Kathryn Tanner on the divine image

If much of contemporary theology can be marked by its emphasis on the immanent, the relational, and the human as the starting point for discussion, Tanner’s Christ the Key is strikingly counter-intuitive. Rather than begin with “well defined and neatly bounded characteristics” that distinguish humanity from God and other creatures, Tanner outlines her project as one that “turns attention initially away from the human altogether.” Her theological arc instead proceeds first from a concentrated Christological reading of creation. From this point, her theology returns to human beings by way of realizing the “unbounded” quality Christ’s own humanity, thereby opening us to the transformation realized in Christ’s own incarnation and ascension. Our identity, our divine image, and our telos are real in and through the second person of the trinity, as she summarizes: “God wants to give us the fullness of God’s own life through the closest possible relationship with us as that comes to completion in Christ.”

Having Christ as the total means for our transformation places central importance on the humanity of Jesus. As true God and true Man, the person of Jesus is the paradigm for the transformation of the rest of the human race. Just as the humanity of Christ is itself “shaped and re-formed according to the character of the Word,” so human nature is re-modeled after the divine image “so as to become humanly perfect.” Jesus becomes the “new man,” giving Himself to the rest of humanity while still “fully oriented without fail to the God he worships and serves.” Crucially, Tanner maintains that the transformation of human nature is not according to “the divine image per se but specifically human perfection.” The relation of the human to the divine is still “a dim analogue of divinity.” We participate in the divine image through, and only through, Christ. We cannot become the image ourselves; there is in this sense no “ontological continuum” between Creator and creation. Yet, at the same time, because the Word has become flesh, it has become “proper” to us, despite the fact that we remain human in our nature. We are conformed to the imago Christi such that, even in our humanity, we now “have a nature that imitates God only by not having, one might say, a clearly delimited nature.” While every other creature has ordered limits, fulfilling a specific role to the glory of God, humans participate in the divine image through an excessive, imaginative love for the good, the unlimited, and the eternal.

Puritan abolitionists

The jeremiad didn’t die after the decline of Puritan Christendom. If anything, the long-anticipated declension seemed to cause an expansion of prophetic discourse to an even wider range of social concerns. Abolitionism spread among the latter day Puritans even as they were coming to terms with the loss of their “sacred canopy.” The black Congregationalist minister Samuel Ringgold Ward noted that his white congregation in the early 19^th century lived “apart from the allurements and deceptions” of fashionable society. These “God-fearing descendants of New England Puritans … felt at liberty to hear, judge, and determine for themselves, and to act in accordance with what the Bible, as they understood it, demanded of them.”Even as these latter-day Puritans now found themselves divested of hegemonic influence in the new republic, they remained committed to democratic participation and reform – especially in the anti-slavery opinions of Edwards’ heirs. In his book, Perfectionist Politics, Douglas Strong notes that the abolitionist evangelicals charted a “middle course” between the radicalism of William Lloyd Garrison and the ineffectual institutionalism of other Christians.

The underside of the Puritan covenant

On an October evening in 1727, a violent earthquake was felt throughout the New England colonies. The next day, as Puritan churches convened for services of fasting and prayer, Jonathan Edwards – only recently ordained as the young minister of Northampton, Massachusetts – took to his pulpit and preached from the book of Jonah on the text: “And God saw their works that they turned from their evil way, and God repented of the evil that he had said he would do unto them and he did it not.” Edwards’ exhortation was pointed: the people of New England had brought themselves to the brink of national judgment, as evidenced in “extraordinary” providential displays of “strange sights in the heavens, and sometimes by earthquakes.” This initial sign was only a warning of what might come. While divine mercy was longsuffering toward erring individuals, the corporate sins of impiety and injustice were so not easily pardoned, since “God is more strict in punishing of a wicked people in this world than a wicked person.” The material blessings which had attended the Puritans’ “special commission” were strictly conditional, pending the general faithfulness of the nation as a whole.

