Author: David Opderbeck

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Theology

What is Justice, Part 2

Part 2 of  my series on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Justice in Love is up on Jesus Creed.  Head on over and join in the conversation.  Below is the post.

In my first post, I highlighted some of the major themes in Wolterstorff’s recent books:  Justice:  Rights and Wrongs, and Justice in Love.  Wolterstorff seeks to ground human rights in the claim that each and every human being has worth because God loves each and every human being with the “love of attachment.”  In this post, I want to jump ahead to the final two chapters of Justice in Love to confront a fundamental issue that lurks underneath Wolterstorff’s entire project.  Those chapters are entitled “The Justice of God’s Generosity in Romans” and “What is Justification and What is Just?”

For now, what do you think of Wolterstorff’s treatment of the nature of God’s justice in Romans?  Is Luther’s treatment of Romans in On the Bondage of the Will correct, or does Luther overstate or mis-state the case?  I’m particularly interested to hear from readers who are knowledgeable about the New Perspective on Paul:  does Wolterstorff properly frame these two chapters in terms that are consistent with the NPP?

When I was a child, we used to sing the tune “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.  Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.  Jesus loves the little children of the world.”  Today we might blush a bit at the racial and colonialist undertones of this song, but we might want to affirm its basic message:  Jesus loves all the children of the world.  God loves everyone.  As children, we also memorized John 3:16 (in the King James, of course!):  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life.” God loves the whole world.   Jesus died for everyone and God’s gift of life is available to everyone.  Wolterstorff’s basic notion that God loves everyone seems manifestly attested to in popular evangelical piety and in scripture.

There were no Sunday School ditties, however, referring to Paul’s dense and tangled argument in Romans 1-11.  The famous passage in Romans 9:13-22 must give us pause as we think about “justice”:

Just as it is written, “JACOB I LOVED, BUT ESAU I HATED.”

What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! For He says to Moses, “I WILL HAVE MERCY ON WHOM I HAVE MERCY, AND I WILL HAVE COMPASSION ON WHOM I HAVE COMPASSION.” So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “FOR THIS VERY PURPOSE I RAISED YOU UP, TO DEMONSTRATE MY POWER IN YOU, AND THAT MY NAME MIGHT BE PROCLAIMED THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE EARTH.” So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.

You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?

Obviously, this is a massively difficult passage for any Christian perspective on human rights and justice.  God hates some people?  God creates some people for destruction?  In what sense can a person God creates for “common use,” a person whom God “hates,” have “human rights” – particularly rights grounded in God’s love?  For many theologians and ethicists in the Reformed traditions, Romans 1-11 demonstrates that there is, in fact, no such thing as “human rights” and no such thing as any “natural” sense of ethics or justice.

In his treatise “On the Bondage of the Will,” Martin Luther responded to Catholic theologian Desiderius Erasmus’ claim that Luther’s theology destroyed the concept of human free will.  Exactly, Luther responded:  we do not have free will because God foreknows everything, including the fact of each person’s salvation or reprobation.  This is not a problem for “justice,” Luther said, because

If [God’s] justice were such as could be adjudged just by human reckoning, it clearly would not be Divine; it would in no way differ from human justice. But inasmuch as He is the one true God, wholly incomprehensible and inaccessible to man’s understanding, it is reasonable, indeed inevitable, that His justice also should be incomprehensible; as Paul cries, saying: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!”

It is not a stretch to suggest that Luther’s rejection of the Catholic view of human freedom and natural justice lay at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. It also is not a stretch to suggest that this remains a fundamental dividing point not only between the Reformed and Catholic and Orthodox traditions, but also among evangelicals today.

