Leithart on Secularization

Peter Leithart has a great post over at FT on the “secularity” of the Gospel and its eschatological power:

For Celsus and many of his contemporaries, a religion without the stoicheia can only be a form of atheism. Celsus mistakes the “baptism” as a secularization.

Sociologists and historians have been making the same mistake ever since. Christianity does not promote “secularity” in the modern sense. Where Christianity has become dominant, Christians have always sought to reshape public life, law, social order, custom, and economic life, in accord with the demands of the gospel. They have not considered public life a safe-zone, free from the influence of the gospel. But the gospel does challenge and overthrow the institutions and patterns of the old world. Wherever the gospel arrives, sacred sites lose their sacredness, the gods go silent, the religious ceremonies that encrust daily life go by the wayside, blood and sacrifice cease. When the good news gets to the scattered tribes of the Amazon, or unevangelized peoples of Africa or Asia, it comes as an announcement of a new exodus, a baptism that leads out of Egypt into a new world, guided by the pillar of the Spirit.

Congar, Scripture, and Protestantism

Even in Congar’s modified view of Scripture and tradition, there are still definite gaps in Protestant and Catholic understandings of the doctrine of Scripture. For instance, John Webster argues that Congar may go too far in his integration of written word and lived community, since “scripture’s task as prophetic and apostolic witness to the divine Word can only be accomplished if it is in some sense an alien element in the church.”

However, Congar’s definition of tradition as something beyond written authority makes room for a fuller sense of both tradition and Scripture. His emphasis on tradition as the full reality of Christian faith is both a challenge and an ecumenical invitation to Protestantism. And in fact, Webster suggests that Congar’s critique of the Protestant doctrine of sola Scriptura may apply better to some of its modern manifestations than to the original doctrine of the magisterial Reformers. For Congar, Scripture and the life of the Church are no longer set apart as independent rivals for authority (as indeed some 19th century Protestant theology seems to assume), but each can now serve as a full witness to the mystery of God’s communication to His Church. They exist together inseparably, and provide a unified testimony of salvation.

Congar and Calvin on our Mother

In The Meaning of Tradition, Yves Congar argues that the various aspects of lived tradition (including practices and doctrines not explicitly stated in canonical Scripture) are not extrinsic to the Scripture, but are rather continued ecclesial reflections on the mystery of revelation itself witnessed in Scripture. Congar makes the stark claim that, perhaps apart from some rare exceptions, “there is not a single point of belief that the Church holds by tradition alone, without any reference to Scripture.” As such, the relationship between Scripture and tradition is not well represented by a hierarchy of competing authority, as in the neo-Scholastic model. Rather, Congar suggests that a more appropriate paradigm might be one of lived tradition as mother, in which tradition “creates the surroundings, where life will retain its warmth.” The feminine quality of tradition expresses truth “instinctively and vitally” as “the one who waits, keeping intact the warmth and intimacy of the home.”

Ironically, Congar may find an unlikely friend in John Calvin’s theology of the Church as Mother: “For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels” (Institutes IV.1.4).

Peas in a pod

Go read Stegall on the Acorn scandal. Uniquely provocative as usual.

Items of note (9/18/09)

• Ry posts on Dulles and “blueprint ecclesiologies.”
• Bobby Grow on the forensic and ontological emphases of atonement theology.
• Goroncy posts a wonderful quote from Moltmann on resurrection and our impatient hope.
• Part two of TOJ’s interview of Jeffrey Stout. (Part one here.)
• David Bentley Hart commits heresy (maybe): “Dostoevsky is immeasurably inferior to Tolstoy.”
• Friday audio: A.A. Bondy’s “Rapture (Sweet Rapture)” [audio:http://www.theopolitical.com/data/Rapture (Sweet Rapture).mp3]

Dei Verbum, Faith, and Revelation

In his article, “The Symbolic Structure of Revelation,” Avery Dulles made the statement that faith does not exist outside revelation. It’s interesting to ask whether this is consistent with the statements about faith and revelation in Dei Verbum. The context is key, since Dulles (alongside Barth) is making his assertion most directly against the historicist and propositionalist schools, which each suppose a definition of revelation that is extrinsic and objectively demonstrable. Dulles rather affirms that revelation is “discerned by a spiritually attuned consciousness.”

