Pondering the idea of setting myself word limits for posts in the future. Within the past 24 hours I have posted about 10,000 words here. I doubt that (m)any people will have read them through.
Matt Colvin has recently transferred a number of posts from his old Fragmenta blog onto his new Colvinism blog. This has given us the chance to revisit a number of real gems. Here are a few of his posts which I thought that I would take the opportunity to share with you all.
Some helpful exegetical remarks on 1 Corinthians 10
10:4 – Note Paul’s very inventive interpretation of the OT: “the rock was the Messiah”??!! Precisely the sort of thing we cannot get away with now, because there are no controls on this sort of interpretation, no brakes to prevent it from running off the rails. It is not enough to say that “the rock was YHWH; he was the one with whom Israel had to do during the wilderness wanderings.” No, for Paul does not say that “the rock was ὁ κύριος,” but that it was “the Messiah”: God’s anointed eschatological king.
The parallel between between Numbers 16 and 2 Timothy 2:14-26
Now Paul uses another OT story to help Timothy make sense of his own situation in Ephesus, contending with these false teachers:
2:19 – The “solid foundation” is two-fold, and contrary to certain modern theologies, there is no contradiction between the two parts:
First, “The Lord knows those who are His.” On the face of things, this is merely an endorsement of the doctrine of Election, a cornerstone of Israel’s faith. God has a people that is his. There is no question of Him forgetting who they are.
But we must be aware of the source of the quotation. It is a slight modification of Numbers 16:5, in which Moses deals with the rebellion of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram by saying to Korah, “Tomorrow morning YHWH will show who is His and who is holy.” There is a difference between the righteous and the wicked, no matter how the latter may have insinuated themselves into the congregation.
Second, “Let everyone who names the name of Christ depart from unrighteousness.” Having spoken of election, Paul now speaks of our duty to walk righteousless. There is no contradiction with election here. Paul is giving another near-quotation from Numbers 16, in this case verse 21, where YHWH says to Moses and Aaron, “Separate yourself from this congregation, that I may consume them in a moment,” and 16:24, “Get away fromt he tents of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram,” and 16:26, “Depart now from the tents of these wicked men! Touch nothing of theirs, lest you also be consumed in all their sins.”
Implication: this story ends in the destruction of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. Paul is telling Timothy that Hymenaeus & Philetus will end in a similar way: God will destroy them. So again and again, he addresses Timothy with “but you…” and warns him to stay away from them. Don’t touch the filthy chamber pot. Keep yourself clean from them, and then you will be like a washed and clean bowl or vase sitting in the cupboard ready to use for some noble purpose.
An interesting reading of 1 Corinthians 7:15
Jesus’ healing in Mark 5 and Paul’s healing of Tabitha in Acts 9
9:40 – Peter’s raising of Tabitha to life is remarkable as an echo of Jesus’ activity in Mark 5. Not only does he follow Jesus pattern by kicking out everyone else from the room (ekbalwn de exw pantas; cf. Mk. 5:40, autos de ekbalwn pantas), but Peter’s command, “Tabitha, anastethi” is very similar to Jesus’ words in Mk. 5:41, “Talitha koum,” which is translated “To korasion, egeire” The two Greek verbs used in the commands, egeirw and anistemi barely differ at all. The difference between the two utterances in the original Aramaic was likely only one letter: Talitha vs. Tabitha.
Brown suggests that our Western art tradition is mistaken to show John either pouring or submersing people in the river. Rather, the salient feature of his baptism was going into, and coming out of, the river: i.e. crossing it. Jesus’ disciples refer to John as the one he was with “on the other side of the Jordan.” Given 1 Cor. 10′s reference to “baptism into Moses” by crossing the sea, we may wonder whether Brown may not be right. He mentions that it is odd for John to be “proclaiming a baptism” rather than just doing one.
What does it mean to be ‘blameless’?
When we combine this insight with Leithart’s insights on the nature of “imputation” in the Bible — that the assigning of guilt for a sin is distinct from the sin itself — we can see that it is a very different matter to say that someone is “sinless” than it is to say that they are “blameless.”
The Bible never calls anyone except Jesus “sinless.” But it calls many people blameless: Job, Zacharias and Elizabeth, etc. But it is especially interesting that Paul refers to his preconversion self as both “a persecutor and a violent man” and as “blameless, as touching the righteousness that is in the Torah.”
Paul means that he, in his life as a Pharisaic Jew had been, not sinless, but faithful to avail himself of the means of expiation that God had provided in the Torah. Likewise the parents of John the Baptizer.
Ananias and Sapphira paralleled with Rechab and Baanah
Some very helpful observations on the non-introspective character of conscience
A compelling reading of the book of Ruth
Observations on women’s headcoverings in 1 Corinthians 11
The head of woman is man, however. And woman is the image and glory of man. Paul says that she ought to cover her head, i.e. she ought to cover her hair, which is (symbolically) the glory of man. If she fails to do this, she shames her head, i.e. the man.
Now, compare all this with what is said of Moses in 2 Cor. 3:13. He veiled his face so that the people might not see the end of the glory of the Torah, which was fading away (since the Torah was a temporary administration of God’s relationship with men). But we, with unveiled faces, unlike Moses, reflect the glory of Christ (3:18), which does not fade.
I submit that this is a key to the understanding of 1 Cor. 11:
The man, whose head is Christ, ought not to cover his head, since the glory of Christ ought to be revealed publicly. Modesty about displaying the image and glory of Christ would be shaming to Christ.
But the woman’s case is not the same. Her head is Man, from whom she was taken, and for whom she was made. And Hebrews tells us that “we do not yet see all things under man’s feet” (Heb. 2:8) — Man is not yet glorified; that must await the consummation.
The distinction between man and woman and their headgear in 1 Cor. 11 thus is a disclosure, in public semiotics, of our present moment in redemptive history: after the glorification of Christ, but before the glorification of man. We ought not to suppose that the covering of women’s heads is a permanent feature of God’s plan. If Christ’s words in Mt. 10:26 are a general principle with application beyond their context to our present topic as well, then veiling or covering must of its very nature be temporary: “for there is nothing veiled that will not be unveiled (οὐδὲν γάρ ἐστιν κεκαλυμμένον ὃ οὐκ ἀποκαλυφθήσεται).
The glory of man, presently concealed, but to be revealed later, is the motive for Paul’s otherwise puzzling mention of the angels. The creation was under their authority until Christ was elevated to the right hand of God as the first of many brothers. The angels ought to see the glory of Christ — i.e. the public claim that the Son of God has attained greater honour than the angels — declared publicly by the uncovered heads of the men of the church. But they ought not to be confronted with premature and inappropriate claims — via uncovered women’s heads — about the glory of man. The creation waits with eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed; but man’s glory is not yet.
Finally, a personal favourite: Morsels in Romans 12 and John 13
In reading Romans 12 last week, I was surprised by an interesting verb in verse 20:
ἀλλὰ ἐὰν πεινᾷ ὁ ἐχθρός σου, ψώμιζε αὐτόν: ἐὰν διψᾷ, πότιζε αὐτόν: τοῦτο γὰρ ποιῶν ἄνθρακας πυρὸς σωρεύσεις ἐπὶ τὴν κεφαλὴν αὐτοῦ.
“But if your enemy is hungry, give him a morsel; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink, for by doing this you will heap up coals of fire on his head.”The verb in question is ψώμιζε, to give a morsel. It is a rare verb. LSJ cite Numbers 11:4 LXX as another instance (“the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us a morsel of flesh to eat? – τίς ἡμᾶς ψωμιεῖ κρέα”). But what caught my eye is the fact that the verb is cognate with another word, the fairly unusual noun ψωμιον. Where does it occur? In John 13:26:
25ἀναπεσὼν οὖν ἐκεῖνος οὕτως ἐπὶ τὸ στῆθος τοῦ Ἰησοῦ λέγει αὐτῷ, Κύριε, τίς ἐστιν; 26ἀποκρίνεται [ὁ] Ἰησοῦς, Ἐκεῖνός ἐστιν ᾧ ἐγὼ βάψω τὸ ψωμίον καὶ δώσω αὐτῷ. βάψας οὖν τὸ ψωμίον [λαμβάνει καὶ] δίδωσιν Ἰούδᾳ Σίμωνος Ἰσκαριώτου. 27καὶ μετὰ τὸ ψωμίον τότε εἰσῆλθεν εἰς ἐκεῖνον ὁ Σατανᾶς. λέγει οὖν αὐτῷ ὁ Ἰησοῦς, Ὃ ποιεῖς ποίησον τάχιον.“He, leaning back on Jesus’ breast, said to Him, “Lord, who is it?” Jesus replied, “It is that one for whom I shall dip the sop and give it to him.” And so, when he had dipped the sop, he took it and gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. And with the sop at that time Satan entered into him. So Jesus said to him, “What you are doing, do quickly.”
If your enemy is hungry…
Very cool.
Thanks, Matt!
Over on Archbishop Cranmer’s blog, His Grace observes:
Hitherto, we have been led to believe that the consultation in Scotland on the introduction of ‘gay marriage’ was a matter for the Scots alone: no-one else in any corner of the UK was able to vote.
However, yesterday the pro-‘gay marriage’ groups let it slip that they are asking people outside Scotland to respond, suggesting that the Scottish Government will accept non-Scottish responses.
The consultation closes tomorrow. I strongly urge you to fill out this form and register your opinion.
I filled mine out earlier, with the following explanation of my position:
I believe that redrawing the institution of marriage around individual sexual agents is dangerous, jeopardising the common goods that are invested in the institution.
Marriage is a recognition of the centrality of the relationship between the sexes – the two halves of the human race – in the constitution of society. It is a recognition that sex is not a univocal reality, but that the bodies of males and females are ordered together in a manner that is intrinsic to their unique and specific phenomenology.
It is a recognition that a lifelong committed sexual relationship between a man and a woman is generally procreative. Society’s sanction and celebration of their sexual relationship recognises that their children are an extension of their marital union, expressed in the bodies that they pledged to each other in their wedding.
It is a recognition that the sexual relationship between a man and a woman is oriented, not merely to the good of bringing the sexes together, and expressing our natural sexual dimorphism, but also to the good of procreation. The sexual relationship between a man and a woman has potential public consequences on account of procreation that no same sex relationship can have. The two are not equal, and it is natural that marriage should be given a particular and especial status, as society has a peculiar vested interest in such sexual relationships that it does not have in the case of relationships between persons of the same sex.
The connection of marriage with procreation is one of the primary reasons for its institutional character, as society has a clear interest in surrounding marriage with a serious of social norms and expectations, as through procreation the ends of marriage powerfully transcend the mere interests of the sexual partners within it. Lacking this same means of rendering a private sexual relationship public through procreation, same sex marriage will hasten the redrawing of our understanding of marriage around partnerships completely detached from the end of procreation, and the deinstitutionalisation of the union.
Marriage is a recognition of the rights of children to be, when at all possible, raised by their biological parents, and that being raised and socialised by a parent of both sexes, exhibiting the loving and lifelong commitment and cooperation that should exist between the sexes, is in the best interests both of the child and of society more widely. It is a recognition of the irreplaceableness and gendered character of both fathers and mothers.
It is recognition of the importance of holding genetic, gestational, legal, and social parenthood together as closely as possible. Marriage idealises the fusion of all of these, as the various aspects of parenthood are integrated into a single institution. The redefinition of marriage that the admission of same sex couples to the institution involves no longer upholds this.
Marriage protects children’s rights to a lineage, simple origins and an assured paternity. The admission of same sex couples to the institution will hasten the normalisation and widespread use of reproductive technology, removing the origins of our relationship with our offspring from the intimate and aneconomic union of the marriage bed to economic and legal transactions in the marketplace. This encourages the depersonalisation of children, making abortion, for instance, considerably more conscionable.
Marriage protects the bonds of blood that constitute the wider life of the family, the bonds between siblings, generations, extended relations, etc. It involves the recognition that marriage is not merely ordered to serve the interests of the merely living, but also exists for the sake of generations past and future. Same sex marriage focuses the rationale of marriage too closely on the interests of the sexual partners. On account of its necessarily non-procreative character, same sex marriages cannot protect and extend the bonds of blood to the same extent.
Marriage is monogamous, but same sex marriage threatens the monogamous character of marriage, by undermining its rationale. Monogamy is not solely or primarily concerned with the inviolability and exclusivity of the romantic and companionate attachment to a single sexual partner, but is chiefly based upon the realities of gender difference, sexual dimorphism, reproductive pairing, and biological parenthood. Absent these realities, and monogamy loses most of its rationale. Recognising same-sex partnerships as marriages goes beyond marginalising these realities to undermine or deny their significance, attacking the very things that monogamy seeks to protect. It opens the door to the watering down of the concept of monogamy as lifelong sexual exclusivity in an ordinarily procreative partnership between a man and a woman, or to the recognition of polyamorous partnerships and the social countenancing of open marriages.
The real question here is whether committed same sex partnerships should be recognised as marriages, or whether they should be seen as sui generis, with a distinct character of their own, unlike that of marriage.
Although my convictions on this matter are deeply informed by my Christian faith, I believe that a clear understanding of what is involved in such redefinitions of marriage will reveal that this is a matter that Christian and non-Christian, religious and non-religious, and, dare I say, even gay and straight, can find common cause on. Once again, the form to fill out is here.
Part 2: A Closer Examination of Junia, The Female Apostle
Part 3: Representation and Ordination: Of Sons and Wives
Having just read McKnight’s book, Junia is Not Alone, after reading Steve Holmes’ review on his blog, I have rather mixed feelings. McKnight makes a passionate case that the stories of women both in the Bible and in Church history have been ‘erased’. At the heart of his case lies the vexed issue of the translation of Romans 16:7, and the fact that for many years Junia was identified as a man, Junias, as theologians and Bible translators were supposedly unable to handle the possibility of a female apostle.