Edwards’ jeremiad intriguingly invokes a form of civic perfectionism. His predecessors in the Reformed tradition were generally reliant on provincial and feudal sponsorship, and often could not presume the continued support of the political authorities. However, the American Puritans’ situation was markedly different: formal legitimacy no longer needed to be pursued or contested. For the Puritans, the New England charter contained the promise for an entirely new sort of civil society. In the New World, it was no longer necessary to answer a pre-existing political and religious hierarchy; there was no immediate kingdom or bishopric with claims to inherent privilege. Formal political legitimacy was now implicitly granted; the challenge was now how to vindicate that privilege morally and theologically before the watching world. The project therefore required consistent popular faithfulness toward the terms of covenant virtue.

Edwards’ use of the jeremiad reflects the immediate concerns of the Puritan civic tradition. It was not that the American jeremiad was emblematic of some congratulatory optimism; rather, there appears to be a very real fear that project would fail, despite its idealistic foundations. While there were provisions for temporal blessing should the covenanted people act faithfully, the rhetorical weight is placed precisely on the potential that the people would fail to live up the conditions of the “special commission.” Further, the “sins” that threatened the stability of this society were not arbitrary or abstract – they concerned injustice, libel, commercial greed, drunkenness, and lack of concern for the poor. The irony of New England’s perceived chosen status was that the Puritans saw themselves as the most imperiled of all nations. With the stakes as high as they were, the conditions for national blessing made it possible – even necessary – for a prophetic “underside.”

Wheaton vs. Louisville

I attended Wheaton College’s N.T. Wright conference this past week, and had a great time visiting my old west suburban backyard. Wheaton put on a good show, with a great supporting cast to back up the imposing performances of the bishop from Durham. Only side-effect: after hanging out with a number of Canadian Reformed ministers over the long weekend, I began to slip “eh” onto the end of my increasingly Kuyperian-inflected sentences.

Somehow, I was unaware until a few days ago that another noteworthy conference was underway at the very same time down in Louisville. Names such as Sproul, MacArthur, Duncan, Mohler, Piper, put together what I think may have been the first comprehensive assembly of neo-Reformed figureheads. Over at Christianity Today, Brett McCracken writes about his experience last week attending both events. The whole review is worth a read. (McCracken is right to highlight Vanhoozer’s talk, which was one of the best parts of the weekend for me.)

For the T4G folks, protecting disputed doctrines against heresy is where good theology is born. Clear thinking comes from friction and protestation, from Hegelian dialectics (R.C. Sproul spoke on this), but not from compromise. The Patristic Fathers got it right whenever they were ironing out disputed doctrines and fighting against heresy, said Ligon Duncan in his talk. But on matters that were not disputed, he said, their thought sometimes got muddled up.

The exact opposite point was made at the Wheaton Conference by Kevin Vanhoozer, professor of systematic theology at Wheaton, who suggested that theologians like Wright (and, presumably Christians in general) are more often correct in matters they collectively affirm than in matters they dispute. This statement reflects the contrasting spirit of the Wheaton Conference as regards unity: It’s what we affirmthat matters. Are we on the same page on the core issues? Can we agree on the claims of the creeds? Yes? Then let’s hash out the details of theological minutia (which is definitely important) in a spirited, friendly debate as the people of God exercising the renewal of our minds (Romans 12:2).

Conversions in the secular age

The disenchanted world ostensibly closes off humanity from the outside permeations of black magic and demonic spirits. Yet, as Charles Taylor notes in A Secular Age, even this new world is not immune to an oppressive sense of darkness. Even after we have exorcised the vestiges of the pre-modern, we still experience “unguarded moments when we can feel the immense weight of suffering” in our world (681). The poignancy of violence and loss can still “get to us” in our modern vulnerability. When “self-stabilizing” society disintegrates into violence, some may choose to cope by disengaging from the suffering (682, 690). Perhaps empathy is not only futile, but counterproductive (697).