Wolterstorff dives boldly into this historical debate.  He suggests that his “interpretation of Paul will be along the lines of ‘the new Paul’ initiated by Stendahl and Sanders.”  (JIL, p. 247).  Romans, he says, “can be seen as a meditation on the theological significance of Jesus’ actions [in showing “no partiality” to non-Jews] and Peter’s vision [in Acts 10, in which table fellowship is opened to gentiles].”  Paul’s central argument in Romans 1-11 is that God is substantively just in extending covenant blessings to the Gentiles because those blessings are extended on the same basis upon which they were made available to the Jews:   faith.

This line of thought obviously diverges significantly from Luther’s.  Wolterstorff suggests that the substantive principle of God’s justice is, indeed, discernible and is made known in the course of Paul’s argument.  For Wolterstorff, Romans 1-11 is not about the unknowability of God’s justice.  Rather, it is a theodicy in which Paul argues that God impartially offers justification to Jew and Gentile alike.

But what about Paul’s theme of election?  Wolterstorff argues that Paul is

not talking about who shares in the final redemption; he’s talking about the pattern of God’s action in history to bring about redemption.  He’s not talking about who God ultimately justifies; he’s talking about the fact that God chooses certain persons for a special role in the story line of redemption.  He’s not talking about divine strategy; he’s talking about divine tactics.  He’s not talking about who God declares justified on the great day of final judgment; he’s talking about who belongs here and now to “the children of God,” to “the children of the promise.”  (JIL, pp. 267-68).

Wolterstorff subsequently unpacks what he takes as the purpose and meaning of “faith” in relation to justification and justice.  He also tackles the nature of the atonement and its relation to justice.  These are enormous topics in themselves, so I’ll leave them for later posts.

For now, what do you think of Wolterstorff’s treatment of the nature of God’s justice in Romans?  Is Luther’s treatment of Romans in On the Bondage of the Will correct, or does Luther overstate or mis-state the case?  I’m particularly interested to hear from readers who are knowledgeable about the New Perspective on Paul:  does Wolterstorff properly frame these two chapters in terms that are consistent with the NPP?

For my part, I’m not a Biblical scholar or a Paul scholar.  I can’t (and don’t want to try to) speak with authority on how to interpret this incredibly difficult text.  Yet, I’ve read Romans 9-11 dozens of times in recent months, trying to reflect on this very issue of God’s justice.  To me, the interpretive key for Romans 9 must be Romans 11.  But I’ll refrain for the moment from offering more of my thoughts.   Who is right – Luther, or Erasmus and Wolterstorff?

Categories
Biblical Studies Theology

Reading Revelation Responsibly

Here is a video promo for an adult education class I’ll be teaching in October at my church.  Below the video clip is a blurb about the class.

Revelation is a strange and often frightening text.  Christians have struggled for almost two thousand years to understand it.  Today, it is often used to support detailed scenarios of what will happen in the “end times.”  Perhaps you’ve read novels or seen movies that take this popular approach.

While these books and movies can be entertaining, they probably don’t have very much to do with what the text of Revelation meant in its original context, or with what it might mean for us today.   We’ll explore the thought world in which the text was produced — the genre of “apocalyptic” literature, particularly among Jewish people in the first century A.D. — to gain insights about the meaning of the text to its first hearers.  Then we’ll consider how the horizons of the text relate to the horizons of our contemporary understanding and concerns.

We won’t try to produce a final or complete interpretation of the mysteries contained in this text.  Instead, we’ll come to appreciate that, like all of scripture, this text points to the glory and beauty of Jesus Christ, the hope of all creation.

Categories
Justice Religious Legal Theory Theology

What is Justice, Part 1

I’m doing a series on Jesus Creed  on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s most recent book, Justice in Love (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion).  Go over there and join the conversation!  Here’s my first post:

Introduction

Nicholas Wolterstorff is a leading Christian philosophical theologian who combines his intellectual erudition with a warm evangelical faith.  Recently he published an important two-part series of books on the theme of “Justice” — Justice: Rights and Wrongs and Justice in Love.  Although both books touch on some difficult philosophical and theological themes, they are readily accessible to anyone.  If you’re involved in justice ministries, legal or law enforcement work, government or military service, or are otherwise interested in the theme of justice, these are books you should read.

