9.5 Theses for 2017: Simul tragicus et salutaris

To mark the quincentenary of the Reformation (and the tenth anniversary or our original 9.5 theses), millinerd editors have culled the following from Ron Rittgers' brilliant conclusion to Protestantism After 500 Years (2016), Thomas Oden's The Rebirth of Orthodoxy (2003), and above all, Peter Leithart's bracing manifesto, The End of Protestantism (2016).

1. "The first Protestants split from the Latin church that had, of course, already been in schism with the Orthodox church for almost five hundred years. In light of this reality, all Christian must be considered schismatics; no Christian church is immune from this accusation, including Catholics and the Orthodox" (Ronald Rittgers' epilogue to Protestantism After 500 Years, 336).

1.2 "Unlike both Catholic and the Orthodox, most Protestant churches do not claim to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church; they are simply imperfect expressions of this church. They content themselves with a rather minimalistic (perhaps too minimalistic) ecclesiology - the preaching of the Word and proper administration of the sacraments, or, simply, the presence of the resurrected Christ. Therefore they do not confront one another with the impossible choice between two mothers, both of whom have important, compelling, and yet contradictory claims of being the church. Protestantism protects from this double bind even as it protests this double bind, and this protest should not cease until the original schismatics are reconciled. Then it might be time to declare the Reformation over" (ibid.).

1.4 "Perhaps [instead of tragic and necessary] it would be better to speak of the Reformation as tragic but salutary, or as simultaneously tragic and salutary (simul tragicus et salutaris), for it was certainly both" (ibid., 337).


1.6 "2017 should not be about Protestants only, or Protestant and Catholics only.... Perhaps the larger goal of 2017 should be to prepare the way for 2054 when Christians will observe the millennial anniversary of the tragic, unnecessary schism between Catholics and the Orthodox" (ibid., 338).

1.8  "How is [a Protestant conversion to Catholicism] different from Peter's withdrawal from table fellowship with gentiles?...  To become Catholic I would have to contract my ecclesial world" (Peter Leithart, The End of Protestantism, 169-170).

2. "In our desire to recover what the seventeenth-century Puritan divine John Owen called 'the glorious beautiful face of primitive Christianity,' we must go through Wittenberg, Strasbourg, Geneva, and Canterbury, not to mention Louvain, Avila, and Rome" (Timothy George, Protestantism After 500 Years, 324).

3. "The achievement of unity will involve nothing less than a death and rebirth of many forms of church life as we have known them... Nothing less costly can finally suffice" (New Delhli report, 1961).

3.2  "Disunity of the church is a disease in Christ's body, a shattering of the Spirit's temple" (Peter Leithart, The End of Protestantism, 22).

3.3 "We are not only bowling alone; we also have the technology to worship alone" (ibid., 157). 

3.4 "We are all Laodiceans, boasting of our health and wealth when we are poor, blind, wounded, and naked. No tradition has bee spared the desolation of division. Every Christian tradition is distorted insofar as it lacks, or refuses, the gifts that other traditions have" (ibid., 167).

3.6 "We can live with ourselves because we have created a system to salve our conscience and to deflect the Spirit's grief. We have found a way of being church that lets us be at peace with division" (ibid., 3).

 3.8 "If the reunion of humanity has not taken place, Jesus's death and resurrection had no effect" (ibid., 17).

4. "Denominationalism is not union. It is the opposite. It is the institutionalization of division" (ibid., 4).

4.2 "The marketplace analogy [for denominationalism] is itself an accommodation to worldly patterns of sociality" (ibid., 79).

4.3 "[Denominations] are not bodies but collections of eyes, hands, brains, and other disembodied parts" (ibid., 73).

4.4 "Denominationalism [in its endorsement of racial division] makes cowards of us all" (ibid., 86).

4.5 "American has not been secularized because it started out pre-secularized [i.e. its original denominational pluralism]" (ibid., 82). 

4.6 "Denominationalism cannot overcome Babel because the denominational church is a Christianized Babel" (ibid., 89).

4.7 "Denominationalism is not disestablishment but rather the form that Protestant establishment has taken in the United States" (ibid., 146).

4.8 "The dissolution of denominationalism in the solvent of consumer choice may be the flood that sweeps the world clean and makes way for a renewed church" (ibid., 158).

4.9 "It is denominationalsim, not ecumenism, that minimizes the importance of doctrine" (ibid., 77).

5. "The old ecumenism was largely a liberal Protestant artifact... the new ecumenism is above all committed to ancient classical ecumenical teaching...." (Thomas Oden, The New Ecumenism).

5.1 "Protestants have as much right to the councils and church fathers as do the Antiochenes. Augustine and Athanasius are not owned by the Africans; they belong to all. The Turks do not possess Polycarp or Gregory of Nyssa. The Syrians do not possess Ephraim. Rome does not own Leo or Gregory the Great. As the common heritage of all Christians, they may be equally receved and celebrated and enjoyed by all. Believers everywhere my lay equal claim to this vast patrimony - and they are doing so in ever greater numbers. People of vastly different cultures are recognize in in these witnesses their own unity as the people of God, despite different cultural memories, foods, garments, and habits of piety." (Thomas Oden, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy, 64-65).

5.2  "The modern idea of diversity is less diverse than the ancient ecumenical idea of ecumenē.... The modern idea of inclusion is less inclusive than the classic Christian understanding of inclusion" (ibid. 115).

5.25 "No confession or creed can settle all questions for all time" (Peter Leithart, The End of Protestantism, 28).

5.3 "There must... be a way of insisting on doctrinal truth while simultaneously striving to overcome doctrinal division" (ibid., 173).

5.4 "There will be more theological battles in the reunited church than there are today, because in a reunited church believers will be reluctant to relieve pressure by breaking from the church and because Christians of different views will have to learn to live together, dwelling in each other as the Son dwells in the Father" (ibid., 29).

5.5 "Protestant churches will have to become more catholic, and Catholic and Orthodox churches will have to become more biblical" (ibid., 36).

5.6 "If our name is 'Father, Son, and Spirit,' then our name cannot be Lutheran, Reformed, or Orthodox." (ibid., 72).

5.7 "It may be that neither side has really grasped the depth of the biblical teaching on justification" (ibid., 175).

5.75 "Pursuing receptive ecumenism, Christian fall in love with the presence of God in the people, practices, and structures of other Christian traditions" (ibid., 168).

5.8 "[Orthodox] Exiles [from Russia] have played an analogous role in the renaissance of modern theology [as the exiles from Constantinople in 1453]" (ibid.131).

5.9 "Vatican II was not entirely the universal council that the Reformed hoped for. But is is the closest thing we have, and it should be received as the gift that it is" (ibid., 130).

6. "Unity is evangelical because it is the evangel" (ibid., 115).

6.5 "Christendom is being rebuilt on a human scale in town after town across America. It is an [ecumenical] model of ministry suited to our historical moment. Christendom in dead! Long live micro-Christendom" (ibid., 187)!

7. "The triad [Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant] that modern Christian have used to map world Christianity had been completely dismantled [by global Christianity]" (ibid., 127).

7.25 "The proliferation of varieties of Christianity [in global Pentecostalism] reconfigures the church and provides an opportunity to approximate more closely the unity that Jesus prays for" (ibid., 128).

7.75 "Immigrant churches... have a built-in bias toward catholicity" (144). 

8. "When the withdrew from table fellowship with gentiles, Paul did not excuse him with the assurance that spiritual unity was more important than table fellowship. Paul expected - demanded - that the church's unity be visible in table fellowship, in loyalties and allegiances, in the names Christians adopt for themselves.... An invisible unity is not a biblical unity" (ibid., 19, 21).