For Taylor, this is an unsatisfying reaction, akin to the slogan of Dostoevsky’s revolutionaries, “no one is to blame.” The disquiet is deeply unsettling for some who inhabit the immanent frame. From among these, Taylor identifies a class of individual who breaks out of exclusive immanency in a “conversion” experience. The moment of “enlightenment,” if we can call it that, varies by person. For some (Walker Percy) it is a shift of self-understanding that can take account of humanity’s perilous middle space between the animal and the divine (731). In general, the new perspective of the convert goes “beyond the limits” of the older immanent frame, occasionally requiring the invention of a “new language or literary style” (732). The break with immanency, however, does not leave the natural world behind, but rather “includes it while disrupting it.” There is the sense of relation between the immanent order and the higher order – of which conversion offers an inconclusive foretaste. Meaning must lie somewhere within the regnant order.

If conversion implies some break, Taylor recognizes the potential for a reactionary alienation from the immanent world. The nostalgic sense that we have somehow lost “a really Christian order” tends to collapse the tension between the higher order and the imperfections of social life. If it is not possible to live in the old world (as it is imagined), a feeling of alienation from the present order provides an easy retreat. Taylor makes to avoid this mistake by reaffirming the value of modern civilization. The converted prophet need not stand totally on the outside of the immanent order; she may instead stand when necessary as “modern civilization’s ‘loyal opposition’” (745). Implied is the notion that conversion can afford to deny the “illusory totality” of exclusive humanism, even as it resists its own totalizing inclinations. Rather than maintain sole citizenship in the present age, Christian may begin listening “for a voice which we could never have assumed ourselves, whose tone might have been forever unknown to us if we hadn’t strained to understand it” (754). The conversation of Christian faith runs over centuries, and we are now in the position to commence the messy task of working through that long tradition, even as we surrender any easy access to timeless, propositional faith. This project should even open Christians up to the complex motives and contributions of the modern age. The “simple opposition” of contemporary polemics – on both the “modern pagan” and Christian sides – fails to take account of the complex situation (771).

Taylor is conscious of the necessary tensions in what we might call his conversion “imaginary.” By straddling two worlds, and denying ultimacy to each, the converted individual must somehow keep these cross pressures at bay while maintaining a dynamic space for agape and hope.  One imagines that this middle ground provides “space” which is both participatory and also non-ultimate. There is still a “structure of ambivalence” (cf. Eddie Glaude, Exodus, 33). The tensions of conversion remind us that modernity is worth our time and effort, and yet is not the end-game. The modern fears and appearances of false hope are not eradicated by conversion. Yet, while those fears remain immanent, we are now conceptually free to admit the half-glanced intrusion of some deeper reality. This suggests the conditions to engage society while not investing our last hope in something exclusively immediate (and so open up those moments of ultimate despair, as in Percy’s “derangement” of modern humanity). It is possible for an individual in the middle space to participate in, and beckon to, the modern order precisely because he refuses to take that order at face-value. Rather, there is hint of a deeper strand of historical meaning, and perhaps the potential to course-correct the tragic trajectory of a suffering community.

Marsden on Fuller

George Marsden’s Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism functions as a sequel to his earlier work, Fundamentalism and American Culture, and impressively manages to make the history even more readable and compelling. By telling the story of mid-20^th century fundamentalism through the early history of Fuller Theological Seminary, George Marsden deftly integrates a broad thematic narrative with a more intimate account of personal and institutional dynamics.

Drawing on a vast catalog of personal correspondence, institutional records, and first-hand interviews, Marsden assembles a wide variety of characters within the fledgling fundamentalist movement. As conservatives emerged from the modernist battles of the 1920s and 1930s, new theological trenches began to form almost immediately within the movement’s own ranks. While some elements of fundamentalism were characterized by the populist anti-intellectualism of preachers like Billy Sunday, there was still a strong influence carrying over from the Old School Princeton tradition. This largely Presbyterian element was itself unable to agree on a unified stance toward the mainstream, with some more separatist figures insisting on a total break with the old institutions “corrupted” by modernism. In response to the exile from the mainline, fundamentalists began to push for new representative institutions of their own, set up to rival their modernist counterparts.

