RSSThe Protestant Ethic
I will post this comment here so it won’t get lost in the shuffle.
Darryl’s one thesis is fascinating to me. He posits a return to Luther’s emphasis on justification sola fide as a cure for excessive moralism in the church. This turns one of the most compelling critiques of Luther/Calvin on its head. This critique, following Weber and Voegelin, runs something like this:
1) Luther had to reconcile justification sola fide with numerous biblical commands to keep the law.
2) He thus bifurcated scripture into law (OT) versus promise (NT).
3) Law shows us what to do, but gives us no ability to do it. Thus, law has the effect of causing us to understand our failure and in turn despair of our salvation.
4) In this state, man is prepared to receive the promise, which is faith, thereby releasing man from the law, and freeing him to righteousness through unity with Christ.
5) In order to defend against rampant gnostic speculation, Luther renders this righteousness obtained through faith in the promise as a righteousness of the soul only. The body of sin remains, which forecloses the possibility of a terrestrial paradise.
6) This raises the additional problem of a people indifferent to morality and/or positively given over to licentiousness. To combat this kind of derailment on the other side of the track, Luther reintroduces an argument for good works. These good works are conceived of literally as a renewal of “work†under the Adamic covenant, whereby man gives good service in a realm of social obligation as his offering of gratitude to the promise giver (but not as righteousness).
7) These good works become the outward mark of the community of the redeemed.
This is, in very short summary, the spiritual economy which gives us the Protestant Ethic (or what George Santayana called “moral materialismâ€) which, it appears to me, is really what Darryl wants to condemn. I would like very much to believe him when he says a return to Luther/Calvin will aid us, but in light of the historical evidence against this, I am not sure what to think.
R. Scott Clark
June 4th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Caleb,
I don’t have time to take issue with the whole Weber thesis but the story is rather more complicated than you suggest.
Your account of Luther’s hermeneutic is a little off key.
Neither Luther nor the Protestants bifurcated Scripture in the way you suggest.
They did certainly distinguish law and gospel and thereby delivered from the death-dealing moralism of the medieval church which spoke chiefly (and almost exclusively) of “old law” and “new law.”
For a brief account of the Protestant law/gospel hermeneutic see ch 12 of Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry.
rsc
Caleb Stegall
June 4th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Scott, while I appreciate the fact that “the story is rather more complicated,” I do not think my admitted oversimplification is unfair, particularly as it relates to the socio-political implications of Luther’s theological speculations. Implications Luther himself was not unaware of. And I rather think the “whole Weber thesis” is what is at issue here (my 7 points are intended to be a very brief summary of that thesis), at least in large part.
Caleb Stegall
June 5th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Scott,
Upon further reflection, I wonder what you are doing with your odd comment above. It seems to me that one either has time or one doesn’t. If one doesn’t, but feels compelled nonetheless to issue drive-by wrist-slaps, my first inclination (actually, second) is to wonder what it was that agitated one so busy into responding. Is it that Luther/Calvin must be defended at all costs against any questions, even by recourse to weak, bad, or nonexistent argument? Or perhaps one sees an opportunity to hawk a book or two.
In fact, the account given by Weber/Voegelin is not “off,†but actually quite “on.†You admit as much in referencing a “distinguishing†between “law and gospel.†This may have been a deliverance from death-dealing moralism, or, it may have been an egophanic revolt of epic proportions which led to death-dealing moralism and far worse fates. That seems an open question at this point in the discussion.
You may wish to reference my article titled “Bistromathics, Metalogical Pessimistics, and Luther’s Crapper: A Theoblogical Investigation into Reformational Origins†published in the latest issue of Last Rites: the Journal of Sententious Prose and Mental Repose for a fuller understanding of these issues.
Or, you could consider the following:
Let us consider what Locke is actually doing [in Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695], in which Locke proposes to restore the true core of Christianity: the acceptance of Christ as the Messiah, the belief in the one God, and genuine repentance and submission to the law of Christ.
Christian doctrine as it has grown in the tradition of the church is not an arbitrary addition to the Gospel. It is the labor of generations in the attempt to find an adequate expression to the substance of faith in the historically changing economic, political, moral, and intellectual environment of Mediterranean and Western civilization.
