Richard Mouw describes this scene from the film Hardcore (1979) in his wonderful little book Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport. It’s a great read.
Someone passed this quote along to me the other day from a book review J. Greshem Machen wrote in the 1920’s. Still has something to say to us today perhaps.
The entire book is really based upon the pragmatist assumption that religion can be separated from theology and that a man can obtain the values of the religious life apart from the particular intellectual conception which he forms of his God. This assumption leads in the first place to an artificial treatment of history, which altogether fails to do justice to the real complexity of human life; and it leads, in the second place, and in particular, to the reconstruction, contrary to all evidence, of a primitive Gentile Christianity which shall exhibit just the type of nontheological religion which the modern pragmatist desires.
Peter Leithart posted a great review of J. Budziszewski’s The Line Through The Heart, a new work on natural law theory. Leithart is quite complementary in his review which concludes with the suggestion that natural law, even with all of Budziszewski’s qualifications, can’t achieve what many of its enthusiastic supporters think it can:
Paul says all know God and His requirements from creation, but J. Bud is right that we suppress, evade, rationalize, pretend, and can do that for so long that we virtually forget we’re evading. However that law is woven into our minds and hearts, it is woven differently from the way language, thought, creativity, and many other human qualities are woven. Somehow, it is possible to unravel knowledge of God and remain human, which must mean that it is woven differently…Let me make that point stronger, in a Hauerwasian direction. The universe has, I agree, a grain, a design given it by the Triune Creator, and we are to live in accord with that grain. But we discern that grain not from “unaided reason” (J. Bud hedges with “so-called unaided reason”) but in the light of Christ, by the Spirit, through the spectacles of Scripture. When we have the mind of Christ, we see how the world is to be, and how humans are to live, and we learn in turn that the world is not as it should be. To put it more strongly, provocatively: There is nothing bigger, more basic, more universal than Christ the Lord, the One by whom all things were made, the One in whom all things cohere. Christ must be given epistemological priority, and natural law theories, even of the best varieties, don’t honor that priority…This circles back to the practical point. If this argument is true, then the persuasiveness of natural law of J. Bud’s variety requires just as radical a conversion as the fundamentalist demands. It requires the same conversion.
After having studied Romans 14 this week in church, conduct in the midst of theological disputes and church conflict is fresh in my mind. Paul suggests that regarding food and calendar practices the Roman Christians all should “be fully convinced” of their position in their own minds (14:5) at the same time resisting the temptation to pass judgment on those with differing convictions (14:13) I began re-reading Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology this evening and came across some wonderfully relevant passages about the penultimate nature of our theological convictions and our confidence in a fallible church’s fidelity.
No structures of historical continuity merely as such can assure the integrity of witness to reality that is other than the transmitting group, at least if that witness is such as to require hermeneutical reflection. Thus neither Scripture nor creed nor liturgy nor teaching office, nor yet their ensemble, can as historical structures guarantee the fidelity of our proclamation and prayer to the apostolic witness. Affirmation that the church is still the church pledges the certainty of a historical continuity that no structures of historical continuity can make certain. This affirmation therefore reaches beyond its immediate object to be faith that God uses the church’s communal structures to preserve the gospel’s temporal self-identity and so also the temporal self-identity of the gospel’s community.
Invoking such an activity of God, the church speaks of the Spirit. Thus the church believes that her Scriptures are instruments of the Spirit in her life; that her dogmatic decisions may truly begin, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us”; and that ordination grants a “gift” of the Spirit to preserve continuity of the apostolic teaching. Faith that the church is still the church is faith in the Spirit’s presence and rule in and by the structures of the church’s historical continuity. Indeed, even the church’s recognition through the second century of who were and who were not apostles cannot be justified except by trust in the Spirit’s leading.
But if it is God the Spirit who sustains the gospel’s and so the church’s self-identity through time, then that identity cannot be mere historical continuity with the church’s past beginning. For the Spirit is precisely God as the power of the future, God as his own and our transforming outcome. If it is the Spirit who sustains the gospel’s and the church’s self-identity through time, then that identity is primarily anticipation of an end and just so perpetuation of a beginning, anticipation of the “eternal gospel” and just so reiteration of a historic message.
Therefore, until we have identified the particular deity of the Spirit that is, until we have the trinitarian interpretation of God more fully before us we cannot fully understand the church’s tradition, nor therefore Scriptural or creedal or liturgical or ministerial authority. [emphasis mine]
Recognizing that in the midst of our disagreements the Spirit is in our midst guarantees us two things. First, that all parties see through a glass darkly regardless of whatever partial truths are affirmed on either side of any given argument. Any truth confessed is a truth that is confessed on the way to a future which still awaits our arrival. Second, the Spirit’s presence is our guarantee that despite any and all falsehoods either party may hold, they hold them as member’s of a community not abandoned by the Spirit, and thus one that will be safely (if begrudgingly at times) led into all truth.
Were America’s founding fathers divinely inspired? Glenn Beck says yes. That’s an astounding claim. Especially when thrown out comprehensively. As a Christian I’d say the Apostle Paul was divinely inspired when he wrote the Epistle to the Romans, but not in everything he said or did. I watched this wondering what back meant. The other thing that was funny about this segment is the founders Beck points to in the picture to his left: Washington, Franklin and Samuel Adams. Now Samuel Adams was an orthodox New England Calvinist, but Washington and Franklin were both deists. While Washington attended Anglican services regularly, he never was confirmed and never took communion. This was a common practice among Anglicans with deistic sympathies and low christologies. His Freemasonry seems to have made him sympathetic to what we might call today religious pluralism. Franklin was an “out” deist who didn’t believe in the divinity of Christ, the resurrection or the doctrine of the Trinity. I wonder why Beck wouldn’t put up pictures of James Madison or John Witherspoon, both orthodox Calvinists, alongside Samuel Adams. All that being said, the theology of Washington and Franklin is not all that significant to me when evaluating their political achievements. They were brilliant, courageous, visionary men who deserve our gratitude and heart-felt respect. But why do they have to be divinely inspired? And would that make them authoritative sources for faith and life, which as an orthodox Christian I take Holy Scripture to be?