This intimate, perhaps inextricable, association of faith and revelation appears to harmonize very well with certain passages in Dei Verbum, while at other times sounding more discordant, particularly when Dei Verbum invokes the previous statements of Dei Filius. In the former instance, Dei Verbum 5 refers to “the obedience of faith,” by which we offer our entire selves to God (this, perhaps, in contrast to Dei Filius, which emphasized the submission of intellect and will). The act of faith is our willing submission to the truth revealed by God through the empowering of the Spirit. Crucially, this work of the Spirit turns our hearts to God, “opening the eyes of the mind.” Once this work is begun in faith, the Spirit continues to work a deeper revelation of God in our understanding and experience. All this indicates that revelation, or at least the fullness of revelation, is both opened and pursued through faith – that is, a relationship of trust established by God between Himself and those who respond in trust.

A complication to this interpretation arises in the latter half of article 6, which affirms the teaching of Vatican I that God “can be known with certainty from created reality by the light of human reason.” If reason can discern God, what role is left for faith? Can reason arrive at ultimate truth prior to – and therefore outside – the communicative fellowship established between God and humanity by faith? Or is faith a necessary prerequisite?

While the interpretive difficulties are immediately apparent, there are good reasons to read Dei Verbum as developing the theology of Vatican I in order to arrive at a more integral relationship of faith and revelation. For instance, while Dei Filius discusses natural reason preceding faith, Dei Verbum does the reverse: the discussion of revelation provides the foundation for human reason (this evaluation comes from Daniel Gallagher’s ” The Obedience of Faith: Barth, Bultmann, and Dei Verbum”). Further, the notion of human rationality is framed such that it appears to be part and parcel of revelation itself. As article 6 says, God “chose to share” His treasures, which would otherwise remain unknowable. Those treasures comprise various revealed signs and symbols of truth, including the signs of language and thought that we use to reason to our knowledge of God. Reason itself can therefore be viewed as a revealed gift from the treasure stores of God which we employ in our faithful dialogue with Him.

None of this is to deny the apparent tension between the older emphases in Dei Filius and the focus on God’s communication with the faithful in Dei Verbum. And yet, the latter document implies many of the theological assumptions of Avery Dulles’ assertion that revelation does not somehow exist outside faith. For it is through faith that the believer submits herself to God. This submission goes beyond intellectual assent, and in fact drives toward the full revelation of personhood through the act of faith. Faith in this sense acts to illuminate the fullness of revelation for each believer, “opening the eyes of our mind.”

NT Wright conference registration

Registration is now open for next April’s Wheaton Theology Conference, featuring NT Wright, Richard Hayes, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Jeremy Begbie, among others.

Sex and the common

Sexual passion, in papal teaching, appears mainly as an obstacle to authentic love. Many of us have experienced sexual passion as both humbling and liberating, a way in which our bodies know quicker and better than our minds, choose better and faster than our reluctant wills, even get us to where God apparently wants us in a way our minds never could. Along the same lines, papal teaching might find a good word to say about the sweetness of sexual love–also, I think, God’s gift. Amid all the talk of self-donation and mutuality, we should also remember, “plus, it feels good.” Come to think of it, why not devote some meditation to the astonishing triumph of sexual fidelity in marriage? Faithfulness, when it is genuine, is the result of a delicate and attentive creativity between partners, and not simply the automatic product of “self-control.” In short, a more adequate theology of the body would at least acknowledge the positive ways in which the body gifts us by “controlling” us — Luke Timothy Johnson, “A Disembodied ‘Theology of the Body,’” Commonweal.

As a Protestant looking in on the Catholic debates over sexuality and the theology of the body, I admit I sometimes feel a dishonest sort of relief. The Reformation was notorious for its supposed freeing of the marital libido. Never before, perhaps, had a theology caused so many to lose their virginity. Contraception has also not stammered Protestants in the same way it has Catholics (as various wise men have pointed out). That said, I’m troubled by some of the critiques of John Paul II’s bodily theology. Or at least, I’m troubled by a particular assumption. In the above quote, Johnson makes the appropriate point that pleasure should play a role in a modern moral theology (again, this is something that Protestants have been saying for a while). However, my caution begins when the idea of pleasure is somehow employed to distance sexuality from theology. Perhaps it is wise and useful to speak of sex as normal or common – or even to say that, when it comes to violations of sexual morals, God is often more concerned with other sins (hypocrisy, economic sins, etc.). All that granted, I’d still like to maintain simply that if pleasure is something God planned to include in sex, it is necessarily theological. The common does not lose its commonality because it is theological – not unless you want to dichotomize nature and super-nature, that is. Yes, sex is common. It is imperfect. It is often unintentionally comedic. In married life, it happens often without much drama (how many Christian wives can attest to this?). But how does this normality divest sexual action of its inherent sacramentality? Paul implies that there is something unique about sex and sexual union (1 Cor 6, Eph 5), while at other times referring to sex almost as a chore (1 Cor 7:1-5). The sacramentality exists alongside the mundanity.