The Christological struggles of the early centuries absorbed into this expression the Hellenistic intellectual culture, and the Scholasticism of the high Middle Ages absorbed into it the corpus Aristotelicum. In general, the history of Christian doctrine is the process by which the substance of faith is built into the civilization of man. It is a process that started in the immediate environment of Christ, and it is still going on. The precipitation of the process in the New Testament represents, for all that we know, a phase that has already advanced materially beyond the generation of Jesus’ immediate followers. Locke ignores this problem of the historicity of the Christian spirit. But beyond this statement it is not easy to formulate with precision what he has actually done.
At first sight one might say that, through his return to the New Testament phase of the process, he has deliberately thrown out the intellectual civilization that has been built into the expression of the relation of man to the divine ground in his soul. That is quite true. And the ease with which Locke gets rid at one fell swoop of the whole patristic and scholastic intellectual culture has remained paradigmatic for the wholesale civilizational destruction in which the politically predominant movements of our time engage. Nevertheless, the situation is much too complicated to be covered by the brief formula of throwing out a body of tradition. Above all, this formula ignores the problem of the historical process.
A tradition is not a block that can be thrown out. One can throw out a tradition only by throwing oneself out of it. This feat, however, is not so simple as it looks to the naive minds that who believe they can return to a “primitive†Christianity without returning to the civilizational state of “primitive†Christians. This feat, if realized socially, would imply the complete destruction of contemporary civilization, not only under its intellectual aspects, but also economically and technologically. This is not Locke’s intention.
Locke and those who follow him in his course go on to live and to participate in a civilizational environment that has been formed into the remotest wrinkles of its intellectual language by the very tradition they try to remove. Hence, the attempt to return to the earlier phase will result not in a genuine removal of tradition (which would imply the rebuilding of a civilization on a new basis) but in a far-reaching devastation of the intellectual form of contemporary civilization [termed here primitivization].
… . In the light of [comparisons with Warburton, Montesquieu, and Rousseau], Locke’s return to the New Testament looks very much like a beginning of historical romanticism, like an early case of the return to a historical “myth†for the purpose of assuaging the disorder of the age. The common characteristic of such returns is the open or implied critique of civilization, the assumption that the substance has seeped out of its institutional and intellectual forms, the suspicion that perhaps these very forms have killed the substance, and the growing conviction that the meaning of existence can be recovered only by the destruction of the incubus.
–Eric Voegelin, Collected Works, vol. 24 (The History of Political Ideas, vol. 6), Chapter 4, “The English Quest for the Concrete,†sec. 2f., “Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity, pp. 173-174, 179.
W.H. Chellis
June 5th, 2007 at 11:55 am
I will let Scott speak for himself but one area (and I am not sure this has any impact on the major issues involved, indeed I think it does not) is your point:
“2) He thus bifurcated scripture into law (OT) versus promise (NT).”
The Lutheran, and certainly not the Reformed, would have seen the law-gospel distinction in Old Testament/New Testament terms (at least not exclusively).
Caleb Stegall
June 5th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Bill, you are doublely correct: 1) it doesn’t have any impact; and 2) the OT/NT parentheticals in my original are confusing, unneccesary, and can be dispensed with.
W.H. Chellis
June 5th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Then I leave you to your prey.
D Hart
June 7th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Caleb, the only part of the Weber thesis that you outline to which I object is #7. I see biblical reasons for saying that good works are marks of the redeemed. But I see all sorts of historical examples where such an assertion needs real nuance, such as that our good works are as filthy rags, and so become no consolation in our quest to stand on God’s holy hill.
But as for the antinomian implications of the gospel, I will accept them. Protestantism is at odds with classical understandings of virtue. I see no way of reconciling the ancients and Christianity, actually. At the same time, I think the ancients offer lots of wisdom for the non-regenerate and even for the regenerate on bad days.
You have spoken before on this blog about the well-ordered soul. That is the quest of much of political theory from the ancients to at least the early moderns. But the Christian believes that well-ordered soul only comes as a gift of God.
