Staying Protestant Powerpost

Happy Halloween, er... Reformation Day. The lamest church calendar day ever it is true (Schism! Yippee!), but also an occasion to drop the rare, dreaded - more for length than strength - powerpost. The last time it culminated extended wrangling with the less impressive strands of Christian PoMo. The powerpost enables one to, in a way, move on - which is especially important with the potentially paralyzing Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox issue. While I don't claim to have permanently resolved matters by churning out a brawny powerpost (patent pending), it is a sign of temporary resolution, an indication that I won't be bringing up the topic as often in the future.

Continue...
A recent two-part discussion culminates a long history of extended reflection. Stanley Hauerwas' contention that one doesn't have the right to be Protestant without asking oneself every day why one is not Catholic is a good corrective to Protestant prejudice. On the other hand, asking oneself that question every day can be crippling. And so, for a complicated set of reasons, I am Protestant.

A few observations on those of us who wrestle with becoming Catholic or Orthodox:

1. It's an inescapably local question. Princeton may be rich in many ways. It's not rich spiritually. The limited options in my community exacerbates these questions. A wealth of options for an orthodox Protestant might, in turn, lead to no such struggle. Some peculiarly local developments are in fact what permit me to write this post.

2. Apologetics is secondary. When peeling back the layers of ignorance that constitute much Protestant polemic there comes the shocking realization that many, perhaps most Catholic and Orthodox doctrines make beautiful sense. But this is, of course, not the same as to say all their claims are necessarily true. Doctrine matters, but doctrine - when already within the boundaries of Trinitarian orthodoxy - plays a much smaller role, it seems to me, than individual calling. Debates on these matters too quickly devolve into Biblical or historical calculation games, in which the object tends to subtly shift from who's right to who's smarter. The scandal of disunity is, instead, a shoal on which our logical necessities should be shipwrecked. It is a mystery to be lamented, not a puzzle to be solved.

3. This leads to the inescapably subjective nature of this question. "We sometimes face ecclesial choices that are difficult to make and even harder to explain to others," wrote Timothy George in response to Francis Beckwith's conversion. Thank goodness these matters are "subjective" and not a matter of mere apologetics - this keeps us on our toes before our Lord and not dependent on our cleverness. Opposite conclusions can, therefore, stem from equal faithfulness. Of course I may be empirically wrong in my decision to stay Protestant, but it may also interest some Catholics that my conclusion was both generated and confirmed in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. I believe in the presence of Christ there as definitely as I do in his more Protestant promise that "wherever two or three are gathered, there I am in the midst of them."

Subjective as these things may be, there is still the need to articulate one's personal calling. And in this, the Bible verses already discussed have been of great assistance. Although I am interpreting them playfully, I could not be more serious in their citation. Here they are (including the initial one cited by Lewis). Spinal Tap fans will be delighted to see the list now goes to eleven:

The Verses:

1. 1 Cor. 7:20.
2. Luke 11:27-28.
3. Mark 7:8
4. Matt 8:20.
5. Gal. 5:6-8.
6. Exodus 20:17.
7. Matthew 3:9.
8. Acts 7:48-49
9. 1 Kings 12:23-24.
10. John 20:21-22
11. Romans 11:11

In addition, there are a few key quotes, some of which I've mentioned before. Most are from C.S. Lewis. I realize, by the way, it may not be cool for the cutting-edge Christians to still like C.S. Lewis. This interview with Lewis' stepson Douglas Gresham, responsible for the recent Wardrobe film and the forthcoming Prince Caspian and Screwtape movies, may change that. I refer those who still think Lewis uncool to the title of this blog.

The Quotes:

1. Northerness: This is a general principle that, according to S.M. Hutchens, kept Lewis from becoming Catholic. The fact that Lewis called it "northerness" conveniently ties it to the money comment below, but Lewis meant that childhood longing described in Surprised By Joy, which is perhaps better expressed in Father Wisdom's counsel in Pilgrim's Regress:

Feel no wonder that these glimpses of your Island so easily confuse themselves with viler things, and are so easily blasphemed. Above all, never try to keep them, never try to revisit the same place or time wherein the vision was accorded to you. You will pay the penalty of all who would bind down to one place or time within our country that which our country cannot contain. Have you not heard from the Stewards of the sin of idolatry, and how, in their old chronicles, the manna turned to worms if any tried to hoard it? Be not greedy, be not passionate; you will but crush dead on your own breast with hot, rough hands the thing you loved. But if ever you incline to doubt that the thing you long for is something real, remember what your own experience has taught you. Think that it is a feeling, and at once the feeling has no value. Stand sentinel at your own mind, watching for that feeling, and you will find - what shall I say - a flutter in the heart, an image in the head, a sob in the throat: and was that your desire? You know that it was not, and that no feeling whatever will appease you, that feeling, refine it as you will, is but one more spurious claimant - spurious as the gross lusts of which the giant speaks. Let us conclude then that what you desire is no state of yourself at all, but something, for that very reason, Other and Outer. And knowing this you will find tolerable the truth that you cannot attain it. That the thing should be, is so great a good that when you remember "it is" you will forget to be sorry that you can never have it. Nay, anything that you could have would be so much less than this that its fruition would be immeasurably below the mere hunger for this. Wanting is better than having. The glory of any world wherein you can live is in the end appearance: but then, as one of my sons has said, that leaves the world more glorious yet.

Hutchens explains that the passage embodies Lewis'

deep suspicion of realized eschatology, precluding identification of the True Church (or the heavenly Narnia, or Britain) with any of its present, earthly forms. This conviction is also at the heart of Protestant ecclesiology, which in its purer form does not arise from mere anti-Catholicism, but from a positive vision of the nature of reality and our manner of comprehending it, a vision far older than the Reformation-era confessions on the nature and identity of the Church in which it came forward with such force.

2. Mystery of disunity: This is from Lewis' correspondence with an Italian Catholic priest (conducted in classical Latin).

That the whole cause of schism lies in sin I do not hold to be certain. I grant that no schism is without sin but the one proposition does not necessarily follow the other... what would I think of your Thomas More and of our William Tyndale? All the writings of the one and all the writings of the other I have lately read right through. Both of them seem to me most saintly men and to have loved God with their whole heart: I am not worthy to undo the shoes of either of them. Nevertheless they disagree and (what racks and astounds me) their disagreement seems to me to spring not from their vices nor from their ignorance but rather from their virtues and the depths of their faith, so that the more they were at their best the more they were at variance. I believe the judgement of God on their dissension is more profoundly hidden than it appears to you to be: for His judgements are indeed an abyss.

It's not a far leap from that to this from John Paul II's Crossing the Threshold of Hope:

Could it not be that [historic church] divisions have also been a path continually leading the Church to discover the untold wealth contained in Christ's Gospel and in the redemption accomplished by Christ? Perhaps all this wealth would not have come to light otherwise...

3. Essential Unity: There's this interesting passage from the preface to the French edition of La Problem de la Souffrance:

As a Christian, I am very much aware that our divisions grieve the Holy Spirit and hold back the work of Christ; as a logician I realize that when two churches affirm opposing positions, these cannot be reconciled. But because I was an unbeliever for a long time, I perceived something which perhaps those brought up in the Church do not see. Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity, which, in spite of its divisions, it has never lost. I trembled on recognizing the same unmistakable aroma coming from the writings of Dante and Bunyan, Thomas Aquinas and William Law.

To this I can add that Michael Foster quote from Mystery and Philosophy:

It was in studying the doctrine of the Trinity that I came to realize that unity is not a simple thing... Now I am wondering whether in discussing the desired unity of the Church we do not too easily take it for granted that we know quite well what unity means... What if the unity God wills for His church be a unity which, like His own unity, we have not yet conceived in our minds.

These quotes are not meant to excuse or explain away divisions, but to make sense of Christ's presence despite them.

4. Immature and Unsaintly Disputants: Ultimately the scandals of our schism is, as any Reformation era historian will tell you, not a purely doctrinal affair. In the History of Sixteenth Century Literature Lewis wrote:

The process whereby 'faith and works' become a stock gag in the commercial theater is characteristic of that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation. The theological questions really at issue have no significance except on a certain level, a high level, of the spiritual life; they could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure. Under those conditions formulae might possibly have been found which did justice to the Protestant - I had almost said the Pauline - assertions without compromising other elements of the Christian faith. In fact, however, these questions were raised at a moment when they immediately became embittered and entangled with a whole complex of matters theologically irrelevant, and therefore attracted the fatal attention both of government and the mob. When once this had happened, Europe's chance to come through unscathed was lost. It was as if men were set to conduct a metaphysical argument at a fair, in competition or (worse still) forced collaboration with the cheapjacks and the round-abouts, under the eyes of an armed and vigilant police force who frequently changed sides. Each party increasingly misunderstood the other and triumphed in refuting positions which their opponents did not hold: Protestants misrepresenting Romans as Pelagians or Romans misrepresenting Protestants as Antinomians.