McKnight argues that Junia is an example for all women who God gifts to preach and lead in the Church. He claims that, if we were better acquainted with the biblical stories of women, we would see that Junia’s role as an apostle was nothing at all out of the ordinary or surprising, as she stood firmly in a line of strong and leading women in the Old Testament. Yet these characters have also been neglected or effaced, presumably on account of the Church’s desire to marginalize women. McKnight then mentions a number of women from Church history who have been subject to equal neglect.
Are the Stories of Women Effaced and Neglected?
I would love to see Christians better acquainted with the innumerable great women in the Bible and Church history. There is so much rich material there from which we can gain. However, McKnight seems to be making something closer to a conspiracy theory, suggesting that biblical women’s stories are purposefully neglected and, what is far worse, effaced.
However, I am not at all surprised that a generation of the Church with limited biblical literacy isn’t that well acquainted with characters like Deborah, Huldah, Priscilla, Phoebe, and Miriam. I am really not sure that this ignorance tells us a whole lot. How many modern Christians know the characters of, say, Jephthah, Jehu, Apollos, Philip, and Phinehas, as some examples of some key male characters from the same biblical eras, most of whom receive far more attention in the text than the female characters mentioned? How many Christians could discuss the books of Numbers, Judges, or 2 Kings at length? Could it be that the stories of characters such as Deborah, Huldah, and Miriam are merely collateral damage of our neglect of parts of the Old Testament that don’t fit tidily into our view of God or our understanding of our faith and seem either threatening or irrelevant?
In other words, I really don’t think that this is some conspiracy against women: it is just the fact that people don’t know their Bibles especially well, and certain books in particular. It is also on account of the fact that some of these characters just don’t receive a whole lot of attention in the text, and when they are mentioned, it is only in passing. How many sermons have you heard on Epaphroditus lately? I thought so.
Furthermore, having heard a grossly disproportionate number of sermons on the books of Esther and Ruth, and on characters such as Hannah, I wouldn’t be surprised if certain women of the Bible actually receive a great deal more attention than men of similar prominence in the text. In part this is because many of these texts work very well as self-standing stories, which can largely be abstracted from historical context. Characters like Huldah and Deborah get missed because the period of the judges and the period of the divided kingdom are somewhat less accessible or theologically uncomforting. The men of those eras are no less neglected. Mary is neglected because that is the Protestant thing to do (albeit not completely neglected: we hear about her at least once every year). The Song is neglected because it is awkward to preach in services where children are present. Is there a conspiracy of silence concerning the stories of women? I really don’t think so. And for those of us brought up in a context where the Old Testament was very much an open book, most of these stories are extremely familiar.
Similar things could be said about knowledge of Church history. Knowledge of Church history isn’t a whole lot better than biblical knowledge within the Church, and often tends to be focused rather narrowly on a few characters such as Luther and Augustine who stand in splendid isolation from their wider context and are often reduced to mere representatives of whatever denominational ideals we have imposed back upon them.
Obviously it is important to teach stories of the great women of the Bible. We all need examples of faith to which we can relate, and much good could be done through the celebration of the lives of great biblical women, and a deep acquaintance with the many female saints of history. However, modern Christians’ ignorance is not merely of individual characters, but of the larger histories and dramas in which they exist, larger dramas which can have a much more powerful effect when it comes to shaping our understanding of our place and role. A focus upon exemplary characters is helpful, but far more important is a firm grasp of the bigger pictures. The character example approach can also be incredibly selective, tailored to contemporary prejudices. Balance isn’t achieved by making sure that we speak as much about female examples of faith as male ones, but by telling the big stories, stories that transcend individual human actors, and are primarily stories about what God is doing. When you have a grasp upon the biblical narratives as a whole, you will have a far better sense of how much weight to give individual stories in terms of the whole, and will better be able to avoid making sweeping generalizations from exceptional cases. Also, while examples of faith are great, the big stories more clearly reveal the one in whom our faith is placed.
Within this post I want to assess the significance that McKnight gives to Junia and other biblical women, especially as they relate to the question of the ordination of women. A couple of paragraphs of the following post have been posted as comments in another context. Many people have also helped me to sharpen my thoughts in this area. James Jordan’s thoughts on the liturgical difference established in the creation account have been helpful. Others have helped me think through some of these questions through conversation. If you are reading this, you know who you are. I don’t feel that it is for me to associate your name with a piece as controversial as this, though.
Junia
I can’t help but feel that Junia is the Jabez for the women’s ordination crowd: that one character mentioned in passing that provokes intense levels of assured speculation, and on whose significance immense weight is placed.
Yes, we have characters such as Junia, and numerous other important female figures in the biblical narrative. However, closer examination of the actual roles played by women and the roles not played by women doesn’t really seem to support the case of women’s ordination as strongly as originally suggested. The important point that, despite Jesus’ many close female followers, the Twelve were all male is commonly made. The identification of Junia as an ‘apostle’ doesn’t really tell us as much as we would like, given the numerous senses in which this term is used in the NT: there is not just one class of apostle.
McKnight quotes Chrysostom’s high praise of Junia. However, when read alongside Chrysostom’s rather extreme statements about the subordination of women within the life of the Church and their exclusion from leadership and teaching in other contexts, it seems that Chrysostom definitely doesn’t share the absurdly far-reaching conclusions that McKnight draws from this one text. Similar comments could be made about Paul. If women in positions of leadership and teaching over men was really so familiar from the Old Testament, why do we have verses such as 1 Timothy 2:11-15? Perhaps Romans 16:7 really doesn’t present such unambiguous support for women’s leadership after all.
The fact that Junia is mentioned with Andronicus raises further questions. Jesus sent out a wider group of disciples in pairs, and the missionary pair seems to have been a more general pattern within the spread of the early church. Within these pairs (not a few married couples among them, I would suspect), both of whom could be termed ‘apostles’, there seems to have often been a lead missionary and an assistant missionary. This follows the OT pattern where leaders had assistants, helpers, or protégés in various capacities (Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, Elisha and Gehazi, etc.). We see the same pattern with kings and queens, or rulers and their chief representatives. The question at the heart of women’s ordination is not whether women can play key and prominent roles within the life of the Church, but how they should relate to the leading authoritative office of the pastor, priest, or bishop, or whether their roles should primarily be ‘helping’ roles. The case of Junia doesn’t really settle this.
In fact, 1 Corinthians 9:5 might provide supporting evidence on this front. Paul speaks of the practice of ‘the rest of the apostles’, who ‘led about’ ‘a sister, a wife’ with them. This suggests that apostles generally came as husband-wife teams, with the husband taking the lead and the wife participating in and assisting in his ministry. In the third book of the Stromata, Clement of Alexandria (c.150-c.215) speaks of the apostles making their wives fellow workers in their ministry, and that the ministry of their wives was focused on women to whom the apostles would not have had access without causing ill will. It would also suggest that the man was always the lead apostle in such relationships. The pattern of a male lead apostle with a wife as his helper, ministering chiefly to women, fits both the historical record, the biblical text, Romans 16:7, and lends no support to the claims of those who want to claim that women exercised teaching authority over men in the early Church.
The Creation Pattern
The term ‘helper’, of course, is reminiscent of the story of the creation of Eve in Genesis 2, which Paul treats as paradigmatic for understanding the working of gender difference in the life of the Church (1 Corinthians 11:7-9; 1 Timothy 2:11-15). In the prototypical sanctuary of Eden, Adam was created first, and was the one given the priestly task of guarding and keeping the garden, the commandment concerning the forbidden food, and the kingly role of naming the animals. After Adam had been commissioned as the priestly guardian of the garden, Eve is created as an assistant and helper in his commission. Adam was both to lead in the priestly task, and to teach his wife God’s law concerning the Tree. The Fall involved an inversion of these roles. Their creation was oriented in key respects to the performance of this priestly task in the Garden (and later the wider world): one could well argue that in the second creation account, the primary difference between men and women is a difference in liturgical roles and the Fall hinged on a confusion of and failure to exercise roles in the realm of priesthood.
Variegated Leadership
A few further points are commonly ignored in this area.
First, teaching and leadership and their associated offices and roles are not univocal phenomena, but come in many different forms. Some are completely restricted to men, others are overwhelmingly dominated by men, still others are treated in a manner far more indifferent to gender, and some may be dominated by women, or even exclusive to them. At the heart of the women’s ordination debate is the question of women exercising priestly leadership, not of women exercising leadership per se. The offices of priest, king, and prophet are not the same. Although we find queens and prophetesses in the life of Israel, in contrast to the cults of the surrounding nations, YHWH’s cult did not involve priestesses. Although we find women exercising various prominent roles in the NT, we still do not find women being leaders of the liturgical assembly.
Even within these offices and roles there are differentiated forms. Some über-prophets inaugurate new covenant orders. There are lead prophets and helper/assistant/apprentice prophets, leaders of schools of prophets and their followers. The ‘prophetess’ of Isaiah 8:3 may have been named such, not because she was a prophet in her own right, but because she participated in her husband’s ministry. There are prophets with different levels of revelation, from uncertain dreams and dark visions, to ‘mouth to mouth’ revelation (Numbers 12:6-8). There are chief and high priests, regular priests, and assisting Levites. There are Spirit-anointed kings and regular kings, Davidic kings, and non-Davidic kings. There are priest-kings, prophet-kings, and priest-prophets, and figures such as Moses and Christ, to whom all of these offices are ascribed. There are apostles who are members of the Twelve, apostles who witnessed the resurrected Christ, apostles who were sent by a particular church, apostles who performed miracles and others who didn’t, apostles who were personally commissioned by Christ and others who weren’t. I have argued above that there were also apostles who (probably like Isaiah’s wife) enjoyed the title because they were made coworkers by their apostolically commissioned husbands. Even within the Twelve we find distinctions, with Peter as a sort of lead or chief apostle, and James and John as next to him. In my experience, arguments for women’s ordination often treat these categories as if they were homogeneous, and do not take sufficient cognizance of the huge differentiations that can exist within them.
Gender-Conditioned Roles
Second, gender conditions these roles in all sorts of different ways. The sex of animals was stipulated in the Law for various sacrifices. Male animals were stipulated for leaders, female goats or lambs for a commoner’s sin offering (peace offerings are primarily related to the eaters, rather than to the offerers). The existence of socio-liturgical genders suggests that this is not an area where biological sex is a matter of indifference. The priest himself played a symbolic and representative role in relation to the congregation, and as such his gender was a matter of importance. The gendered frameworks for relating the people of God, their leaders, and God don’t disappear in the New Testament.
There is also no such thing as a woman king or woman prophet: there are queens and prophetesses. There are some things that certain kings and prophets do that no queen or prophetess could do. A prophetess could not symbolize God’s relationship to his people as Hosea did, or a queen as Solomon did in his Song. This is all related to the fact that God identifies himself as Father and Husband, and refers to himself using masculine pronouns.
Similar observations could be made about Deborah the judgess, an example to which frequent appeal is made. Deborah’s form of rule contrasts with that of the other judges in several respects. Deborah does not lead directly as the other judges do, but is seen as one who relays God’s commands to the people, the commands of the husband to his bride, or the father to his children. Barak does much of the work that is more generally associated with the major biblical judges as the frontline military leader, while Deborah judgeship is initially associated with the giving of legal decisions (Judges 4:5), perhaps akin to the minor judges of the book (Samuel’s role as a judge seems to have been predominantly of this character too). The other judges go out to judge and lead Israel in battle: Israel comes up to Deborah to be judged. When Deborah does go out, she only does so at Barak’s insistence (and Barak is perceived to be weak, and is told that he will not be the one who gets the great honour). None of this is to denigrate Deborah’s significance. It is just to point out that even when a woman does occupy such a rule, it is occupied in a manner conditioned by her gender.
Deborah describes herself as a ‘mother in Israel’, gendering her role. Her role as judge arose under exceptional circumstances, as civil life in Israel had collapsed (Judges 5:7), and she seems to be trying to re-establish it by serving as a mother figure who raises up Barak and his generation to take leadership. She protects and leads the people in their childlike state (the woman is presented as a key guardian of her children, while the primary task of guardianship in relation to the wider order falls to the man), but seeks to hand over guardianship to a man fit to exercise the role when the opportunity arises. Deborah’s guardianship is the temporary guardianship of the mother, which lasts as long as the minority of her children, and needs to be relinquished when her son comes of age, provided that he will assume his role. As such, Deborah’s leadership is very much the leadership of a ‘helper’. The fact that a woman killing Sisera is presented as a minor judgment upon Barak for his lack of faith merely underlines the fact that it was a particular humiliation for a woman to do what was his task as the man who was supposed to be leading and guarding the people (although Jael smashing Sisera’s head in with a tent pent is a powerful image of the role that the woman plays in the crushing of the serpent’s head).
Yet McKnight claims that Deborah ‘subordinated men’ and that she was ‘Ms. EveryOne in those days: she was president, pope and Rambo bundled in one female body.’ One could wonder whether he had read the text at all. Her rule is practiced in a manner more akin to that of a vice president in the absence of the president, she has no authoritative liturgical office, and she merely accompanies the army: she does not fight herself.
The Anomaly of Woman Leaders in Scripture
Third, women as authoritative leaders of the people of God in any role is incredibly anomalous in Scripture, and is openly portrayed as such (Deborah is described as ‘a woman, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth’, just to make sure that we grasp how surprising it is that a woman is acting as a judge of Israel). We are told of over a dozen judges, but only one of them was a woman. We are told of forty-two kings and queens of Israel and Judah (that number is from memory, so might be worth confirming), and only one of them, Athaliah, was a ruling queen, gaining the throne as the wicked queen consort after the death of her husband King Jehoram. As the only non-descendant of David to sit on the throne of Judah before the exile, and the wicked daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, the sign of a dangerous alliance with the evil Omrides, she could hardly be said to have any sort of divine sanction. All of the other queens (Esther, Jezebel, etc.) are queen consorts or queen mothers. No provision is made for priestesses. There are more women to be found among the prophets, but none among the first order of covenant-founding prophets, such as Moses, Samuel, Elijah, or John the Baptist. Nor are there any women among the prophets who received the highest level of revelation preserved for us in the canon. Of all of the ‘apostles’ of whom we know, only one was a woman, and we can only speculate about what role she played, as she only receives the most passing of mentions. There were no women among the Twelve.