Here are some opening questions:  Why two fat books on “justice?”  Don’t we already know what “justice” means?  What do you think comprises “justice?”  Do human beings have inherent “rights”?  Is a concept of “rights” required for a concept of “justice?”

“Justice” and “rights,” in fact, are slippery concepts.  Western liberal theories of justice and rights, after the rise of modernity, generally attempt to avoid reference to God or any other transcendent source of rights and justice.  John Rawls’ highly influential approach, for example, is rooted in social contractarian ideas.  For Rawls, “justice” requires that each individual give to others what she would desire for herself, if all individuals were ignorant of any other person’s desires.  Other theories, such as the “capacities” approach of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, conceive of “justice” as what is necessary to maximize the innate capabilities of each person in a way that supports human flourishing.  Each of these theories, and others like them, focus only on human or “natural” factors.

Christian theology, of course, must think beyond the human to the divine.  But how do notions of “justice” and “rights” fit into a Christian theistic framework?

In Roman Catholic theology, “justice” is woven into the “natural law,” which is to some degree accessible to all human beings through the exercise of natural reason.  For Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, natural law served as a précis to the fuller understanding of truth and the virtues that could be acquired only through faith.  Following Aristotle, Thomas’ ethical theory is a eudemonistic one – it posits an ideal “good life,” a life in which the vision of God is the ultimate good, and develops virtues and practices required to attain the good life.   Although Thomas considered faith necessary for a fully virtuous live, he believed ordinary human reason could grasp the basic principles of justice.

Wolterstorff argues that eudemonistic theories of ethics fail to supply a stable basis for “rights” and “justice” because they fail to offer an account of inherent human worth.  (JR&W at p. 179).  The “life-goods” of eudemonism, he says, are activities “each of us must choose … with the goal in mind of enhancing one’s own happiness.”  Wolterstorff suggests that, “[t]here is no room in this scheme for the worth of persons and human beings, and hence none for one’s right against others to their treating one a certain way on account of one’s worth.”  (JR&W at p. 179).  This argument against eudemonism is interesting because it turns the usual Protestant / Reformed argument against eudemonism on its head by suggesting that eudemonism is not “humanistic” enough.

Thomistic natural law theory – or at least a version of it – was subject to severe attack during the Protestant Reformation.  Martin Luther, in particular, famously battled with Thomist scholars of his day over the relationship between nature and grace.  This basic question of theological anthropology – to what extent, if at all, can human beings know and do good through natural reason, and what is the necessary role of God’s grace – remains a fundamental question for any Christian theory of justice.

For some strands of Protestant Christian theology, following Luther and to some extent John Calvin, the notion of “human rights” is eyed suspiciously or flatly rejected.  If God’s sovereignty is such that he “can do whatever he wants,” then human beings have no inherent “rights.”  For Reformed thinkers in this vein, the only real basis for “justice” and “rights” is God’s divine command.  The Decalogue provides us with the blueprint for God’s law, which we are bound to obey, and that law gives people obligations to each other, with corresponding rights.  For example, the command not to steal (Exodus 20:15) supports a right against other people to personal property.  But these are not “natural” rights that inhere in persons apart from God’s commands.

One problem with this kind of divine command ethic is that it raises the specter of arbitrariness.  Is theft wrong merely because God says so?  Could God then change the command and at some point declare theft to be lawful and “good?”  On the other hand, is there a standard of “good” to which even God must adhere, suggesting that there is something greater than God?  Most divine command theorists avoid this problem by noting that God Himself is the perfection of good in His being, so that His commands, which are always consistent with His own being, are neither arbitrary nor indebted to a standard above His own being.

