Alastair's Adversaria

Telford Work writes:

Sometimes the issues that create friction and develop doctrine come from the margins, not the center, of the Christian faith. The result is a shift in the tradition’s theological center of gravity: Iconoclasm directed Orthodox attention towards images and away, relatively, from Scripture. Newman supposes all such shifts to be healthy to the tradition, but MacIntyre helps show that the solution to one crisis might possibly weaken the tradition’s ability to respond to future crises.

This is an important lesson. Whilst an orthodox Christology might imply a certain attitude towards images and vice versa, it is important to recognize that neither images nor the rejection of them is central to the Christian faith. In a similar manner, whilst orthodox Christianity cannot be consistently preserved with certain misunderstandings of justification, I don’t believe that justification (as commonly understood) is the ‘main hinge on which religion turns’ (Calvin).

The recentering of the faith around the doctrine of (individual) justification that occurred in many areas following the Reformation made Protestant churches especially vulnerable to certain errors that churches centred on a more catholic (with a small ‘c’) reading of the Nicene Creed would not be. This recentering led to weaknesses that could later be exploited by such movements as liberalism, modernism, secularism, individualism and sectarianism.

This was not the only recentering of the faith that has taken place within Protestant circles. For many the gospel is centred on the ‘five points’ of Calvinism. For others it is centred on the ‘fundamentals’ of fundamentalism. Whilst important truths are at issue in these debates, truths that in many cases serve as litmus tests of Christian orthodoxy, they are not generally central to the gospel. Few of these shibboleths belong to the central confession of our faith. As the faith has become recentred on these shibboleths there has been a tendency to neglect truths that really are central to the Christian faith, such as the Trinity. Such recentering of the tradition generally results in us becoming increasingly sectarian and identifying our distinctives as the gospel, rather than our common catholic faith.

A willingness to call the Virgin Mary Theotokos is an important shibboleth for Christological orthodoxy. Deny this and you risk compromising the whole gospel. However, the importance of this shibboleth has in many quarters of the Church led to an unhealthy recentering of the Christian faith and an unbiblical elevation of the role of Mary and a compromise of the Christian faith in other ways. I think that Protestants and evangelicals are often at risk of similar unorthodox tendencies when we misidentify our distinctives and shibboleths as central truths of the gospel. Just as the practices of kissing icons and venerating Mary gained much of their initial popularity as tests of orthodoxy, so many of our shibboleths risk taking on a life of their own and even, in certain cases, eclipsing the truths that they were once designed to protect.

A few months back I wrote the following:

Eco also draws his reader’s attention to the manner in which a number of thinkers imposed preconceived conclusions upon the evidence that they encountered in their different fields and activities and failed to appreciate the manner in which the evidence actually undermined their familiar categories. For example, Marco Polo discovered the unicorn, but also discovered that it was black rather than white, had hooves like those of an elephant and a pelt like that of a buffalo. He was only able to speak of the unknown in terms of what he had expected to find. ‘He was a victim of his background books.’ It seems to me that this is a mistake that we have all made at some time or other. I am tempted to make a remark about certain theological debates at this point.

[I resisted]

I will resist no longer.

Mark Horne’s comments on Van Til really resonate with my own experience. I feel cheated by the way that many of the Reformed authors (Van Til being a perfect example) that I have read in the past have represented those outside of the Reformed tradition. A large proportion of the Reformed tradition seems to be quite incapable of truly encountering the ‘Other’ — the position that falls outside of our own categories.

When Reformed people encounter positions that differ from their own they tend to do one of two things. They either domesticate the position and paper over the real differences that exist or demonize the position and deny or marginalize the existence of real commonalities. They seem to be unable to call the sufficiency of their own categories into question.

Such a way of looking at the world has given us Augustine and Luther as great heroes of the faith (which they were) despite their holding to supposedly dangerous doctrines such as baptismal regeneration. Rather than acknowledge the importance of such doctrines in their theological systems these doctrines are marginalized and treated as if they could be lopped from their theological systems while leaving the rest intact (the way that Warfield neatly separates Augustine’s ecclesiology from his soteriology is a perfect case in point). Augustine and Luther are domesticated and reduced to being the same as us. They merely echo our own voices. We lack the ability to treat them on their own terms.