Does this mean that we should encourage non-believers to be hellions? Of course not. I’d like to see them be virtuous pagans. Such virtue is possible apart from regenerating grace, I think. But once these folks here that such virtue is inadequate to merit God’s favor, they need to hear the good news of righteousness available only because of Christ’s work.
Caleb Stegall
June 7th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Darryl, I appreciate that reply, thanks. It helpfully delineates some of the principle structures underlying much of these discussions.
While I am not ready to accept the position you sketch here, I appreciate the reality that it is this problem (Christianity’s, and especially Protestant Christianity’s, demythologizing and delegitimatizing all politics/virtue) that lies at the center of most of our received conundrums. And as I tend to approach these issues primarily through the eye of political philosophy, I find it nigh impossible to accept that Christianity properly understood amounts to nothing less radical than the end of politics.
D Hart
June 8th, 2007 at 6:06 am
Caleb, mind you, I’m not happy about where my Protestantism leads me. This may also explain why I am not as critical of the modern political economists (e.g., Mandeville) who believed that exhange and bartering would restrain evil even while promoting self-interest. Again, I’m not happy with that line of argument. But I won’t budge on justification. Blame it on self-interest.
Caleb Stegall
June 8th, 2007 at 8:43 am
Considering the broad sweep of Church history, I don’t think it at all evident that justification forces one into this corner. Though, I concede that a reformed view of justification quite probably does. But of course the problems do not cease once you dig in on either side of that divide.
Luther is probably our chief example of this. To illustrate, I want to go back to your comment that Luther (Protestantism) is incompatible with virtue classically understood. Because this is precisely part of Voegelin’s diagnosis of Luther—that his understanding of justification destroyed ethics. “The whole realm of problems that is to be found in the Ethics of Aristotle or in the quaestiones on law in the Summa of Saint Thomas does not exist for Luther. He simply maintained that ‘everyone can note and tell for himself when he does what is good or what is not good; for if he finds his heart confident that it pleases God, the work is good, even if it were so small a thing as picking up a straw. If confidence is absent, or if he doubts, the work is not good.’â€
So the whole edifice of classical and medieval ethics is dissolved by a magic incantation of the “heart.†Therefore, Luther argued that Christians have no need of “temporal sword, nor law.†Moreover, “if all the world were right Christian, that is right faithful, no prince, king, lord, sword nor law would be necessary or useful … since they have the Holy Spirit in their hearts.†Luther of course understood well the tremendous political problem this created. The question plaguing Luther was, as Voegelin puts it, that: “the consciousness of being a righteous Christian is not so difficult to obtain; and what shall we do when individuals whose actions obviously need some curbing tell us that they are righteous Christians and that the power of the sword must not be used against them?†Luther knew that, as he put it, “evil men under the Christian name would misuse evangelical freedom; they would indulge in their rascalities and say that they are Christians and not subject to law or sword—even as now quite a few are raving.†This will be true in the temporal world of human relations because “the world and the mass[es] are and will be non-Christians however much they are baptized and called Christians.†Thus, Luther argued that the role of temporal authority was to curb the actions of non-Christians in a utilitarian manner. However, if such temporal authority abuses its powers and, for example, outlaws Bibles, it must be resisted by righteous Christians. One cannot bounce back and forth like this between temporal authority and individual conscience forever. Voegelin: “Obviously there is no way out of this mess. When the order of tradition and institutions is destroyed, when order is put at the decisionist mercy of the individual conscience, we have descended to the level of the war of all against all. A respite from such anarchy can come only through the formation of the new community orders in which tradition is in part recaptured and, with socially effective force, imposed as an objective public order on rebellious consciences. This is the situation from which emerges the new order of necessity, the secular state, with the raison d’etat as its rule of conduct.â€