Wolterstorff, however, argues that divine command theories fail because they rest on an analogy to human commands.  We know what a “moral command” looks like because we as human beings issue such commands to each other.  But if human beings can issue moral commands to each other, Wolterstorff says, then the standard for morality can be at least in part a human one, which does not rest on God’s commands as divine command theory requires.

Further, Wolterstorff argues that divine command theories fail because all such theories rest on an inherent moral obligation to obey God’s commands, even prior to any specific command from God (JR&W, at p. 275-76).  The reason we are morally obliged to obey God’s commands cannot itself arise from one of God’s commands, or else we become stuck in an infinite regress.  We must be morally obliged to obey God’s commands because of something inherent in the God-human relation that precedes the divine commands.

In other important strands of Reformed thought, the imago Dei, combined with a theology of “common grace” supports a concept of natural human rights.  This seems to be the approach taken by many contemporary protestants who cite Abraham Kuyper as an influence.  But it remains difficult to understand exactly what about the imago Dei grounds a universal concept of rights.  Is it a set of human capacities that arise from the imago?  If so, what about people who have not yet developed all their capacities (infants) or who have lost them (mentally incapacitated adults)?

Wolterstorff argues that “rights” and “justice” cannot derive from eudemonism, divine commands or the imago Dei alone.  Rather, he says, “human rights” flow primarily from the fact that every human being is loved by God and is thereby a “friend” of God (Wolterstorff calls this the “love of attachment”).  The imago is itself the fruit of that love:  God wishes to relate to us and he desires us to share in His creative life, which is what the imago makes possible.  The fact that God loves us and wishes to relate in friendship to us endows each one of us with inherent dignity.  We each have rights in relation to each other because each one of us is loved by God.  As Wolterstorff summarizes his position in Justice:  Rights and Wrongs:

I conclude that if God loves a human being with the love of attachment, then that love bestows great worth on that human being; other creatures, if they knew about that love, would be envious.  And I conclude that if God loves, in the mode of attachment, each and every human being equally and permanently, then natural human rights inhere in the worth bestowed on human beings by that love.  Natural human rights are what respect for that worth requires.  (JR&W, at p. 360).

This notion that “each and every human being” is loved “equally and permanently” by God obviously appears to conflict with some important passages in scripture, notably in Romans 9, particularly when read through an Augustinian / Reformed theology of Divine election.  If God “loved” Jacob and “hated” Esau (Rom. 9:13), and if God shapes vessels for different purposes, as the potter shapes the clay (Rom. 9:19-21), is it possible to say that God loves “each and every human being equally and permanently?”  Wolterstorff devotes an entire chapter to this problem in Justice in Love, which I will leave for another post.  In short, Wolterstorff interprets Romans through the lens of both Karl Barth’s theology of election and the New Perspective on Paul, and argues that Paul is not addressing the question of individual salvation and individual election that occupied the Reformers in their reading of Romans.

In sum, Wolterstorff’s central argument is that “justice” and “human rights” are substantive concepts rooted in the love of God for each and every human being.  Because we are each created to share in God’s own life and are loved by Him, we owe to each other the dignity due to creatures loved in this unique way by God, and have corresponding rights with respect to each other.

What do you think of Wolterstorff’s arguments against eudemonism, the imago Dei as a basis for rights, and divine command ethics?  Is he correct to locate inherent human dignity in God’s “love of attachment” to us?

Categories
Theology

Nominalism and Love

Peter James Causton offers a brief but brilliant article on nominalism in a symposium on Conor Cunningham’s book Darwin’s Pious Idea.  Nominalism, I think, is the scourge of modern theology both on the right and left.

He notes:

That Christianity understands ultimate reality as personal is both its greatest strength and its biggest problem. A problem because it is the source of the question of evil and a strength because it has no difficulty comprehending the existence of rationality, freedom and personality in creation. The theist has a problem of evil. The atheist has a problem of good.