The same is frequently done with Calvin. From my reading of Calvin I do not believe that he can easily be claimed by any of the parties in contemporary disputes in Presbyterian circles. We really need to learn how to read people like Calvin without presuming that we already know what they are going to say. Domesticating someone is just as effective a way of silencing someone as demonizing them is. We do not although ourselves to be confronted by the ‘other’.

The other tendency is that of demonizing people who differ from us and denying or marginalizing the things that we genuinely have in common. By demonizing people in this way we absolve ourselves of the task of being attentive to what they have to say. Once again we presume that we already know what they are going to say. A tradition that treats people in such a way is self-obsessed and self-absorbed. All is polarized into positions of varying consistency with one of two diametrically opposed systems.

It is, frankly, infuriating to be at the receiving end of this. I have been in this position far too much over the last few years. People try to force you into traditional categories in order to silence you. Once they have put you into a familiar category they don’t bother paying attention to what you are saying. They hear what you are saying without really hearing. They merely hear what they expect to hear. You are a unicorn, no matter how loudly you point out the things that identify you as a rhinoceros.

On the one hand you are told that you are just saying what the Reformed tradition has always said. This protects the tradition from ever being confronted with anything outside or beyond itself that might challenge it to change. On the other hand you are told that you are utterly rejecting the Reformed tradition and that anything that you continue to have in common is a matter of ‘blessed inconsistency’. Once again, by dismissing you in such a manner, the tradition is freed from the task of engagement with the ‘other’. Unicorns only exist in the imagination, as do many of the theological positions that Reformed Christians categorize in terms of (Roman Catholicism, Arminianism, Judaism, etc.).

This is one of the reasons why questioning the helpfulness of the categories of our confessional documents is important. Reformed people have been seeing unicorns in the writings of the apostle Paul, for example, for far too long. Much of what they are seeing is there (just as unicorns share certain prominent features in common with rhinoceri), but we really need to question whether our traditional confessional categories are really sufficient.

Recent years have witnessed a growing awareness of the ‘otherness’ of the apostle Paul and a realization that the tradition has domesticated him in various ways. At this time the tradition should be cultivating a new attentiveness to what the apostle was really trying to say. Whilst this has been taking place in many circles, there has been a significant reaction in others. To those who do not have categories sufficient to deal with the rhinoceros, to deny that it is a unicorn is a clear and inexcuseable denial of the truth. In response to this reaction many have sought to reaffirm their agreement with the traditional confessions and have admitted that it really is a unicorn. What difference is there between a rhinoceros and a unicorn anyway? In so doing they risk domesticating both Paul and themselves.

Whilst I will acknowledge that, in terms of the categories that they thought within, the sixteenth and seventeenth century Reformed did as good a job as could have been done of representing Paul’s position, I believe that these categories are seriously deficient and need to be significantly improved upon if we are really serious about the need to be attentive to Paul. I believe that those who recognize the manner in which traditional categories fail to do justice to Paul should be far more cautious in the way in which they assent to the confessions. Whilst acknowledging the genuine good contained in the confessions, there should be a willingness to be honest about the serious insufficiencies of the categories of the confessions.

At the very least it would help us to know what to do if we were ever to meet a rhinoceros.

So the outward turn of attention in Luther’s doctrine of justification, based on a kind of sacramental externalism and summed up in the phrase “alien righteousness,” must not be confused with the very different externalism of the purely forensic doctrines of justification that predominate in Protestantism, according to which the righteousness of faith makes no inward change in us but only gets Christ’s merits imputed to us. On the contrary, for Luther the alien righteousness of faith is the deepest thing in me: it is Christ dwelling in my heart and conscience as a bridegroom in the bridal chamber, so that “Christ and my conscience … become one body” with the result that I am an entirely different person. I am reborn as that good tree which can bear good fruit, a person who can by faith actually do good works, which make up what Luther calls my own “proper” righteousness. This latter is not the inward and alien righteousness in the depth of my heart, by which I am justified before God, but the external works of righteousness I do for the sake of my body or my neighbor.

We must get used to such apparent reversals in Luther: my own proper righteousness is merely external to me, a thing of the body, while an alien righteousness, found outside me, is what is deepest in my soul. The only way such reversals make sense is if Luther is thinking sacramentally, in terms of an inward gift that I apprehend outside myself.

Read the extended excerpt on the Pontificator’s blog.