Congar and sola scriptura

Yves Congar’s rejection of what he thought of as sola Scriptura looks like a consequence of an eschatologically-realized ecclesiology. Both Congar and the Reformed tradition would affirm the church’s union and participation with Christ. Congar, however, has joined the church to Christ so closely that there appears to be little room for differentiated statuses. Webster points out that Congar’s use of the term “covenant” should allow for the elective condescension of Christ toward His Church. Congar appears to neglect the possibility that even as Christ gives Himself to the church, He remains distinct – and authoritative in se.

We’re told that the church will one day judge angels. This plenitude of power is an eschatological promise, one in which we might partake in part even now. And yet, any such participation occurs only through the plenitude of authority which already resides in Christ. In this respect, even in His union with His body the church, Christ is in some sense an alien authority. The church cannot assimilate Him. The perfect union with Christ in the eschaton is right now a proleptic act. And the fact that He has chosen to join Himself to the church is precisely the mark of unmerited and surprising grace.

Survivors of the nations

I’m not usually a fan of posting long quotes on the blog (although I have sinned after this manner several times before). However, I came across this passage from Jeffrey Stout’s 2006 article, “Survivors of the Nations” (SJT, 59:2), and it seemed like an excellent demonstration of the fundamental divide between the neo-traditionalists and their critics. It also reminded me of the debate earlier this year between the Front Porch Republic and the Postmodern Conservative.

Writes Stout:

When After Virtue and The Peaceable Kingdom appeared, also in the early 1980s, it became clear to me why my editors were somewhat less enthusiastic about my conclusions than I expected them to be. MacIntyre and Hauerwas now sometimes spoke as if liberal modernity essentially consisted in a rejection of tradition, but their main theme was that liberalism is simply mistaken in its assumption that political life can be conducted rationally and virtuously without a prior agreement on the telos of human life. To my surprise, they sometimes referred tome as a liberal, although to their credit theymade clear that I did not reject reliance on tradition as such. At first, I was prepared to see their modernity–tradition dichotomy and their caricature of liberalism as provocative rhetorical gestures, justified by the need to get a complacent audience thinking. It was reassuring that MacIntyre and Hauerwas were sometimeswilling to take back or qualify some of the claims I found dubious. I defended them against scholars who ignored the fine print. It has always been possible to interpret their views in the charitable way David Fergusson does. All you have to do is play down the initially shocking bits while playing up the qualifications. As time went on, however, I came to think that their rhetoric was actually making a bad situation worse. Let me explain how I reached this conclusion.

We survivors of the nations – survivors of the injustices that nations have visited on the poor, on slaves and their descendants, on resident aliens, and on other nations – are also citizens of nations. As such, we bear responsibility for the commissions and omissions those injustices involve, for healing the wounds they have caused, and for loosing the bonds of oppression they have imposed. The responsibility weighs on us.Whose burden would not be lighter without it? One important social trend in our period is a retreat from the responsibilities and disappointments of citizenship into families, friendships, local communities, lifestyle enclaves and religious communions. The retreat is understandable, because the latter relationships all hold out the promise of solace, meaning and a sense of agency to the people involved in them. These relationships are not obviously corrupted by power and money in the ways that the political economies of nation-states are, and they do not typically implicate us in horrendous evils. As identification with the civic nation weakens, however, a citizenry’s sense of responsibility for the behavior of the state diminishes. The role of the citizen atrophies, thus leaving the enormous power of the state in the hands of an elite that can operate with impunity.

In my view, the demise of citizenship, though well under way, is not complete, so people who care about justice still have reason to resist it. MacIntyre and Hauerwas, however, consider it a fait accompli. The demise of citizenship, as they see it, is a byproduct of the fragmentation of ethical discourse in the modern period. Lacking agreement on the telos of human life, citizens are unable to resolve their differences through an exchange of reasons. Public discussion thus becomes a mask for the assertion of arbitrary preferences. If shared ethical deliberation in religiously diverse societies is a sham, there is no point in trying to revive a culture of citizenship in the hope of holding nation-states accountable. The only sensible course is to devote one’s energy to ‘the construction of local forms of community’ within which the tradition of the virtues might survive the ‘new dark ages which are already upon us’.

Items of note (11/20/09)

• Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas debate secularity.
• Brad Littlejohn on capitalism and private property.
• Peter Leithart on why Barth needs de Lubac (although a forthcoming book by Gerald McKenny suggests that this reading of Barth isn’t entirely accurate).
• Halden Doerge on Moltmann and the eschatological unrest of the church.

