Horton on Election: Modern Purgatory Prolonged?

I see that the Matthew Miller, who has 86.667% of the best name ever, has an upcoming interview with Michael Horton on election.  I'll admit to being not surprised, but mildly exasperated, and more than a bit saddened, that Horton appears to revert to Calvin on election in his new Systematic Theology.  Horton says Calvinism has been caricatured, and that it has.  But it's hard to imagine someone giving a more sympathetic, careful and thorough reading of the Reformed tradition on predestination than does Barth in his exegetically-loaded Church Dogmatics II.ii; and yet, Barth fixed that tradition's defining error.  It wasn't sufficiently focused on Christ, which is to say, it was insufficiently Scriptural.  Let me explain.

In the nineteenth century, the great German-American church historian Philip Schaff concluded a survey of the Protestant doctrine of election with this: "But there is a higher position...  The predestinarian scheme of Calvin and the solifidian scheme of Luther must give way or be subordinated to the Christocentric scheme."  Schaff, however, had the humility to realize that, as a church historian, he was unable to do the job. 

Calvinism has the advantage of logical compactness, consistency, and completeness.  Admitting its premises, it is difficult to escape its conclusions.  A system can only be overthrown by a system.  It requires a theological genius of the order of Augustine and Calvin, who shall rise above the antagonism of divine sovereignty and human freedom, and shall lead us to a system built upon the rock of the historic Christ, and inspired form beginning to end with the love of God to all mankind (Church History, Vol. 8, p. 544).

That, published in 1892 when Karl Barth was just four years old, was a prophecy.  I'm heavily critical of Barth at this blog, but it is a criticism that happens from within the certainty that when it comes to the matter of election, Barth was the genius for which Schaff hoped, and no doubt prayed.

But is Calvin on election really that bad?  In what my friend Dan playfully calls, "the book," David Hart mentions Calvin briefly in a devastating little seciton entitled "The Covenant of Light."  In Calvin's era,

The covenant of light was broken.  God became, progressively, the world's infinite contrary.  And this state of theological decline was so precipitous and complete that it even became possible for someone as formidably intelligent as Calvin, without any apparent embarrassment, to regard the fairly lurid portrait of the omnipotent despot of book III of his Institutes - who not only ordains the destiny of souls, but in fact predestines the first sin, and so bring the whole drama of creation and redemption to pass (including the eternal perdition of the vast majority of humanity) as a display of his own dread soverintgy - as a proper depiction of the Christian God.  One ancient Augustinian misreading of Paul's ruminations upon the mystery of election, had, at last, eventuated in fatalism.

It's a short section, and readers might have wondered, as did I, what it might look like if expanded.  Unfortunately for Calvinists, it has been in an essay entitled Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence, appearing here (and also, it seems, here, but as far as I'm concerned, twice is not nearly enough).  Calvin, according to Hart, was,

hardly unique for his time... he was simply the most pitilessly consistent of the theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - a period when metaphysical subtlety seems to have been at its lowest ebb throughout the world - and the one least susceptible to any tendency toward embarrassment at the rather ghastly implications of his own thought.

As it happens, this error was not limited to Calvinism, which is too easy a target for Hart, who bundles Calvin in with the later "Baroque Thomism" of Domingo Bañez, Garrigou-Lagrange et alia.  Calvin's blame is therefore lessened because it was shared.  Using the concept of praemotio - Catholics conveyed the same idea, making God, who determines certain individuals to eternal damnation, the author of evil.  Not surprisingly, Hart sees the poverty of this perspective as a direct result of the loss of that old millinerd hobbyhorse, the analogia entis (the "covenant of light"), which again, is shorthand for patristic/medieval metaphysical consensus, that transcendence - the only Christian kind - which transcends classical notions of transcendence.  Christian "being" is almost always caricatured before it is deconstructed.  But Xavier Zubiri explains the actual Christian view:  "Being is operation.  And the more perfect something is, the deeper and more fertile is its operative activity.  Being, said Dionysios, is ecstatic."  But back to Hart:

What is absent from the [Calvinist/Bañezian] picture of divine causality is that ancient metaphysical vision that Przywara chose to call the 'analogia entis'.  In this "analogical ontology', the infinite dependency of created being upon divine being is understood strictly in terms of the ever-greater difference between them; and, under the rule of this ontology, it is possible to affirm the real participation of the creature's freedom in God's free creative act without asserting any ontic continuity of kind between created and divine acts.  When, however, the rule of analogy declines - as it did at the threshold of modernity - then invariably the words we attempt to apply both to creatures and to God (goodness, justice, mercy, love, freedom) dissolve into equivocity, and theology can recover its coherence only by choosing a single 'attribute' to treat as univocal, in order that God and world might be united again.  In the early modern period, the attribute most generally preferred was 'power' or 'sovereignty' - or, more abstractly, 'cause.'

