sense to look for alliances with Christians and churches we might find agreement with on certain issues.”

He continued: “In many a way it may be hoped that confessional Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue on the world level could contribute to pursuing the goal of communicating foundational principles of Christian faith and defending them against being watered down, being contradicted, being challenged, and neglected not only from outside Christianity, but also within the realm of established church bodies. That is why it makes sense to me for the ILC and its member churches to enter into a theological dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church.”

The Roman Catholic Church seems to agree. When the German discussions ended, the participants issued a report encouraging both churches to enter into formal dialogue. Responding to that report, the new president of the PCPCU, Cardinal Kurt Koch, wrote in 2011 to Bishop Voigt of the SELK, informing him that the Roman Catholic Church is highly interested in starting an official dialogue with the ILC.

(Here is a link to the International Lutheran Council.)

Block suggests that recent opposition to Obamacare is a factor in making these ecumenical discussions plausible:

In the United States of America, for example, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod have recently become allies over the subject of religious liberty in the face of the Health and Human Services contraceptive mandate. And in Canada, very tentative discussions between the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and Lutheran Church–Canada have also begun. These churches are members of the International Lutheran Council, an international association of Lutheran churches known for their more traditional interpretation of the authority of Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions—hence the term “confessional” Lutherans.

I don’t mean to remind Lutherans impolitely of Martin Luther’s chutzpah at the Marburg Colloquy, but these sort of dialogues do present a problem both for the integrity of the Roman Catholic Church and Lutheran communions and for the powers of human reason. Here I am reminded of Alan Wolfe’s interpretation of the recent thaw between Roman Catholics and Protestants in the United States (this from a sociologist of Jewish-American extraction who has no dog in the interpretive fight):

Now it is undoubtedly truth that many of these once furious debates between Catholics and Protestants have subsided in contemporary America. For the first time in our history, a generic thing called Christianity is emerging, as large numbers of switchers move from one faith to another and as young spiritual seekers respond, not to doctrinal differences between faiths, but to the vibrancy of specific sermons or the charisma of particular clergy. But if there exists a convergence among Christians today, it is difficult to imagine that the Christianity which historically divided them is precisely what is now unifying them. On the contrary, it makes more sense to argue that there is something in contemporary American culture that causes all American religions to become similar to each other (just as there is likely something in Nigerian culture that make all of Nigeria’s faiths — Anglican, Catholic, and Muslim — conservative in a worldwide context). Once something resembling a generic Christianity emerges, in other words, it confirms a relationship between democracy and Christianity, but it is not the one discovered by Tocqueville and extended by Heclo: today democracy shapes Christianity more than the other way around. (in Christianity and American Democracy, by Hugh Heclo et al, 191-192)

This is one reason why lumping causes indigestion for splitters. I don’t presume to speak for the lumpers who seem to be able to swallow anything.

The Reorganization of Old Princeton

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Our own Darryl Hart recently visited with the folks at Reformed Forum to speak about the reorganization of Old Princeton on Christ the Center. Darryl’s article on the subject, “The Reorganization of Princeton Theological Seminary and the Exhaustion of American Presbyterianism” is published in the 2012 issue of The Confessional Presbyterian Journal. Listen to another interesting conversation on this important event in the history of American Presbyterianism.

Lumpers, Splitters, and Historical Honesty

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I could not help but think of a recent post at CTC while preparing for class on Turkey and the United States today. In his chapter from Islam and the West, “Other People’s History,” Bernard Lewis takes aim at those who accuse Orientalists (those who study the Middle East, China and India for starters) of intellectual imperialism, as if the study of non-western civilizations arises from a “predatory” or “larcenous” interest in “other people’s cultural possessions.” He goes on to say that scholarship should be competent, fair, honest, and not distorted by “loyalties and purposes.” But these considerations “are of no importance to those who believe that all scholarship or, rather, all scholarly discourse is ideological and that their ideology, and therefore their scholarly discourse is better or stronger because it is openly avowed and, more especially, because it is theirs.” He goes on to describe this disregard for even-handed scholarship in the following way:

“You want to study in my archives, read my literature, talk to my people, work on my history? Then you must pay your respects to my point of view, you must promote my national aspirations as I may from time to tie define or redefine them.” To comply with this requirement, the historian must choose for himself and demand of others a presentation of history that includes only what in the present climate of opinion is seen as positive and excludes, and if called upon denies, anything that in the present climate of opinion is seen as negative. (122)

This description of biased history resembles Ken Howell’s description of the “Classic” Roman Catholic approach, in “Three Frameworks for Interpreting the Church Fathers,” for examining the early church (and arguably for the rest of Roman Catholic history). What Howell describes is not necessarily cynical about “objective” historical frameworks. But he does affirm that “true” historical account has to conform to a certain bias in favor of “the home team.”