All of which raises the question: who are the ones who are really misrepresenting the biblical emphasis in this matter?
‘Masculine’ Virtues in Leadership
Finally, certain roles are strongly conditioned by virtues and qualities that are regarded as particularly masculine. The great priestly leaders of the people of God were marked out by their preparedness to employ sacred violence without pity in the service of God’s holiness. The tribe of Levi was already marked out as one of the two violent tribes in Genesis. The Levites were set apart for service after slaying 3,000 of their brethren after the golden calf incident. Phinehas thrust the spear through the Midianite and the Israelite and was given an everlasting priesthood as a result. Samuel was the one who hacked Agag in pieces, when Saul failed to do so. The Israelite army temporarily has a sort of priestly status when called together for holy war, which suggests that the priests were regarded as a sort of standing army.
This pattern continues into the New Testament. Paul, Peter, James, and John all seem to have been men characterized by a sort of avenging zeal, zeal which was broken and harnessed for God’s service. Peter, the one who cut off the High Priest’s servant’s ear, later became the one proclaiming the divine death sentence on Ananias and Sapphira. Paul was the former persecutor of the Church, who called for the ecclesiastical death sentence of excommunication to be applied without pity or pause in the case of continued sexual immorality (note the allusion to the OT death penalty in 1 Corinthians 5:13).
The priest’s business was death. He was the man of knife, fire, cut flesh, and spilt blood. The priests were the crack troops who manned the moral and cultic boundaries of the nation, and were praised for being able to rise above all pity when judgment was necessary. The priest as the elite sword-wielder, who will not show mercy in the defence of truth when all others fail, and will not spare, pity, or compromise when others do, seems to be a pretty consistent theme in relation to priestly leadership in Scripture, yet rather noticeable by its absence in current understandings of pastoral ministry. The capacity to exercise agonistic, uncompromising, and strong leadership from the front, when such leadership is called for, seems to have been peculiarly characteristic of that which was expected of the priests, as the moral guardians of the nation.
Although life is the chief characteristic of the new covenant, death is still present at the threshold. We enter into new life through death, and the judgment of death must be cast on all those that reject the new life in Christ. The pastor, like the angel, is the one charged with keeping the threshold (and the pastor can be referred to as an angel – Revelation 2-3). The pastor is also called to be a specialist in death, even though he is no longer charged with cutting up animals. He has to be able to be a firm and uncompromising wielder of the sword of the Word, executing judgment upon the enemies of God, and preparing the people of God as sacrifices to ascend into God’s presence through the Spirit, cutting them to the heart (note the parallels between Peter cutting 3,000 people to the heart as chief apostle on the Day of Pentecost and the Levites’ slaying of 3,000 of their brethren at Sinai) and dividing joints from marrow.
In addition to the symbolic purposes of the priesthood (which to my mind make women occupying the office as impossible as a man being a mother, a matter of fact and not merely permission), these observations would seem to show that God has a preference for predominantly ‘masculine’ virtues in this particular ministry context. The biblical vision of new covenant pastoral ministry is far more akin to that of the priestly guardianship and fatherhood than it is to the nurturing and spiritually therapeutic role that modern priestly and pastoral ministry often predominantly tends to focus upon (although the pastor obviously needs to play a nurturing role too). The ‘teaching’ that the priest is charged with (and which 1 Timothy 2:12 forbids a woman to exercise over a man), is not mere instruction, but authoritative and ruling teaching: the priest is charged with inculcating and guarding ‘orthodoxy’, ensuring that the holy things are not profaned, and that those who profane the temple of God are judged. Many people within the life of the Church can play a role in instructing us in the truth, but it is the priest who has the peculiar responsibility and increased accountability in this area.
The movement away from this model of priestly leadership comes with a blurring of the boundaries in the life of the Church. The moral, theological, and relational boundaries of the Church are no longer guarded as they once were, and in the name of such things as sensitivity, relevance, and tolerance, teachings and practices that were previous firmly rejected become tolerated. Church discipline becomes a rare occurrence. The Church no longer operates on a war footing, with the pastor as a military commander. The Church also becomes overly focused upon the internal axis of its existence, on private spirituality, and loses sense of itself as a sharply distinct culture that proclaims, defends, and presses its creed against all others.
How Ought we to Regard Gifted Women in the Life of the Church?
What ought we to say about women who are obviously gifted teachers and leaders? The Church in many quarters has much work to do in order to value the ministry of women as it ought. However, the way to address this is not to treat all roles as if they ought to be indifferent to gender, or as if they should exhibit gender equality. Rather, the solution is to recover and celebrate the numerous prominent roles that women can play within the life of the Church. We need more female spiritual directors, lay teachers, theologians, commentators, scholars, churchwardens, vestrywomen, treasurers, vergers, sacristans, elder women (different from elders), deaconesses, lay chaplains, leaders of Bible studies, missionaries, etc. The ministries of women in the Church should not be limited solely to ones involving dealing with children and other women, and much more use should be made of women’s gifts of spiritual guidance and insight, administrative ability, and theological wisdom. If we were to push in this direction, we might find that the life of the Church would be considerably enriched, and that the clergy-laity opposition would become far less dominant in our thinking, as both clergy and laity would have prominent and valued forms of ministry.
We should be more attentive to norms. Overwhelmingly male leadership in certain realms is not merely common, but should be treated as normal and healthy. Grossly unequal representation of men and women in certain positions of leadership should not automatically be assumed to be an injustice to be rectified (although we should always be attentive to possibilities of injustice). Exceptional cases should not be pressed against the norm. History’s witness to female warriors such as Mulan and Joan of Arc is not an argument in favour of equal representation of men and women in the military, for instance. It is merely evidence that some norms have certain exceptions.
Conversely, those opposing the ordination of women should be more flexible when it comes to these exceptional cases, where the norms might not apply in the same manner. Even though women can never be priests, there are situations where a woman may by virtue of unusual circumstance, or peculiar gifting, play a role that women would not usually play. Deborah might be an example of this, Joan of Arc another. In both cases they were not ‘subordinating men’ but playing a critical helping role in raising up a man of limited strength to take over rule, when other leadership had failed. These situations may be more common in the current context, in which many churches have a serious lack of men, and even more so of spiritually mature men. A woman of spiritual maturity and with leadership ability that makes her stand out from the rest of a small congregation may well end up exercising a sort of priestly oversight, guardianship, and teaching leadership in that context. Like Deborah she would be leading as a mother and a helper until such a time as a man became spiritually mature enough to take over. When there is no man to step up in certain areas of leadership, the woman may have to do his job for him. Such cases are anomalous, and not arguments against the norm. There are also innumerable examples of women exhibiting a considerable overlap of areas of gifting with many priests, often exceeding them in many respects.
Women’s Leadership in Society
To sum up certain of the points made to this point, women are neither permitted nor able to exercise the office of a priest. The lead priestly role was given to the man at the creation. The woman can participate in her husband’s role, but only as a helper. The role of priest is gendered in further ways, as the priest represents and images God’s relationship with his people. The gendering of biblical priesthood is as intrinsic to the role as the gendering of the role of fatherhood is. No slight is made upon the gifts and competencies of women in excluding them from it. In Scripture, priesthood also privileges certain traits and strengths that are especially associated with men. Certain women can exhibit these traits, yet these traits are far more common and more widely desirable among men.
This order is focused upon the worship of the sanctuary, the starting point where the direction of life is set, and from which it flows. However, similar patterns can be observed in other, wider or secondary spheres of life. The Scripture seems to ascribe a similar sort of ‘priestly’ role to the husband and father in a family. He is the one chiefly responsible for establishing, upholding, and protecting the moral and cultural boundaries and norms of the household, and ensuring that his children are raised in the truth. He is the one who must be prepared to lay down his life to defend his wife and children. He stands on the frontline of the family, as the primary representative of and defender of his family in the relationship with the wider society and world. The wife is his vice-president and chief counsellor in relation to that role, which he undertakes to serve her and his family. In turn, he must support and empower his wife in her role, subordinating his own concerns to hers.
Understanding the leadership of the husband as a priestly leadership, after the analogy of the pattern of the sanctuary, helps us to appreciate more clearly what is and what isn’t involved here. Priestly leadership is authoritative leadership in regard to the elementary and foundational things of life. The priest is the one who secures the foundation, and the one who guards the boundaries. The priest’s leadership is protological leadership. It is leadership concerned primarily with the law, rather than with the richer realms of wisdom and vision. It is leadership that is at its most prominent in the period of institutional immaturity, and which gradually becomes less prominent in the life of the community over time. This sort of male priestly leadership, practiced properly, should progressively move into the background and end up primarily involving empowering service of women in their perfecting and glorifying ministry, which comes to occupy the foreground.
If the life of the family is lived on four axes (borrowing a model from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy), one could argue that the men are primarily active on the axis relating the family to the wider world, with the women as helpers, the women are primarily active on the axis that relates the family to the future, with the men as helpers, the men are primarily active on the axis relating the family to its moral and cultural norms and its past, with the women as helpers, and the women are primarily active on the internal axis of the family, within which the community of the family is formed, with the men as helpers.
Parallels between the role of women and the role of the Spirit should not be missed: the Spirit is the one who brings the future and forms communion. The Father is the initiator and author, who establishes the mission. The mature Son is the one who fights and dies for his sister-bride and his younger brothers.
Similar comments could be made about the Church. If you look at virtually any Church, the congregational life and the knitting together of it as a community is primarily accomplished by women. In a similar manner, the flowering of the life of the Church occurs as the ministries of women in its life start to become more prominent and widespread. This is not occurred through the displacing of the male priestly ministry, but through the expansion of lay ministries as the Church grows out into the wider world. In wider society a similar pattern applies. A country without father figures loses sight of the boundaries and norms and becomes vulnerable to attack, infiltration, and corruption. A country that effaces women cuts off its future and becomes violent and fragmented.
In the more general cultural sphere of society, women leadership is not treated in the same way as it is within the context of worship and the family, however, leadership does not cease to be gendered, and many forms of authority and leadership will be dominated by men, not on account of some dark patriarchal conspiracy, but because the sexes are generally gifted differently in different areas. The task of laying down one’s life to defend the boundaries of society from attack, for instance, is still primarily regarded as the task of sons who have attained to maturity.
In Scripture, authority is symbolically masculine, as it originates with a God who stands over against us (a symbolically female deity will usually be accompanied by a downplaying of the Creator-creature distinction, and a tendency to place stress upon some original unity), and who refers to himself with masculine pronouns. This masculine character of authority means that men can ‘image’ authority in a manner that women can’t, although women can represent authority (as a wife can represent her husband, for instance). This creates a distinction between ‘priestly’ forms of leadership that can image authority, and ‘helper’ forms of leadership, which can only represent it (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:3-10).
One will often also be able to recognize differences between ‘helper’ forms of leadership and ‘priestly’ forms of leadership between men and women, even in this wider realm, authority being parsed differently, depending on the person who exercises it. A helper form of leadership, for instance, has a less direct relationship to authority, but tends to displace primary authority onto institutional structures, some deeper social identity, or the office as distinct from the person occupying it. Such leadership does not stand over against people in the same way in which a leader that personally identifies strongly and directly with the authority of his office does. ‘Priestly’ leadership that images final authority over men and women is overwhelming the preserve of male leaders.
A focus on authority being masculine need not exclude women from occupying leading positions in society. However, it means that when they do so, their leadership will tend to take a different form from that of many males. In certain contexts this different form of leadership may be considerably more effective. It also means that men will almost certainly be more represented in many areas of leadership.
Finally, does this character of authority disempower women? Under the biblical model of authority, no, it ought not to. The one who exercises authority is a servant and a minister to others, exercising it on their behalf, placing their needs and concerns above his own. Biblically, the minister of authority does so in order to empower others, not subordinate and dominate them.
We can see this at work in the Scripture, where the woman is presented as the chief counsellor of her husband, and as the one with privileged access to his heart. The man may have the authority and direct power, but the wife has an immense indirect power to harness the heart of her husband and other men and turn it to the direction that she desires. We see this in such bad cases as Herod and Herodias, Ahab and Jezebel, Solomon and his wives, but also in positive cases such as David and Abigail, and Ahasuerus and Esther. We also see it in God’s constant attention to the prayers of his people. The woman is the one who inspires and directs action.
Although some see the manipulative wife as proof that the wife should just ‘keep in her place’, it seems to me that such a wife is rather an example of a God-given power used for ill. The contrast between Esther and Herodias is informative here. In both cases they are promised up to half the kingdom (Esther 5:3, 6; Mark 6:22-23) and end up giving counsel that leads to the taking of a man’s life. However, the contrast is stark: Esther’s counsel is good and designed to save the righteous from their enemies; Herodias’ advice is evil, calculated to destroy and silence the faithful prophet.
The good husband uses his authority to serve the interests of his wife, and puts it at her disposal to empower her. Since one more controversial comment is hardly going to attract that much attention after all of those already made above, let me end by observing that I don’t think that feminism has really changed much at all on this front when it comes to the fundamental dynamics of authority in society. Society is still primarily founded upon male power and authority, vested in government, the legal system, the police force, and the primarily moral authority of such as fathers and clergymen.
As a group women represent a far more vulnerable group than men (largely because they are vulnerable to men) and so society has always needed to make provision to protect women. In the past security for women was provided through the family and a patriarchal structure. This traditional familial structure, while providing a measure of security and protection for women, tended to abuse and mistreat them in various ways, constraining their horizons and limiting their opportunities. The structure of society is primarily created and enforced by men. Although some women will be more dominant than many men, the most dominant and powerful figures in any given society will tend to be male. Women need protection to a degree that men do not as they are both more vulnerable as a group than men, and are also exposed to many risks that men are not.
To escape the limits of oppressive family structures, and to achieve equal opportunities in the wider world of business and education, etc., women needed legal protections and government involvement and protection to take over from the old family structure. While men were expected to take unreasonable behaviour in the workplace, for instance, on the chin and stand up for themselves, the movement of women into traditionally male workplaces necessitated many more protections to be put in place. Where formerly the family had borne the primary responsibility of protecting and providing for women, in many ways that task has been shifted to the government and the legal system.