8.2 The unity of the church in not an invisible reality that renders visible things irrelevant. It is a future reality that gives present actions their orientation and meanings" (ibid., 19).

8.4 "Being a Reformational Catholic Christian is a circus ride, a high-wire act with no net but the living arms of our faithful Father" (ibid., 191).

8.6 "Black-white, Protestant-Catholic: these are the boundaries that must be transgressed, the dividing walls that must be broken through" (ibid., 98).

8.8 "As we eat and drink [together], we show forth the meaning of Jesus's wall-demolishing death..." (ibid., 18).

9. "We are called to die to what we are so we may be what we will be" (ibid., 166).

9.25 "Reunion, when it comes, will be a gift of God, a work of the Spirit. Yet we must act, and our actions will either preserve current divisions, make them worse, or move toward the unity for which Jesus prays" (ibid., 165).

9.5 "Not knowing what comes next is one of the glories of being human" (ibid., 151).

The Late Middle Ages Rightly Blamed

Some probably unintended Protestant responses to Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation over here.

Eucharistic Election

A correction:  Below I mentioned the ressourcement Barthianism to come, as forecasted by Kenneth Oakes.  Seems, however, that with Aaron Riches, it may already have.  See his Church, Eucharist and Predestination in Barth and de Lubac: Convergence and Divergence in Communio. Riches shows how Henri de Lubac anticipated Barth on predestination, and provides an "irenic corrective" to Barth's disappointing eucharistic theology.  One excerpt from a very rich paper:

 Obviously Barth’s sacramental theology is sharply at odds with the Roman Catholic tradition. What is perhaps less obvious is how radically at odds it is with the received “orthodoxy” of his own Reformed tradition. In the nineteenth century, the American Calvinist, John Williamson Nevin, cogently demonstrated what a high view of the Eucharist orthodox Calvinism actually had; and more, he shows definitively that Zwingli’s position was categorically refused in all the original Reformed confessions. But more than simply recovering Calvin’s eucharistic theology, Nevin also offered an extension of Calvin in the form of an explicit doctrine of Christ’s union to the Church, maintained and accomplished in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Moreover, there is in Nevin a strong correlation between the gift of the ecclesial Body and the Eucharist, and in this regard Nevin represents perhaps the most promising possibility of a Reformed/Lubacian correlation.

McCormack is right: "We do [Barth] no service if we simply repeat him."  But the road after Barth can lead as much in a eucharistic direction as a neo-Barthian one.  The point is to move with Barth, beyond him, among other reasons, because the very methodology he condemns - starting with an open ontological framework which Christ (and only Christ) fulfills - is, at least according to Luke, Paul's exactly (objectors please first read Betz on Pryzwara).  But why throw the election baby out with the actualistic bathwater?  "It would be absurd," argues Phillip Cary, "to instruct Christians to believe in Barth's actualism the same way Luther's catechism instructs believers to believe in the power of the sacraments.  The doctrine of actualism is not something to put our faith in, the sacraments are."

Strap high eucharistic theology onto Karl Barth's doctrine of predestination, and things get interesting very fast.   If there's a thought more beautiful than Barth's election delicately fused into a high eucharistic theology, I'd like to know.  There may be a Barthian monstrance in the church's future, wherein we visually ponder the mystery of election.  I hope to see it.

After the Color Wars

Surely you've heard about the upcoming conference: Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial [thank goodness] Protestant-Catholic Dialogue (register here).  One problem with such exciting, if necessarily donnish, debates is that they require nothing less than full time scholarly devotion to follow along, let alone the decade (at least) of study necessary to actually contribute to the discussion.  But as an art historian, at least I can analyze the conference poster's graphic design.


I've seen a good many such posters in my day (lately 60-70% of which seem to be for religious lectures at this supposedly "secular" University).  This, however, is one of the finest.  It both arrests the eye and pleases it, captures attention and intrigues.  Leaving aside the Barth or Thomas only bootleg editions, let's analyze the version depicted here:  Barth's color, I'm convinced, is more than a pedantic evocation of the "red pastor of Safenwil."  Together, the red and blue theme conjure the color alignment of American political divisions, which are not entirely dissimilar to the (infinitely more civil) conversations between (some) Barthians and Thomists. Barth and Thomas are occasionally presented as the only truly comprehensive Christian alternatives.  For many Catholics, there's a significant extent to which Thomas has to be proven right.  Notice that Aeterni in Aeterni Patris.  And if for Barth, “theology will really be theology...  when from beginning to end it is christology" (61), then Barthianism becomes (for some) the closest we've ever been to real theology since the Bible itself.  Such options - combined with intelligence, education and time - result in well-equipped authorities for both parties, providing residents of either camp with considerable reserves of argumentation with which to bolster their predetermined alignments.  True blue and crimson red. These colors don't run.  More on this below.

Another wise visual choice was to give Thomas the traces of a radiating nimbus. Contemporary Thomists, having absorbed (so far as my shelf-perusing can tell) aspects of Henri de Lubac's symbolic (as oppose to dialectical) theology, have given the Angelic Doctor a patristic facelift, justifying the poster giving Thomas a medieval sheen. Dominicans follow suit by frequently sporting appropriately medieval white habits.  Barth, however, wears appropriately modern eyeglasses in the poster, and smokes.  Many Barthians do both as well.  And yet, the little tuft of hair on Barth's head, threatening to elongate into medieval radiance, hints at the more sacramental, ressourcement Barthianism to come. 

The next deft design manouever was to print the date of the conference in red, showing that this time - unlike the Analogia Entis conference - Barthians have the home court advantage.  Such an advantage worked well for the D.C. Thomists back in 2008.  Barth's "invention of the anti-Christ" quip, mind you, is no longer on the table.  McCormack successfully contextualized it away, showed it to have been directed against Protestants, and he developed the very idea he hinted at a decade ago (see page 109), namely that Barth has his own very distinctive analogy of being (a case which KJ, you'll recall, has sealed).  I'll spare you my lauding the other essays in the formidable volume because it would annoy those who disagree with me on this, but suffice it to say, it is no longer a question of whether or not one has an analogy of being, but which one.  Ecumenical dialogue at such conferences, in other words, works.

How will this home-court advantage work for the Princeton Barthians?  Blooming Washington may have made an irresistible case for the analogy of being, but so does Princeton regarding this conference's ecumenical aim.  Thomas and Calvin, you'll recall, are already in dialogue in the Princeton University Chapel - where Barth himself preached. There he is with MLK, but note the architecture.  He's appropriately standing on the Chapel's south, Protestant, side (obviated by the south window's dedication to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Milton's Paradise Lost).  Conversely, in the early twentieth century, long before ecumenism was fashionable, Princeton hosted the (once) famous Thomist, Cardinal Mercier, who is himself honored with his own window, appropriately placed on the north, Catholic side (indicated by Malory's Morte d'Arthur and Dante's Divine Comedy).  Pace Jason Byassee's fine article on a crucial building, Princeton (you've tired of hearing me say) lays claim to one of (the?) finest ecumenical chapels in the world, making this town - following Princeton proposal precedent - an ideal venue for such discussions.  And whereas Barth may have been here, Thomas is.  An authenticated relic of Thomas Aquinas (a spinal fragment, I believe), safe in Catholic custody and awaiting the resurrection, won't be far from where the conference takes place. 

As blue Thomists and red Barthians courteously campaign, will some kind of imperfect purple compromise or Green Party candidate emerge?  This would be understandable, even necessary.  When Summa question 13's analogical mean between univocity and equivocity is genuinely grasped (ironically, by yielding mental grasp), it appears increasingly inevitable, regardless of who gets the blame for the analogical perspective's consequent dissolution, or exactly where one identifies the pre-modern/modern divide.  Univocity clings to the epistemological red balloon, equivocity pops it, whereas analogy faithfully releases said balloon into God's infinite blue sky above. 