It’s funny, I am sitting in the lobby of Union Theological Seminary, having come up here from Princeton Theological Seminary, reading a reflection about theological study at Yale Divinity School in the early 80’s. In it Rusty Reno talks about the joys of discovering Michael Wyschogrod in his graduate student days:
We were all the more attracted to Wyschogrod because he spoke up for the authority of revelation when the modern Protestant tradition in which most of us had been raised had gravitated to the liberal theological project. Put simply, theological liberalism tries to distill essential, timeless teachings from the historical forms of traditional teaching, thus liberating a supposedly greater and more profound religious truth from the limitations of its historical, communally authoritative formulations and allowing for a more plastic, mobile, and critical relation to church teaching…We knew the liberal theological project had to be resisted. The church’s universal mission can tempt her to deracinate her own teachings. This temptation becomes all the more powerful in the modern era when an emerging secular culture begins to compete with the church for the intellectual loyalty of educated people. Feeling torn between two masters, modern Christians seek a third and higher set of principles, a view of Christian faith that allow us to manage the difficult relations between the doctrinal truths that church teaches and modern life.
Reno describes Wyschogrod as a Jewish Barthian. He’s not the first one to do so. But what he sees in Wyschogrod’s theology that in his mind Barth lacks is carnality:
The Body of Faith read like a Barthian “No!” to liberal theology, which had its own career in nineteenth and twentieth-century Judaism. It showed us that Jewish faith is rooted not in universalizing abstractions but in the concrete reality of the seed of Abraham and the particularity of God’s commandments, what he refers to as the “carnal election” of Israel. Wyschogrod points out that the Christian notion of the Incarnation implicit in the I am that Jesus pronounces plays a role similar to the Jewish doctrine of the election of Israel. Both say that God puts all his eggs in one basket, with Jews pointing to the Jewish people and Christians pointing to the Jewish body of Jesus on the cross. Both involve a “carnal election,” or, as he puts it elsewhere, a “carnal faith”–that line of biological descent, that man hanging on the cross…Carnal election, carnal faith–the formulations arrested us. Most of us had decided to study at Yale because the program in theology participated in the Barthian “No!” to liberal Protestant theology. Yet, for all the influence Barth exerted, in retrospect I can see that we were vaguely dissatisfied with Barthian theology. His theology certainly reflected an intense and rich affirmation of that man hanging on the cross, but there was something troublingly thin about Barth’s undoubtedly impressive achievement. He once said of Schleiermacher that the great founder of modern liberal theology tried to talk about God by talking about man in a loud voice. Perhaps we were unconsciously suspicious that Barth tried to talk about God by talking about theology in a loud voice. In a word, Barth’s voice seemed to lack “carnality.”
I might want to quibble with Rusty’s assessment of Barth, but the piece made me want to go re-read Wyschogrod.
At our church’s weekly bible study we were discussing the significance of the Resurrection. It was a great conversation. I wish I had re-read a piece by Richard Gaffin beforehand. Here’s a nice passage from his essay entitled “Redemption and Resurrection”. Particularly nice is Gaffin’s emphasis that Christ didn’t rise but was raised from the dead:
In view, further, is Christ’s resurrection as an innately eschatological event. In fact, as much as any, it is the key inaugurating event of eschatology, the dawn of the new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15), the arrival of the age to come (Rom. 12:2; Gal. 1:4). It is not an isolated event in the past, but, in having occurred in the past, it belongs to the future consummation and from that future has entered history. In Christ’s resurrection the resurrection-harvest at the end of history is already visible. Pressed, if present, say, at a modern-day prophecy conference, as to when the event of bodily resurrection for believers will take place, the first thing the apostle would probably want to say is, it has already begun!
The emphasis on Christ as the first-fruits of resurrection points out that, for Paul, the primary significance of Christ’s resurrection lies in what he and believers have in common, not in the profound difference between them; the accent falls not on his true deity but on his genuine humanity. The Resurrection, as we will presently note in more detail, is not so much an especially evident display or powerful proof of Christ’s divine nature as it is the powerful transformation of his human nature.
This emphasis is confirmed in an implicit but pervasive fashion by Paul’s numerous references, without elaboration, to the simple fact of the Resurrection [4]. These undeveloped statements display a consistent, unmistakable pattern: 1) God in his specific identity as the Father raises Jesus from the dead (Gal. 1:1, 2) Jesus is passive in his resurrection. This viewpoint is held without exception, so far as I can see. Nowhere does Paul teach that Christ was active in or contributed to his resurrection, much less that he raised himself; Jesus did not rise, but was raised from the dead. The stress everywhere is on the creative power and action of the Father, of which Christ is the recipient.
I was re-reading a piece by Peter Leithart on the Trinity and sacramental theology when I came across this quote:
Reformed theology has never been able to fit sacramental theology convincingly into its overall system. Even when the importance of the sacraments has been affirmed, it has often taken the form of concession rather than implication: In spite of who God is, and in spite of his sovereign distribution of grace in salvation, and in spite of his normal way of operating, God cdso communicates his presence to his people in signs and seals.
-Peter Leithart, “Framing” Sacramental Theology: Trinity and Symbol, WJT (62) 2000
This is simple, but pretty good.