The actual underlying direct power and authority in society hasn’t really changed hands as significantly as many seem to think. There have obviously been shifts, but the chief gains have been made by the leveraging of the key male-dominated institutions that are most powerful in our society to empower women against the men that they relate to more immediately, and by limiting the scope of ‘priestly’ forms of authority, by ‘displacing’ authority as much as possible. The fundamental logic of authority remains, though.
This is not to attack the genuine gains that have been made in this area. However, it should serve to encourage us to work with the grain of the world as God created it, rather than against it. Strong and uncompromising masculine leadership, ministered in a biblical fashion for the sake of others, empowers everyone, and not just the one who exercises it, while a departure from this pattern compromises society, to the detriment of all. In certain contexts, most particularly in the life of the Church and the family, such leadership can play an incredibly important role. The fact that many women feel oppressed and marginalized rather than strengthened and given an ever-growing space for their own ministries by the way that such leadership has been exercised is a good sign that it has been approached poorly. Although this lengthy post has concentrated on tackling the claim that women should be ordained pastors and priests, such a position would have been far less likely to have arisen had we a clearer grasp upon and fuller practice of the empowering and liberating form that the ministry of authority takes for those for whom it is ministered. My hope is that we take clear steps to address our own failures in this matter.
Part 2: A Closer Examination of Junia, The Female Apostle
Part 3: Representation and Ordination: Of Sons and Wives
Steve Holmes has some helpful comments on the complementarian/egalitarian debate here, raising questions about the possibility of forging areas of common ground between advocates of the positions.
It is very late here, and I am not sure how coherent the following thoughts will be, but one thing that I find interesting in this particular debate is the degree to which opposing designations can frequently mask significant similarities in actual practice, especially in the context of the family. When one looks at couples who claim to be egalitarian in their approach to marriage and couples that claim to be complementarian, there is often little difference between the two. I am sure that there are occasions when an objective observer might find it hard to determine which couple was which if not told beforehand. In practice, the differences that these distinctions make (especially within the context of family life) may be relatively minor.
On such an occasion, playing a game of ‘Theological Taboo’ may be helpful. For those who haven’t played it before, Taboo is a game in which you have to get your teammates to guess a word written on a card, without using either the word, or any of the other five associated words mentioned on the card. ‘Theological Taboo’ is a variation on this game, in which we withdraw controversial and loaded terms from circulation within the debate entirely, and seek to say what we wish to say without employing them at all. In the case of this particular theological debate, for instance, in addition to dropping ‘complementarian’ and ‘egalitarian’ from our vocabulary, this could involve forgoing associated terms such as ‘authority’, ‘leadership’, ‘submission’.
Such theological labels can be like different-shaped suitcases. While they serve important purposes, about which more anon, they also can conceal both similarities and differences. When these suitcases are dispensed with we might be surprised at how similar the contents of those with different suitcases have been all along, and how startlingly different the contents of many of those who shared the same suitcase are. An excessive focus upon the suitcases over their contents can lead to a failure to expose the unpleasant ideological commitments and practices stowed away in our theological companions’ luggage. Removing the suitcases from the picture for a while can provide a context in which alliances can be renegotiated and common ground can be formed both within one’s own theological position and also with those without in order to tackle abuses. Too many people are passed through theological customs unchecked simply because they are carrying a friendly looking suitcase.
Now, obviously, the distinction between a suitcase and its contents is far too simplistic an analogy for theology: our theological terms are partly constitutive of the experiences, practices, and realities that they denominate. Nevertheless, our terms do not exhaust or wholly determine the reality of the things that they name, and the complicated relationship between the two is especially fruitful to explore when negotiating such matters of theological difference.
The temporary shelving of key terms in debates can have the salutary effect of helping to reveal exactly what is at issue. I suspect that we would be surprised at how often the stumbling blocks are primarily the terms themselves, rather than the particular ideological commitments entailed by them.
A similar effect can be observed in tests of political affiliation. A person’s particular political views can bear a complex relationship to the political party with whom they identify. There are many people who would strongly support a particular policy until they hear that it is Labour’s policy, or the official position of the Tory Party. It is the identification with a particular party rather than actual policy that can be the stumbling block. The issue may be less with the claims that the position commits you to than with the unsettling fellow passengers with whom it lumps you.
Such self-designations can be ways in which we seek to keep faith with our histories and our communities, which is another reason why adopting a different self-designation can so trouble us, and be perceived as an act of betrayal. For instance, my construction of my theological identity, even if none of my actual theological convictions were to be changed, could take quite a different form had I been raised in a Lutheran context. As it is, however, given my upbringing and personal history, my theology is shaped by a commitment to the Reformed tradition. While I don’t want to be seen to suggest that such commitments are to be regretted, I believe that a clearer understanding of the role that they play can open up the possibility of less adversarial relations between people of various camps.
Names are important, and often they are the sticking point, rather than the practice, reality, set of convictions, or experiences that they designate. Recognizing this helps us to knock many issues down to size.
When everyone has unpacked their suitcases we may well discover that there are different suitcases that are more appropriate to the contents which we seek to pack in them, and that our battles over differing suitcases could often be avoided in such a manner. These more appropriate and mediating constructions will often also provide a firmer foundation from which to recognize and address the abuses of former ideological companions. While names are important and their suspension from the discussion may well often need to be no more than temporary, there are occasions when this suspension may reveal their need to be substituted.
There are many people, for instance, who treat the name ‘baptism in the Spirit’ as if it was exhaustively and inextricably connected with the experiences of which Pentecostals use it to speak. While changing the terminology of the experience would necessarily change the experience itself (as the experience is experienced as an experience of baptism in the Spirit) in key respects, it wouldn’t annihilate the experience. What a Pentecostal would experience as the second blessing of ‘baptism in the Spirit’, other Christians could describe in far less loaded terms, while not denying or detracting from the importance of the experience in its proper place. We may often discover that, provided that such things are maintained, people are quite willing to adopt a different construction.
My own experience might be illustrative in this area. I was raised in a Baptist home and my childhood was shaped by a particular evangelical and Baptist narrative of conversion, a narrative within which I interpreted – and experienced – my experience. Changing my understanding of such things as conversion and the Christian family forced me to unpack and repack my former experience. In the process I discovered that my experience was quite amenable to different constructions and interpretations. The importance of my childhood experiences was not abandoned, just differently understood.
In the case of the complementarian/egalitarian debate, if the distinction is forced upon me, I will class myself as a complementarian. However, I find most articulations of the position unsatisfactory on several fronts, and am troubled by many of those with whom I this classes me. I chafe at being classed as a complementarian, as the use of such terms as shibboleths has often come to serve as a replacement for close examination of the contents of people’s theological suitcases (the term ‘penal substitution’ is another example of the privileging of the ‘suitcase’ in theological discussion). I have huge problems with the contents of many other complementarians’ suitcases, and I would like to believe (admittedly, most of us want to believe this) that the contents of my suitcase merit closer attention than that within which they are carried.
I also believe that this is one debate where playing Theological Taboo, concentrating on the level of actual practices, unclouded by our preferred terminology, might be helpful. Are ministries and gifts being recognized (temporarily leaving to one side the question of what they are being recognized as)? Is sexual/gender difference(s) being recognized? How is authority being practiced? Are persons and communities flourishing in the various axes of their existence? Are we seeing differentiation? Are we seeing subordination? While such an approach will by no means settle such a debate, I believe that the asking of such questions of our own and other communities can prove a profitable route for the revelation of common ground.
The ideal king would be rather like the king in chess: the most useless piece on the board, which occupies its square simply to prevent any other piece from doing so, but which is somehow still the whole game. There is something positively sacramental about its strategic impotence. And there is something blessedly gallant about giving one’s wholehearted allegiance to some poor inbred ditherer whose chief passions are Dresden china and the history of fly-fishing, but who nonetheless, quite ex opere operato, is also the bearer of the dignity of the nation, the anointed embodiment of the genius gentis—a kind of totem or, better, mascot.
From here. Linked by Mark Horne.
This is one of the several reasons why I appreciate constitutional monarchy.
Reframing the Question of Personhood
The question of personhood rightly lies at the centre of debates over the issue of abortion. However, the way that this question is posed is seldom either helpful or illuminating. The concept of personhood that is operative within the question is one that is generally heavily freighted with problematic assumptions, on both sides of the debate. Within this post I want to suggest the possibility that we could press the question in a very different and more enlightening direction.
The question of personhood is habitually framed purely in the form of the question ‘is the fetus a person?’ By examining the characteristics of the unborn infant we are expected to reach some determination of whether it matches up to our standard of personhood.
A crucial underlying assumption here seems to be that personhood is an intrinsic property of a being. Yet such an assumption is by no means necessary and, as I believe we can recognize upon closer reflection upon the actual ways and contexts in which we ascribe personhood, by no means the most natural way of regarding matters.
An alternative starting point, one with far more to commend it, could begin with the recognition that personhood cannot truly be understood apart from relationship (the following thoughts owe much to John Zizioulas). While personhood can often be treated as if it were just another generic property of the human being, personhood is that which renders me unique and irreplaceable. It runs deeper than all of our individual properties as distinct human beings, and even deeper than our ‘personalities’. At its heart, personhood concerns itself with the who question, over the what questions. My personhood is not merely some property of my biological constitution, but a unique place that I occupy in relationship with others, that which exalts me above generic and interchangeable properties, and makes me irreducible to bare qualities or types. Abstract me from all relationship and reduce me to mere properties, and I am depersonalized.
If this is the case, then we are all partially constitutive of each other’s personhood. This truth can be demonstrated in innumerable ways. It is through relationship that we attain to identity, language, freedom, self-awareness, self-expression, and self-transcendence. Were it not for relationship, we would be little more than naked, feeble, and inarticulate beasts, prisoners of appetite and instinct. Our personhood cannot truly be conceived apart from relationship and to the extent that we deny relationship, we lose the ability to perceive personhood and dehumanize ourselves. Once this has been recognized, we should appreciate that any starting point that seeks to assess the personhood of the unborn infant in abstraction from relationship is fundamentally flawed.
Taking the relational character of personhood seriously from the outset, different ways of framing the personhood question present themselves. For instance, instead of analysing the unborn infant and seeing whether it has the intrinsic character of a person, perhaps it would be more worthwhile to ask questions such as ‘under which conditions if any can we make it possible for ourselves to cease to regard, or begin to regard, unborn infants as persons?’
People can and do view the unborn as persons all of the time. This ascription of personhood is not some conclusion arrived at only at the end of an involved philosophical argument, but is a natural and instinctive relationship to the child. What is more, this ascription of personhood is habitually performed under general conditions, not merely by pro-life campaigners, but by people across the spectrum, even many of those who would characterize themselves as firmly pro-choice, or have had or performed abortions. The same doctor who disposes of one woman’s child as a thing of little value can treat another woman’s child as a being of inestimable worth. The same woman who can feel and practice a profound and personalizing attachment to an unborn infant in one case, can seek to abort her unborn infant in another.
What accounts for the stark difference here? We could look in vain for some intrinsic difference between the unborn infants. The difference lies in the relationships with the infant. More particularly, the difference concerns the manner in which the persons relating to the infant view it, not the infant itself.
This form of ascription of personhood is not dependent upon holding that the unborn child has a certain level of mental, affective, or sensory capacities, and can happily acknowledge that the unborn infant exists in a penumbral state of being, where lots of things remain unclear, and the status of the post-natal individual is not yet enjoyed. The crispness of the conventional binary divisions between personhood and non-personhood as they touch upon the status of the unborn infant need not be as clearly defined under this approach, as our ascription of personhood is not contingent upon the intrinsic properties of the unborn infant to the same degree.
The Breakdown of our Perception of Personhood
Where this perception of personhood within the bonds of relationship exists, abortion is virtually unthinkable (although some might countenance it under the most extreme of situations, such as when the life of the mother is in jeopardy, when it will be regarded as an unspeakable tragedy). For abortion to occur, the sense of personhood needs to be numbed. The anaesthetizing of our sense of the unborn infant’s personhood is achieved through such means as linguistic sleight of hand: for instance, speaking of ‘the fetus’ rather than ‘your baby’ is a primary surgical incision of the abortion procedure. By such moves the bond between the infant and the mother, a bond far more important than any umbilical cord, is cut.
While such an ascription of personhood is generally strong, under certain conditions, such as rape pregnancy, it begins to lose hold. One does not have to look far to find people who, although asserting that the unborn infant is a person, are prepared to make an exception for abortion in the case of rape pregnancy. In such contexts, people find it quite possible to view the unborn in completely depersonalized and dehumanized ways.
My suggestion is that we need to focus the abortion debate more explicitly on those factors that make the difference, and upon which our ascription of personhood depends. As we have already observed, the factors that make the difference often tell us virtually nothing about the unborn infant itself, but they do tell us a lot about the person who holds the perceptions. The issue here is not whether the unborn infant is a person, but how our perceptions of personhood are formed, how we are able to see the unborn as persons, and what needs to be the case for us to lose our capacity to see them as such. Abortion is a symptom of a society’s person-blindness, and taking such an approach permits us to address it as such.
Phenomenologizing the question of the personhood of the unborn in such a manner makes it a question about ourselves, far more than it is a question about the unborn. It becomes a question about such things as the factors that shape our perception of personhood, about the practices, institutions, and realities that frame our experience and ascription of personhood, about our duties to welcome the gift of the other’s existence, and our duties to be co-creators of each other’s being.
I believe that the reframing of this question can point us in the direction of fertile areas of exploration. In particular, it draws our attention to the various factors that are shaping and altering our phenomenology of the child and the unborn. In the process it reveals the degree to which the question of abortion relates to a raft of other issues, issues that are usually considered quite distinct from it.