Calvin’s early view of baptism

In his early writings, Calvin shared the early apophatic tendencies of his fellow reformers in Zurich and Strasbourg. While the essential rite remained even within the Roman ritual, Calvin stressed the necessity to “free the rite from the elaborate anointing with oil and chrism, the consecration of the font, and the repeated exorcisms… so that the full force of the baptismal sign of washing might appear in all simplicity and directness.”

At the same time, Calvin’s theology of baptism centered on the Augustinian paradigm of the outward sign and the spiritual promise contained therein. Following in the wake of the first reforms of Zurich and Strasbourg, Calvin tends to side with Bucer’s emphasis on the promise and confirmation given in baptism – that is, baptism as a sort of dramatic representation of the Spirit’s inner work. There is a notable absence of Zwinglian language in Calvin’s earlier definitions of the sacraments. As John Riggs points out, the earlier editions of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion do not contain a notion of baptism as a human (ecclesial) pledge. Rather, baptism is the “true sign” of an inner reality. Bryan Spinks argues that an implicit critique of Zwingli resides in Calvin’s polemic against those who “dared to write that baptism is nothing but a token and mark by which we confess our religion before men, as soldiers bear the insignia of their commander as a mark of their profession.”

All these early reforms were animated to varying degrees by the Augustinian paradigm. However, as long as Rome remained the primary rival, the theological emphasis was on the inner reality, rather than the outward sign. This is true of Bucer in the 1520s, and doubly true of Zwingli – who frees the outward pledge from any causal connection with the inner grace. The rise of the Anabaptist party would alter the terms of the debate. While Zwingli’s views remained generally consistent (with the exception of the hardening of his position on infant baptism) , Bucer’s theology of baptism would be significantly altered in order to defend against the new attacks on the unity of the inner reality and outward sign. Calvin’s theology would also adapt to the new rival theology, but in a slightly different direction. Rather than return to an emphasis on the objectivity of the rite, Calvin would develop his theology of the visible church, and in doing so, adopt some of the Zwinglian language he had formerly disavowed.

Anabaptism and early Reformed baptism

Hughes Oliphant Old argues that the rise of the Anabaptists forced the early reformers to fill out their own baptismal theologies. While early on, the focus had been on the superstitious accretions of late medieval practice, by the 1530s, there was an effort to reinforce the essential validity that remained at the heart of the Christian rite of baptism. Even in their most aggressive interrogations of perceived superstitions, they were still adamant to retain continuity with the essential ancient – and medieval – baptismal rite.

Bucer is illustrative of this shift. Like both Luther and Zwingli, his early efforts were directed toward the proper appropriation of the sacrament, without superstition or a notion of acquisition of merit through the elements. However, by the 1530s Bucer was actively debating various Anabaptists, perhaps most importantly, Bernard Rothmann of Munster. In response to claims of Rothmann and others, Bucer began to emphasize the Augustinian idea that the outward sign was efficacious precisely because it was the manifestation of divine grace. His polemic against the Catholics remained: the additional rituals of Rome were invalid because they were not instituted by God. At the same time, the true rite of baptism, the “washing of grace,” actually accomplishes something. He argued in a letter addressed to the churches of Munster, “our regeneration and our renewal through the Holy Spirit are offer and showed us, revealed through words and washing in water.” In his 1534 catechism, he states, “In and with these visible signs God delivers and give over his invisible and hidden grace, and the redemption in Christ.” While a decade earlier, Bucer had placed a wide gap between the poles of inner grace and outward sign, his interaction with the Anabaptists effected a much closer correlation between the two. The sacrament must be still be accompanied by faith to attain its proper end, but Bucer’s emphasis is now on the instrumentality of the rite itself. Baptism could “save” because the inner grace was inhered in the dramatic rite. As John Riggs argues, “When Bucer no longer needed to address the issue of proper appropriation and discuss what the sacrament did not do, he stood with the long tradition of sacramental validity and asserted that divine grace inhered to the external sign.”