It would be nice to leave the story at this – juxtaposing a nihilistic materialism to a life affirming Christianity – but the reality is far messier, and Christian theology has done much more to contribute to the current climate of nihilism than many of its adherents are willing to admit.

For just as nominalism in its modern guise undermines any conception of the rational and free person, nominalism in its medieval theological guise does as well. The utterly transcendent voluntarist God is an abyss of will. A humanity made in the image of such a God is no longer defined by its rationality or its capacity for love but by its ability to will.

Predictably enough when Ockham wrote of the image of God in humanity, it was humanity’s freedom that he focused on. This turn to the will in Christian theology entered into the stream of early modern thinking and reached its apotheosis in Nietzsche’s will to power.

Indeed it easy enough to conceive Dawkins selfish gene as a brute dumb materialized version of the will to power, for both in Dawkins and Nietzsche’s accounts morality and piety are merely masks worn by an atavistic force. Though at least in Nietzsche it is force worthy of being called life.

All comprehensive systems of thought tend to hide some kind of God within them. Some principle of reality which takes on the characteristic of being unconditioned, eternal or absolute. To reverse Marx’s dictum, systems of thought usually have mystical kernels contained in their rational shells.

The real question for the Christian theologian is what kind of God they find revealed in Jesus Christ. Is it really the voluntarist God of Ockham or the absolutely sovereign God of hyper-Calvinism?

The scandal of much Christian theology is that it privileges the power of God over the love of God. Perhaps this reflects our congenital inability as fallen creatures to take the love of god seriously – to fully realize that the love of God and power of God is really the same thing. That love is not an attribute of God, but what God is.

 

Categories
Spirituality

The Most Beautiful Ikon

My ten year old son painted this shell for me.  The cross-shaped figure at the top is Jesus.

My son has epilepsy.  His seizures in recent years have been under control, but he cannot properly process language.  He can communicate and understand many things, but only in his own unique way.

This shell is one of the most precious gifts I’ve ever received.  It points in to the one who is beyond language, beyond “normal” syntax, beyond appearances.  That one looks out from it over the whole world, his arms outstretched from the cross to embrace and take back into it all of creation’s groaning.

Categories
Religious Legal Theory

Journal of Christian Legal Thought

The inaugural issue of the Journal of Christian Legal Thought is out.  There are a number of thoughtful, brief essays on seminal theological resources for Christian legal thinking (including one from yours truly on Milbank).  It’s a promising start that reflects the unity-within-diversity among American Christian legal scholars.

Categories
Biblical Studies

Dressage and Israelite Chariots

I noticed this description of a new book from Eisenbraun’s.  The author is an ancient near eastern scholar who participates in dressage and is writing about the archeology of the use of horses and chariots in ancient Israel.  Combining two elite, esoteric interests into a book project — now how cool is that?

Almost every book in the Hebrew Bible mentions horses and chariots in some manner, usually in a military context. However, the importance of horses, chariots, and equestrians in ancient Israel is typically mentioned only in passing, if at all, by historians, hippologists, and biblical scholars. When it is mentioned, the topic engenders a great deal of confusion.

Notwithstanding the substantial textual and archaeological evidence of the horse’s historic presence, recent scholars seem to be led by a general belief that there were very few horses in Iron Age Israel and that Israel’s chariotry was insignificant. The reason for this current sentiment is tied primarily to the academic controversy of the past 50 years over whether the 17 tripartite-pillared buildings excavated at Megiddo in the early 20th century were, in fact, stables. Although the original excavators, archaeologists from the University of Chicago, designated these buildings as stables, a number of scholars (and a few archaeologists) later challenged this view and adopted alternative interpretations. After they “reassessed” the Megiddo stables as “storehouses,” “marketplaces,” or “barracks,” the idea developed that there was no place for the horses to be kept and, therefore, there must have been few horses in Israel. The lack of stables, when added to the suggestion that Iron Age Israel could not have afforded to buy expensive horses and maintain an even more expensive chariotry, led to a dearth of horses in ancient Israel; or so the logic goes that has permeated the literature. Cantrell’s book attempts to dispel this notion.