The phenomenology of the child and the unborn in today’s society is experiencing change from a number of different quarters. New understandings of the family are changing our perception of the child. The family has been sentimentalized, and its relationships are gradually being whittled down to mere close emotional attachments. As this occurs, children and our bonds to them are sentimentalized also. Where such sentiment is absent, the family and its relationships lose their rationale. The child who doesn’t have parents who feel sentimental about it has hardly any reason to exist and to be expected to bear a child that one does not love is wrong (much as being expecting to remain married to someone that one doesn’t love is completely unreasonable).
The relationships of the family are also being given a voluntaristic cast: marriage is now a lifestyle choice with the romantic choices of adults at its centre, rather than a vocation naturally ordered towards the procreation and raising of children. Hence the question of the ‘unwanted child’ often impacts upon the question of abortion.
Where marriage is regarded as a child-oriented vocation, marriage becomes a matter of creating a hospitable space where children can be welcomed into the world, with a place in society and its loving relationships secured for them. Where marriage is in decline, and illegitimacy is seen as having little significance, children increasingly enter the world as strangers, with no place prepared for them, and without the same clear claim upon our loyalties. When sexual relationships in general and even the institution of marriage are no longer ordered at their heart to the needs and interests of children, no openness to relationship with the unborn infant can be presumed upon and the unexpected child can come to be perceived as an intruder. Without this foundational openness to relationship, the unborn child is easily abstracted and depersonalized.
Our understanding of the child is radically impacted by other relationships. Whatever we may believe about the capacities of the unborn child, for Christians the fact that we know that God views it with love and concern shapes the way that we relate to it. We can’t depersonalize something that is loved by God in this manner.
Abortion is also far harder to countenance in the context of a loving and committed married relationship and a large immediate and extended family. Within such a context, the child is seen as a physical expression of the love between two persons, and as one who belongs in relationship with many others beyond the couple. The unborn child is a grandson, a sister, a nephew, a cousin. All of these relationships give the unborn child value as a person, and make it difficult for us to depersonalize the unborn child in our perception. They also make it harder for us to think that we can unilaterally determine the unborn infant’s fate.
Our present cultural understanding of the family is narrowly fixated on the sentimental snapshot of the small nuclear family, with two smiling parents and one or two kids. However, the family is a project that stretches across multiple generations, in which identity and culture are preserved, enriched, and passed on. Divorce and illegitimacy are extremely serious in this conception. Illegitimacy deprives a child of his patrimony. Divorce represents a loss and dissolution of the family’s social, relational, and financial capital, and the unravelling of the threads of our origins. When the life of the family is regarded as something that transcends us and places constraints, expectations, and duties upon us we begin to perceive both ourselves and our offspring very differently. We are no longer autonomous, but must recognize that the interest that many other parties have in us. Abortion in such a framework is far harder to countenance.
When sex is depersonalized, the conceived child is depersonalized too. A culture accustomed to casual sex will sleep far more easily with abortion. If sex is not naturally connected with procreation, with the expectation that before initiating a sexual relationship one must take responsibility for and make provision for its potential procreative consequences, conception does not have the same aspect. If you haven’t engaged in sex as a responsible act that might entail procreative consequences for which you must prepare ourselves, you will be far more likely to reject your unborn child as an unwanted and dispensable by-product. If you have meaningless sex with a person who means nothing to you, you will view the child conceived from such intercourse very differently from the manner in which the married couple who have pledged their bodies and entire lives to each other in a lifelong and exclusive personal one flesh union will view a child conceived from theirs.
Procreation has also been depersonalized. No longer limited to the context of the loving communication of pledged bodies sealing a comprehensive gift of selves in a one flesh lifelong exclusive union, the use of reproductive technology has become mainstream. More significantly, reproductive technology has shaped our perception of children and the unborn in general. Reproductive technology abstracts procreation from the personal gift of bodies in the marital act, operating in terms of the autonomy of bodies (a position advanced ideologically by the feminist movement, for instance).
The belief in the autonomy of bodies denies and resists the ways in which our bodies are naturally connected and ordered to those of others. In the autonomy of bodies the ordering of male and female bodies to each other is no longer treated as a natural aspect of their phenomenology. The same is the case with the relationship between the unborn infant and its mother. The natural connection can be presented as if it were one of violent alien invasion, or parasitic attachment. The surrogate mother probably has no lasting attachment to the child that she bears. Her body is merely a host for a being that, although attached, bears no real relationship. Bonds of flesh and blood and shared bodies are denied their natural meaning.
Not only can bodies be detached from other bodies, they can also be depersonalized and detached from persons. Bodies are atomized: one person provides sperm, another a womb, another an egg. Procreation is no longer limited to the realm of aneconomic bodily gift in marriage, but is mediated by technology and the marketplace, the atomized body and its parts and materials being bought and sold. If you are dealing only with an anonymous sperm donor and concerned solely with the quality of his genetic material, your attitude to the conceived child will be rather different to someone who conceived the child with her husband and a father-to-be. No prizes for guessing which child is more likely to be regarded in a depersonalized manner.
As bodily ties are denied with the rise of the atomized, depersonalized, and autonomous body, the meaning of the unborn child’s existence is no longer assured by the personal ties created by shared bodies, but becomes contingent upon some parent choosing in their favour. Parenthood ceases to have any real meaning. Where the bonds between bodies and between bodies and persons are recognized, a given-ness of the relationship between the parents and their unborn child is ensured. Where this no longer exists, relationship can only be a voluntaristic choice that the parents may or may not make in the child’s favour. While the choice remains unmade, the child exists in a sort of ontological limbo, its status as a person hanging in the balance.
All of this is mixed up with a liberal view of the person as the autonomous and rational right-bearing agent, and the reconfiguration of the unruly reality of the family around this. For liberal thought, with the autonomous and undifferentiated right-bearing individual as the primary unit of explanation, the realities represented by the family and children in particular pose immense problems and cannot easily be processed. A ‘one flesh’ union that expresses sexual difference, the ordering of male and female bodies to each other, and has the natural capacity to produce a new public reality, imposing an identity onto persons born into a ground level aneconomic order of gift that both precedes and transcends the political, just breaks too many of liberalism’s rules.
Why Resistance to Same-Sex Marriage is a Pro-Life Position
Not a few Christians believe that the Church should take a stand on the ‘pro-life’ issue of abortion, but are embarrassed when the Church takes an equally principled stand against same-sex marriage. Thinking about the subject of same-sex marriage a while back, I was struck by just how much our struggle for a Christian phenomenology of the child presses us to fight against same-sex marriage. The argument above demonstrates that taking a stand against same-sex marriage is essentially a pro-life matter.
One could in fact argue that the paradigmatic family of liberal ideology is the same-sex couple with adopted children or children born through reproductive technology, a family of purely volitional attachments (every child is chosen) between undifferentiated individual sexual agents for whom gender need not be stipulated, creating a privatized realm of sentimental bonds, where bodies are clearly autonomous and all relationships boil down to romantic or emotional attachment adumbrated by contract.
The same-sex marriage debate isn’t a debate about whether certain individuals can get married, so much as it is a debate about the meaning of marriage itself. As such, the same-sex marriage debate has bearing upon the way that our entire society conceives of and practices marriage.
Same-sex marriage leads us to deny or undermine the ordering of the institution of marriage towards children. Children become a secondary storey that may or may not be added to the relationship. It presents sex as a univocal reality, no longer ordered towards procreation. It denies or undermines the privileged and unique character of the sexual relationship between men and women as it relates to procreation and parenthood. It treats the parental roles of mother and father as interchangeable or dispensable. It downplays the significance of the marital ideal of children being conceived out of the loving intercourse of the pledged bodies of their parents. It relativizes the importance of the bonds of blood that connect us to our offspring and to or wider families. It hastens the voluntarization of the concept of parenthood. And, let’s not fool ourselves: it is in connection with the same-sex family that the widespread use of reproductive technology to circumvent any need to procreate naturally will become normalized, and come to be regarded as the right of the individual sexual agent.
Same-sex marriage is the epitome of the new liberal conception of marriage in general. While our battle against this conception is far broader than one against same-sex marriage – these notions are widely held by people within conventional marriages – it is at this point that the antitheses come to their clearest expression.
This new doctrine of marriage has massive implications for our phenomenology of the child. One by one, it snips the personalizing bonds of relationship that shape our perception of children in general, and the unborn in particular. Once normalized, these concepts will be free to infect our entire society’s perception of such matters.
Avenues for Theological Reflection on the Unborn
The Scriptures present us with a set of beliefs and practices that enable us to perceive the unborn as persons, and to welcome them into the world. The state of pre-birth is seen as one of loving preparation and anticipation of what is yet to be, and is illustrative of our pre-eschatological existence. Because God is a hospitable God, he has opened his future to us, and on account of this future, our present unformed state gains considerable value and significance. Our current existence is not regarded according to some dubious intrinsic worth, but according to the promise of what we will become in Christ.
God’s regarding us in our unformed state, not assessing our being according to its intrinsic merits, but in accordance with his loving imputation of righteousness, and in light of what he will one day form us to be in Christ is essentially the truth of justification. We are loved as the Father relates to us in terms of his relationship with his Son in the communion of the Spirit. We are loved as God has prepared a future for us, and consequently can view us in terms of what we can one day become, rather than just what we presently are. We are loved as our creation is regarded as a personal act, in which God is lovingly invested. We are loved as we are bound up in the Spiritual communion of the saints through our relationships with faithful parents and relations.
In these analogies, we are the unborn, still awaiting what we will one day be. Our unborn children are prophetic gifts to us, in which God allows us to participate in something of the reality of the relationship that he bears to us in the present. God’s hospitality, tenderness, compassion, love, regard for, and personalizing dealings with us in our present unformed state afford us a pattern for our own relationships with the unborn.
It is popularly supposed in certain quarters that the general denial of transubstantiation among Protestants and particularly by the Reformers was occasioned by a resistance to the ideas of the ‘Real Presence’ of Christ in the Eucharist, or to the notion of our participation in the substance of his flesh and blood in the sacrament. Having recently responded to this assumption, and being very surprised by the fact that the person in question held it, I thought that I would repost an edited version of my response here. While I am fairly certain that for the significant majority of the followers of this blog, the following is olde hatte, experience is teaching me that there are certain facts whose knowledge one shouldn’t take for granted. There are ideas that have a lot of popular currency, despite their utter lack of historical support. For those whose impressions of Protestantism are derived from the experience of independent evangelicalism, with its low view of the church, sacraments, and the liturgy, it can come as some shock to discover that the Reformers generally held quite different visions. As I appreciate that the following post may be completely familiar to you, I beg your indulgence for the sake of those for whom this really is new.
The debate with the Roman Catholics was not chiefly concerned with the question of whether we eat Christ’s flesh and drink his blood in the sacrament, but with the question of the manner in which we do so (although the concern to maintain the undiluted reality of our eating and drinking of Christ’s flesh and blood was fundamental to all, and seems to have served as a more focal concern for certain parties, who believed that others were compromising or dissembling a denial of it beneath an ambiguous lip service). For instance, Calvin, commenting on the manna as ‘spiritual food’ in 1 Corinthians 10, claims ‘it follows, that it is not bare emblems that are presented to us in the Sacraments, but that the thing represented is at the same time truly imparted, for God is not a deceiver to feed us with empty fancies.’ Sign and reality are bound together, yet not to be confused, much as the dove at Jesus’ baptism is a true manifestation and conferral of the presence of the Spirit.
The belief that in faithfully partaking of the elements of the bread and wine we partake of the substance of the flesh and blood of Christ (and not just of his Spirit) is a matter on which there was general agreement between the Roman Catholics and the leading Reformers. Luther and the Lutherans were unambiguous in their assertion of substantial participation in the flesh and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. Here is a basic Lutheran confessional statement on the subject (check out the rest of the major Lutheran confessions here: a number of the documents make the same point in far greater detail):
Of the Sacrament of the Altar we hold that bread and wine in the Supper are the true body and blood of Christ, and are given and received not only by the godly, but also by wicked Christians.
This statement, from the Smalcald Articles, which were written by Luther himself, expressly affirms the substantial presence of Christ in the Supper, and also goes further than the Reformed, who generally denied the last point (the manducatio impiorum). ‘Substantial’ presence is affirmed in more or less those very words in the Formula of Concord, which also expresses itself strongly against both the Zwinglians and a more subtle dilution of the Reformed view that might give the suggestion that the ‘spiritual’ participation the Reformed speak of ‘means nothing else than the Spirit of Christ or the power of the absent body of Christ and His merit, which is present; but the body of Christ is in no mode or way present, except only above in the highest heaven, to which we should elevate ourselves into heaven by the thoughts of our faith, and there, not at all, however, in the bread and wine of the Holy Supper, should seek this body and blood.’
On transubstantiation the Smalcald Articles declare:
As regards transubstantiation, we care nothing about the sophistical subtlety by which they teach that bread and wine leave or lose their own natural substance, and that there remain only the appearance and colour of bread, and not true bread.
Luther and the Lutherans thus affirm that the substance of Christ is present in the sacrament (and locally present too), while denying that transubstantiation provide the true way to understand this substantial presence (and maintaining an unease about and resistance to the scholastic categories of Aristotelian philosophy).
As for the Reformed, the following quotes are from some important early Reformed Confessions. This is from Articles XXXVI, XXXVII, and XXXVIII of the French Confession (1559), which was mostly written by Calvin himself:
We confess that the Lord’s Supper, which is the second sacraments, is a witness of the union which we have with Christ, inasmuch as he not only died and rose again for us once, but also feeds and nourishes us truly with his flesh and blood, so that we may be one in him, and that our life may be in common. Although he be in heaven until he come to judge all the earth, still we believe that by the secret and incomprehensible power of his Spirit he feeds and strengthens us with the substance of his body and of his blood. We hold that this is done spiritually, not because we put imagination and fancy in the place of fact and truth, but because the greatness of this mystery exceeds the measure of our senses and the laws of nature. In short, because it is heavenly, it can only be apprehended by faith.
We believe, as has been said, that in the Lord’s Supper, as well in baptism, God gives us really and in fact that which he there sets forth to us; and that consequently with these signs is given the true possession and enjoyment of that which they present to us. And thus all who bring a pure faith, like a vessel, to the sacred table of Christ, receive truly that of which it is a sign; for the body and the blood of Jesus Christ give food and drink to the soul, no less than bread and wine nourish the body.
