Why this discussion needs a lawyer, and tidying up other loose ends

Caleb Stegall

As a litigator and one who argues in front of people for a living, I think it is important to understand the arguments people make in their rhetorical form in order to clearly see the underlying interests, position, strengths, and weaknesses which those rhetorical forms are intended to advance or protect in the confusing context and on the shifting battleground of different pushes and pulls of power and its exercise by the different combatants.

I don’t think enough attention is paid to this sort of analysis, and as a result, it is often extremely difficult to penetrate beyond the surface of things and break through what conventional wisdom views as prolonged entrenched warfare with little prospect for material advance but high likelihood of massive bloodshed.

To apply this kind of analysis to one narrow aspect of this discussion in a rather perfunctory and, admittedly, unsatisfactory way (if anyone wants to give me a hefty advance to write a book on the subject, let me know :)), I want to address Doug’s repeated question and thus the loose end of my promised response.

Doug has repeatedly admonished Darryl for essentially wanting to have it both ways in claiming a Reformational tradition but then accusing the FV of not being a church. At risk of cutting my friend and DRC colleague off at the knees, I would simply concede Doug’s point—in part. He is right, the Reformation was not a church. He is right, many of the high-church and traditionalist arguments being made could likewise have been made (and were made) against Luther. The Reformation was a tragic necessity which enshrined, in a way that had not been true before, the principle of individual choice at the center of the Christian faith. Yes, this was true of even the magisterial reformers like Luther and Calvin.

It would not do to neglect to point out all the good things that come from the dynamism, creativity, vitality, etc., which were unleashed on the world by the Spirit via the Protestant Church. It also does not do to fail to acknowledge the manifest destructive tendencies of the protestant principle (schism, liberalization, modern alienation and disenchantment, etc.), especially because a chief responsibility of the custodians of the Prostestant faith is precisely to check and restrain those destructive tendencies. This is what the magisterial reformers knew and why they battled the radical reformers so vigorously. See Luther and the peasants’ revolt and Hooker versus the radical puritans for two historical examples. The art of being Protestant is to a large extent the art of understanding this mixed history and conflicted inheritance and negotiating its tensions for the health of the church.

For this reason, I think Doug is wrong to conclude that we cannot have it both ways. Maintaining order and health across generations is, to a large extent, an exercise in having it both ways. This is why I believe it is necessary to craft a protestant doctrine of “the noble lie” as I put it earlier in this discussion. We are where we are in history. We deal with it. Sometimes, for the health of our received order, we must creatively double deal with it. The Westminster divines, I submit, understood this. This is why I reject simple minded appeals to authority, whether of the pope or of the WCF, even though I think that such appeals are very healthy in the minds of the laity, because they preserve the right order and smooth function of the tradition. This order can become turned against itself and sow the seeds of its own failure, however, under the “rule of opinion,” which is why I have criticized both sides for, essentially, being too earnest about their own status as saints and wearers of the white hats. 99% of history doesn’t require white hats; it requires prudent men who understand what they have received and what they must do to pass it on.

To many unaccustomed to thinking this way, what I am saying will likely appear cynical to a wicked extreme. Let me suggest that it is not. To paraphrase Eliot, the Church is the music while the music lasts. In other words, the Church has power—it has the mojo—and much of our faith and adherence boils down, in the end, to resting on the aphorism: It is true because the church says it is true. Yes, this is an appeal to authority, but it is supple, multi-textured, and anything but simple minded.

I said this to Gary Wills (a Catholic who wants to liberalize/protestantize his own church) once when we were both guests on some NPR radio show and he accused me of idolatry. I am still thinking about that, but my tentative conclusion is that he is wrong and I am right. Big surprise, eh?

I realize this recitation may put me on the outs with everyone here, but if it is fodder for further conversation and mutual understanding, that is all to the good.