Calvin's theological errors, therefore, were the result of an atmospheric poverty.  We trust the medievals not because they are old, but because of the air they breathed; and whether people realize it or not, people like C.S. Lewis because, as a medievalist, he breathed it too.  For such a perspective on Providence, Hart turns, as any sane person must, to Maximus the Confessor, the go to man for an apophatic reconciliation of divine and human freedom (as so wonderfully expressed in this lecture by Thomas Hopko).  But it's Hart's geneology of atheism where things get chillingly good:

The great irony of the enthusiasm that a few reactionary Catholic scholars today harbour for Bañezian or 'classical' Thomism is their curious belief that such a theology offers a solution to the pathologies of modernity...  [But] this is the God of early modernity in his full majesty... a pure abyss of sovereignty justifying itself though its own exercise.  He may be a God of eternal law, but behind his legislation lies a more original lawlessness....  The God of absolute will who was born in the late Middle Ages had by the late sixteenth century so successfully usurped the place of the true God that few theologians could recognize him for the imposter he was.  And the piety he inspired was, in some measure, a kind of blasphemous piety: a servile and fatalistic adoration of boundless power masquerading as a love of righteousness.  More importantly, this theology - through the miraculous technology of the printing press - entered into common Christian consciousness as the theology of previous ages never could, and in so doing provided Western humanity at once both with a new model of freedom and with a God whom it would be necessary, in the fullness of time, to kill....

If this is God, then Feuerbach and Nietzsche were both perfectly correct to see his exaltation as an impoverishment and abasement of the human at the hands of a celestial despot.  For such freedom - such pure arbitrium - must always enter into a contest of wills; it could never exist within a peaceful order of analogical participation, in which one freedom could draw its being from a higher freedom.  Freedom of this sort is one and indivisible, and has no source but itself...


It was this God who, having first deprived us of any true knowledge of the transcendent good, died for modern culture, and left us to believe that the true God had perished.  The explicit nihilism of late modernity is not even really a rejection of the modern God; it is merely the inevitable result of this presence in history, and of the implicit nihilism of the theology that invented him.  Indeed, worship of this god is the first and most inexcusable nihilism, for it can have no real motives other than craven obsequiousness or sadistic delight.  Modern atheism is merely the consummation of this forgetfullness of the transcendent God that this theology made perfect. Moreover, it may be that, in an age in which the only choice available to human thought was between faith in the modern God of pure sovereignty and simple unbelief, the latter was the holier - the more Christian - path.

And finally, the kicker:

Late modernity might even be thought of as a time of purgatorial probation, a harsh but necessary hygiene of the spirit, by enduring which we might once again be made able to lift up our minds to the truly transcendent, eternally absolved of all evil, in whom there is no darkness of all...  When all that is high and holy in God has been forgotten, and God has been reduced to sheer irresistible causal power, the old names for God have lost their true meaning, and the death of God has already been accomplished, even if we have not yet consciously ceased to believe.  When atheism becomes explicit, however, it also becomes possible to recognize the logic that informs it, to trace it back to its remoter origins, perhaps even to begin to revers its effects.  It may be that a certain grace operates though disbelief...   It is principally the god of modernity - the god of pure sovereignty, the voluntarist god of 'permissive decrees' and the praemotio physica - who has died for modern humanity, and perhaps theology has no nobler calling for now that to see that he remains dead, and that every attempt to revive him is thwarted...

Full stop.  I hesitate to add to such an important sweep of prose, but what Hart doesn't mention (because he it was outside the scope of the essay), is that Barth on election avoids this critique (even if certain strands of anti-metaphysical contemporary neo-Barthianism, I fear, may not).  Barth and Hart, it seems to me, have common cause.  God, according to Barth, did not select certain individuals to perish before the world was made, but willed, in perfect freedom, to save them.  Is this universalism?  No.  That's what Calvinists tell you about Barth so you don't have to read him.  Barth just means that someone's choosing to continue to resist their election involves the impossible possibility of resisting who they actually are.  As Bruce McCormack so helpfully explained in his 2007 Barth conference lecture, Barth preserves the Pauline tension between limited atonement and universalism, neither of which should be taught as official church doctrine; it is a tension the Bible does not permit us to collapse.