Thus we hold water, being a feeble element, still testifies to us in truth the inward cleansing of our souls in the blood of Jesus Christ by the efficacy of his Spirit, and that the bread and wine given to us in the sacrament serve to our spiritual nourishment, inasmuch as they show, as to our sight, that the body of Christ is our meat, and his blood our drink. And we reject the Enthusiasts and Sacramentarians who will not receive such signs and marks, although our Savior said: ‘This is my body, and this cup is my blood.’”
Two key points to notice here. First, substantial participation in the body and blood of Christ through participation in the sacrament is affirmed ‘by the secret and incomprehensible power of his Spirit he feeds and strengthens us with the substance of his body and of his blood’). Second, participation in the substance of Christ’s flesh and blood is affirmed. This speaks to the concern of the Lutherans that the spiritual participation spoken of is ‘nothing else than the Spirit of Christ or the power of the absent body of Christ and His merit’: the Spirit conjoins the sign with the reality, but the reality is not merely the presence of the Spirit, but the substance of Christ himself. Third, Calvin makes a constant point of stressing the work of the Spirit in conjoining the sign with the reality. Christ is not rendered locally present, but by the Spirit, who can bring distant things together, he feeds us on his substance as we physically eat the bread and the wine in a faithful manner.
A few more quotations for good measure. This is from the Scottish Confession (1560), of which John Knox was one of the leading writers:
And thus we utterly damn the vanity of those that affirm sacraments to be nothing else but naked and bare signs. No, we assuredly believe that by baptism we are engrafted in Christ Jesus, to be made partakers of his justice, by the which our sins are covered and remitted; and also, that in the supper, rightly used, Christ Jesus is so joined with us, that he becomes the very nourishment and food of our souls. Not that we imagine any transubstantiation of bread into Christ’s natural body, and of wine in his natural blood (as the Papists have perniciously taught and damnably believed); but this union and conjunction which we have with the body and blood of Christ Jesus, in the right use of the sacraments, is wrought by operation of the Holy Ghost, who by true faith carries us above all things that are visible, carnal, and earthly, and makes us to feed upon the body and blood of Christ Jesus, which was once broken and shed for us, which now is in heaven, and appears in the presence of his Father for us. And yet, notwithstanding the far distance of place which is betwixt his body now glorified in the heaven, and us now mortal in this earth, yet we most assuredly believe that the bread that we break is the communion of Christ’s body, and the cup which we bless is the communion of his blood. So that we confess, and undoubtedly believe, that the faithful, in the right use of the Lord’s table, do so eat the body and drink the blood of the Lord Jesus, that he remains in them and they in him: yea, that they are so made flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bones, that as the Eternal Godhead has given to the flesh of Christ Jesus (which of its own condition and nature was mortal and corruptible) life and immortality, so does Christ Jesus’ flesh and blood eaten and drunken by us, give to us the same prerogatives. Which, albeit we confess are neither given unto us at that only time, neither yet by the proper power and virtue of the sacrament only; yet we affirm that the faithful, in the right use of the Lord’s table, have such conjunction with Christ Jesus, as the natural man cannot apprehend.
Yea, and further we affirm, that albeit the faithful, oppressed by negligence, and manly infirmity, do not profit so much as they would in the very instant action of the supper, yet shall it after bring fruit forth, as lively seed sown in good ground. For the Holy Spirit (which can never be divided from the right institution of the Lord Jesus) will not frustrate the faithful of the fruit of that mystical action; but all this, we say, comes by true faith, which apprehends Christ Jesus, who only makes this sacrament effectual unto us. And, therefore, whosoever slanders us, as that we affirm or believe sacraments to be only naked and bare signs, do injury unto us, and speak against the manifest truth.
But this liberally and frankly we must confess, that we make a distinction betwixt Christ Jesus, in his natural substance, and betwixt the elements in the sacramental signs; so that we will neither worship the signs in place of that which is signified by them; neither yet do we despise and interpret them as unprofitable and vain; but do use them with all reverence, examining ourselves diligently before that so we do, because we are assured by the mouth of the apostle, That such as eat of that bread, and drink of that cup, unworthily, are guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord Jesus.
Such statements are an important line of evidence in addressing those who believe that the Reformed shied away from a robust view of the sacraments. The position that is held by most evangelicals, viz. that the sacraments are nothing but bare and empty signs, is ‘utterly damned’ as a vanity. This confession also makes clear that part of the rationale for denying transubstantiation and the local presence, which was resistance to the veneration of the elements.
The notion that the sacraments are shorn of mystery by the Reformed deniers of transubstantiation should also be decisively refuted by such declarations. If anything, this Reformed doctrine of the Eucharist can be even more mysterious than that of the Catholics. While the Catholics speak in terms of the conversion of the elements, of the bringing down of Christ to us, Calvin and many of the Reformed speak instead of the Spirit lifting us up to Christ. In both cases presence is enjoyed. However, the notion that Christ’s presence is brought down to earth in the sacrament is far less mysterious than the notion that by the Spirit we are raised into Christ’s heavenly presence by his Spirit, where he feeds us on his flesh and blood.
The following quotes from the Second Helvetic Confession (1562), written by Heinrich Bullinger, also flesh out the Reformed doctrine further:
THE SACRAMENTAL UNION. Therefore the signs acquire the names of things because they are mystical signs of sacred things, and because the signs and the things signified are sacramentally joined together; joined together, I say, or united by a mystical signification, and by the purpose or will of him who instituted the sacraments. For the water, bread, and wine are not common, but holy signs. And he that instituted water in baptism did not institute it with the will and intention that the faithful should only be sprinkled by the water of baptism; and he who commanded the bread to be eaten and the wine to be drunk in the supper did not want the faithful to receive only bread and wine without any mystery as they eat bread in their homes; but that they should spiritually partake of the things signified, and by faith be truly cleansed from their sins, and partake of Christ.
THE THING SIGNIFIED IS NEITHER INCLUDED IN OR BOUND TO THE SACRAMENTS. We do not approve of the doctrine of those who teach that grace and the things signified are so bound to and included in the signs that whoever participate outwardly in the signs, no matter what sort of persons they be, also inwardly participate in the grace and things signified.
However, as we do not estimate the value of the sacraments by the worthiness or unworthiness of the ministers, so we do not estimate it by the condition of those who receive them. For we know that the value of the sacraments depends upon faith and upon the truthfulness and pure goodness of God. For as the Word of God remains the true Word of God, in which, when it is preached, not only bare words are repeated, but at the same time the things signified or announced in words are offered by God, even if the ungodly and unbelievers hear and understand the words yet do not enjoy the things signified, because they do not receive them by true faith; so the sacraments, which by the Word consist of signs and the things signified, remain true and inviolate sacraments, signifying not only sacred things, but, by God offering, the things signified, even if unbelievers do not receive the things offered. This is not the fault of God who gives and offers them, but the fault of men who receive them without faith and illegitimately; but whose unbelief does not invalidate the faithfulness of God (Rom. 3:3 f.).
Here the confession denies the doctrine of the manducatio impiorum of the Lutherans and Roman Catholics, while making the important point that the reality of the sacrament is not contingent on the faith of the believer. Christ is present in the sacrament: it is not our faith that makes him present. However, without faith we are like men without mouths at a banquet. The Belgic Confession, written by Guido se Brès in the 1560s and one of the Three Forms of Unity, expresses this point quite clearly in Article 35:
Thus, to support the physical and earthly life God has prescribed for us an appropriate earthly and material bread, which is as common to all as life itself also is. But to maintain the spiritual and heavenly life that belongs to believers he has sent a living bread that came down from heaven: namely Jesus Christ, who nourishes and maintains the spiritual life of believers when eaten – that is, when appropriated and received spiritually by faith.
To represent to us this spiritual and heavenly bread Christ has instituted an earthly and visible bread as the sacrament of his body and wine as the sacrament of his blood. He did this to testify to us that just as truly as we take and hold the sacraments in our hands and eat and drink it in our mouths, by which our life is then sustained, so truly we receive into our souls, for our spiritual life, the true body and true blood of Christ, our only Savior. We receive these by faith, which is the hand and mouth of our souls.
Now it is certain that Jesus Christ did not prescribe his sacraments for us in vain, since he works in us all he represents by these holy signs, although the manner in which he does it goes beyond our understanding and is uncomprehensible to us, just as the operation of God’s Spirit is hidden and incomprehensible.
Yet we do not go wrong when we say that what is eaten is Christ’s own natural body and what is drunk is his own blood – but the manner in which we eat it is not by the mouth but by the Spirit, through faith.
In that way Jesus Christ remains always seated at the right hand of God the Father in heaven – but he never refrains on that account to communicate himself to us through faith.
This banquet is a spiritual table at which Christ communicates himself to us with all his benefits. At that table he makes us enjoy himself as much as the merits of his suffering and death, as he nourishes, strengthens, and comforts our poor, desolate souls by the eating of his flesh, and relieves and renews them by the drinking of his blood.
Moreover, though the sacraments and thing signified are joined together, not all receive both of them. The wicked person certainly takes the sacrament, to his condemnation, but does not receive the truth of the sacrament, just as Judas and Simon the Sorcerer both indeed received the sacrament, but not Christ, who was signified by it. He is communicated only to believers.
The Reformed doctrine, through its wish to avoid certain of the dangers perceived in the notions of transubstantiation and local presence, and rather subtle distinctions and definitions, can open itself up to suspicions of evasion and equivocity, suspicions that in some cases may be well founded, especially among the Reformed of later generations. However, as one examines people such as Calvin more closely, one finds that many of one’s suspicions and objections are satisfactorily addressed. This is not to say that the Reformed always express their doctrine of the Supper in the most appropriate or unambiguous of ways, or that one couldn’t improve upon it by using stronger and more robustly affirmative expressions, but the wiggle room isn’t as large as some may suppose. Unfortunately, when one’s affirmations are so hedged with necessary qualifications and denials, they can lose some of their force and invite questions in the hearers. One sometimes wishes that Reformed theologians had adopted more positive and assertive formulations for their doctrine from the start. As it was, the weight of the Reformed Eucharistic doctrine shifted rather steadily away from the affirmations to the denials and qualifications.
For all of its strengths, for instance, the accent of Calvin’s doctrine frequently lies in the wrong place, in a manner that will dissatisfy many. Calvin places entirely too great a focus upon the way that the Supper communicates to our minds, inviting the notion that the efficacy of the Supper is entirely mediated by our mental faculties, perhaps sowing the seeds for serious declension in later Reformed doctrines of the Eucharist, and inviting the suspicion (such as that of the Lutherans in the Formula of Concord) that for the Reformed the Supper communicates nothing, but merely triggers our remembrance and faith to enjoy a communion with Christ that occurs unmediated by the sacrament. With Calvin’s focus upon the mind, the ‘rite-ness’ of the Supper is easily lost sight of and the Supper becomes a matter for spiritual contemplation, primarily existing to be meditated upon, rather than eaten. It also invites a subjectivizing and interiorizing movement in our understanding of the sacrament. God’s work in the sacrament can be downplayed, with the accent being placed upon our work of raising our thoughts to heaven, remembering Christ’s death, and grasping him by faith. At points this growing stress upon our action in the sacrament threatens to displace the primacy of God’s action within it. It is worth remembering that the medieval Mass that Calvin was reacting against was also for most a spectacle to be meditated upon: in this respect, Calvin’s doctrine could be accused of not making a sufficient break with the abuses of the past.
Some might wonder whether Calvin and the Reformed, while teaching the reality of participation in Christ’s flesh and blood in the Supper, render it largely superfluous by their emphasis upon the Word. Is the Supper, while a genuine participation in Christ, a dispensable one, all that we need being supplied by the Word? While a clearer declaration of the necessity of the Supper might be desirable, I don’t think that Calvin in particular held such a position. Calvin stresses the ideal of regular weekly communion. The Roman Catholic practice of infrequent communion and withholding of the cup from the laity starved the people of God of their rightful food, to their detriment. While Calvin’s stress on the importance of the regular celebration of the Supper may be primarily upon the didactic and remembrance-serving role that it plays, in addition to the way that it stimulates love in the body and knowledge of our union, the Supper does give us something that nothing else can, and so cannot be substituted. The following quotation is from Calvin’s Geneva Catechism:
M. Do we obtain this communion by the Supper alone?
S. No, indeed. For by the gospel also, as Paul declares, Christ is communicated to us. And Paul justly declares this, seeing we are there told that we are flesh of his flesh and bones of his bones — that he is the living bread which came down from heaven to nourish our souls — that we are one with him as he is one with the Father, etc. (1 Corinthians 1:6; Ephesians 5:30; John 6:51; John 17:21.)
M. What more do we obtain from the sacrament, or what other benefit does it confer upon us?
S. The communion of which I spoke is thereby confirmed and increased; for although Christ is exhibited to us both in baptism and in the gospel, we do not however receive him entire, but in part only. [emphasis added]
Thus, while communion with Christ is not limited to the Supper, Christ communicates himself to us in the Supper in a manner that he does not elsewhere, and which cannot be substituted for by other means.
Several other quotations could be presented, but the above really capture the heart of the doctrine as it was confessed by the early Reformed. Both Lutherans and the Reformed thus generally believed and confessed a participation of the flesh and blood of Christ in the sacrament. While Zwingli’s view was considerably lower (and lest I be thought to deny it, Zwingli’s was definitely a Protestant view, though certainly not the Protestant view, or the most dominant view within the early confessional Reformed and Lutheran traditions), it was generally Calvin’s stronger doctrine that found its way into the confessional formulations.
If the Reformed and Lutherans held the doctrines outlined above, what really is the problem with transubstantiation? Doesn’t the very strength of the Reformers’ resistance to transubstantiation suggest that their doctrine was considerably lower than I have argued above?
At the outset we should notice that the Reformers did not merely attack the doctrine of transubstantiation, but also often spoke strongly against those who, like contemporary evangelicals, deny the reality of our participation in the substance of Christ in the sacrament. One does not need to adopt opposing errors in order to strongly attack transubstantiation.