The Claim

I started these quotes with "northering" and I will end with the north as well. A most effective way to make sense of the strange calling some of us have to Protestantism is to consider the analogy, first used by Calvin in his Reply to Sadoleto, of Protestantism to the northern kingdom. Divided Israel is our primary Scriptural resource for fathoming the divided church. In his commentary on 1 Kings, Leithart explains that Israel's divisions were God's judgement. It was a "twist" that God initiated in response to twistedness, for "to the blameless, God shows himself blameless... but to the crooked, God shows himself crooked" (Psalm 18:25-26). Our fate could have come straight from Dante's Inferno. Our divisions are crooked, it is therefore no wonder that people want desperately to make such easy sense of them, but also no wonder that this is perhaps ultimately impossible.

The rule to follow in these matters in conscience. The Vatican's ecumenist in chief, Cardinal Walter Kaspar, said as much when he visited here a few years ago. I didn't need a Cardinal to tell me this, but it helps. The catch in that counsel is what happens when one's conscience gets better informed. My conclusion is one example of what I believe to be both better information and a discernment of personal calling. My conscience keeps me Protestant. Hier stehe ich.

This is a long post, and one might suspect I am compensating for clear justification with excess material. But I can boil down my reason for staying Protestant to one sentence. As much as I believe in the primary authority of Scripture and faith's priority in salvation, there are probably more Catholics and Orthodox Christians who believe this today than there are Protestants, so that won't be the sentence. Instead, the sentence is this: I am decidedly more certain that the unity of Christ's church has been lost than I am of Catholic and Orthodox claims to still possess it.

This is terrifying news for all of us. Intelligent people of note betraying a variety of opinion on such a crucial question might mean we have to each answer the question ourselves.

my generation

Peter Suderman's analysis reminded me of a saki/sushi party in Manhattan with "my generation." The conversation revolved around a guy who had just started a magazine. It was an incredible idea, he told us, such that as soon as we saw it we'd think, "What an incredible idea." We asked him what it was, but in all seriousness, he wasn't allowed to tell us. Following awkward silence, he added, "You'll know when you see it."

Still looking.

update: For a more sustained and less snarky generational analysis than my own, consider the cover story in the current Books & Culture, Getting A Life. While I prefer "adultolescence," Christian Smith uses "emerging adulthood" to describe the above phenomenon. The money quote: "Authentic selves are made more than found."

two more

Timothy George's article is now online, providing occasion to ammend the "Staying Protestant" list:

7. Matthew 3:9. Self-explanatory, and perhaps the best one so far. How did I miss this?

8. Acts 7:48-49. Stephen's unique take on the Old Testament in Acts 7 has a very "Protestant" flavor, a reminder that there is room in the Kingdom for both people of temple and tent.

Also recall Edward T. Oakes' intriguing suggestion.

update: The search is finally over. Thanks to Joe's comment below, the perfect verse for staying Protestant - and I mean perfect - has been cited to provide all justification (mixed, albeit, with painful regret) for that peculiar northern compulsion:

9. 1 Kings 12:23-24. Said Joe, "Even if one were to grant that the Roman Church is the church, we need not conclude the Reformation was unfounded. Elijah was a mighty prophet in the northern kingdom, and even there God reserved 7K who did not bow the knee to Baal. Perhaps some of us, like Elijah, are called to the North."

I love being outdone.

Philip Bess in Princeton

Protestants, I'm afraid it fair to say, either don't engage the secular academic world, or "engage" it by slowly, often quickly, capitulating to its premises. One could argue this is because Protestantism has jettisoned the theological resources necessary for proper engagement, such as the analogia entis and virtue ethics. By forsaking the first, Protestants may please themselves with their internal consistency, but they lose the perspective that permits a distinctly Christian book to begin by suggesting, "I have started with an argument from natural rather than supernatural premises." As to the second, virtue ethics permits someone to make charitable sense of the gifts of their secular peers, enabling a book's dedication to a colleague, "who in seeking goodness and beauty also seeks God."