Some important qualifiers:  Of course, just because Calvin is wrong on election doesn't mean he's all wrong.  Aspects of Zachman's Calvin may retain enough of the patristic consensus to endure Hart's critique.  Furthermore, however rarely it is pointed out, it should also be mentioned that Orthodoxy before the twentieth century Patristic revival, because of its unfortunate direct translation of the exact late modern Catholic theology Hart criticizes, peddled the strange god as well.  And of course, don't forget the Baroque Thomism that is Hart's primary target.  I'm afraid we're all to blame.  What Hunsinger calls "enclave theology" won't do.  But Barth on election, the miraculous Catholic ressourcement that gave us Vatican II, and the Orthodox Patristic revival of the twentieth century, have collectively worked to euthanize the voluntarist god.

It's a free country, and one can still go with Calvin on election.  But this would only be to actualize this country's cultural instincts, which have been to summon endless armies of protesters from both within (Arminianism, etc.) and without (Transcendentalism, etc.) the church, armies recently collated by Peter Thusen's book Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine.  Among them is Timothy George, who writes to his fellow Baptists, "Let us banish the word 'Calvinist" from our midst.  Let us confess freely and humbly that none of us understand completely how divine sovereignty and human responsibility coalesce in the grace-wrought act of repentance and faith."  Do we really think that all these protestations were, and are, responding to mere caricatures of Calvinism?  How strange, furthermore, to continue summoning such necessary protests when the system has, finally, been fixed.  Horton's a smart man, and I hope he addresses at least some of these concerns.

I understand that the via millinerdum - going with Barth on election and against him on the analogia entis - is an inconsistent ecumenical gamble, but it's one I'm willing to take.  Call it the Barth/Hart pincer effect against the decretum absolutum, in whatever confessional guise it may have appeared.   Cue the kum bay ya if you'd wish, but only together can Christians, in Hart's words, "help to prepare their world for the return of the true God revealed in Christ, in all the mystery of his transcendent and provident love."

Warehouse Transfiguration

Internetiquette demands

...that if you see an unjustly bad solitary amazon review weighing a good book down, one which will almost certainly be seen by far more people than the most carefully written review in a given academic journal, then do something about it.  Don't just let those albatrosses hang.  At any rate, that link might provide some broader context to God is Not a Story, discussed below.  In short, theological readings of film are a dime a dozen; but only Murphy (to my knowledge) has realized the reverse. 

The Theological Necessity of Poetry

Francesca Murphy's feisty, film theory-infused cartography and critique of the last half-century's theological discourse, God is Not a Story, relates that Thomas' fourth proof for God's existence ("from the degrees that are found in things") is frequently understood to have the least contemporary relevance.  Murphy quotes Peter Geach: "I have sometimes suspected this 'proof' of being one of the least defensible remnants of Platonism in Aquinas."  But, Murphy reports, an anonymous commenter with very fine penmanship wrote in the margins of the book where she read Geach's statement:  "it [the fourth proof] is the basis of analogical predication." 

Taking off from this inspired scribble, Murphy explains how Balthasar recasts each of the five proofs, not embarrassed by the fourth, but, in a way, led by it.  Balthasar's cypto-Thomist argumentation (appearing in Glory V) is infused with a "metaphysical sense of the analogy of the created world to the Creator, and, in particular, the analogy of created freedom to divine freedom." Murphy continues:

Since Aristotle's Metaphysics, all authentic philosophies have begun in wonder; but presupposing, as they do, the perspective of an adult male, they tend to detemporalize it.  Von Balthasar gives us a 'genuine beginning', by setting out from what is, within each human life, the historically first act of amazed delight in existing, and showing how it goes on.

The effect is a dramatized, biographical account of the proofs, which "invites us to attend to reality rather than to our own reason or to our own act of faith."  (That good poetry or painting is a necessary adjunct to such a proof seems almost too obvious to mention.)  Beginning as it does not with male adulthood, but with infancy that necessitates a mother, Murphy dubs Balthasar's an argument from natality.  She quotes Wilhelmsen's The Metaphysics of Love, who boils Balthasar down:

The universe of being is simply because God caused it to be.  Why did God cause it?  Because he willed to.  Why did he so will?  The question... is lost in the mystery of Divine Freedom.. the answer to this question is not a 'reason' but something transcending all reasons: love.  There is being rather than nothign because there is love.  Love is not a reason but it is a cause.  ...What being-loved makes being do is precisely be.. the metaphysically ultimate explanation for the universe of finite being is the love of God rather than His power.