For Luther there were a few issues. For instance, the doctrine of transubstantiation was pure scholasticism, and Luther was no fan of Aristotle. Imposing the distorting categories of Aristotle upon the sacrament that lay at the heart of Christian existence was deeply offensive. Transubstantiation also taught that the substance of bread and wine were annihilated, which seemed directly contrary to Scripture and philosophical falsehood to Luther.
For Calvin, transubstantiation confounded the sign and the reality, which although conjoined, should not be confused. It was seen to lead to the fetishization and even (in bastardized forms) circumscription of presence within the elements, and encouraged the pagan practice of bread worship and the idea of the continuing sacrifice of the Mass (one of the core issues in the Reformation). For Calvin and other Reformers, the question of ex opere operato in relation to the sacraments was a key one. The question was not whether or not the sacraments were efficacious (many if not most of the leading early Reformers held to some form of baptismal regeneration, for instance), but how exactly they were so. Ex opere operato, as it functioned within Roman Catholic theology, was seen to bind the grace of God to the elements in a manner that made God’s grace appear automatic and depersonalized (this is a helpful article on the subject). Calvin wished to emphasize Christ’s personal action by the Spirit in the sacrament and not reduce him to mute substance that could be manipulated at human will, or treated as an idol. The sacraments are not automatic operations, but personal actions in which Christ faithfully gives us exactly what is promised and represented within them, but not in such a way in which we can control, depersonalize him, or put him at our disposal (the reasons for the Reformed denial of the manducatio impiorum lie here).
Unlike Luther, Calvin objected to the idea of the local presence of the substance of Christ in the Supper. The fact of the ascension and the absence of Christ’s flesh was important to Calvin in his debates with Lutherans and Roman Catholics. We have to be raised up by the Spirit in our participation in the Supper to partake of Christ’s flesh and blood. Like Luther, Calvin objects to the annihilation of the substance of the bread and wine. Calvin is also concerned about the Christological implications of the doctrines of transubstantiation and of Luther (debates about the extra calvinisticum, the ubiquity of Christ, the communicatio idiomatum, etc.).
For a clearer understanding of Calvin’s doctrine, which, if anything, teaches a greater level of sacramental mystery than transubstantiation (transubstantiation speaks in terms of the conversion of the elements: Calvin’s position speaks in terms of the spiritual translation of the worshipper to the place of Christ’s bodily presence by the Spirit – the Spirit unites things spatially distant), I highly recommend reading his chapter on the subject in the Institutes.
From the perspective of the modern evangelical, the positions of Calvin and Luther and their followers seem to be little different from those of transubstantiation, but in a context where the genuine participation in the substance of the flesh and blood of Christ in the Eucharist is more or less a given, their views really can seem worlds apart. That said, I believe that there is huge potential for convergence between followers of Calvin, Luther, and Roman Catholics within the current context (and even, to some extent, those who have always felt a little uncomfortable with their forms of sacramental realism, framed as they are by deficient accounts of the relationship between sign and reality). The linguistic turn in philosophy, for instance, opens up new ways of conceiving sacramental efficacy and causality, beyond those that framed the 16th century debates (reading a Catholic like Louis-Marie Chauvet – Symbol and Sacrament – one cannot but be struck by the unprecedented opportunities for a bringing together of formerly irreconcilable concerns in the current context). We are living in a time when the Eucharistic conversations of the Reformation could be revived to great profit, and former impasses overcome.
While I find his precise articulation of the doctrine of the Eucharist unsatisfactory, largely on account of certain misplaced accents and lacunae, I believe that Calvin presents the most promising and fertile framework for addressing some of the issues relating both to the question of Christ’s presence in the Supper, and of our participation in his flesh and blood. To my mind, the key strength of Calvin’s proposed approach lies in its robustly personal character. Calvin’s approach provides a clearer way for us to understand the Eucharist as fundamentally Christ’s personal action. Throughout the Eucharist Christ is personally active, not merely passively present, but actively communicating himself. This leads to a further point: Christ’s personal self-communication through the work of his Spirit provides a way for us to focus less upon the elements as static presence, and more upon Christ’s presence as something inextricable from the action of the sacrament. Finally, in what is perhaps his most daring move, Calvin speaks of the Spirit lifting us up to Christ’s presence, rather than Christ being dragged down. What this suggests is that the mystery of the Eucharist is not primarily something that happens to bread and wine, but something that pertains to the entire rite, both elements and communicants. This extension of the mystery enables us to overcome what Peter Leithart has termed the static ‘zoom lens’ with which element-focused approaches to the Eucharist approach the rite. In the place of this we have a ‘wide-angle lens’, which comprehends the entire rite and all participants in it. As Douglas Farrow has observed, Calvin’s focus on the work of the Spirit also opens the possibility of a more eschatological cast to our doctrine of the Eucharist. If the Spirit can unite things distant in space, surely he can also unite things distant in time. Calvin’s approach provides an opening for us to think of the Supper as an anticipatory enjoyment of the life of the kingdom in the present through the work of the eschatological Spirit. It is in these areas, I believe that the promise of the Reformed doctrine of the Eucharist is to be found.
The concept of a New Exodus is commonly encountered in the field of New Testament scholarship: Christ defeats the Pharaoh, delivers us from slavery, and brings us into the promise. This theme is significant and illuminating, yet one thing that is commonly missed is the degree to which the Exodus story serves as a paradigmatic event throughout the Old and New Testaments. This is merely one of numerous examples that could be provided of the need for some sort of a grasp of the entire scriptural text, if we are properly to understand any part. There are, quite literally, dozens of events and narratives that follow the Exodus pattern in the Bible, and innumerable textual pointers to this for those who are paying attention. It is simply not the case that we have one Old Testament exodus and a New Testament exodus that fulfils this type: rather exoduses are found throughout the text, as a developing pattern that is explored from several different angles and taken in a number of varying directions. Once again, the work of James Jordan in this area is without peer, and should be consulted by anyone who wishes to think seriously about this (Jordan’s insights provide the basis for much that I have to say below).
Within the larger Exodus pattern, there are lots of themes. There may be the theme of slavery (Jacob is reduced to the condition of slavery to Laban, who no longer treats him as kin, but makes him work as a hired worker, the Israelites become the slaves of Pharaoh, the Jews are taken captive to Babylon). There may be an attack upon the woman and her seed (the repeated stories of the pagan tyrants taking the patriarchs’ wives are examples here). The serpent is frequently deceived, often by the woman – God is fond of poetic justice. Many of the exodus stories of the Bible involve righteous deception of the tyrants (Rachel deceives Laban, the Hebrew midwives deceive Pharaoh, Jael deceives Sisera, Michal deceives Saul, Esther deceives Haman, Rahab deceives the men of Jericho, etc., etc.). False gods are humiliated (the plagues of the Exodus are plagues upon the gods of Egypt, the exodus of the captured ark from Philistia involves the humiliation of Dagon in his own temple, Rachel sits on Laban’s household gods during her period, Michal uses a teraphim as a prop for David in his bed, Elijah humiliates the priests of Baal at Mount Carmel prior to the end of the drought, etc.). The wicked are ravaged by plagues and diseases (the plagues on Pharaoh and his house when he takes Sarai in Genesis 12, all of the wombs of Abimelech’s household are closed when he takes Sarah, the plagues on the Philistine cities when they take the ark, the demonic affliction of Saul and of Israel at the coming of Christ – in both cases widespread demonic affliction seems to follow the coming of a new anointed one). The righteous plunder the wicked and gain much spoil (the riches Abraham gains from Egypt, God’s transfer of the property of Laban to Jacob, the plundering of the Egyptians in the Exodus, the return of the ark with riches from Philistia, Esther’s plundering of the house of Haman). The wicked suffer a decisive defeat (there is a reason why the Egyptians don’t appear on the scene again between the time of the Exodus and the reign of Solomon – God completely destroyed their crops, lifestock, killed their firstborn, humiliated their gods, destroyed their ruler and his army, and as the Israelites head towards Canaan, they meet the Amalekites heading the other direction, ready to pick at the bones of a nation that once exercised regional hegemony, the Jews kill their enemies following the deliverance of Esther).
In addition to these themes we also find clusters of tell-tale motifs – water crossings and deliverances (events that often involve chariots), pagan tyrants receiving visions and dreams (Pilate’s wife, Nebuchadnezzar, Abraham’s Abimelech), themes of pregnancy and childbirth, threats to the lives of infants, or the wives (e.g. David’s sojourn in Philistia), meals at night time, the coming of an angel or messenger to judge the wicked but deliver the righteous (e.g. in Acts 12 Peter is ‘struck’ by the angel, who exoduses him from prison, while Herod is ‘struck’ by the angel and is eaten alive by worms), tyrants claiming innocence and accusing the righteous of being the problem (the pagan kings who take the wives of the patriarchs, Ahab with Elijah, Pilate washing his hands of Jesus’ blood), the establishing of heaps and pillars as witnesses, travel to a particular mountain (Noah landing on Mount Ararat, Elijah going to Mount Horeb), where a new covenant order is established, etc., etc. While many of these motifs may not be essential to the Exodus pattern, they are nonetheless important clues and indications of its possible presence.
As an example, one exodus narrative that surprisingly few people pick up on is Lot’s exodus from Sodom, which contains a number of classic exodus motifs and themes. The angels bring the promise of a son to Abraham and Sarah – exodus from state of barrenness – after which they go on to judge the wicked city (Sodom and Egypt are twins in Scripture in many contexts, e.g. Revelation 11:8). The rite of circumcision is instituted or established just beforehand. As the Lord himself is one of the angels, the other angels can be seen as the two witnesses, as Moses and Aaron were in the Egyptian Exodus, or the witnesses in Revelation 11. The angels are ‘passing by’ (Genesis 18:3, 5), just as they would later do with Egypt. There is a threat to life at the doorway, and the doorway becomes a site of angelic protection and judgment upon those outside. There is the pressing call to leave the city with all relatives and possessions and the notion that the ‘outcry’ against a city or the voice of the oppressed has reached the ear of YHWH. An evening meal of unleavened bread is eaten. The angels seize the hands of Lot and his family to get them to escape (cf. Jeremiah 31:32). Lot is instructed to flee, literally, to The Mountain (not ‘the mountains’). A witnessing pillar/heap is established (as God judges Lot’s wife by turning her into a pillar of salt).
Lot’s exodus, however, is in many respects an anti-exodus. Lot’s story is supposed to contrast with the exodus story of Abraham that surrounds it on both sides (much as Judah’s story will later function in relation to Joseph’s). For instance, Lot’s wife is made as sterile as salt, whereas the barren Sarah is made fruitful.
Much else going on there, and should be explored in another context: my basic point is that, for those with ears to hear, the Bible is overflowing with exodus stories (and there are several ‘second Moseses’ before we arrive at Christ, perhaps the most noteworthy being Elijah). Each of these stories is slightly different and explores various dimensions of the theme, some even inverting (Saul and the witch of Endor) or parodying it (Jeroboam’s story, for instance).
By the time that we arrive at the New Testament, our ears should be so accustomed to Exodus language and motifs that we recognize it all over the place, whether in subtly charged ways of wording things (‘led up by the Spirit into the wilderness’ – Matthew 4:1), the exodus themes of a narrative such as John 5 (38 years of infirmity matching the 38 years of wandering in the wilderness, sheep near the waters, an angel stirring the waters for deliverance), or second order allusions such as Hebrews 13:20 (cf. Isaiah 63:11-14). One final observation: if we want to ‘get’ the exodus motifs of the New Testament, we really need to start with detailed knowledge of the development of the theme of exodus within the Old Testament. For instance, most people don’t appreciate the degree to which the sacrificial system invokes exodus themes. However, the union of these two themes provides huge insight when reading the story of the gospels.
Richard Beck has posted some rough and rambling thoughts on the subject of capitalism, socialism, and politics. Although I have some more serious posts planned for the future on other subjects, I thought that, rather than leaving the blog dormant for a few more days, I would post some initial rambling thoughts of my own in response to his. My aim here is not primarily to come down on one side or another of any debate, but to encourage a broader and more challenging conversation on the subject.
My thoughts are rough and unsystematized, but generally fall under a few headings.
The Pattern of the Jerusalem Church
The Jerusalem church of the early chapters of Acts is frequently presented as an example of ‘collectivist’ or ‘communist’ society, and taken as an example that we should follow. We should be more cautious about taking such an approach.
There is little evidence that the practice of the distribution of the funds obtained through the widespread land-selling of the early Jerusalem church was the general custom of the early church. Rather than reading the practice of the Jerusalem church as the normal pattern for all other churches, perhaps it is better to situate the practice more firmly in its particular context.
There are rather good reasons why Jerusalem believers would be liquidizing their assets. They were following Christ, who had taught that Jerusalem would be flattened within that generation. Jesus had taught that they would have to flee Jerusalem, and that there may not even be enough time for them to grab their clothes (Matthew 24:15ff). The floor was about to fall out of the Jerusalem market and so it made sense to sell quickly, as a matter of shrewd financial dealings, but far more importantly as a prophetic action, investing in the only venture that would survive the coming apocalypse (I suspect that much of the money obtained through such sales ended up supporting some of the early missionary ventures: the Jerusalem Christians seem to be financially struggling in later years).
Our ears should have already been alerted to the scriptural significance of land sales in Jerusalem by the description of the use of the money for which Christ was sold. The first property bought in the land of Canaan was a burial place for Abraham and his family, the Field of Machpelah (Genesis 23). This burial place was a guarantee of the inheritance that was still to come. Christ’s blood money purchases a burial place for strangers in the former land of promise – The Field of Blood. This is just one more sign that the whole city is to be rendered desolate, and as a declaration that the habitation of Israel will be given into the hands of strangers. In Acts 1, Judas stands as a figure representative of the Jewish society that rejected Jesus: the rendering desolate of his habitation anticipates the judgment awaiting Israel as a whole. As usual, Peter Leithart has some insightful observations on this subject.