On the other hand, when one reads enough Barth to absorb his account of election, sensing its vertiginous beauty, the way it transcends alternatives and answers serious historical problems (Protestant and Catholic), it's hard not to feel the gravitation pull of the Church Dogmatics.  Drawn by both Thomas and Barth in this way, must we intentionally sacrifice one of them, forging a consistent position for the sake of sanity?  Or, can we affirm them both, nursing the consequent dissatisfaction in Radnerian fashion, bearing the splintered cross of Christian division for the sake of a unity yet to come?

And what about the Orthodox, who don't get included in these discussion as much as they might?  After all, in significant ways, the Orthodox are the "source" in ressourcement.  Granted, Orthodox colors tend also not to run.  But the Barthian touchpoints at the recent Patristic Doctrine of the Atonement conference were downright eerie.  Among Orthodoxy's modern representatives, does Bulgakov emerge as the middle ground between Barth and Thomas, with his remarkably "Barthian," possibly even McCormackian, view of election (though developed before Barth!), and a robutsly analogical perspective (notwithstanding his admittedly risky sophiology)?  And what of Radical Orthodoxy, which - while cool towards Barth - lionizes Bulgakov (alongside de Lubac) as one of the two "truly great theologians of the twentieth century" (104)? 

Then comes the dark horse candidate of ressourcement evangelicals (to be distinguished from Milbank and co.), which muddle the colors even more.  If Henri de Lubac is for evangelicals too, what happens when his criticism of Thomism's nature/grace distinction strangely aligns with Barth's chief concerns?  "One wonders," once mused Robert Jenson, "if de Lubac ever realized how close his positions are to those of much Reformed theology, notably those of Karl Barth” (67).  We need no longer merely wonder, however, as Kenneth Oakes has cautiously spelled out the undeniable parallels, which continues (for me at least) to be big news.  One doesn't need a Ph.D. in theology to intuit the connection between Boersma's Heavenly Participation and Adam Neder's wonderfully clear study of participation in Christ according to Barth, which ends (I remind you) by putting Barth in dialogue with Orthodoxy.  More of this, please.  Hans Boersma, focusing as he has on Catholicism, may not have explored these connections fully, but he has left them open, wise enough as he was not to burn the Barthian bridge. 

All this, again, is by way of complimenting the poster, whose stark primary color alternatives beg for some kind of (hopefully not just eschatological) blend.  A general pre-modern downshifting can be discerned across communal lines, even while some choose to recklessly accelerate into a vague and unwelcoming (post-Christinan?) future.  The ecumenical potential of 1) patristically-corrected nouvelle théologie Thomism (see Mansini on that), 2) an increasingly sacramental Barthianism, 3) Eastern Orthodoxy in toto, 4) the Radical Orthodoxy instinct (more than its tone) and 5) ressourcement evangelicalism, is not uninteresting.  Such an alignment threatens to fill the secular disenchantment laid bare by Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, or (more recently) Glenn Olsen.  Perhaps this is the purple we're looking for.  If so, said conference seems the most likely way of finding out.  

Knew Little and Cared Less

Nothing like a little Balkan (or Cretan, or Cypriot) history to decalcify one's assumptions about divided Christianity. The Serbian ruler Stefan Nemanja, for example, had been baptized by a Latin bishop, and chrismated, while still an infant, by the Greek bishop of Ras. And like it or not, it is beyond question that by 1213 the monasteries of Athos recognized papal jurisdiction (an arrangement which soon dissolved).  Pope Innocent III, after all, had rescued them from a ravenous Latin despot who terrorized the Holy Mountain.  Historian Dimitri Obolensky continues:

It is remarkable that an Athonite monk [Domentijan], writing in surroundings which had suffered greatly from Latin intolerance and brutality, found words to express his veneration for the see of Rome. It is not unreasonable to see in this broadmindedness a sign that, despite doctrinal disputes and jurisdictional rivalry in the mid-thirteenth century, the belief in Christendom as a single body was still alive, even on Mount Athos (pages 145-146).

...To see in Stephen (as many historians have done) the champion of Latin traditions in Serbia, and in Sava the defender of the Orthodox Church, is to fly in the face of the evidence and to ignore that sense of a united Christendom, which in the first half of the thirteenth century still survived in the Balkans. The atrocities committed in Constantinople and elsewhere by the armies of the Fourth Crusade certainly caused most Greeks to harden their hearts to the West; but in many parts of the Balkans it was otherwise: there, a distinguished medievalist [Dvornik] has written, "people knew little and cared less about differences between the two Churches and ... cherished the naive conviction that one should remain on speaking terms with both the great Christian centers"  (pages 153-154).

Riding back from church this last Sunday with some Middle Schoolers, one asked me to explain to him the differences between Protestants and Catholics.   Having just heard a sermon on the Nicene Creed at an evangelical church, in which Catholics and Orthodox Christians were spoken of highly, he was puzzled.  I began to hold forth, but then held back, choosing instead to talk about the Christ we share in common. Yes, theological distinctions matter, I get that.  But on another level, explanations help too much.  He should never stop being puzzled.  None of us should.

Florovsky and the Unity to Come

In one of his lesser known articles, David Hart wrote the following: "That the language of God’s Trinity—of God’s perfect unity within the 'diversifying' act of his knowing love—should become the grammar of a dispute that seems always to harbor yet greater dimensions of suspicion and misunderstanding is an offense not only against reason, but against love."  The same goes, one could say, for the question of Atonement.  One among many fruits of a genuinely fantastic conference (publication forthcoming) was that tidy categories between Eastern and Western perspectives in this area are perhaps as suspect as they are in regard to Trinitarian doctrine.  Several of the Orthodox speakers (most notably Matthew Baker) not only suggested that the neo-patristic synthesis can veer dangerously close to Harnack's "pure essence" of Christianity, but made magnanimous gestures not only to Catholicism, but to Protestantism as well (especially Fr. Dragas and Alexis Torrance).  I was frankly moved.

Which returns us to Hart:

It may well be that the truest Trinitarian [not to mention Atonement] theology of which the Eastern and Western catholic traditions are now capable would consist in the resolution to turn in charity each to the other, in the hope of each finding mirrored in the other those hidden depths that neither is competent to recognize in itself; for the glory of the Spirit is never visible to us apart from our willingness to receive its light from without.  Such observations quickly become either saccharine or sanctimonious...  [but] so long as either East or West refuses the glory that appears in the other, it refuses the Holy Spirit—the bond of peace, of unity, and of love—and all our worlds grow dark.

Because this is the Hart blockquote blog, I'll return to him again, this time from his contribution to the Orthodox Readings of Augustine volume:

As often as not, "ecumenism" between East and West consists in little more than a relentless syncope of category errors:  the drearily predictable alarm and indignation with which traditional Thomists find that Gregory Palamas, transposed into Thomas' Latin, is not a Thomist; the deep and slightly macabre delight with which earnest Palamites discover that Thomas, read through Palamite lenses, proves to be no Palamite; arch dismissals of eastern understandings of grace as "semipelagian" by doctrinaire Augustinians; the reckless intensity with which a particular kind of Orthodox polemicist fixes upon some single principle found somewhere in Latin theological tradition - like "subsistent relations" or "created grace" - violently misinterprets it, and then uses it to diagnose a fundamental deformity in western theology that must estrange it forever from the wellsprings of Orthodox truth; and so on.  Perhaps this kind of thing is inevitable when a conversation arises between two traditions that claim to possess the sole, incontrovertible truth of things.