Balthasar's argument itself is hard going, and has the disadvantage of being, according to Murphy, a good deal more difficult to comprehend than Thomas' classic proofs; but after Hegel and Heidegger, such is our lot. Still, the proof is "bolder at both ends of the spectrum of reason and faith."  That is, Balthasar is both confident that the "acknowledgment of uncreated being proposed in the Fourth Way is available to non-Christian reason," yet at the same time "what Barth calls an 'analogy of faith' is present throughout the argument."  Which is to say, Balthasar spurs his readers to receive the gift of supernatural faith throughout, not simply before or after, the argument.  Accordingly, I'm not sure that tidy reason/faith distinctions will do, nor will attempts to present the gospel in Christianese.

As it happens, there are Protestant theologies that provide the pre-conditions for Balthasar's proof as well, such as the Presbyterian Jonathan Edwards or the Methodist Adam Clarke.  For a very recent Anglican endorsement of analogical reasoning, one that is profoundly aware of Barth's critiques, there's Ephraim Radner's The World in the Shadow of God (a book of poems with a meaty theological preface).  Building on Hauerwas' Gifford Lectures, Radner offers a welcome attempt to rehabilitate natural theology, offering a desperately needed historical overview of the issue.  Even the idea of an analogy of creation, according to Radner, is "already rooted in a Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian) metaphysic."

The very notion of "analogy" - of metaphysical "being" or of form or of reality - between creature and Creator orients the discussion in a way that Barth was perhaps not as sensitive to and even as appreciative of as he ought to have been.  Creature and Creator demand, in their very utterance and use as words and concepts, the application of presuppositions, at least, that assert fundamental relationships that are described only on the basis of "revelation."  Indeed, the words cannot be deployed even apart from some kind of grammar, even narrative grammar, that must appropriate particular claims, in the Christian case, of Scripture.  Why then the worry over their secularly imported status?

This is not far from Colin Gunton's hopeful suggestion, contra Barth and Jenson, that there may be concepts "that enable us to think our world...  inherent within certain words there lies the possibility of conceiving things as they are." But back to Radner:

Indeed, the analogy is "latent" in creation itself, and its imitative character is itself a part of the inspiring work of God, whose description and articulation are given particular form by artists, but hardly invented by them.  Indeed, the artist shares with his work the common Cause that draws them together, so that speech or crafted expression become bound up inextricably with the very nature of created analogy.

Radner's call to poetry (to which painting is easily appended) is a far cry from the idolatry of creativity: "Poetry is at its best when.. it works as the incisive catalogue of naturalism, for the sake of clear outlines, and then simply lays its forms at the precipice of its descriptions, within the roar of Scripture's cataracts."  This echoes Maritain's assertion that "Religion saves poetry from the absurdity of believing itself destined to transform ethics and life, saves it from its overweening arrogance."

Concisely summarizing over a century of Trinitarian debate, Francesca Murphy reminds us that the supposed distinction between "Greek" and Western Trinitarianism "was an unwise invention of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century neo-Thomism" which "exiled crucial elements that are actually in the texts of Augustine and Thomas, expatriating them to the benighted 'East', thereby creating a false dilemma which had to be solved through Rahner's rule."  Similarly, Ephraim Radner argues that "the 'rupture' between nature and revelation that seems to have overwhelmed natural theology in the modern era is perhaps itself wrongheaded and in need of recovering." Perhaps we might call the solving of this equally pernicious false dilemma "Radner's rule."  That rule being Radner's formulation that makes the title of this post.

Champagne, Butterflies, Universities, and Mary

I've got a piece up at the Huffington Post right now regarding Champagne and butterflies, so if you're inclined, please decorate it with tweets, likes, inflammatory comments and such.  Be it known that it's not too late to see either exhibit, whether Martínez Celaya at MOBIA (Closing January 16) or Mako Fujimura at the Dillon Gallery (closing tomorrow, but reopening at MOBIA in June).  Also, info on the ASCHA symposium "Why Have There Been No Great Modern Religious Artists?" is available here.

There's also a longer article of mine entitled the Useless University (which is not an insult) up at Public Discourse.  On similar lines, don't miss the wit of Peter Wicks in A Defense of My Life's Vocation at Notre Dame Magazine.

And there's something about Mary up at First Thoughts.

Starbucks and Alexandria

A few folks have emailed me about the new Starbucks logo, which remains, I am convinced, even in the new form (following medieval precedent), a spur to chastity.  It's all in the backfiles.

On an infinitely more sober not, I'm afraid to say that my previous meditations on what it would be like were violence to hit the Copts have an unfortunate currency due to the recent attacks in Alexandria. From The Rowdy Mysticism of Coptic Cairo: "The energy in this liturgy cannot be so easily extinguished. Indeed, any other kind of explosion would be dim in comparison to the clamor of this praise. Terrorists summon fear from their claim that the power they wield is ultimate, which it is not.  The deathless one so boisterously exalted in the Coptic liturgy – He is the one with power over life and death."