Fuller Seminary was formed out of this animated milieu. The alliance of the radio-evangelist Charles Fuller and the erudite Harold Ockenga typified the combination of populist and intellectual styles within the early movement. After its founding in 1947, Fuller Seminary worked to assemble a faculty of the best and brightest evangelical minds. Intriguingly, Marsden’s narrative highlights the ways in which the seminary was keen to associate itself with the prestigious Princeton tradition. Even as the conservatives fought off the influence of the mainline, they sought to establish a basis for respectable evangelical scholarship by implying continuity with an older Reformed identity.

The tensions between the populist and more intellectual elements continued to grow, particularly as the line between fundamentalism and new evangelicalism became more definitive. As the rhetoric of separatist fundamentalists like Carl McIntyre began to heat up, the divisions within the seminary became harder to ignore. While Ockenga took up the defense against the separatists, more pragmatic, financial concerns further complicated the issue. The perceived influence of neo-orthodoxy made it even harder more some of the more progressive faculty to escape suspicion. The debates over biblical inerrancy and the future of the institution came to a boiling point in early 1960s. The new presidency of David Hubbard, contentiously inaugurated in 1963, marked a turn toward a more “open” evangelicalism, away from fundamentalism and also aspects of the Princeton tradition.

Marsden is particularly fascinating and provocative in his recognition of the echoes of the 19^th century Old School and New Light debates in Fuller’s history. His choice of title, Reforming Fundamentalism, seems to play with this allusion, demonstrating how older controversies continued to influence 20^th century approaches to doctrinal identity. In many ways, both sides of the mid-century debates at Fuller comprised an evangelical recapitulation (though perhaps not a resolution) of the residual tensions of an older tradition.

Taylor’s pressures of belief

In the final part to A Secular Age, Taylor sets about reframing a number of his previous leitmotifs –exclusive humanism, the modern moral order, cosmic order versus natural universe, disenchantment, and the Reform emphasis on the ordinary, among others. While the preceding sections brought the historical narrative up to the modern age, Taylor now turns his detailed and discursive final chapters to address the question of the spiritual setting of our present day.

As he argued previously, we have arrived historically at a particular social imaginary, a sensed context in which we develop our beliefs about morality, relationality, and the meaning of life itself. The old enchanted world of the porous self gradually gave way to an immanent frame of belief and self-conceptuality, making it possible – perhaps likely – for moderns to conceive of a universe without God. Yet, as Taylor argued earlier, “exclusive humanism wasn’t just something we fell into, once the old myths dissolved” (255). Rather, that immanent imaginary was conceived and nourished within a fundamentally religious context, with inherent religious motives. And contrary to the subtraction thesis, a remnant transcendence may persist even now within the immanent frame. This frame can remain open to some, and closed to others (544-5). While some adherents of the “closed world structure” portray religion as a modern anachronism (561), many modern varieties of belief and faith remain quite prevalent. The genealogy of exclusive secularism is itself suggestive of particular Reform and evangelical elements (564). In short, “we are not necessarily as ‘modern’ as we think we are” (546).

Taylor suggests that there is, in fact, “the possibility that Western modernity might be sustained by its own original spiritual vision” (572). This is a rather remarkable achievement in its own right. The prevalence of natural science and materialism (of even the reductionist variety) has not eradicated ethics, but offered an alternative account from within the new immanent frame (597). In this way, Taylor appears to make a particularly deft move, divesting “the secular” of the subtraction thesis of any ultimate function. Rather, reductionist materialism and exclusive humanism are beliefs within a socio-historical context. These “beliefs” therefore function relatively similar to other beliefs with a greater openness to transcendence, faith, and providence. The options are distinct, but rather equally tenable: “the culture of immanence itself leaves the choice open” (600).

By implication, Taylor wishes to demonstrate how both belief and ostensible unbelief share the same contextual stage, and therefore face the same ethical-dramatic conundrums. Both Christians and exclusive humanists may feel the same “cross pressures” of immanency and transcendence in the dilemmas of ordinary life, death, sexuality, sacrifice, and so on. There is equal opportunity for Nietzschean, materialist, and Christian alike to stumble through the ultimate answers – inevitably forced to some recourse of “belief.” And while each will formulate rival definitions of human fullness and ethical motivation (604), there remain common predispositions to humanistic wonder, to personal fulfillment, to utopian dreams (616). Taylor recognizes that this is no coincidence, since both believers and unbelievers “emerge from the same long process of Reform in Latin Christendom. We are brothers under the skin.” Speaking in Christian terms, Taylor goes so far as to suggest that elements of the post-Enlightenment immanent frame function providentially, by restoring “practical primacy of life” (637).