Such boneheaded recalcitrance was remarkably absent from the Florovsky Society's charter conference.  The passage continues:

It would be humbling indeed to discover that many of our most finely wrought systems of thought possess many accidental elements, peculiar to our particular cultural sensibilities or native tongues, or that perhaps our ways of depicting the truth to ourselves might be only partial and corrigible approximations to a truth that others, under extremely different forms, have approached with equal or better success.  More terrible yet is the possibility that many of our differences will prove to be only differences of sensibility and language, and not of substance at all, thus reducing our systems to relative expressions of the truth, rather than the pristine vehicles of truth we wish them to be.

One might sense a degree of relativism in that passage, but it's the benign kind: Doctrine, firm as its basic Creedal and Biblical contours must necessarily be, is always "relative" to the divine mysteries it describes. 

During the conference, I asked an ill-formulated question of the brilliant John Behr which, however poorly articulated, still expressed what I believe was an important point.  It will not do to trumpet what we can anachronistically call Irenaian supralapsarianism - the idea that God would have become incarnate regardless of the fall - if in doing so we approach the fragmentation of modernity in a non-Irenean way.  If God can bring unspeakable good from humankind's precipitous fall, then certainly he can do the same with our woeful academic fragmentations and even church divisions.  The unity that will (we hope) be achieved on the far side of our disciplinary and ecclesial disjunctions may be more glorious than the unity we had before it, simply because the atomization resulting from our sequestered specializations has resulted in more knowledge than we had before.  The fact that Protestant theology - through Barth - has been completely overhauled in light of the very Athanasian insights explored in this conference is an extraordinary advance toward such a unity.  Likewise, the Biblical insights so expertly mined in the conference by George Parsenios would not have come to light without the tools of modern Biblical scholarship, however damaging those tools can be in clumsier hands.

I sat next to a Protestant thinking about converting to Orthodoxy at the conference.  (They should have warned him to avoid me.)  My simple plea to him was to do what he felt called to do, so long as the question is not only "What's best for me?" but also "What's best for broader church unity?" The latter question can change everything.  As David Poecking made so clear in a piece on Ecumenical Futility today, inter-Christian converts often become wrenches in the ecumenical gears.  (Needless to say, there are fine exceptions to this general tendency, many of which I know personally, but the tendency remains.)

I'll summarize by quoting that Slavic Pope of which many are so fond:  "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..."  His italics, not mine.

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.

Protestant Iconicity and the Catholic Calvin

It's unfortunate, but understandable, to see fellow Protestants repelled by the word "iconicity," that is, repelled by the idea that the universe is an image of God.  However, to refute this misconception one needs only appeal to Calvin. Randall Zachman concludes his exemplary and ecumenically loaded achievement, Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin, in this way:

Calvin describes the self-manifestation of God in a vast array of mirrors, living images, signs, and symbols, not only in the works of God in the universe, but also in the works of God in Israel and the Christian Church....  Far from replacing images with words, Calvin combines image and word in all aspects of our lives with God and with others.  We must hear the Word of God if we are rightly to behold the symbols in which the invisible God becomes somewhat visible; but we must also behold with our eyes the goodness of God that the Word declares to us.  Calvin will accentuate the visibility of divine self-revelation by describing the Word of God itself as a living image of God, in which the hidden thoughts of God might be beheld, even as human thoughts are represented in the language we use...  Unlike Luther, Calvin will exhibit no unease with the self-revelation of God in visions and dreams, not only to the prophets, but also to the apostles.

Calvin's concern to see the self-revelation of God in terms of the combination of the Word of God that we hear and the living images of God that we behold places him squarely within the broader catholic tradition from the time of the orthodox theologians of the early Church to his own day.  Calvin combines proclamation and manifestation in an exemplary way, providing us with one model of how to fulfill David Tracy's call that we learn to combine the two in our own day.  Calvin also holds together the revelation of God in the truth of the Word with the manifestation of the goodness of God in the beauty of God's works, in a way that anticipates Hans Urs von Balthasar's attempt to do the same in our own day.  We are led to union with the fountain of every good thing in God only when we hold together the proclamation of that goodness in the Word of God with the manifestation of that goodness in the beauty of the living images of God.

Yes, that's right folks, that there's a Calvinist analogia entis.  But it gets better:

Moreover, one can discern what one might call an increasing catholicity in the development of Calvin's theology.... The image of God in humanity, which Calvin initially describes as "obliterated and deleted" in Adam, is increasingly described as yet remaining in the "lineaments" of the image in the reason, understanding, and sense of divinity in all people.  The laying on of hands, which Calvin caustically dismissed in 1536 as Rome's "aping" of the apostles, is described as a sacrament with regard to ordination, and a useful rite with regard to confirmation, by the third edition of the Institutes in 1543.  The gestures of prayer, such as the uplifting of hands and eyes and the bending of the knee, are increasingly seen as both expressing and stimulating piety in ourselves and others. Calvin even recognizes the legitimacy of the pious use of the sign of the cross, though he thought that too much superstition was attached to it to restore it in his day.  His willingness to adopt and endorse sacraments and rites that he initially rejected has not been fully appreciated, and can serve as an important resource for ecumenical understanding.

John Williamson Nevin, the great nineteenth century high church Calvinist, would be pleased.  Yes, Calvin prohibited images in worship, and Zachman explains that "he can at times so insist on the essential invisibility of God that he appears to undermine his whole understanding of divine manifestation in symbols and living images.  [But] he creates this tension in order to maintain the dialectical relationship between the visibility and invisibility of God."  A dialectic which, I never tire of rehearsing (but you may tire of hearing), is at the heart of the Orthodox understanding of icons. 

Turns out then, that when typologist-in-chief Jonathan Edwards wrote Images of Divine Things, in which he unfolded the iconic nature of the cosmos (and which he planned to expand in his unwritten magnum opus) he was not displaying a Neo-Platonic quirk, but unpacking a basic Calvinist insight, no wait, a basic Christian insight, that Calvin was wise enough to have somewhat recovered as he matured.  

Protestant iconoclasts, as I've said elsewhere, hurling Dyrness and Finney at your crumbling defenses, knowing your ammunition is old and rusting, surrender now. It will be honorable, and no punitive measures will be taken.  If you choose to desist, you will be both wrong and boring, and your descendants will find themselves converting to Orthodoxy or Catholicism, or - it must be said - unbelief.  Protestants without icons?  Impossible. As strange as a Protestant who - contra nearly all the Reformers - doesn't believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary!

Conversion Matters

James K.A. Smith's review of Francis Beckwith's Return to Rome (the best parts of which are the opening paragraphs), might on the surface appear to be a critique of Protestants who convert/revert to Catholicism.  It struck me, however, as an endorsement of just such a move. Obviously Smith disagrees with Beckwith epistemologically, and (moreso perhaps) politically, but Smith's last paragraph simply highlighted the fact that there is room for both Beckwith and Smith within the Catholic faith.  It's a spacious church, that Roman one.

Recently, Robert Jenson shed some new light on his attitude towards Catholicism.  Writing a "How My Mind has Changed" article for The Christian Century, Jenson explains why he and his wife Blanche "will not, we now think, become Roman Catholic, despite great empathy with formerly Lutheran or Anglican friends and allies who have."

I have written that all Western churches should be under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, in his role as patriarch of the West. I have written that the universal church needs a universal pastor and that Rome is the only place for this ministry. I stand by all that. But I have never believed and do not now believe that one's soul is endangered merely by lacking full communion with Rome. Nor do I believe that a celebration of the Eucharist or of other of the mysteries lacks any reality or efficacy sheerly because the celebrant has not been ordained by a bishop recognized as such by Rome. Thus individuals - as distinct from churches - who are not in full communion with the bishop of Rome can and therefore must decide for themselves whether to seek it. That such individual choices are inescapable is among the punishments visited upon a divided church.