I understand it may be tasteless to quote myself, but if the chief weakness of blogging is the tyranny of the moment, then archival references are a necessary evil.

Rush to the Ecumenical End Zone

I hold a personal grudge toward all millinerd readers who knew of George Hunsinger's Ecumenism and Eucharist: Let Us Keep the Feast, but left me to find it on my own now two years after its publication.  Forgiveness pending.

The book seems to revolve around this crucial insight about divided Christianity: "The most urgent and overriding goal... is not self-preservation [institutionally or personally] but reunion."  This, I am currently convinced, in addition to Simone Weil's fascinating contention that one can receive the eucharist through the eyes, remains an imperfect but at least interesting answer to the question, posed so frequently to Protestants such as myself, "Why haven't you yet converted to Catholicism or Orthodoxy?"  That is to say, personal conversions do bring personal relief, but they frequently do less to ameliorate, and more to exacerbate, remaining divides.  Yes, there are many exceptions to this general rule, and one can - hypothetically - work for unity from any given fragment.  Still, the hope for greater Christian unity beyond one's personal predicament remains a compelling reason for staying with the fragment one knows best.

Guided by this principle, Hunsinger makes a strong Protestant case for the real presence via eucharistic transelementation (for which he provides ample cross-confessional documentation), asks pointed questions that the Reformed, Catholic and Orthodox communions are afraid to ask, sacramentalizes Niebuhr's Christ and Culture schema, and (of course!) concludes in the realm of art and architecture, without which his proposals can't be fully realized.  I have my disagreements, but they are overwhelmed by the fact that unlike so many, Hunsinger simply gets that Mercersburg high church Protestantism is not a personal preference for those into that sort of thing, but an ecumenical necessity.  And yet, it's the personal moments that drive the points home, such as Hunsinger relating how excruciating it is to sit through crackers and grape juice sacramental trainwrecks, or (in the Pro Ecclesia Summer 2010 discussion of the book) what it's like to eat at Mt. Athos alone.   At any rate, here's a sample:

The point of this exercise in ecumenical admonition has not been to make any one tradition look good by making others look bad.  It has only been to suggest that there are more than enough warts (defectus) to go around.  No existing church can reasonably claim to be free of them in non-trivial respects.  It is perhaps the special vocation of Reformational churches, formed as they are by the great and liberating doctrine of simul iustus et peccator, to press the point. 

It may also be our vocation, I would add, simply because we have more warts.  And how can I resist quoting Hunsinger on the good Karl Barth:

Readers familiar with my previous writings may wonder how anyone so steeped in Barth's theology could have arrived at the positions in this book.  The most general answer is that I wish to align myself with the trajectory established by Thomas F. Torrance and Alasdair Heron, who have blazed a trail before me, moving not only with Barth and through Barth on the eucharist, but also beyond and against him....

It fell to T.F. Torrance, Barth's student, to make the connection that his mentor never quite managed to carry through: "The action of the supper," wrote Torrance, "is not another action than that which Christ has already accomplished on our behalf, and which is proclaimed in the Gospel."  It is rather the very same action in a new and sacramental form.  Ecumenical theology after Barth has every reason to exploit this insight.

Indeed, without Torrance, Hunsinger "might never have seen how to get from Karl Barth to something like the ecumenical center," which is to remind us that the ecumenical center Karl Barth is not. Perhaps the Torrance trajectory also helps explain why Adam Neder's important section on Barth and the Orthodox take on divinization is an addendum, whereas Torrance and divinization required a book in and of itself.  (Protestants unfamiliar with divinization might consult this Leithart post.)  And did I mention that the book reconciling Palamas and Aquinas on divinization has already been written?  Or that Jonathan Edwards had not dissimilar ideas?  Yes, these are exciting ecumenical times, at least in the rarefied contours of academe.

I won't comment any further on Hunsinger's accomplishment, other than to say that Eucharist and Ecumenism may be, to invoke that tired cliché that is in this case appropriate, "essential reading." Christian theological discourse today can resemble a linebaker pile-up of enclave confessional theologians alongside equally dogmatic secular academic theologians.   But Hunsinger, when given the ball, managed to push his way past some fleshy defenders and get a first down for ecumenism.  The least we can do is cheer.  Granted, a look at the scoreboard is depressing, but no matter.  Someone in the stands is holding up a placard reading Jeremiah 31:10.

Next play:  Hail Mary.