And Luther was not immune to this dynamic. In fact, when the chips were down, he rather brazenly smuggles the Aristotelian concept of “a plurality of ethics†(the guidance of judgment by an awareness of the differences of persons in society) in through the back door. The revolting peasants of 1525 who claimed the Lutheran mantle of conscience wrote that: “It has been the custom hitherto for men to hold us as their own property; and this is pitiable, seeing that Christ has redeemed and bought us all with the precious shedding of His blood, the lowly as well as the great, excepting no one. Therefore, it agrees with Scripture that we be free and will to be so.†And Luther responded: “That is making Christian liberty an utterly carnal thing. Did not Abraham and other patriarchs and prophets have slaves? Read what St. Paul teaches about servants, who, at the time, were all slaves. Therefore the Article is dead against the Gospel. It is a piece of robbery by which everyman takes from his lord the body which has become his lord’s property. For the slave can be a Christian and have Christian liberty, in the same way that a prisoner or a sick man is a Christian, and yet not free. This Article would make all men equal, and turn the spiritual kingdom of Christ into a worldly, external kingdom; and that is impossible, for a worldly kingdom cannot stand unless there is in it an inequality of persons, so that some are free, some imprisoned, some lords, some subjects, etc.â€
Now, it would be dumb here to get bogged down in an argument over slavery and not see the deeper significance of this exchange. For in it, you can see Luther essentially rejecting the cessation of ethics generated by his own position on justification. But the situation becomes intolerable when the right hand is forced to deny what the left hand is trying to do behind the back (which is what I think virtually all Reformed political theory must, by necessity, become). Absent some sort of double-dealing, we are left with, in Voegelin’s words, either the logic of anarchy or the logic of the state sponsored bloodbath.
D Hart
June 9th, 2007 at 9:12 am
Caleb, I’m not about to defend Luther, not because of embarrassment but mainly because of ignorance. My recollection of 1520s Luther is that he got himself in a mess of trouble and then had to change course. He was what we call a work in progress as was the society around him.
But I don’t think Luther’s problems are only Lutherans’. WCF 16.7 says that the good works of the unregenerate “are sinful and cannot please God.” That reflects Protestant teaching on how people become good, by the saving work of God. That also puts Reformed Christians in the difficult territory of telling unsaved neighbors, “please be good (but in reality your good works are sinful).” I see no way around this problem for Protestants, Luther’s dealings with the peasants and radicalism notwithstanding.
So I sense a Reformed Christian has to make a choice at some point. Either he can have his cake (justification and a restricted understanding of the good that upsets the West’s account of virtue) or he can eat it (Aristotelian ethics, its footnotes, and a public, shared understanding of the good). But he can’t have his cake and eat it too. Not until glory anyway when I imagine there will be plenty of forks to go round.
Caleb Stegall
June 12th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Darryl, a couple things:
1) Luther’s views on justification were not a work in progress by 1520. Everything that came after was and still is a work in progress in light of those views.
2) I don’t really accept your position of “these are the problems” and we have to “just live with them.” It seems to me to be a way of avoiding reality and also fails to account for the ways that reality impinges on the lives of ordinary people. As you have said before, the pastor has to get paid. If Christians can really truly have no shared, common good with the societies in which they live, what are you asking them to do? And will they do it? No, of course they won’t. They will live as if there IS an appreciable common good and be forced at some level into an internal self-deception. I maintain that this self-deception is at the heart of the whole shebang of reformed schizophrenia on these questions.
3) Doesn’t your view expressed here lead to a rejection of common grace?
4) Doesn’t your view undermine all of your criticisms of evangelicalism, so much of which depends on arguments from prudence, wisdom, etc., all of which are quite Aristotelian in nature?
Caleb Stegall
June 12th, 2007 at 11:16 am
More on common grace:
“There existed in paganism a continued revelation through nature and the reason, in heart and conscience,—an illumination of the Logos, a speech from the wisdom of God through the hidden working of grace. . . . No doubt among the heathen this wisdom has in many respects become corrupted and falsified; they retain only fragments of truth, not the one, entire, full truth. But even such fragments are profitable and good. The three sisters, logic, physics and ethics, are like unto the three wise men from the east, who came to worship in Jesus the perfect wisdom. The good philosophical thoughts and ethical precepts found scattered through the pagan world receive in Christ their unity and center. They stand for the desire which in Christ finds its satisfaction; they represent the question to which Christ gives the answer; they are the idea of which Christ furnishes the reality. The pagan world, especially in its philosophy, is a pedagogy unto Christ; Aristotle, like John the Baptist, is the forerunner of Christ. It behooves the Christians to enrich their temple with the vessels of the Egyptians and to adorn the crown of Christ, their king, with the pearls brought up from the sea of paganism.”