Despite his acknowledgment of Roman primacy, Jenson concludes that his family will (for now) stay Protestant, due to a "stubborn, indeed now somewhat desperate, dedication to that original ecumenical vision and an accumulation of experiences and reflections, none decisive by itself." Which is to say, there is far more at work in the decision to convert than getting one's theological and church historical facts straight (however important that may be).  This is something which Beckwith, it seems to me, understands.  Rather than being (as Smith claims) "a litany of facts, arguments, and propositions," Return to Rome read to me as an attempt to respond to a litany of Protestant facts, arguments and propositions, offering the more mysterious, downright "Smithian," both/and terrain of Catholic dogma instead.  In addition, familial factors were especially active in Beckwith's case (which is why Smith's "where is love?" line was odd).  Beckwith's grandmother, wife and nephew - not just Louis Bouyer and Cardinal Newman - were key players in his decision.

It is hard to begrudge Protestants who convert to Catholicism, or Orthodoxy for that matter, especially when justification, the Reformation's "article by which the church stands or falls," is undergoing a very public, Protestant overhaul.  But the tragedy of a church divided can obfuscate what might otherwise be clear.  Even when conceding the superiority of another tradition, we can be bound to our own through personal history or pastoral commitments, or a bottomless sense of genuine indebtedness.  A faith formed chiefly by the New Testament will intuitively grasp the absurdity of having to choose not only Christ, but among the fragments of his broken ecclesial body as well.  But the church has been sundered, and this is our lot.

[crossposted at evangel]

A Scarf for the Ecumenical Winter

Sarah Wilson’s editorials in Lutheran Forum are like Jason Byassee’s guest editorials in Theology Today: Not to be missed. I’ve already conveyed Byassee’s noticing a new – notably institutional - fidelity in younger Christians. And now Wilson, in "Why Stay?", chimes in with some reasons for traditional Christians to remain in denominations with, shall we say, “difficulties.” Though she has ELCA Lutherans in mind, her reasoning applies across much of the board. Her essay is both realistic and hopeful, though she admits that an argument to stay or leave will never have the mystical sheen of Nicaea or Chalcedon. Instead, it will be “a messy argument about the church and the sinners who populate it… neither self-evident nor conclusive nor susceptible of satisfying proof.” Inspired in part by Radner’s The End of the Church (which she suggests may be “tragically correct”), Wilson points out the need to love one’s enemies, quoting an obscure Scriptural passage that says something about “endur[ing] all things.”

Without downplaying the fractious issues at hand, Wilson reminds us that a church body “decreeing” something means little unless it is received. In other words, we need not get too worked up about “official” denominational pronouncements, as they may not ultimately matter. (Anyone who has attended such denominational meetings will, no doubt, concur.) More pressing should be the following concern: “You don’t want to face the Lord on judgment day and say, ‘I broke fellowship with the unrighteous because I was sick of dealing with them,’ lest He say the same thing back to you!” Mixed metaphors or not, the following phrase of Wilson’s is also a keeper: “It’s time to stop playing the game that actually plays us, jump off the hamster wheel of denominational splintering, and renounce schism once and for all as a solution to ecclesiastical trouble.”

In another meaty article on the liturgical movement, Wilson goes on to squeeze some lemonade from the lemons of our present “ecumenical winter” (mixed metaphors, it seems, are contagious). Summarizing a wide swath of recent scholarship, Wilson rehearses the gains and losses of the liturgical movement’s past 100 years, which is yoked to the same gains and losses of the ecumenical movement. Massive projects such as the international Lima Liturgy, Wilson suggests, have proven more reflective of those with the time, interest and plane fare to attend ecumenical world summits that anything genuinely “on the ground.” Bureaucracy, 20th century ecumenism taught us, can only go so far.

And yet, Wilson suggests that the apparent “decline” of the formal liturgical movement conceals an invisible success: “Nearly all the liturgy in our churches these days is ecumenical… Hymns cross boundaries… non-Roman Catholics sing Gregorian chants, non-Evangelicals sing contemporary praise songs… [all] a remarkable case of spontaneous reception.” Even if such success is due more to globalization than the liturgical movement itself, it’s an encouraging fact. Wilson sees a lack of formal, universal liturgy to be a plus. The holy grail (quite literally) of a shared eucharist need not be the only measure of ecumenical and liturgical success. Instead, we should be teaching how the common faith appears across boundaries, and learning how to recognize when it does not (as, for example, when Father, Son and Holy Spirit is replaced with “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer”). In other words, Wilson suggests we should be fostering receptivity for an ecumenism to come.

The theme of reception connects both of Wilson’s articles. Denominational statements (however vapid) and liturgical inventions (however ingenious) both mean little if they are not received by the laity. John Henry Newman famously articulated the same principle in his essay “on consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine.” For another example of the need for reception, consider that fifteenth century “ecumenical movement,” spurred by Ottoman colonialism, which culminated in the Council of Ferrara-Florence. Like the ecumenism of the past century, this council too had a great deal of initial, outward success. But such success was not received. It gave church history a fleeting glimpse of Orthodox/Catholic unity, which the Orthodox back home simply did not buy. Fortunately, there is a much greater degree of receptivity for this kind of unity today, though it has taken five centuries, and may take more.

The point is this: Church unity is far larger, less detectable, and much more important than any of our official organizations, statements or meetings can convey. Hence, when one looks beyond such (lately faltering) formalities, things appear much differently. One may or may not find Wilson’s arguments for staying convincing, but her decision to endure is buoyed by ecumenical hope. Perhaps we Protestants should spend less time wondering whether or not we should become Roman Catholic or Orthodox, and more time marveling that the question is even a possibility. (Such marveling was the entire point of Noll and Nystrom’s Is the Reformation Over?) Despite her dissatisfaction with the ELCA to which she is committed, Wilson sees new flashes of receptivity in the contemporary Christian terrain. Instead of looking back to an ideal “undivided” church, she proposes

that we consider the unified church for which Jesus prayed to lie not in the past but still in the future. When we have a true reconciliation of all baptized Christians, this will be a better unity than the church has ever known, better even than the unity of the early, non-yet-divided church.

I’m not sure if Wilson’s closing salvo is a punt to nowhere in particular, or a gust of warmth in the big ecumenical chill. But I like it (though I would have appreciated hearing more about the undeniable role that the See of Peter would play, and is playing, in such future reconciliation). At any rate, one may wonder why such proposed unity doesn’t happen more quickly, but one needs not: The Holy Spirit, after all, has to deal with us.

Snow Angels at Sinai

I decided to take the millinerd show on the road to defend icons, but it's good to be back. I used the original Iconophile terminology, briefly quoting the most helpful encapsulation of the icon debate that I'm aware of, and then I simplified the matter, admitting that I was doing just that. In the comments, I was both accused of simplifying (which I had already conceded), and of using overly subtle terminology. "The anatomy of a blog makes serious conversation all but impossible," said Alan Jacobs, and sometimes he's right. What makes it worse, is that peppered amongst such comments were some very insightful ones. Alas, I can commiserate with Dan Siedell's recently expressed frustrations.

Rather than churn out another post to defend this position abroad, I've decided to pick up my ball and go home.  It should be easier to keep up with the comment volume here.  Now, let's take a deep breath get a few things straight about icons:

1. The Iconophiles who defended icons in the Iconoclastic controversy used complex terminology to defend against the complex terminology of the Iconoclasts, but their aim was to vindicate the instinctive Christian piety of the laity. When faced with charges laced with complex terminology, clients - however guileless - better hope their lawyers are equipped with equally complex terminology.