Too often today, scholars ignore or diminish the role of the horse in battle. It is important to remember that ancient historians took for granted knowledge about horses that modern scholars have now forgotten or never knew. Cantrell’s involvement with horses as a rider, competitor, trainer, breeder, and importer includes equine experience ranging from competitive barrel-racing to jumping, and for the past 25 years, dressage. The Horsemen of Israel relies on the author’s knowledge of and experience with horses as well as her expertise in the field of ancient Near Eastern languages, literature, and archaeology.

Categories
Law and Policy

Joseph Singer on American Ambivalence About Government

A nice quote from Harvard law professor Joseph Singer, from the Cornell Law Review of all places:

Americans reflexively oppose “big government” but support the myriad regulations and social programs that government enacts.  They do not want regulations, but they do want laws that protect them from unsafe products and workplaces; laws that protect them from polluted air and water; and laws that regulate land use to prevent factories from being located in the middle of residential subdivisions.  They do not want government to interfere with the free market but they do want government to protect ‘hard working Americans’ from losing their homes.  They are skeptical of big government but just as skeptical of big business.  They like the idea of small government but not the practice:  when hard times strike, they demand government action.  This suggests that the American people embrace both sides of the libertarian / progressive split.  It turns out that we are deeply ambivalent about the relationship between law and economics.  It also means that we we have a similar ambivalence about property rights.

Categories
Science and Religion

Patterns, Mind Games, and the Supremacy of Science?

There’s an annoying book review in today’s Wall Street Journal of Michael Shermer’s latest attempt at reductionism, The Believing Brain:  From Ghosts to God and Politics.  As the review glowingly summarizes the book, people are hard-wired to find patterns in random events, and “there’s a neurological upside to pattern-finding: When we come across information that confirms what we already believe, we get a rewarding jolt of dopamine.”  Ergo, “God is simply the human explanation for pattern-making and agency on an epic scale,” along with “aliens” and other “things unseen.”

The reviewer, Ronald Bailey, who is a correspondent for “Reason” magazine, notes that

it is science itself that Mr. Shermer most heartily embraces. “The Believing Brain” ends with an engaging history of astronomy that illustrates how the scientific method developed as the only reliable way for us to discover true patterns and true agents at work. Seeing through a telescope, it seems, is believing of the best kind.

It doesn’t take much “reason” to wonder how “science” or “the scientific method” have escaped the long tendrils of the wish-fulfillment and confirmation bias Shermer and Bailey descry in every other area of human belief.  Perhaps Bailey and Shermer enjoy a “rewarding jolt of dopamine” upon observing the “patterns” of naivete among the vast unenlightened masses of human history?  Does the observed “pattern” of correlation between dopamine levels and belief confirmation really determine the truth of their theories, or are the theories underdetermined projections upon the “data?” Is belief in the “scientific method” — belief that there is even a simple and definable “scientific method” — just another instance of blind faith in “things unseen?”  (Can “the scientific method” be observed in a telescope?)

If Shermer is correct, one could never know.  We are then each trapped in prisons of epistemic reflexivity, doomed to repeat an infinite feedback loop of unknowing from which there is no escape.

Categories
Beauty of the Christian Faith Theology

The Beauty of the Christian Faith: Introduction: The Nature of Doctrine: Protestantism

I’m working on an adult curriculum titled “The Beauty of the Christian Faith.”  It explores the basic elements of Christian faith as expressed in the Nicene Creed.  I’ll be posting excerpts as they’re done.  Here’s the sixth part of the introduction.  Prior posts can be accessed through the Beauty of the Christian Faith Page.