Christian faith itself, therefore, does not provide a static, all-encompassing “answer” to the modern dilemma; neither does exclusive humanism. Implicit in this affirmation is the warning against a turn back to the pre-modern status quo, with its own attendant problems (651). Nor should Christians adopt a reactionary emphasis on the transcendent at the expense of the human (cf. Nussbaum’s critique, 625ff). Doing so only reinforces the unbelief of some who reject Christianity because it denies “the joys of ordinary sensual, bodily existence in the name of illusory ideals of abstinence and renunciation” (627). In order to avoid this charge, faith must involve “rediscovery and affirmation of important human goods” (628). Present in Taylor’s open immanency is an appeal for a modern theological humanism. The ad intra of faith and transcendence must be attended by the ad extra of sacrifice and relationality. In the end, the Christian response to the modern dilemma cannot follow exclusive humanism in making human flourishing the ultimate goal: “There is a point in giving it all up, if one can contribute to repairing the breach with God” (655). The tension between the cross pressures of transcendence and humanism are in fact vitally necessary to the Christian consciousness. Even if a maximal answer to the dilemma is unobtainable, there is still hope that a non-reductive Christianity can provide an openness which may bear much fruit.

Democratic ethics

The ethical life of democracy is given its fullest apology in the third and final part of Democracy and Tradition. While criticisms are leveled at contractual liberalism and neo-traditionalism throughout the text, Stout saves his most constructive arguments for last. In many ways, this constructive project occupies a tenuous middle ground, and is appealing for perhaps that very reason. Stout argues for a pragmatism that is “modest” and ethical, and for a democratic polity that is both contextual and capable of forming virtue. Forgoing absolute egalitarianism, he proposes a democratic practice that is “relatively nondeferential” (212), and accepts a sort of “minimal realism” while denying that some explicit definition of truth is a necessary societal preservative (254, 257).

This move away from an ethical codex toward one of “discursive practices” (286) recalls Stout’s earlier appeal to the nuance required of a non-aristocratic approach to virtue and motivation – as seen in the move away from allegorical exempla in the writings of the essayists and humanists (167). However, this move need not – and should not – result in relativism or a complete antirealism (254). Stout even concedes the possibility of the equivalent use of “truth” (249). Rather, what he denies is not this theoretical sort of realism, but rather its claim for total explanatory ability. In brief, Stout’s pragmatism “prefers to travel light,” free of unwieldy metaphysical correlations which portray truth properties as if they were “furniture” in the natural world (254). Rather than look to metaphysics as a grounds for moral norms – which stand outside the “causal order,” according to Brandom – is it more useful to pursue normative “attitudes,” social habits which result in actual obligations and rights (275). Crucially, Stout’s pragmatism resists the inclination to doubt whether such socially-created norms “really” exist – since there is no explanatory use in appealing to a “more real” reality.

This socially-determinative approach to moral objectivity raises the question of whether democratic pragmatism inevitably leads to an authoritarian cultural homogenization via a “stream of mass entertainment, manipulative advertising, and political pandering” (281). If moral norms are explained entirely by social practice, what is to keep democracy from gradually adopting a “conformist type of sociality”? In response, Stout reemphasizes the individualist aspects of democratic tradition, which, in Whitman’s words, ward off an easy popular acquiescence to “crude, superstitious, and rotten” opinions. True democratic community can be defended against a homogenizing tendency by appealing to “substantive commitments to mutual respect, equal voice, and the value of critical discussion,” all of which must stand against conforming one’s commitments to the brute authority of majority opinion (281). Participation in this discussion is individualistic, but also contextualized by recognition of one’s own critical thoughts as dependent “on what is rational in my social situation” (304). At heart, Stout’s vision of democratic community is constituted by mutual responsibility toward one another in the “practice of exchanging reasons about ethical and political questions” (304). In this way, democratic virtue theorists “are anything but levelers” (283).

