Staying Protestant?

R.C. or not R.C.? That is the question.

Protestants who don't ask themselves why they're not Catholic (or Orthodox) puzzle me; as do Catholics (or Orthodox) who don't seek to convert Protestants to their respective communions.

I once listened to a Peter Gomes sermon, Where Are the Protestants?, hoping for some light on this important question. What I got was a pleasant sermon illustration on ecumenism (competing church bells of Harvard ought ring in harmony, not discord), along with Gomes' curious assertion that to be Protestant is actually about protest itself. Aside from the fact that this definition carries little historical weight, one wonders why adherence to a Protestant church is necessary to continue that good work of protest. In fact, if Gomes is right, then those who convert to Catholicism or Orthodoxy are the most genuinely Protestant, protesting as they are Protestantism's reduction to mere protest.

Gomes is to be commended, however, for at least attempting to publicly answer the question of the day, on which many Protestants observe an uncomfortable silence; uncomfortable because so many bright and faithful Protestants are Protestant no more.

It is natural for a Protestant to appeal to Scripture in tackling the question, as Scripture - not personal autonomy or protest - was, believe it or not, the point of the Reformation. Might there be one particular Bible passage with the power to keep someone Protestant? C.S. Lewis (whose reflection on this subject are most profound), suggested John 20:21-22 was appropriate. I'll add a few more possibilities, provided no one accuse me of "prooftexting" as a shortcut to thought. It this case the verses are an encapsulation of much (perhaps too much) thought.

1. 1 Cor. 7:20. Self explanatory, and by far the cleverest. Granted the "bloom where you're planted" does not account for toxic soil.

2. Luke 11:27-28. In the 16th century Protestant arsenal, some verses were used illegitimately. This Lukan line, however, was fair game, and can still stir that Ulster blood. It's the Protestant equivalent to the Dyothelite's Matthew 26:39 (as to "Dyothelite," again I refer you to theo-blogging rule 3). Problem is, triumphantly pointing this verse as Protestant vindication requires a caricature of Catholic and Orthodox thought on Mary.

3. Along similar lines there's Mark 7:8, which still has some punch when protesting an undeniable historical tendency. Granted this requires ignoring John Henry Newman on development of doctrine.

4. Matt 8:20. Who says we get ecclesial satisfaction this side of things anyway? This one perhaps encapsulates Radner's thought, and gets problematic with extreme ecclesial dissatisfaction.

5. Gal. 5:6-8. This one's quite dangerous, as to make the direct Catholic/Orthodox parallel with the Judaizers would be to equate both those communions with "yokes of slavery" that "alienate from Christ." This is as unfounded as a Protestant claiming Catholics or Orthodox need become Protestant to be saved (though, as Peter Kreeft concedes here, on occasion they do). Still, the verse again warns of the danger in adding essentials to the gospel that aren't essentials.

6. Finally, while the Protestant with lingering anti-Catholicism needs consider Exodus 20:12, the Protestant overcome by desire to become Orthodox or Catholic might consider Exodus 20:17. Depending on your upbringing, that first one can work for staying Protestant as well.

If I may quote some earlier reflection, the competing claims of Catholics and Orthodox "should be more than enough to scramble any hasty conclusions." When struggling with this matter, as I often do, I think back to King Kong. Alone, the girl [Protestant ecclesiology] is no match for the beast, but then the T-Rex comes along.

Nevertheless, in the words of Timothy George, ours is a time when callings "to a deeper discipleship to Christ across the historic divides" are not uncommon. The point - it is so easy to forget - being deeper discipleship.

Chastity: The Movie

Lest I be misunderstood on the salacious subject below, here is (another) reminder of how seriously chastity was taken by the medieval mind, using Emile Mâle's paraphrase of Prudentius' Psychomachia, that is, "Soul Battle:"

Chastity (Pudicitia), a young girl in shining armour, encounters the sudden shock of Lust (Libido), a courtesan who brandishes a smoking torch. She overturns the torch with the blow of a stone, and drawing her sword slays Lust, who as she dies vomits turgid blood which taints the purity of the surrounding air. Pitiless as a Homeric warrior, Chastity apostrophises the corpse of her enemy, extolling Judith in whom chastity first triumphed, then she washes her polluted sword in the sacred water of Jordan (p. 99-101).

How is that not a screenplay? The title, "Psychomachia," is a given.

Mel?