Doctrines:  Second Order Statements Derived from the First Order Sources of Theology

Doctrines are propositional theological statements that summarize claims to knowledge about God.  A “propositional” statement is simply a discrete statement of claimed fact, such as “water is comprised of hydrogen and oxygen atoms.”  Doctrines historically have been collected in summary statements such as creeds and confessions.

The manner in which doctrines function as theological authorities is the subject of some debate among different types of Christians.  The debate relates to the relationship between scripture and tradition and also to the nature of scripture in relation to doctrinal propositions.  The next sections discuss how this relationship is understood in Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant traditions.  You should understand, however, that there is considerable variety even within each of these traditions.  The models discussed below are intended as broad and general illustrations of key themes and differences.

Protestantism

Protestant approaches to the nature of doctrine are quite diverse.  In general, protestants emphasize scripture as the final “norming norm” (norma normans) of theology and doctrine.  Most Protestants therefore would argue that doctrines are not in themselves basic sources of authority.  Instead, doctrines are “second order” statements because doctrinal propositions always derive from the basic sources of theology (scripture, tradition, reason and experience).

Protestants do not always agree among themselves about precisely how the first order sources of theological authority relate to second order doctrinal propositions.  Many Protestants think scripture contains or is the immediate source of some direct, propositional doctrinal statements.  For them, many doctrinal propositions are effectively irreformable because they are derived directly from scripture.  Some Protestants argue that scripture is not fundamentally propositional in nature, or that scripture can only be understood dynamically as the Holy Spirit makes its meaning clear, and that doctrinal statements therefore in principle are always reformable.

These two different types of Protestant views can be illustrated as follows:

Figure 3 illustrates a model in which scripture supplies direct or nearly direct doctrinal propositions.  In this model, reason, experience and tradition mostly serve to aid in the understanding of scripture.  Reason and experience are grouped together because they are understood as related sources.

Another model for Protestant construction of doctrine is illustrated in Figure 4:

This model is labeled “Wesleyan Postliberal / Postconservative” because it reflects the pietist streams of Protestantism, particularly as led by John Wesley and by the Anabaptists before and after Wesley, and because it also reflects a contemporary effort to overcome the breach between “conservative / fundamentalist” and “liberal” theologies that erupted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

John Wesley was a great evangelist and reformer who lived in the eighteenth century.  He emphasized personal piety, including the experience of conversion, the devotional practices of prayer and Bible reading, and abstinence from cultural practices thought to be damaging, such as consuming alcohol.  The four sources of authority we have discussed in this Module – scripture, tradition, reason and experience – are often called the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral,” because they were emphasized by Wesley in contrast to the more “intellectual” approach of the Calvinist Reformed churches.  Wesley also rejected the Cavlinist doctrine of “double predestination” – the belief that God chose in advance who will and will not be saved – and taught that salvation is available to everyone.  In fact, the differences between Calvinism and Wesleyanism continue to represent one of the major dividing points in the history of American evangelicalism.

“Anabaptist” refers to various Protestant groups that dissented from the Calvinist-Reformed churches on various matters starting in the fifteenth century, including on the nature of baptism.  Calvinists baptized infants, whereas Anabaptists held that only adults should be baptized.  Anabaptist also held that even people baptized as infants should be re-baptized as consenting adults.  “Ana-“Baptist literally means “re-“baptize.  Anabaptists emphasized personal piety, including the direct illumination of the individual conscience by the Holy Spirit.  The Anabaptists often were ferociously persecuted by Calvinists, including punishments such as burning at the stake.  Most independent Evangelical churches in North America follow Anabaptist beliefs about baptism, although such churches usually are disconnected from other typical Anabaptist teachings (most Anabaptists, for example, were and are pacifist).  Many Charismatic and Pentecostal practices also bear some relationship to the Anabaptist emphasis on direct illumination by the Holy Spirit.

Because both Wesleyans and Anabaptists focused more on personal experience than intellectual knowledge, they were less attuned the particularity of doctrinal statements.  This does not mean they ignored doctrine, but it does mean that their approach was closer to the “post-conservative / post-liberal” approach described below.