Herman Bavinck, “Calvin and Common Grace,†Princeton Theological Review
7 (1909)
Now Bavinck was part of a movement that tried (and I have admiration for the attempt) to recover from within the Reformation of Luther and Calvin some coherent rational for ethics, politics, and art. That this movement ultimately failed does not, to me, dilute or negate the truth of the sentiment above (though Bavinck’s attempt to root this deeply in Calvinism may be at the root of his movement’s failure).
Or as Voegelin puts the rhetorical question to Luther: “Do the glories of Greece lead only to hell?” The answer is, no, they lead to Jesus.
D Hart
June 12th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Caleb, isn’t my acceptance of the problem of virtue better than saying I have a 12-point plan to fix it? I understand my response can come across as complacent. But personally I take this defeat as altogether serious.
I have my reservations about “common grace” not simply because it is part of the neo-Calvinist oeuvre. I generally appreciate what folks are trying to accomplish when appealing to common grace but I think the older categories of creation and providence work just as well, and may even take the created order more seriously.
At the same time, I think it is hard to answer Voegelin’s question historically the way you do. The glories of Greece seem to have led to the glories of Rome and with it a theology of glory that would have embarrassed the Corinthians. This doesn’t mean that I am opposed to the wisdom or proposals of the ancients or of Voegelin. I’d much prefer Aristotle to Mandeville, and in either case will take some kind of common life wherever I can find it. (It actually works amazing well on our block in Philadelphia where our non-observant Christian, Roman Catholic and agnostic neighbors tolerate a couple of Calvinists with remarkable grace.) What I balk at are efforts to make Christianity continuous with the true, good, and beautiful of the world, as if the gospel is the culmination of those goods. I believe that Protestantism recognized the paradoxial relationship between cult and culture.
This doesn’t mean that the world’s culture is inherently without value. To the extent that it reflects the created order and to the extent that God ordains it as a platform for his gracious work, it is something in which Christians should participate depending on their callings. But the reality of sin, as I understand it, means that no human efforts, no matter how true, good or beautiful, will please God. It’s that wrinkle of Protestantism that leads me to answer Voegelin by saying that the glories of Greece are glorious and unfortunately still lead to hell. (Please don’t tell my neighbors.)
As far as my objections to evangelicalism, they are legion and I don’t think they have much to do with common grace or related issues. In a nutshell, my problem is that evangelicalism is a generic form of Christianity that doesn’t sufficiently address all of God’s revealed truth as Reformed, Lutherans, Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have tried to do.
Caleb Stegall
June 12th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Darryl,
Yes, your serious acceptance of the dramatic concessions of the Reformational shift is far preferable to those who would deny the shift had any costs at all. It is, in fact, what makes this discussion worth having.
The only thing remaining is to grapple with the very difficulty of this defeat. It is a defeat that only souls with substantial spiritual stamina seem able to endure. How should we account for this historical truth? This is where Evangelicalism becomes relevant, as it seems to be the current historical force capable of mediating the between the Reformed disenchanting of the world and the mass of spiritually weakened people (a weakening, by the way, attributable to the very disenchantment we are talking about). I’ll make it specific: You dislike Evangelical praise songs (as do I), yet you have given up any possibility of a coherent rational for human artistry. Here is how I see the situation: I think it is acceptable for you to say, “I won’t budge on X, and I concede that X (protestant view of justification) fatally undermines A (common ethics), B (common politics), and C (common culture), yet we still have a provisional need for ABC so I will object to the philistines who want to dispense with ABC at every opportunity.” (This is my basic reading of Luther). The only problem is that people simply will not go along with this unless you operate within a context of some kind of shrewd Machiavellian sleight-of-hand. The most generous reading of Evangelicalism, to me, is as a tragically necessary sleight-of-hand. But if we are to do away with it and retain X, we need a better trick (broadly speaking, the “trick” of post-Reformation modernity has been the economists’ reliance on “self-interest” and the political theorists reliance on the “swindle of consent”—the narrative of western declension might be viewed as the “wearing thin” of these noble lies). (On the other hand, I was holding out hope that you would show me how X does not fatally undermine ABC. But since you just went and conceded it, this is what we seem left with.)