Too late for the film on this one, but roughly contemporary to Prudentius was Pope Leo the Great, who suggested that Israel's mortal struggle with the seven tribes tropologically (see point 3) suggested our own battle with the Seven Deadly Sins.

Today something I wrote got posted On the Square. Should you not have noticed, shame on you for checking millinerd before you checked First Things. I'm flattered, but where are your priorities?

Saint Ludwig

Said Paul of believers, "Not many of you were wise by the standards of this world." Some however, were. Diogenes Allen once related a story of Princeton philosophy professor Gregory Vlastos, who closed his career with a lecture explaining that, exalted as Plato's ideals may have been, for the concept of love of enemies the world would have to wait for Jesus Christ. Coming from a world authority on Plato, that's worth a ponder.

The best philosophers, it seems, know the limit of their discipline. Maybe it's not so odd then that the man who was, arguably, the 20th century's most distinguished one - Ludwig Wittgenstein - had this to say in a private notebook entry, dated 1937:

What inclines even me to believe Christ's resurrection?... -If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once again we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, -what I need is certainly not wisdom, dreams or speculations - and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: it is love that believes even the Resurrection; hold fast even to the Resurrection. What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption. Holding fast to this must be holding fast to that belief... So this can come about only if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything will be different and it will be 'no wonder' if you can do things that you cannot do now. (A man who is suspended looks the same as one who is standing, but the interplay of forces within him is nevertheless quite different, so that he can act quite differently that can a standing man). The issue has been put before us clearly: do we stand on earth on our own feet or are we suspended from above, attached to a living Lord (p. 6)?

Why I Am Not a Christian author Bertrand Russell's prize student declaring faith in the resurrection? Count it as further evidence to support Charles Taylor's thesis that Modernity is misunderstood as monolithic secularism. Instead, according to this reviewer, it actually "implies a huge range of possible ways of thinking, including many variations of theism and atheism."

Constantine's Hammer

Patriarchy? Boo! Constantinianism? Boo! But according to some church history amateur named Jaroslav Pelikan, you can really only hate one. Amongst Constantine's reformulations of Roman law,

"socially, the most important were probably those that proscribed certain ancient Roman practices now deemed immoral and antisocial [such as] the Christian laws modifying the patria potestas, under which in ancient Rome the father of the family or clan had the right to decide the question of life or death for a newborn child, especially for one that was born deformed. Constantine struck down that provision of the patria potestas, thereby helping to initiate the legislation against abortion that was to characterize the legal and moral position of most nations in Christendom, both Eastern and Western, until comparatively modern times, but thereby also making it necessary to invent other forms of care for such unwanted children." (26).

Should you know of a more blatant historical instance of patriarchy (a pater with archy over life and death) being forcefully dismantled, do tell.

Of course, that's not the story whole. Military action has its justifications, but it seems slightly contrary to the spirit of the crucifixion for Constantine to have melted down the nails from the true cross and have them "made into a bridle-bit and a helmet, which he used on military expeditions" (Socrates Scholasticus' Ecclesiastical History 1.17). I imagine CNN's history gophers for "God's Warriors" would love that last bit, while politely ignoring the first.

eight cents per day

If you had to read one thing on the Emerging Church, you would do well to make it a short article entitled "Evangelical Amnesia" by Dean C. Curry (a Messiah College professor of politics) in the current issue of First Things.

This post is also intended to dish out some "tough love" to those who are not yet subscribers of First Things (which, to see Curry's article anytime soon, you must be). Send my your address by email and I can ensure the first few of you get a free trial issue. Also notice that Stanley Hauerwas is back in those pages with a feature article. Eight cents, as you may have guessed, is thirty bucks per year divided by 365 - approximately equivalent to one sip of good coffee.

The Joy of Distinction

While in Seminary, I witnessed a student get publicly corrected by a professor only once. The correction was due not to a grave theological error (which there were ample opportunity to correct), but due to the student referencing the God who revealed himself - sorry, I mean "Godself" - as Father Son and Spirit with the pronoun "He." If only for the sake of diversity, consider Kathryn Greene-McCreight (who, if I'm not mistaken, is part of that remarkable batch of Yale Ph.d's back in the Frei/Lindbeck days). At the risk of public correction, she writes,

I do not, as a policy, adopt "inclusive language" in reference to God.... Many feminists would not use the terms Father and Son, for example, to speak of the first and second persons of the Trinity. However, it is not the nature the Christian God to "include" either males or females within its being in this way. I use inclusive language only for humanity, since there is nothing in the reality of God that allows us, whether male or female, the luxury of being "included" in the first place. Since God is generally referred to in the Bible with the pronoun he, this is also the pronoun I generally use to refer to God. I thereby suggest neither that God is male nor that the female is "underrepresented" and the male "overrepresented" in the Godhead" (p. 8 of a fine book).