2. Protestants who refuse to engage this terminology and cling to their distrust of icons are not dissimilar to Protestants who refuse to read the Catholic Catechism, continuing to insist that Catholicism teaches that Mary should be worshiped, faith is by works, or tradition trumps Scripture. Those who cling to these caricatures will only attract and keep the ignorant (no small crowd).  But there are better reasons to stay Protestant.  I look forward to reading Sarah Wilson's.

3. The most advanced form of Byzantine Iconophile thought is very limited in its claims. Instead of continuing to refer to my article that makes this case (a strategy wearing thin even on me), instead I'll quote another Byzantine art historian who makes the exact same point. In her contribution to The Byzantine World, Bissera Pentcheva explains:

Byzantine Iconoclasm (726-843) challenged [the] understanding of eikon as a site of pneuma dwelling in matter. So far, we have viewed this crisis through the prism of the sixteenth-century Reformation, imagining the destruction of churches, murals, mosaics and panels. By contrast, the Byzantine phenomenon appears to have been more of a process of narrowing of the meaning of eikon: from an identification with a body (an essentialist theory manifested in the stylite cults) to an eikon understood as the imprint - typos - of visual characteristics on matter (a formalist, non-essentialist theory).

While the Iconophiles used the image of the seal to illustrate these limited aesthetic ambitions, Pentcheva compellingly equates this non-essentialist theory of icons with snow angels. As a snow angel is not the child who made it, so an icon of Christ does not claim to "capture" Christ's divine nature.

4. Of course such sophisticated theological justification was not always kept in mind, but this is no reason to dismiss it. The Byzantines were relatively vigilant. When the practice of icons was abused because clergy or laity put too much faith in matter itself, Byzantium would sometimes have itself small Reformations. Emperor Alexios I Comenenos, for example, had to remind his subjects, in a 1095 decree, that an icon was only a likeness.

5. There is nothing about icons, properly understood, that violates the command to not make graven images.  Such images, most people seem to understand, are not worshiped. A fine - perhaps the finest - illustration of this fact comes from the place where the command was originally given: Mt. Sinai. Pentcheva, again quite perceptively, explains that the icon collection at Sinai was, in a way, most consistent with advanced Byzantine Iconophile opinion. There are no metal or ivory icons at Sinai, material features which attract attention to the icon itself.  All Sinai icons are painted on humble wooden panels. There are no miraculous icons at all at Sinai, which tend to take the focus away from the prototype. In contrast to the glittering, bulbous, sometimes promiscuous icons of Constantinople, the ascetic icons of Sinai are devotionally chaste, especially conforming to the commandment given just a short climb away. It is fitting, therefore, that these are the icons to have mostly survived.

6. It is not absurd to suggest that the Iconoclast par excellence John Calvin is therefore in agreement with the most advanced Byzantine justification for icons. Calvin knew only of the first (essentialist) defense of icons made by John of Damascus.  While this was not necessarily wrong, it was improved upon. Calvin cannot be faulted for failing to consult sources that he did not have. It is ecumenically serendipitous that the Genevan Reformer had no opportunity to refute the most advanced Byzantine argument for icons.  In fact, he made points similar to those made by the later Byzantine Iconophiles. This is why it's such great news that Wheaton chose a Reformed president (who gave an illuminating interview here).  Icons will festoon Blanchard Hall in a matter of months.  I'm sure of it.

"Do you want to go away as well?"

Whenever Jason Byassee writes a guest editorial for Theology Today, don't miss it. In the latest issue he describes his experience with young ministers:

Another sign of hope is the posture of these young ministers toward institutions. Many of my former seminary classmates left the ministry after they tried to fix things at warp speed. They tried to make the whole church pacifist. Or inerrantist. Or as inclusive as they are in their enlightened, tolerant state. All in a year or two. They wrote some articles, served a church or two, went to some conferences, and it just didn't work. So they became Latin-Mass Catholics, for whom Pope Benedict XVI is a dangerous liberal with too compromising a posture vis-à-vis the modern world. Or they became bicycling, farmers-market shopping crusaders against carbon-based fuels. Now they look at people like us and are puzzled: "Why are you still messing around with church and those same old pitiful problems?" In their impatience they fail to see that God chooses to save corporately, through institutions... God saves by Israel and the church after all - it should be no surprise to anyone who's even glanced at the Bible or church history that institutions are often corrupt. And as the young ministers often showed me, institutions are the most beautiful thing there is.

Of course, a given reader might find themselves quibbling with portions of Byassee's editorial, such as his upholding Andrew Sullivan as an example of what it means to faithful to an institution you disagree with. Furthermore, a Catholic convert from Protestantism might reply: "I fully agree. Where were those arguments in the 16th century?" But those are quibbles. Like Kevin de Young, Byassee exposes the immaturity, a thwarted hunger for power, in those who are too good for institutions. Needless to say, such deserters are in significant company. John 6:66 comes to mind: Christ had an embarrassing public moment, after which, "many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him." The verse that is the title of this post immediately followed. Would that we had a shred of the faithfulness of David, who, with a clear shot to eliminate the undeniably corrupt institutional leadership of Saul once and for all, was egged on to murder by his men, but instead replied, "The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my lord, the Lord's anointed" (1 Samuel 24:6).

Now, as an American evangelical, if someone could clarify to which of the dozen or so ecclesial institutions that have shaped me I should be faithful, I'll get right on it.

[cross-posted at Evangel]

Less vs. More at Wheaton

Which is to say, the "orthodoxy on the cheap" of Baptist Timothy George vs. the "orthodoxy with a surcharge" of Catholic revert Francis Beckwith in a Penner dialogue (video here) on whether or not Evangelical Catholicism is possible. Moral of the story (according to George): Get an account statement of your own tradition and invest respective funds wisely.

This time, it's personal

The City wonders if I missed the personal, not theological, point of Knippenberg's review. I wish I had. Problem is, I did catch it, and therein spotted myself. Personal reasons, such as the heritage card, are what you rely on when you were chasing the theological straight and nothing turned. The Reformation was not about heritage.

Let me explain why I feel deprived of theological reasons for not being Catholic: First, I find myself wondering what positive Protestant beliefs there are that one is forbidden to believe in the Catholic Church. My answer: None. This leads me to cling to objections. Theological emphases or preferences won't cut it. What is required to sustain the serious matter of church division are the most serious of objections, ones by which the church stands or falls. This is why the early Barth may have been onto something when he said that the analogia entis was the invention of the anti-Christ, and hence the only good reason to not become Catholic. Yes, Barth was wrong about that; but when Barthians soften his rhetoric today with an insulating layer of ecumenical fuzzies, they know not what they do. The Reformation started with such hard-hitting language, and only so can it continue. However untrue and perverse, there is something profoundly shrewd about the time-honored American tradition of referring to Catholicism as the whore of Babylon. Such rhetoric ensured Protestantism's survival; abandoning it all but guarantees Protestant ill health.

If Trueman is right about the Catholic Church being the default option in the West, then Protestant objections to Catholicism, whatever they may be, must be able to bear the weight of continued church division. That's a lot of pressure per cubic foot of objection. When the stakes are this high, it seems rather chintzy to to nit-pick the Catholic Catechism's soteriology insisting, "That's not exactly how I see it," or to parse clauses of the Joint Declaration on Justification insisting "more progress must be made." Progress towards what? I thought the point was unity - and after a century of ecumenical effort, few should be fooled as to where real prospects for unity reside.