While many Christians in academia can be found fueling today's fragmentation ethos, other wryly resist it, declaring "I am obviously not uninterested in comprehensive narratives, most especially true ones." Why is it so rare to see a Christian academic who, rather than cutting a deal, just cuts to the chase?

Architecture schools today are largely though not exclusively divided between embracing critical theory and embracing sustainability as the ideological "next best thing." In some instances, critical theory presents itself (usually implicitly, but always ironically) as the best foundation for sustainability; and sustainability in turn sometimes presents itself as a kind of critical theory. Critical theory, however, by its own logic - e.g., its views of the primacy of the will-to-power, and of the "constructedness" of nature - is notoriously poor soil for a theory of sustainability or, for that matter, of a just social pluralism, each of which is arguably better grounded in traditional Western religious views of the created character of man and nature and their relationship to each other and to God.

Perhaps other Christian academics don't write paragraphs like that for fear - a legitimate one - of earning the disdain of their colleagues. And Philip Bess, the author of all the above quotations, admits as much:

My allegiance to [the Aristotelian-Thomist] tradition - my happy participation in and defense of the religious and metaphysical realism of Western culture - makes me in most schools of architecture today practically unemployable, and almost certainly untenurable.

Yet Bess did recently find a place as Director of Graduate Studies at Notre Dame's School of Architecture. If you're in town, he's coming to Princeton this Monday October 22nd, and will be giving a talk at 5pm in Murray Dodge.

Of course, there are Protestants who would protest my dim portrayal of Protestant academic engagement, insisting that one can have a properly mitigated analogia entis, virtue ethics, etc. while remaining Protestant - and thank God for them. Fortunately, our era of "plate-sharing" ecumenism permits a Protestant to do just that, leading perhaps to more courageous academic engagement. I have not read The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, which is apparently an excellent book. I was, however, amused by a Stanley Hauerwas quip I once overheard in relation to it, which serves as a playful chastisement to Christians in academe: "Not nearly outrageous enough!"

In a fleeting moment of Anglican unity, both conservatives and liberals were disappointed with Gene Robinson's Princeton visit last week.

The Music Delusion

Unable to withstand the bracing logic of the new atheism, soon religion will be eliminated completely. It may then be time to consider the next frontier, to expose another phenomenon that has outlived any evolutionary purpose it might once have had: Music.

Certainly you've heard them blather, perhaps you were once one yourself: those sentimental, simple folk who claim that music "moves" them. To explain this supposed pleasure they point to empirically unsubstantiated "feelings." Conveniently, they insist that the measurement of this stimulation is beyond the reach of science. (Are they not grateful for antibiotics?) A further indicator of their quackery is the repeated insistence that "words cannot express" musically generated contentment. Are words, the traditional avenue of intelligent human expression, too difficult for these self-professed "music-lovers"? When will they have the courage to realize that music, better still, "music" does not even exist?

Science tells us that what primitive cultures once referred to as "music" is in fact the manipulation and arrangement of measurable sound waves. Sorry folks, so much for that "ineffable" symphony. The effect "music" has on the human organism, we now know, is a side-effect of this sound wave manipulation which, like most things, can be traced to the mating urge.

Yet why is our culture still so bound by what science has finally explained? "Music" departments persist in colleges and universities worldwide. Huge sums of money are wasted on its performance and "appreciation." A massive, corrupt industry duplicates this "music" to perpetuate its effect on common people, most of whom are ignorant of its evolutionary explanation.

It is bad enough that "music" fills concert halls and stadiums the world over, but often we brights are forced to listen to it even against our will, in cars, elevators, malls, grocery stores - it's everywhere. Courageous individuals without a sensibility for the appreciation or performance of "music" have in the past been unfairly stigmatized as having a "tin-ear." But modern science has vindicated our perspective, so here's a more accurate way label to label us: Just plain smart.