Finally, even if one concedes that the glories of Greece led to the glories of Rome, can we not also concede with St. Augustine that Rome had “at least such worthiness before God that the Savior would appear in their empire.” If I recall correctly, C.S. Lewis once said that before the mass of western people could become good Christians they would first have to re-learn how to be good pagans.
W.H. Chellis
June 13th, 2007 at 8:11 am
An impressive discussion. The rub is this… we are not interacting with 17th Century Protestant scholasticism. My reading of Richard Muller suggests that the tension we are talking about was resolved by the Protestant scholastics.
In the corpus of their works we find an unmovable defense of justification along with a reintroduction of scholastic methodology, Aristotelian logic, and ethics.
So Luther damns Aristotle. Melanchton’s loci restores him. Sure Calvin spits venom at scholastics, but the question is which scholastics? In fact, I would argue that Post-Reformation orthodoxy (especially the Reformed variety) is closer to the medival realist position on culture, ethics, and metaphysics than it was to the via modernity of Occam-ist nominalism.
I am not sure Luther is the best guide to these questions. He is the point of most extreme tension. Raised in a theological environment of nominalism, this Augustianian rebelled against the spirit of his age. The tensions are roughly defined and not well understood by Luther.
Viva Reformed Scholasticism!
D Hart
June 14th, 2007 at 11:59 am
So Caleb is going soft on evangelicals and Bill is holding out for a revival of the Protestant scholastics. This must be what happens when you sing too many psalms?
I do think Bill is on to something, though, in that the Westminster Confession leaves room for the “light” of nature informing the circumstances of church life. That light seems to give great value to Robert’s Rules and could likely be employed to trash praise songs.
But before I throw the towel in completely on A, B, and C, I wonder what Caleb thinks of a distinction between what is ultimately good and what is provisionally good. This is where I think the light of nature goes — it gives us the true, good and beautiful but only in a provisional sense. What fundamentalists and Kuyperians both seem to be guilty of is not having such a sense, as if the world and its affairs are good but not sacred or redemptive. Of course, fundamentalists avoided the world because it was wicked. Kuyperians seem to make up for this by making the world full of the possibility of redemption. Neither approach has it right in my view. And a lot of this goes back to how we read the Garden. God created it good, but it wasn’t blessed. That blessedness awaited Adam keeping the Covenant. And now on this side of the fall, that goodness is seriously diminished. But I still think it’s available through said light of nature.
What justification does is to remind us that such goodness will not suffice to merit God’s favor.
Or is this squishy?
W.H. Chellis
June 14th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Not squishy! I think you are right on.
Caleb Stegall
June 14th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Darryl, you are backing off of your inner fundamentalist here, which is actually more in line with what I originally expected. I admit it was something of a breath of fresh air to encounter fundamentalism openly admitted, regretted, and still defended. But as always, for civilized men who can appreciate Chesterton’s thick steak, glass of red, and good cigar, the regret always overwhelms the defense, no?
I completely agree with your large paragraph describing the failures of both fundamentalism and neocalvinism. In fact, it tracks quite nicely with this paper by Ken Meyers (http://www.marshillaudio.org/resources/pdf/ComGrace.pdf) from which I cribbed the Bavinck quote.
But this does, in fact, toss us back into the sticky (squishy?) question of understanding the social/cultural implications of Luther’s understanding of justification, which, by all acounts (including your own a few days ago) leaves no room for a common account of the good. If we wish to preserve the light of nature we must understand that such goodness as may be had through the light of nature does in fact precipitate God’s favor. For Augustine, at least, whether such favor ever become salvific or not remains unknowable.