Meanwhile, Model 3, the “Protestant-Propositionalist” model, was the dominant approach in the Calvinist-Reformed and, to a certain extent, in the Lutheran-Reformed churches, until the mid-Nineteenth Century.  In the 19th Century, in connection with various philosophical, cultural, and other changes, “Liberal” theology began to challenge all notions of religious authority.  In many cases, Liberal theology eventually relegated all theological claims – including basic claims such as the divinity of Christ – to the realm of private emotional sentiment.

Some branches of Protestantism, including Fundamentalism and some varieties of Evangelicalism, clung (and still cling) ferociously to the Protestant–Propositionalist model, in an effort to avoid the specter of Liberal theology.  These theologies, however, tend to make claims that cannot be sustained about what the Bible is or how it should be interpreted.[1]  Moreover, more often than not, this approach simply produces profound, basic, and irresolvable disagreements about what doctrinal propositions the Bible actually is thought to state.[2]

In recent decades, many Protestants in both “Mainline” and “Evangelical” circles, wary of the excesses of both Liberal theology and Fundamentalism, have focused on theological methods that appreciate the divine-human nature of scripture and the contextual-historical nature of doctrinal statements, while recognizing the importance of continuity and stability.  Figure 4 is one way of thinking of this relationship.[3]

Since Figure 4 is a Protestant model, scripture is the central source of theological authority.  Reason, Tradition, and Experience are also sources of authority, which inform how scripture is read and understood, but which are also subject to scripture as a final norm.  Unlike in the Protestant-Propositionalist model, however, scripture is not here understood primarily as a direct sourcebook of doctrinal propositions.  Although scripture does contain direct doctrinal statements, the texts of scripture are for the most part not given in the form of creedal statements.  Instead, scripture is given to us in the diverse forms of narratives, stories, poems, songs, letters, visions, and so on.  Doctrinal propositions derive from scripture (along with and informed by reason, tradition, and experience), but scripture is not essentially a rational-propositional sourcebook.

This is an important point, because it helps situate doctrinal propositions as fallible, human statements.  We do not worship “doctrine” – we worship the living God.  In an effort to understand and explain what we know of God, we engage in the process of formulating doctrinal propositions from the basic sources of knowledge God has made available to us.  This perspective helps us engage the scriptures and the other sources of theological authority with greater humility.  It also encourages patience and dialogue when we disagree with each other.

This does not mean that faithful Christians are free to modify at will the essential meaning of basic doctrines that have been passed down throughout the history of the faith.  This also is a vitally important point.  A central core of Christian doctrine has stood the test of time because of its deep connection to the first order sources of Christian theology.  This is the case with the Nicene Creed, which is the doctrinal statement that forms the backbone of this class.  To depart substantially from this central core of doctrine is to think in a way that is less than fully “Christian.”  We study the Nicene Creed to explore how its propositions tie together the first-order sources of theological authority in a way that is coherent, satisfying, beautiful, and unifying.  When we recite the Creed, we proclaim publicly that its propositions express essential truth about God and the world.

Nevertheless, we recognize that even great doctrinal documents such as the Nicene Creed are second order statements.  Our purpose is not merely to study and recite historical words.  Our purpose is to participate more deeply in the living faith the Creed proclaims.  In the next Module, we will begin to explore the contours of that living faith through the articles of the Creed.

 

[1] An example of this is the effort in some circles to read the ancient texts of the Bible as modern “scientific” documents.

[2] An example of this are the deep disagreements between Calvinist and Dispensational conservative evangelicals, about matters as basic as the nature of human free will, Divine predestination, and the economy of salvation.

[3] Many contemporary Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theologians would adopt a similar model, somewhat in contrast to the more “traditional” models in Figures 1 and 2, but perhaps with a different relationship between scripture and the other sources of authority.