In Strasbourg, these developments were reflected in a change of ritual language. Tertullian’s definition of sacramentum as public pledge had been influential – to the greatest extent with Zwingli. Bucer had initially adopted similar language, but by the mid-1530s, he was referring to the sacrament conceptually as a mysterion.  What is significant about this shift of paradigm is the way in which baptism now becomes more than public profession (although this element still remains). Rather, the mystery of what is conferred spiritually through an outward act becomes the central definition of baptism. In the 1534 catechism, Bucer writes that the outer words and signs of baptism “are called sacraments and mysteria, holy secrets: while one thing happens inwardly through the power of Christ, another thing appears and happens outwardly in the ministry of the church.”  Bryan Spinks points out that around this time, Bucer began attributing to the baptismal rite what he had previously ascribed only to the inner workings of the Spirit. In 1536, he wrote: “The sacraments, which are as it were visible gospels, instituted by Christ the Lord, so that he may communicate his redemption to us through them. Thus it is quite clear that they are in a certain way instruments and channels of the Spirit and of his grace.” This language of instrumentality may stand out to the modern Reformed community, which is more hesitant to ascribe such objectivity to the rite itself. However, for Bucer, it must be remembered that baptism has a deep referent to promise of future sanctification. What God has started in the rite of baptism, He will complete through the renewal of lived faith. Nothing resides in human hands.

Hays on the meaning of marriage

In The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Richard Hays argues that an easy acceptance and normalization of divorce tells a rival story to the divine story of God and His people. The rejection of divorce, and the various rules surrounding that rejection, is the result of a greater narrative. God hates divorce because marriage is a microcosm of spiritual fidelity. So, contrary to certain traditional accounts, when Paul deals with the theology of marriage in Ephesians, the emphasis is not on indissolubility, but instead moves toward the perfect care and nourishment which typify Christ’s love for the Church.

Marriage therefore takes on an eschatological nature. It is a “figurative sign of the longed-for eschatological union of Christ and the church.” And it is in this context, in this story, that it is very difficult to read marriage as something “ephemeral.” In other words, if marriage is unavoidably symbolic and eschatological, then what we say about divorce reflects back on the greater narrative.

The next question, then, is whether we can even apply such a model for the brokenness that we witness or perhaps experience every day. As Hays attempts to show in his exegetical work, the interpretation of Jesus’ commands regarding divorce acquired various glosses over time and in different communities. Paul himself interestingly comes right out to say that his “Pauline exception” to divorce did not originate with Christ. Particular sets of circumstances required the church to reformulate and adapt with a message appropriate for a particular place and people. Hays grants this much (“it is undeniable that we see here a process of adaptation, in which Jesus’ unconditional prohibition of divorce is applied and qualified in the interest of practicability.”) However, crucially, Hays still wants to affirm that the later adaptations follow by implication. There is, he says, a certain “trajectory” of the story, from Genesis through Hosea to Jesus and the Church. Pastoral improvisation is not only allowable, but necessary, to respond to the specific brokenness that we experience in the Church.

But how? Hays argues that the appeal to experience is very often used to legitimate what is often the easy accommodation to whatever cultural trends are predominant. Should we therefore “improvise” our ecclesial response, as Bishop Spong would want, to bless the dissolution of a marriage now typified by “an increasing inability to communicate,” or one in which the “potential for [quality of] life” is diminished? Hays would argue no, but not perhaps for the reasons we would expect.

Hays proposes that an ethic can be read through various hermeneutic lenses (rule-based, principle-based, affection-based, and symbol-based). In response to Bishop Spong, one might expect Hays to fall back on the explicit rules given by Jesus or by Paul. But instead, he appeals almost beyond them to the narrative framework of the entire Christian tradition (in canon and ecclesial teaching). Essentially, he argues that if we were to accept Spong’s take on divorce, we would have to change fundamentally the story we tell not only about marriage, but about redemption, about the nature of divine forgiveness, and about God’s election of sinners. What we do now testifies to what we believe God has done. So, yes, revisions are necessary, but must not damage the eschatological direction of the overarching story.

Notre Dame conference

Just a quick headline for the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture conference next week: The Summons of Freedom. For me, it serves as a sort of pretty fair consolation prize after not being able to attend the AAR meeting this weekend in Montreal. Some of the panels and lectures look interesting enough, including:

Friday, November 13

Fictional Explorations

• Walker Percy and the Pursuit of Happiness (Elizabeth Amato, Baylor)
• All Are Responsible for All: Flannery O’Connor, Fyodor Dostoevsky and a Vision of the Common Good (Richard Corneil, St. Peter’s Seminary)
• The End of “The End of the Affair” by Graham Greene (Janet McCann, Texas A&M)

Augustinian Themes

• Augustine’s Account of the ‘Passions,’ and its Relation to Stoic Virtue Ethics (Sarah Byers, Boston College)
• Augustine on Christian Civic Virtue in Bad Regimes (Daniel Burns, Boston College)
• Dying we live: MacIntyre, Narrative Unity and Augustine (David DiQuattro, Grove City College)

Divorce as Fracture of the Common Good: Ingmar Bergman on Guilt, Art, and Confession
— Thomas Hibbs, Baylor