This is what Carl Braaten meant when, writing in Concordia Theological Quarterly, he analogized Lutherans to Frenchmen exiled from Nazi-occupied France:

Now, what if the Free French forgot the reason for their exile, and as expatriates became so accustomed to life outside of France that they forgot about returning and reuniting with the French countrymen they had left behind? What if they began to think and act as though what was meant to be only a temporary arrangement in an emergency situation had actually become for them a permanent home and established settlement? ... If that would have happened, one would call it a tragedy, akin to the tragedy of the Reformation.

When Protestantism is understood as exile, theological grips by which to resist the gravitational force of Catholicism are hard to find.

This, however, leaves us with the personal, the situational reasons to not be Catholic, which can provide that missing grip. In fact, ideas are overrated. Personal reasons may ultimately be the face cards of the matter at hand. There's the professional model, exemplified by Tony Blair who didn't become Catholic until he stepped down from a rather high profile position. Or the spousal model, exemplified by Thomas Howard who didn't become Catholic until his wife gave him her ungrudging blessing. Perhaps some people are too quick to override such personal reasons, trampling over a faithful spouse or a family heritage as they dash madly for the Tiber. We don't make our theological decisions in sanitized intellectual laboratories vacuum sealed from personal and professional reality. And no, that's not relativism - it's theologically informed realism. Yes, such personal reasons can amount to a refusal to "take up your cross and follow Me," but to assume they always amount to that is thick-headed. There are good, and bad, personal reasons for not being Catholic. But the things about personal reasons is, they're personal.

Catholicism, Mohler and Notre Dame

I occasionally get reader feedback for this blog (whose feedburner should now be fixed, so please update your readers). One friend, a very good one from Seminary, actually sent me a real response letter. On actual paper. This ups the stakes considerably.

His question was "Why not be Catholic?", and he said he would await the response on millinerd. He claims to have his own "answers" (the scarequotes are his), "but evidently my answers are not sufficient to end the internal monologue." I too have produced "answers" in this forum, perhaps too often and at a "thou dost protest too much" length. The fact that my friend would ask me the question again indicates his accurate perception that my internal monologue also continues.

While I'm not prepared to take on that mother of all question right now, what I can do, and just did, is point to my dissatisfaction with how other Protestants answer it. (While I indicate this dissatisfaction, keep in mind, I'm not doing that much better myself.)

Consider that indefatigable Seminary President Albert Mohler. I listen to Mohler religiously, because - simply put - he matters. The exposure that Mainline Protestants once enjoyed now belongs to Mohler: Who else gets nearly back to back prominence in Time (where Mohler spearheads one of the ten most significant ideas changing not America, but the world) and Newsweek (where he was the main interlocutor for the much discussed End of Christian America article)? Mohler gets this attention because he is a principled Protestant. For Mohler, Catholicism is nary a threat. While he has addressed the matter at considerable length, overall the Roman question doesn't seem to trouble him; a position which sometimes requires considerable dexterity to achieve.

A recent announcement on his site and radio program (start at 34:20 here) gives - seemingly out of nowhere - a great deal of attention to one particular Catholic book. Mohler has not so much as mentioned any of Benedict XVI's books, nor his addresses. In fact, Mohler rarely gives significant attention to normative expressions of Roman Catholicism, a tone which Catholic callers on Ask Anything Wednesday repeatedly protest. Catholicism plays a largely negative role on Mohler's show (except when Robert George is the guest). But all of a sudden, one book gets puffed, and you can bet the farm it's not Beckwith's Return to Rome. Why? Because, I respectfully suggest, Dr. Mohler very much needs this particular book to exist.

A liberal Catholic at Notre Dame (I am shocked - shocked - to find that gambling is going on in here) becomes the authority for what the "Roman Catholic Church now teaches on a number of crucial issues." Funny, I thought those cues came from some city in Italy, not South Bend. Mohler then highlights a passage with the power to galvanize the traditional evangelicals in his considerable audience, and leaves it at that. No analysis. No disclaimer. Take another look.

Just like that, the "Why not be Catholic?" question is easily answered: Because Catholics, you see, are theologically unprincipled pluralists. Nevermind a Pope who has challenged the "dictatorship of relativism" on the world stage. Nevermind Dominus Iesus, the official position which this liberal theologian's passage is deliberately set against. Nevermind the fact that the only American theologian ever elected to the cardinalate was the unimpeachably orthodox Avery Dulles. Nevermind any of that.

We need not wonder how Albert Mohler would respond to a theologian in his Southern Baptist Convention who deliberately countered that denomination's tenor of doctrinal orthodoxy that Mohler does so much to set. Yet when this happens within Roman Catholicism, the opposition not only goes unchallenged by Mohler, it gets headlined on his website, and made to appear as if it is mainstream Catholic teaching. Albert Mohler is a lightning-quick, well-informed man who preaches the gospel with a fervency that I often admire. But to keep his listeners from having to ask that very difficult question, "Why not be Catholic?", he pronounces, from his Louisville cathedra, a newfangled law: Notre Dame locuta est - causa finita est.

The Decent Thing?

In the current issue of The City, Joseph Knippenberg reviews Francis Beckwith's Return to Rome. Rather than contesting Beckwith's Catholic views on justification and sanctification, Knippenberg admits he and many Reformed folk share them. But no matter. "We have a lot to learn from Rome, but we don't have to follow [Beckwith] all the way there to reap those benefits." We should "continue the conversation" and learn from each other; but, says Knippenberg, "I'll continue worshiping at my Presbyterian church."

Knippenberg's review reminded me of another review, Westminster Theological Seminary Professor Carl R. Trueman's review of Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom's Is the Reformation Over?. The review is quoted at length by Beckwith in Return to Rome because, says Beckwith, it "rocked me to the core." Trueman argues that Noll and Nystrom "do not draw the obvious conclusion from their own arguments." Trueman continues,

Every year I tell my Reformation history class that Roman Catholicism is, at least in the West, the default position. Rome has a better claim to historical continuity and institutional unity than any Protestant denomination, let alone the strange hybrid that is evangelicalism; in the light of these facts, therefore, we need good, solid reasons for not being Catholic; not being a Catholic should, in other words, be a positive act of will and commitment, something we need to get out of bed determined to do every day. It would seem, however, that if Noll and Nystrom are correct, many who call themselves evangelical really lack any good reason for such an act of will; and the obvious conclusion, therefore, should be that they do the decent thing and rejoin the Roman Catholic Church. I cannot go down that path myself, primarily because of my view of justification by faith and because of my ecclesiology; but those who reject the former and lack the latter have no real basis upon which to perpetuate what is, in effect, an act of schism on their part.

The Continualist

Though it made things rather crowded, it was appropriate that Father Richard John Neuhaus' funeral mass took place at his home parish, The Church of the Immaculate Conception in the East Village. There by Stuyvesant Town he celebrated the sacrament countless times, amidst "ordinary parishioners," many of whom knew nothing of his status as a public figure, the work he engaged in beyond his role as a parish priest. As Father de Souza noted in his magnificent homily, that altar, not his column in First Things, was his axis mundi.

I realized after the service that I had wandered into the church long ago, perhaps a decade earlier. I can't remember if it was when visiting my sister at NYU or on some youthful romp through the East Village, but I slipped in once to see the fabricated cave - the "Lourdes Grotto" in the back of the church, made to look like the actual cave in France with a hovering statue of Mary. Back then, it was one of those moments when an evangelical warms up to Catholic culture, and I remember despite the kitsch, that outlet of pedestrian Catholic piety having a positive impression. I was delightfully surprised today to discover that such a commanding intellectual had served for so long in the same church.