This explains my comments on evangelicals, not that I am going soft on them, but rather that the most generous read one can put on evangelicalism is that it is a kind of double-dealing (or having a reformed cake and eating someone elses natural law cake, as you might put it) that mediates between fundamentalism and outright transformationalism (whether it by theonomic or neocalvinist). Even given this generous read, I would argue that evangelicalism is an extremely weak form of mediation due to its denial of the truth of what is going on, which renders it defenseless against the liberalism of pop politics, pop markets, and pop culture. This would explain, for example, the mind-bending phenomena of evangelicals openly and simultaneously arguing for an objectivist public ethic (abortion, homoesexuality, etc.) and a subjectivist private ethic (praise songs, birth control, etc.). This also explains why so many in the evangelical camp who are tasked with spying on and making night raids on the storehouse of virtue contained in other traditions (Rome) so often “go native” and one night, never return to the evangelical camp.
Bill, your comments on Reformed scholasticism are interesting. I would like to interact some with that tradition, but alas, am mostly ignorant of it at this point.
D Hart
June 16th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Oh good, maybe it’s a squishy cake I can have and eat after my thick steak and before my cigar.
Caleb, when you say that evangelicals deny “the truth of what is going on” what exactly do you mean by what is going on? Is it not realizing their double dealing? Or is it not recognizing the dilemma of Luther’s teaching for the sanctified life or virtue? I’m particularly interested because I like your take on the objectivist-subjectivist schizophrenia among evangelicals.
In the name of provisional goodness I am willing to say to an unbeliever that it is better for him not to violate God’s law because I do think his eternal punishments will be less because of some “virtue.” But I wonder if that is going to be persuasive.
My fundamentalism comes from my constantly being struck by the paradoxical relationship between grace and virtue/wisdom. Last Sunday our New Testament reading came from 2 Cor. 12. The very idea that we are made perfect in weakness, or that the folly of the cross is wiser than the wisdom of the Greeks is simply stunning to me and confounds even the brightest light of nature. For whatever difficulties Luther precipitated, he certainly recognized the paradoxical nature of the gospel in ways that always shock as you read him. And as long as neo-Calvinists and evangelicals fail to do justice to the paradox, as long as I have breath I’ll keep reminding them of it and being a pain in the bleep about it.
Caleb Stegall
June 19th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Darryl, both. I mean that they do not recognize the tragic tension between being a “good Christian” and a “good man.” And it is not sufficient to choose one and either pine for the other, or pretend that the tension does not exist.
Yes, the Gospel is radical. And this returns me to a theme I’ve been sounding repeatedly on this blog: the radicalism of being made perfect in weakness is temporal social and cultural suicide.
I agree that we should seek to do justice to the paradox. I think we can fail to do justice to the paradox by underappreciating the omni-present necessity of temporal “pagan” goods that our creaturely existence demands.
Consider:
“The doctrine of the sermon [on the mount] is an eschatological doctrine. It demands a change of heart and imposes rules of conduct that have their meaning for men who live in the daily expectation of the kingdom of Heaven. It is not a doctrine that can be followed by men who live in a less intense environment, who expect to live out their lives and who wish to make the world livable for their families. Following the doctrine of the sermon to the letter would in each individual case inevitably entail social and economic disaster and probably lead to an early death. The pressure of an eschatological doctrine of this type influences strongly the structure of a civilization. The rules of the sermon are not a code that can be followed like the Ten Commandments. The radicalism of the demands precludes their use as a system of social ethics. Any set of rules that is accepted by a Christian society as the standard of conduct will inevitably fall far short of the teaching of the sermon.” EV, HPI vol. i.
I find this compelling. Hence my advocacy for a penitent political theology. One that will theorize on a foundation of the stark experience of power and shortage in the temporal world, yet also will come under the eschatalogical pressure of the radicalism of the Gospel, which tempers that experience with the Christian experience of guilt, confession, repentence, and renewal.
D Hart
June 20th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Caleb wrote, “I find this compelling.” Me too. (Maybe because it’s the first quotation from Voegelin I think I’ve understood.)