An honest historian working within the Classic Catholic Framework (CCF) will face all the diverse and varied expressions of Christian belief brought forth from the relevant texts. He will, however, ask different questions about those texts from those who work in the CPF (Classic Protestant) or the MCF (Modern Critical). Central to inquiry in the CCF is the notion of witness. Witnesses point to something greater and more enduring than themselves. In the CCF, the goal is to study the relevant witnesses in order to discover the deposit of faith which is the doctrinal content of the Christian faith. This approach assumes continuity across space and time. That continuity may not be total or exhaustive but it has essential qualities and characteristics which are transmitted over time.

Howell’s goes on to contrast this with how Protestants approach the early church:

The problem posed by the Protestant interpretation of early church history was as follows: how do you know what in the Fathers should be taken as binding and what should not? The Protestant answer was clear if not always easy to apply in practice: measure the Fathers against Scripture. Of course, the learned Roman Catholics believed this was an insufficient answer. How does one know if one’s interpretation of Scripture, which is being used as the criterion of judging the Fathers, is correct? The criterion of “the unanimous consent of the fathers” turned the Reformation’s answer on its head. It said that the way we know what interpretations of the Scriptures are legitimate is by the universality, antiquity, and consensus of the fathers. In this view, what was unanimous among the fathers, such as the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, was binding on the church. What was not unanimous, such as how the creation narratives of Genesis were to be interpreted, was not binding.

I know that in Reformed circles some historians have argued, following the Dutch Calvinist w-v notion, that “objective” history is impossible and that the bias of faith in understanding the past adds value — it sees the hand of God at work or the importance of religious “values” where a non-believing historian miss them. Howell not only seems to follow this rejection of academic neutrality, but he adds criteria for studying the past that in my view rig the game before it even starts. He says that a historian needs to find continuity and unanimity among the church fathers.

This is sometimes what historians call lumping. That is, they take all positions and force them into a kind of consensus so that difficulties, tensions, even contradictions are ironed out of history. On the other side are splitters who recognize disagreements, discrepancies, rivalries, and discontinuities. I myself prefer the splitting model if only because the vacuous term “evangelical” is supposed somehow to make sense of the Assemblies of God and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, or Calvinism is supposed to make sense of Scott Clark and Nelson Kloosterman.

If you pushed most historians, even though they complain about lumpers in their ranks, most would concede that the craft of history errs on the side of splitting because humans rarely agree, ideas are contested, and free societies (at least) inherently nurture disagreements (though the history of the human race is littered with intellectual combat). This is why Howell’s use of the word “honest” is curious. A Roman Catholic historian who must find consensus and unanimity may be honest. But people who see differences where others see the same thing can well ask whether the lumpers are truly being fair to the past. Funny, not even the Bible approaches salvation history as a lumper does it is hard to imagine a time in the sagas of the Israelites or the really early church (REC) when everyone agreed.

Jonathan Edwards and American Exceptionalism

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Richard Gamble in his new book, In Search of the City on a Hill, spends a lot of time on John Winthrop’s role in appropriating and transforming Jesus’ trope of a “city on a hill” for Puritan and (later) U.S. purposes. But he also observes Jonathan Edwards’ contribution to the myth of America as God’s “New Israel”:

A fuller understanding of Edwards’s role in making Jesus’ metaphor into an American myth would take us into his eschatology, his expectation that America might be the site of the coming of Christ’s millennial kingdom, his view of history as the outworking of the conflict between the Papacy and the Reformation, and the nuances of his theology of church and state. Among these larger questions, one historical debates has centered on the degree to which Edwards promoted what Ernest Lee Tuveson in the 1960s called America’s ‘Redeemer Myth.’ . . . As one voice among thousands, Edwards helped perpetuate that quintessentially Puritan notion of a righteous city set high upon a hill for all the world to see. . .

. . . whether righteous or unrighteous, obedient or disobedient, New Englanders were God’s chosen people, a spectacle to the world. Either way, the covenantal relationship was real and inescapable. America could not be hidden. Its light may have grown dim, but the city on a hill — even as just one city on a hill among many possible cities — laboured under the duties of a national covenant of works. This view may indeed be ‘pessimistic,’ but it does nothing to affect America’s standing as a city on a hill and how that theology can affect the nation’s understanding of the church and its calling in the world. A more nuanced ‘Edwardsian’ handling of the metaphor might make for a more chastened national identity, or a more restrained foreign policy, or a more communitarian theory of social justice, but it would still be premised on an identification of America as ‘our Israel’ and open the way for all the implications of national chosenness. Edwards used the metaphor of the city to bind his church members with the cords of a national covenant, obscuring the Augustinian understand of a sojourning City of God on pilgrimage through the City of Man. Better known, his sermons might have restrained American conduct with a sobering sense of divine accountability. But like so many of his era, he blurred the sacred and the secular. The things of Caesar looked very much like the things of God from inside the walls of Edwards’s city. (84-85)