Saturday, November 14

Pope Benedict on Modernity

• The Middle Way: How Caritas in Veritate Illuminates Catholic Social Teaching (Joseph Brutto, Notre Dame)
• A Worldview in Three Acts: Pope Benedict’s ministry to Advanced Modernity in his Encyclicals (Ashleen Kelly, Notre Dame)
• Pope Benedict XVI’s Critique of Modernity (James Lee, Notre Dame)

Wendell Berry: A Man for All Seasons

• Civic Lessons from Port William, Kentucky: Wendell Berry’s Imaginative World of ‘Membership’ (Michael Stevens, Cornerstone University)
• The Place of Knowing: Wendell Berry and the Epistemology of Agrarianism (Mark Mitchell, Patrick Henry College)
• Healing the Hidden Wound: The Theology of the Body in Wendell Berry’s Remembering (Nathan Schlueter, Hillsdale College)
• Gratitude as a Virtue in Wendell Berry (Matt Bonzo, Cornerstone University)

Panel Discussion: Front Porch Republic: The Places of Virtue

• James Matthew Wilson, Villanova University
• Jason Peters, Augustana College
• Patrick Deneen, Georgetown University
  Chair: Philip Bess, University of Notre Dame

Panel Discussion: Living Well With Modernity: Foundations of Moral Thought in the Modern Period

• Charles Taylor’s ‘Two Cheers’ for Modernity (William English, Duke)
• Three Waves and the Longer Cycle of Decline: Leo Strauss and Bernard Lonergan on Modernity (Thomas Harmon, Ave Maria University)
• Freedom and Reason in Later Medieval Philosophy (Brendan Palla, Fordham University)
  Chair: Garey Spradley, Grove City College

Items of note (11/6/09)

• Halden sets Leithart against Zizioulas
• Brad Littlejohn goes anarchist on Caritas in Veritate (on Guy Fawkes Day, no less)
• New Testament SBL papers are online
• Jamie Smith apparently loves cheese almost as much as I do
• Peter Lawler on post-Christianity and DB Hart
• Kyle Strobel on Calvin and baptism
• Friday audio: Frightened Rabbit’s “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” [audio:http://www.theopolitical.com/data/Swim_Until.mp3]

Herdt on Calvinist Virtue

In her book, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices, Jennifer Herdt has a fascinating section on the Reformed approach to the acquisition of virtue, and the suspicion of false virtue. Luther had blatantly rejected the idea of mimetic virtue, which he thought necessarily manifested a kind of works-righteousness. Any seeming acquisition of virtue via human agency was actually a sneaky form of vice. Within the Reformed tradition, Herdt supposes, we might expect to see at least partial recovery of mimetic virtue. Calvinism, after all, famously teaches the third use of the law (although perhaps not as clearly in the 21st century), by which Christians can see and respond through grace to the right virtues given to us in Scripture. And in fact, in some ways, Calvinists did manifest a more common, or civic, idea of virtue — specifically in the political sphere, where they animated reforms in education, health care, poor laws, political theory, and so on.

However, Herdt argues that Calvinism harbored an even more paralyzing instability concerning mimetic virtue than did Lutheranism. While Calvin stressed the necessity to imitate Christ, and did not seem as concerned as Luther with the self-deluded qualities of virtue, he did emphasize the danger of the faithful failing to manifest their salvation in true inward faith. Both strands of reformation thought attempt to point us away from our own works, but the Calvinist tradition in particular stressed the necessity of a personal assurance of salvation — for salvation.

This is something I’ve always been puzzled by. For all the apparent consolation contained in the doctrine of the preservatation of the saints, the emphasis on the necessity for that individual consciousness (what the WCF calls the “infallible assurance of faith”) has always seemed dangerously vague. Calvin prefers to place the burden on the consciousness of salvation over and against the mimetic virtue. Herdt argues that this point may be Calvin’s most egregious departure from Augustine. In his attempt to keep justification categorically distinct from sanctification, Calvin surprisingly adopts a rather high view of the human ability to discern the full potential of grace. Augustine had rather argued that we can only recognize grace “imperfectly and retrospectively.” There is an eschatological humility in Augustine which Calvin seems ready to dispense with. This Calvinist divide of course only grew wider with the Puritans, and continues in large part to the present day. Calvinists are still — arguably more than any other tradition — concerned with questions like “Who am, really? Am I, or am I not, one of the elect?” It’s a strange and unsatisfying approximation of the Pauline warning to work out salvation in fear and trembling.