It's time for those of us who know "music" is superfluous evolutionary waste to finally be heard. The survival of the species may depend on it. You recall that supposedly innocuous "drummer boy?" Yeah right. More like "war boy." How many more armies will be inspired by this "music" as they march into battle to rip our delicate world apart? How many more politicians will use this "music" to rally ignorant masses to their ends? The stakes could not be higher. Science has finally pulled back the curtain on this tired phenomenon; bravely holding that curtain open may be the only thing that keeps our world intact.

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Having been accused (somewhere that I won't link to) of being a PoMo renegade who discounts the historicity of the resurrection, permit me a moment of self-defense. Although it feels like a gut punch, the opportunity to clarify is appreciated.

In Saving Veronica I suggested that one might approach medieval apocryphal accounts metaphorically. Not being a Bultmannian sellout, I repeatedly suggested I was unwilling to approach canonical matters in that fashion. I knew this might provoke suspicion, which is why I wrote, "To expect contemporary Christians to navigate this delicate terrain is much to ask." Are we all simply PoMo or anti-PoMo? On some matters (the resurrection) the stakes are indeed that high. On others, there is room for nuance. Perhaps more importantly, why should PoMo set the agenda in the first place? Hence I quoted Balthasar's remark that the gospel contains "its own interior authenticity," to which aesthetics and historicism - which is to say postmodernity and modernity - need both submit.

No one would (I hope) refuse to read novels on the basis that one can't permit any dangerous middle ground between truth and falsehood. Novels attempt to do something different than relate facts, yet as we know, they often ring surprisingly, refreshingly true. The medieval accounts I referred to arose well before the category of "fiction" as we know it; yet they can perhaps be understood in the same way: as novellas refreshingly true. The question as to whether the Veronica or Mandylion accounts happened exactly as recorded I left open. However, I am a Christian, and so the matter such accounts ultimately refer to - the Word Made flesh - I left closed.

Was Luke really a painter? I don't know. I do not insist upon that matter in the way I insist upon the resurrection for two reasons. One, we don't have enough evidence, and two, it is not an essential matter of faith. In the meantime, I am willing to direct such apocryphal accounts towards matters of faith that are essential.

Those images - the Kamouliana, the Acheiropoieton - are they what Christ really looked like? At the very least such images record one most important fact: God in Christ has a human face - two eyes, one nose, and a mouth. Is not the fact that God omniscient limited himself to a few sensory organs more significant than their exact configuration?

Those images - the Shroud of Turin, the Lucca statue - do they record the actual stature of Christ? To quote Theodore the Studite, at the very least such images transmit that

He who is without quality becomes three cubits high... he whose position cannot be designated stands and sits and reclines... he who is without form is seen in the form of a man (Patrologia Graeca 99.332B).

Is not the fact that God in Christ took on a body more significant than whether or not it was 5'10''?

By marshaling such image legends toward their referent, I am doing exactly what the last ecumenical council insisted icons must always do - point us to their heavenly prototype. To quote Basil the Great, "the honor paid to the image passes to its prototype." To quote Pavel Florensky, "The icon - apart from its spiritual vision - is not an icon at all but a board."

Where is the vegan consistent enough to only read books passed onto us through papyrus?

update: On a related note, here is a medieval Irish "Who am I?" riddle:

An enemy ended my life, deprived me of my physical strength: then he dipped me in water and drew me out again, and put me in the sun, where I soon shed all my hair. After that, the knife's sharp edge bit into me and all my blemishes were scraped away; fingers folded me and the bird's feather often moved over my brown surface, sprinkling meaningful marks; it swallowed more wood-dye and again traveled over me leaving black tracks. Then a man bound me, he stretched skin over me and adorned me with gold; thus I am enriched by the wondrous work of smiths, wound about with shining metal.

Here's a hint.

Like the trucker with a family on both coasts, I'm two-timing this blog again by posting elsewhere.

update: A senior staff member here at millinerd.com has drafted a memo informing me that if one writes a blog post that's loooong, it most likely will not be read. And so, I summarize myself:

Knowing when to approach something allegorically and when to take it literally is hard to teach. It's like knowing when to laugh, and more importantly perhaps, when not to. I find it regrettable that some Christians today seem to be laughing at the wrong times, and dead serious with the jokes. As Protestants (I still am one), we're under no obligation to follow the Reformers at their worst. But, I should add, at least their impatience with apocrypha and allegory left them with more time for the essentials that too many of us have discarded.