More significantly, the description of the early Jerusalem church as ‘communist’ or ‘collectivist’ is quite misleading. The practice of the early Jerusalem church was not ‘communist’ but one of voluntary gift. Private property was still maintained, recognized, and honoured (e.g. Acts 5:3-4). However, those who were in need were readily provided for by those who had the resources. When we read the relevant passages more carefully, ‘having everything in common’ seems to mean something considerably less than the abolition of private property.
God builds his church out of willing human hearts: just as the tabernacle was built with money freely given by the Israelites, so Christ forms his Church with the willing gifts of his people. The concept of gift presupposes some sense of property, for one cannot truly give what does not in some sense belong to you. If we are going to take the example of the Jerusalem church seriously, I believe that it is in the analysis of the concept of gift that the most fruitful insights will be found. The biblical teaching concerning gift has the potential to transform our ways of thinking about property in several important ways, a point that I will touch upon again later.
The notion that the practice of the early Jerusalem church should provide a model for economies generally, and the economies of Western nations more particularly fails to recognize with the underlying problem of scale. An enthusiastic young church with about 3000-5000 members is a very different beast from a diverse nation of almost 60 or 300 million, and the sharing of property in common will necessarily take a profoundly different form.
The sharing of property in the early Jerusalem church was an aspect of a shared life. The members of the church had one heart (Acts 4:32), continued with one accord in daily meeting in the temple and in communal (and sacramental) eating (Acts 2:44-47). It was a witness to the Jews, who may not have been supporting the priests and Levites well (many priests joined the early church – Acts 6:7), and to the Greeks, representing the sharing and friendship of the ideal community envisaged by certain philosophical schools.
Abstracting the sharing of property from the sharing of a common life and a common heart is problematic, and to aim for the former apart from the latter two is to put the cart before the horse. Free-riders are a problem in many shared property or welfare systems. In a society without a common heart or life, we will (not without a measure of reason) become paranoid about people ‘abusing the system’ and will tend to resort to increasingly invasive forms of official supervision to ensure that people are not. This is merely a version of the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Commons can be incredibly successful, but their success relies upon a culture of voluntary conditional cooperation, and the close monitoring of free-riders. Where the majority are working primarily towards private and self-interested ends against the interests of the wider community, or no clear common ends can be established, and where free-riders are not closely monitored by a strong community, the commons will struggle to achieve genuine success.
Successful commons generally work because people need to cooperate to achieve sustainable success, and the cost of pursuing self-interested ends without respecting the common ends of the community are too high. The ‘commons’ of the early church were so successful because the community had such a clear common vision, and free-riders would find it hard to fly beneath the radar in such a thick fabric of communal life, and would be strongly discouraged by the high disincentives of possible alienation from the church of Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Timothy 5:8).
Lacking the cooperative ends and substantial shared life that make the commons successful, both communist visions and modern welfare states face problems. In fact, one could even argue that the modern welfare state exists in large part as an alternative to the genuine commons that can be created by shared life in community ( while I don’t want to suggest that effective commons existed before the rise of the welfare state, richer structures of charity and family and community safety nets definitely did in many areas), and that the welfare state can often serve to absolve us of the sense of responsibility to share our lives with the poor, a biblical responsibility that is far more primary than that of sharing our wealth. I believe that many of our problems in this area arise from our inability to form effective commons in a society that operates according to individualistic assumptions.
We should also recognize that communal ownership and managed economies need not be bad things in principle. Very few families operate either as pure free markets or realms of pure private ownership. Families can often be examples of successful commons because free-riders are easily monitored, and clear shared communal identity, life, and ends exist. However, scalability is difficult, not least because it demands a level of knowledge that we cannot easily attain and becomes abstracted from the fabric of actual communities. These scalability problems lead governments to resort to the same sort of detached and impersonal technocratic and bureaucratic structures and systems that multinational companies tend to use, structures that tend to run directly contrary to some of the primary humanizing goods that they may have originally been set up to protect (on this note, a church that is too big to celebrate the Lord’s Supper together is too big: in such a context we shouldn’t be surprised if the language of business tends to supplant the language of communion). Perhaps this is where the Jerusalem church could provide a model: workable and humanizing government needs to operate on a human scale, and technical systems cannot easily substitute for the trust born of a shared life of fellowship.
This also highlights a more general problem with prevailing forms of capitalism, which have the (I would suggest intrinsic) tendency to become abstracted from any concrete community. Rather than being regarded as a no-man’s land of exchange, the market should be seen as a form of commons, a place for a society to practice a particular form of its communal life. This doesn’t mean that the market should achieve equal outcomes for all parties, just that the good of a wider society should always be served by it. Where the market becomes dominated by the operations of agencies that have no interest in the common good of the society, the market has ceased to function properly.
Gift and the Question of Anthropology
Addressing economic systems at the level of their basic anthropology seems to me to be exactly the right way of going about things. I think that the problem of dominant models of capitalism (not the only models) is precisely that which lies at the heart of much liberal thought in general. Liberalism thinks in terms of mature right-bearing individuals, who enter into social orders at a logically secondary stage. Within this vision, whether in its economic or political forms, liberalism has always struggled to deal with the place of families and children in particular, who bear testament to the fact that the primal fact is not the individual, but loving communions that transcend individuality (this is one reason why liberal governments have a vested interest in redrawing the definition of the family around the rights of autonomous sexual agents).
The basic anthropological reality is not self-interest, but the reciprocity of bonding in a shared life. Everything that we have – language, property, identity, etc. – grows out of communion. Looked at from a different perspective, our economic activity could be seen to not merely or even primarily be about self-interest, but to be about creating, participating in, strengthening, and sustaining community. Most people operating in the marketplace do not do so merely or even primarily out of self-interest, but out of far more complex motives, foremost among them being a desire to participate in the exchanges that form much of the shared life of our communities. The attenuated culture of the consumer society is in large measure concerned with a desire to share a life of some sort with others. Many of the problems that we have today arise from the breakdown or corruption of the communities that sustain our economies, to be replaced by mistrust and hatred. We don’t trust each other, because we believe that each person is ultimately only in it for himself.
The more that we gear our system around the false anthropology of self-interest, the more that we will encourage the very practices that cause our present problems. However, what would happen if we took seriously the primacy of man’s desire for communion, both with other persons and with the world? What if we didn’t assume that all ends and ‘goods’ are private, but believed that people actively desire to pursue shared ‘goods’? What would a firm constructed on such an assumption look like? This false anthropology also leads us to create economies that don’t truly serve to satisfy people’s deeper desires, but leave them frustrated and alienated.
It seems to me that the concept of property would retain a very important place in such a vision. The concept of property is important, because it recognizes the manner in which the human self extends its reach to invest itself in the world and other people. Without the concept of property, the reach of the human self is restricted. While this would prevent certain evils, it also hinders numerous goods.
What scriptural thought does, it seems to me, is challenge the notion of absolute power and ownership that is often bound up in our notions of private property. Property can rather be construed in terms of gift, as something that we have received from the hands of others, and must in turn minister to others. The gift is not alienated from the giver, and in receiving the gift, a communion is established between giver and receiver. In working for a boss, I give the products of my labour to him, and he gives me remuneration. However, this does not absolve us of our duties to each other. Quite the opposite: this exchange of gifts should be regarded as the assumption of those duties, the formation of a new relationship. The products of my work now belong to my boss, but in the manner of the ownership of gifts, rather than absolutely private possessions. Our goods, in such a vision, cease to be purely private possessions held against all others, and, though remaining at our personal disposal, become sites of communion with others.
The biblical teaching concerning the Church speaks of it as a place of differentiated individual spiritual gifts – each a participation in the common Gift of the Spirit – exercised for the benefit of the whole and the blessing of everyone. The gifts are ‘possessed’ in some sense by the gifted one, but they are the minister of a common good, which is possessed by all. This unsettles the notion of the absolute power and autonomy of the private property owner, upon which much capitalist thinking relies. However, the biblical celebration of differentiated and unequal gifting (and honour associated with gifting) and the fact that the gifted person actually has genuine stewardship of and discretion in the exercise of the gift stands opposed to much anti-capitalist thinking.
Inequality and Fairness
Our individualistic ways of thinking about fairness can lose sight of the biblical emphasis upon larger intergenerational movements of wealth. Accustomed as we are to thinking of ourselves as individuals, we can lose sight of the biblical emphasis on the management and passing on of legacies. Against the orthodoxy of individualistic Western culture, we are born into stories, rather than with a blank slate on which to write a story of our own choice.
Capital is something that is accumulated over longer periods of time. Moral capital, social capital, financial capital, and other means of production are things that are developed by investment over many generations. The indolent and wicked wrong both their ancestors and their offspring, squandering the capital that has been passed on to them. Conversely, families that are careful in their accumulation and management of their wealth can be blessed for many generations.
When we start to think in the generational terms in terms of which God operates, rather than the individualist ones of Western evangelical culture, perhaps we will be less inclined to think that the fact that the fruits of diligence in the present can result in exponential growth of one’s descendants’ wellbeing represents a ‘flaw’. Why shouldn’t God bless the descendants of the diligent man to several generations (even those who may not be personally worthy of it)? If I work to invest in the future of any children that I might have, why shouldn’t God bless my labours with a bountiful harvest? Why shouldn’t my children have a huge advantage over kids with limited parental investment in their upbringing? Conversely, the reason that we find it so hard to accept the justice of the fact that many are hobbled by the wickedness, abusiveness, unfaithfulness, improvidence, and indolence of their parents lies in large measure in the fact that we perceive ourselves purely as detached individuals, rather than as in significant part the legacies of our parents, and as gifts to our own children. If we started to reckon more seriously with the way that God has created the world to work, perhaps we would be a better means of bringing his healing to it.
God is a God who encourages long term thinking that looks several generations down the line, and does not focus merely upon the present state of affairs. This is one reason why the playing field is never ‘reset’: God wants to teach us to think about the long term too. Corrupt and lucky ‘winners’ don’t tend to hold onto their wealth very well, whereas the diligent and shrewd losers don’t tend to remain poor for so long. I believe that we probably have several millennia (at least) left before the final coming of Christ: we can afford to be patient in our digging of deep foundations, and not be distracted too much by the shallow-based towers shooting up around us.
The ‘Preferential Option for the Poor’
Although not without biblical basis, the notion of a ‘preferential option for the poor’ is generally overstated, and tends to lose sight of other aspects of the biblical picture. Obviously, there is a lot of biblical teaching on the subject of God’s concern for the poor and oppressed, and criticism of the oppressive and unjust rich. However, the poor are not regarded as automatically morally superior (the Bible is prepared to make the sort of distinctions between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor that run contrary to many liberal sensibilities), nor are the rich universally demonized (although in certain contexts of oppression, riches can be a sign of complicity). Poverty is occasionally presented as a consequence of wickedness, foolishness, or laziness, and riches frequently presented as a blessing upon faithfulness and wisdom, even in the New Testament.
We should also remember that the majority of the great heroes of the faith came from the privileged classes, and many of them were insanely rich. The biblical evidence would seem to suggest that Abraham came from the ruling classes of Ur. He had a private army of 318 men and a sheikhdom that probably had more than 2000 people in it. His descendants needed huge territories to graze their animals. Moses had a ruling class upbringing of immense privilege. Job was a king with over 20,000 animals. Solomon was mind-bogglingly wealthy. These guys were the billionaires of their day. Much of the Bible was written by and about the 1%, and God doesn’t seem to judge these guys for being as privileged as they are, though responsibilities to take concern for the poor comes with their wealth.
Being wealthy when other people are poor doesn’t mean that you should feel guilty, or serve as proof of injustice. God gives different gifts to each person and we should be faithful in what we have been given, rather than being envious of those who have been given more than us. The Bible openly condemns systemic injustice and riches obtained unjustly through oppression and exploitation of the poor, but riches per se are not a smoking gun.
Even the people who were poor and persecuted in Scripture generally had great connections (if we look carefully, we see these connections all over the New Testament: the disciples had connections at the temple, Jesus had wealthy and influential supporters among the ruling classes, Paul was quite happy to pull strings of privilege in certain situations and benefited from family and other contacts). Biblical characters also seem to exhibit a preferential option for evangelizing the rich and influential. Although the gospel was preached to the poor, the New Testament has a lot more to say about the way that the gospel was brought to the movers and shakers of Jewish and Roman society, before members of courts, kings, governors, wealthy members of society, the military, and the aristocracy, etc.
While the above is obviously only part of the picture and the ‘preferential option for the poor’ has important truths to it, my purpose here is to challenge a rather popular one-sided picture. The Bible presents us with a vision of society that is more ‘top-down’ than ‘bottom-up’: if you want to change society, you must focus on prophetically addressing its leaders, influencers, and most gifted members. Could part of our problem be the fact that the church so focuses on evangelizing people as individuals at the point of existential weakness, that it has ceased meaningfully to address the movers and shakers of society as movers and shakers (although some churches will speak generally about unjust systems, the personal responsibility of those within these systems is seldom pressed), and thus encouraged the development of an amoral culture in politics and cultural, business, and financial leadership?
In fact, borrowing a point from Slavoj Žižek, a privatized faith in such a culture can be a means of sustaining the structures that it should be challenging. It allows us inwardly to disassociate ourselves from the structures that we are complicit in, while remaining embedded and involved in them, now with a decreased sense of discomfort. The rich Christian, addressed solely as a spiritual pauper, can become numbed to the fact of his material wealth and the moral duties that this might place upon him. A church that thought more seriously about addressing itself to the influential, the rich, and the powerful in society, precisely as rich, influential, and powerful, and not solely as spiritually poor individuals, might have more of a social impact.
The Middle Way?
As regards the answer lying in the middle (and which thinker out there doesn’t like to present his answer as lying between two gerrymandered extremes?), the sweet spot between capitalism and socialism, why should we believe that splitting the difference between two wrong answers will give us a right one? Is this not just an assumption that the prevailing framing of our political, social, and economic questions is the correct one?
n. pl.
A miscellaneous collection of notes, remarks, or selections.
Alastair's Adversaria 