The constructive qualities of Stout’s democratic pragmatism contain an ironic theological appeal, even as they resist the temptation to identify any metaphysical telos. His presentation of “the ethical life of democracy” instills some hope that contemporary fragmentation and alienation are not irreversible aspects of political life; rather, a mutuality of shared and disputed concerns and commitments can provide for a virtue-forming civic society. One hopes that the suggestions for such a democratic moral society can sustain the weight of actual practice, as Stout himself would emphasize. The democratic history is complicated, however: Emerson’s support for the violence of John Brown seemingly stands at odds with Martin Luther King’s nonviolent resistance. Stout’s language of moderate perfectionism is more appealing that the some of the early excessive rhetoric of Emerson and Whitman; whether democratic discourse inclines toward moderate or excessive rhetoric is left in doubt.

One feature that may remain problematic for some of Stout’s Augustinian democrats is the emphasis on self-reliant privilege. For Stout, it is crucial that the social playground be cleared of bullies; no one should feel required to say “pretty please” or “I beg of you” (208). A theological humanist would agree concerning the desacralization of hierarchy. And yet, there is a certain discomfort with the emphasis on (earned) entitlement. Is it possible that amidst the polyphonic community of mutual reason-giving and respect there should be a general intonation of love? The addition need not be a mere theological addendum, since love appears to change the whole context of democratic inter-relationality. Love would seemingly make the implied language of gratitude (“pretty please”) and unmerited favor (“I beg of you”) possible while still divesting power of any ultimate hierocratic force. Perhaps a society of “relative non-deference” could be more adequately explained and even sustained by a society of ever-increasing mutual deference. One wonders whether the former option provides enough resistance to the kind of excess that appeared periodically in some of democracy’s earliest defenders. While pessimism is no proper alternative, there does seem to be some need for theological gravity when formulating the potential for democratic community.

Jonathan Edwards’ civic theology

Until recently, it was often accepted that Edwards had “very little” to say about Christian engagement in political life. Sidney Mead wrote in 1977 of Edwards as “a complete supernaturalist,” whereby his emphasis on the internal spirituality of the soul led to an “absolute separation of salvation from one’s life in the ‘natural world.’” As a result, argued Mead, Edwards isolated the regenerate mind in an “obscurantist citadel of euphoric and absolute assurance.” While other scholars offered more charitable analysis than this sharp-tongued disparagement, it was nevertheless common to view Edwards predominantly as a theologian concerned with matters of the heart. And certainly, the majority of critical texts focus on Edwards’ theology of the will, moral psychology, and his theological aesthetics.

However, as Harry Stout suggested some time ago, Edwards was still very much an active participant in the Reformed Puritan political heritage. Recent scholarly focus on his “occasional” sermons has shed new light on the ways in which Edwards employed more traditional language concerning the relation of the material circumstances of political society to the workings of providence. Gerald McDermott has argued strongly that Edwards can and should contribute to contemporary understandings of the Christian responsibility toward the civil community, while attempting to exonerate Edwards of the later excesses of American civil religion. In the process, McDermott not insignificantly prefers to write about Edwards’ “public theology” rather than his “political theology,” since the latter term implies “the politicization of religion.” The choice of terms has the additional benefit of distinguishing the individualistic aspects of Edwards’ public theology from the more communitarian intonations of “civil religion.”

While McDermott argues persuasively concerning Edwards’ stance toward civil religion, his choice of terms prioritizes the individual aspects of civil responsibility to the neglect of Edwards’ more traditional Reformed civic theology, which itself comprises both individual and corporate duties. For this reason, it seems that “civic theology” is a relatively more appropriate category in which to contextualize Edwards’ view of the Christian responsibility toward society as a whole. For Edwards, after all, there is properly no such as purely private religion; all internal religion (ad intra) must be externalized in true experience (ad extra). The distinction of civic and congregational theology therefore appears more fitting than one of public and private theology.