Contra Greene-McCreight's point on inclusion, some might actually believe we are ontological members of the Godhead, as (it seems) did Meister Eckhart:

We are an only son whom the Father has been eternally begetting out of the hidden darkness of eternal concealment, indwelling in the first beginning of the primal purity which is the plenitude of all purity. There I have been eternally at rest and asleep in the hidden understanding of the eternal Father, immanent and unspoken. Out of that purity He has been ever begetting me, his only-begotten son, in the very image of His eternal Fatherhood that I may be a father and beget him of whom I am begetting (Sermons and Treatises 2, 63-64).

But you see, that would be dangerously close to one of those grave theological errors referred to above. The doctrine of divinization, following testaments old and new, is something else entirely, and is so much more interesting. With it one gets all the benefits of divinity (immortality) but none of the responsibility (presiding at the final judgment). Boethius succinctly explains this often misunderstood concept (if you'll pardon the non-inclusive translation) in this way:

Since men are made blessed by the obtaining of blessedness, and blessedness is nothing else but divinity, it is manifest that men are blessed by the obtaining of divinity... wherefore everyone that is blessed is a god, but by nature there is only one God; but there may be many by participation (Consolatio, para. 10, 23-26).

Neglecting his Boethius, Eckhart - who was no dummy - slips uncomfortably close to the "You are God in a physical body... You are all power... You are all intelligence" of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. The real secret is, as far as women writers on spirituality in English, there's long been a much better one (free here). But as it also has some pitfalls, I'd stick with Kathryn Greene-McCreight, who seems to firmly grasp the joy of distinction between herself and God, whose English is consequently much less awkward ("Godself"?), and whose Theological Commentary on Galatians is due out eventually from Brazos Press.

Desolation

Regarding the apparent "scandal" of Mother Teresa's doubt, has anyone consulted the locus classicus of spiritual direction, Saint Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises? The ninth rule in the discernment section (very worth your time, found here, continued here) reads:

There are three principal reasons why we find ourselves desolate.

The first is, because of our being tepid, lazy or negligent in our spiritual exercises; and so through our faults, spiritual consolation withdraws from us.

The second, to try us and see how much we are and how much we let ourselves out in His service and praise without such great pay of consolation and great graces.

The third, to give us true acquaintance and knowledge, that we may interiorly feel that it is not ours to get or keep great devotion, intense love, tears, or any other spiritual consolation, but that all is the gift and grace of God our Lord, and that we may not build a nest in a thing not ours, raising our intellect into some pride or vainglory, attributing to us devotion or the other things of the spiritual consolation.

Is it news that a woman so far along the path to sainthood was being taught advanced lessons in the spiritual life? I suppose ignorance about basic Christianity ensures it is.

update: For more extended treatment, do consult this article from 2003:

We may prefer to think that she spent her days in a state of ecstatic mystical union with God, because that would get us ordinary worldlings off the hook. How else could this unremarkable woman, no different from the rest of us, bear to throw her lot in with the poorest of the poor, sharing their meager diet and rough clothing, wiping leprous sores and enduring the agonies of the dying, for so many years without respite, unless she were somehow lifted above it all, shielded by spiritual endorphins? Yet we have her own testimony that what made her self-negating work possible was not a subjective experience of ecstasy but an objective relationship to God shorn of the sensible awareness of God's presence...

Mother Teresa learned to deal with her trial of faith by converting her feeling of abandonment by God into an act of abandonment to God. It would be her Gethsemane, she came to believe, and her participation in the thirst Jesus suffered on the Cross. And it gave her access to the deepest poverty of the modern world: the poverty of meaninglessness and loneliness. To endure this trial of faith would be to bear witness to the fidelity for which the world is starving. "Keep smiling," Mother Teresa used to tell her community and guests, and somehow, coming from her, it doesn't seem trite. For when she kept smiling during her night of faith, it was not a cover-up but a manifestation of her loving resolve to be "an apostle of joy."