Father de Souza's homily celebrated Neuhaus' love for "convivium." Besides the ultimate convivium of the Eucharist, Neuhaus relished the kind comprised of vivid company mixed with cigars and a drinks. "The Scripture passage for this morning doesn't mention cigars, but Father Neuhaus wasn't a sola scriptura kind of guy." The reference to RJN as a "master of the dinner table" was fitting.

Yes, Neuhaus was conservative, but Jordan Hylden points out the folly of those who would use that word to explain him away:

More than once, when discussion at the office turned to the intellectual, political, or theological trend of the moment, RJN would get a familiar, amused look on his face - a half-grin, raised eyebrow, and mischievous twinkle in his eyes that said, "I've seen this sort of thing before." Fads meant little to Father Neuhaus, and he knew well how much the allure of intellectual fashion and the approval of the "right people" could blind one to the truth. He came to be dismissed by some as simply another "conservative." But I daresay that much of what he said will, given time, prove more enduring than the several fashions with which he was out of step.

Perhaps more than a conservative, Neuhuas was a continualist. As George Weigel has mentioned, Neuhaus' two central ideas were the compatibility of disestablishment and free enterprise of religion - ensuring that religion would continue to be part of his republic; and his extension of the Civil Rights movement, with the understanding that the pro-life cause was its genuine continuation. Also, "continualist" was the word he used in one of his later books to describe those who recognized the legitimacy of the Second Vatican Council. A continualist is neither a liberal who says the Council didn't go far enough, nor a conservative who saw it as breaking fundamentally with the Catholic past. Neuhaus was a Vatican II continualist who interpreted the Council as leavened by the millenia of church history that came before it, a history with which it was in harmony, not discord. The Council did bring changes, however, changes that enabled Neuhaus to become a Catholic, albeit one who faithfully lifted up daily prayer from the Lutheran prayerbook. He saw his conversion as a continuation of his genuine Lutheranism.

But Neuhaus was a continualist in another, more methaphysical, way as well. Once in a dinner conversation when I was lucky enough to sit next to him, I asked him once about his view of Marian piety and the communion of Saints. He paused, reflected, took a deep breath, and relished the chance to respond. Melodramatic as it may sound, he looked out at the dinner table like the two of us both standing on the edge of a great vista, with mountains stretching dozens of miles ahead. He explained how he expected to develop new skills of devotion, capacities he would need to nurture as he explored the horizons of communion with God and his church that lay ahead. Though it was months before his death, he sounded as if he was just beginning, which of course he was. Neuhaus continues his journey of communion with God, "higher up and further in." What a gift to have known him, and what a privilege to have seen him off.

Brilliant Article Alert

Matthew Lee Anderson's The New Evangelical Scandal in the current issue of The City is a triumph. I enjoyed this insider's account of evangelicalism so much that I didn't even have emotion left over to be envious that I hadn't written it myself.

A few (okay, more than a few) exerpts:

In the face of declining partisanship, patriotism, and eroding family ties, young evangelicals have increasingly turned away from their roots in search of a sense of grounding and stability. They have the intelligence to notice the flaws, but often lack the charity and the patience to work to fix them.

The renewed focus on community and on institutional structures is still grounded in the decisionism that has aways marked evangelicalism. The fact that we are born as Americans - or as evangelicals - is unimportant. What is important is that we choose to be patriotic, that we choose to be Republican, that we choose to be evangelicals (or emergent, or Catholic, or Presbyterian) - and that we make that choice independent from and irrespective of any tradition that may have shaped us.

The young evangelical fashions himself into his own preferred identity, and then finds others who have done likewise. More often than not this results in a rejection of the traditions - political or otherwise - in which younger evangelicals were raised...

No book is more exemplary of this need to create our own identity than Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz... For many young evangelicals, it functions as a modern-day Confessions, with two important exceptions: there is no attempt to discover the unity behind the decenteredness and fragmentation, and there is no interlocutor. It is difficult to see how his rambling and disjointed narrative and his distaste for social institutions and religion are not simply Fifties beatnik ideology baptized. The fact that it has resonated with so many young evangelicals reveals that most of us are struggling to pick up the pieces of an ever-expanding world and form a unique identity for ourselves, which is precisely what Donald Miller attempts to do. He simply has been more successful than most.

Younger evangelicals' claims to be above the fray may be true politically - but in the place of political power they have begun to seek cultural influence. The new movement to become culture creators is driven largely by the rejection of the evangelical artistic sub-culture... But young evangelicals' language about engaging the arts suggests that their new pursuit has little to do with excellence for its own sake - rather, artistic engagement is frequently subsumed under the hope and promise of cultural influence.

focusing on building the Kingdom here and now [i.e. Brian McLaren] to the exclusion of a robust eschatology ignores the inevitable failure of the Church to influence the world for Jesus that eschatology presupposes, creating idealistic (and ultimately, humanistic) notions of Chrisitianity and its potential for progress in the world. It is disingenuous of young evangelicals to criticize the political triumphalism of the religious right while ignoring the cultural triumphalism that this presupposes, and which undergirds our own cultural ethos.

I get the sense that for many of my young evangelical peers, the doctrine of eschatology is less important not because of careful reflection upon the Scriptures, but because of the political and cultural scorn the doctrine has earned. For most young evangelicals, eschatology is cringe inducing not because traditional formulations are wrong, but because they are weird. That all Christians would disappear in a flash will hardly earn Christians cultural acceptability - and cultural acceptance, today, is their paramount desire.

Theologically and ecclesiastically, it is fair to say that the exodus from evangelicalism by many of its intellectual leaders will continue. One could reasonably argue that the distinctives of evangelicalism are such that it is exactly where intellectuals ought to be, and that they have an obligation to remain evangelical.

I'd include more, but I may have already broken a copyright law. While the author seems to have a blog over here, you can get a free copy of the article in The City (published three times a year) by filling out this form which will take all of thirty seconds.

UPDATE: The article is now online.

Without a Paddle

Commenting on Reveal, Willow Creek's well publicized, weirdly-entitled self-study, S.M. Hutchens ("Up a Creek" Touchstone Nov. 2008) inadvertently wins the award for best use of the word "lactations."

Since the criteria used by Willow Creek to measure spiritual growth are by and large the same as those used by other Evangelical churches, if this study is valid the entire movement has been confronted with the question of whether the deeper one ventures into the Christian faith - the better he knows his Bible, the more faithful he is in the service of Christ, the more concerned he is for the welfare and mission of the Church - the less of a modern Evangelical he must perforce become. I have not heard it articulated this way, but think the conclusion inescapable... Something has been learned at Willow Creek that allows the more advanced member to understand he is in a spiritual nursery and can no longer live satisfactorily on its lactations. This means, however, that there must have been a competence of nourshiment to begin with.. and this is no small thing.

Reveal may provide trenchant analysis, but did we really need a published research survey to tell us this? Evangelicalism brings people to Christ (no small thing indeed). But the question is not whether maturing Evangelicals need to supplement their spiritual diet with the older Christian traditions. The question is whether one can do so on an intellectual level (e.g. a literary "taste" for patristic thought), while remaining outside the eucharistic, liturgical frameworks of those older traditions.

As to whether Anglicanism counts as one of them, in the same issue, William J. Tighe's retrospective assessment of Dom Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy suggests that contemporary liturgical scholars have confirmed Dix's view that Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer is essentially incompatible with Catholic and Orthodox traditions, its beauty being "clothed upon the negations of Zwingli."

Since when - I ask in jest - did Touchstone become a subsidiary of The Coming Home Newtork?

Regarding Protestants converting, Anastasia is on a roll.

In his theological commentary on Matthew (the one written well before theological commentaries were the done thing), Dale Bruner illuminates the same subject: "A believer needs a steady diet of both Paul and Matthew, of both gospel and law, in order to walk the narrow path into the kingdom."