At the conclusion of my last post, I mentioned D’Costa’s emphasis on “participatory ontology” in his construction of a theology of the unevangelized. This notion is an important part of D’Costa’s approach to how a person without explicit faith in Christ during this life might be saved. I believe it is significant not only for the problem of the unevangelized, but also for soteriology in general – indeed, it may be the most significant aspect of the meaning of human nature and salvation routinely omitted from popular Christian teaching.
Questions for the day: What do you think of the notion of “participatory ontology?” Can a person who does not know of Christ or who has not yet confessed Christ “participate” in Christ? Do works of virtue in the lives of non-Christians suggest that God is already at work saving them? Are these concepts Protestant Christians can adopt, particularly those of us who self-describe as “evangelical?”
“Participatory ontology,” in connection with the doctrine of salvation, is the idea that being “saved” involves participation in the life of the triune God. The very being (the “ontology”) of people who are saved is joined in a real way to the being of God. There are many scriptural warrants for this idea, including Romans 6:1-12, 1 Cor. 6:12-17 and 1 John 2:24-25 (which is but one instance of the theme of “abiding” or “remaining” in Christ throughout 1 John). It is an important theme in the Christian Tradition, particularly in the Eastern concept of theosis, but also in the West, notably among the mystics.
This does not mean, of course, that human beings become co-equal members of the Godhead along with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But it does mean that humans were designed to partake in the perichoretic life of the Trinity, in way suited to our creatureliness, yet without the alienation caused by sin. Indeed, all of creation was designed to participate in God’s life. The eschatological conclusion of God’s entire plan of salvation is nothing less than the accomplishment of this goal: upon the consummation of Christ’s Kingdom, “the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).
How do we participate in God’s life? The basic answer is that “by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast” (Eph. 2:8-9). But “faith,” in Biblical terms, is inseparable from the way we live: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Eph. 2:10) And without grace and faith, it is impossible for anyone to live well. “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb. 11:6). Because of the alienation caused by sin, we are unable to participate in God’s life, which means we are unable in ourselves to do anything good: “There is no one righteous, not even one . . . . There is no one who does good, not even one” (Rom. 3:10-18).
All good and all truth come from God. Therefore, whenever a person experiences and practices true love, joy, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self control – whenever real virtue is present – this is the result of the grace and faith that enable participation in God’s life. (For the moment, I am glossing over some important distinctions between Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, and other theologies concerning the effects of sin on the will and natural human reason, and the extent to which human beings “cooperate” in their own salvation. All agree, however, that grace and faith are required for true virtue).
For D’Costa, the link between grace, faith, and virtue suggests that virtuous non-Christians already have some degree of faith in the true God and thereby already are participating in Christ. The belief that the unevangelized can hear the gospel in the “limbo of the just,” D’Costa notes,
Does not negate or downplay the historical lives lived by people and communities as building God’s kingdom in “inchoate” ways, in seeking goodness, truth, and beauty, as best they can. It is precisely in these ways that such peoples already begin to participate in the life of the triune God.
This notion is consistent with Karl Rahner’s notion of the “anonymous Christian,” which influenced the inclusivism of the Catholic Church’s Vatican II documents. In D’Costa’s proposal, when such people are confronted by Christ in the “limbo of the just,” their epistemic response completes the inchoate grace and faith they experienced and demonstrated in life. Even for baptized Christians, he notes, the “Beautific Vision” – the eternal and direct knowledge of God — is available only in heaven, where all of the corruptions of sin are eliminated. In other words, even baptized Christians lack full knowledge of God in this life and must meet Christ at death in order to complete their salvation.
If non-Christians can participate by grace and inchoate faith in the life of Christ, what is the purpose of the Church?
More on D’Costa’s perspective on this – with some important missiological implications – in my next post.
Good post from Jamie Smith on the uses and misuses of the slogan “semper reformanda“:
There are strains of the Reformed tradition which like to emphasize that they are “always reforming,” invoking the Latin semper reformanda as a motto. But if one analyzes when and how this is invoked, one will notice something very slippery: that under the banner of “reforming” what we get is really just an agenda for “updating” the faith. And such an “updating” project is far from what was envisioned by the Reformers.
Indeed, such “updating” is more like the mid-century stream of aggiornamento advocated by Catholic theologians who were trying to get the church to “go modern”–to “update” the faith by conforming it to the new regnant standards of what counted as rational, true and just. But such a project of “updating” is ultimately correlationist (as I use the term in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy): it locates the standards for what we ought to believe outside the faith–in the supposedly neutral, objective findings of economics or sociology or evolutionary psychology. This puts Christian faith back on its heels, in a stance of deference to the canons of extra-Scriptural authorities.
But such “updating” is not reform; or, to put it more starkly, to be “always updating” is not the equivalent of semper reformanda. To be sure, Christian faith pushes us to value careful attention to empirical realities and thus requires us to grapple with our unfolding knowledge of our material and social world. Without question. In equal measure, the church, in order to be faithful, is called to be always reforming, not sitting on its laurels as if it has arrived at the truth. Since such a pursuit is an eternal vocation, it would seem odd to think we’ve arrived.
However, the call to be always reforming is not simply a matter of “updating” the faith according to current trends and fads; nor is it even a matter of “correlating” the faith with the supposedly secure findings of other authorities. To be “always reforming” is to be engaged in the hard work of being a tradition, which includes the difficult labor of arguing about what constitutes a faithful extension of the tradition (I have something like Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of “tradition” in mind here). This difficult work of reform differs from “updating” because it retains the center of gravity in the tradition (which, of course, includes and prioritizes the “founding document” of the tradition–in this case, Scripture).
This is merely a sketch to watch the “codes” at work when “always reforming” is invoked, and to urge a kind of semantic caution that under the banner of “reforming” language what we often get is a progressivism that is animated by a chronological snobbery which is a far cry from the task of reform, let alone the Reformers.
As a Roman Catholic theologian, D’Costa is constrained by the doctrine of Extra Ecclesiam nulla salas – “There is no salvation outside the Church.” Catholics mean by this that the visible Roman Church is the only vehicle of salvation, although after Vatican II this is broadly interpreted. Protestants are not constrained by this doctrine in exactly the same way. A central tenet of the Reformation is that the Church is an “invisible” body based on the inner life of faith. Nevertheless, traditional Protestant teaching continues to hold that salvation is inaccessible Extra Ecclesiam – that those who are saved must belong to the Church, albeit the Church reinterpreted as an invisible body based on inward faith.
For some Christians in earlier centuries, Extra Ecclesiam was perhaps not as vexing a problem as it appears to us today. Many assumed that Christendom covered most of humanity. D’Costa recognizes the problem Extra Ecclesiam presents today: “the assumption . . . that the entire world is confronted with the gospel . . . is no longer tenable as we now know that, throughout Christian history, there have been billions of people and cultures who have not heard the Gospel.” He resolves this problem with reference to the “Limbo of the Just” and with an important move concerning the nature of participation in Christ.
The “Limbo of the Just” is a concept found in very early Christian tradition. It is rooted in the “descent” passage of 1 Peter 3:18-4:6. The early Church Fathers recognized that many apparently good and just people had lived before Christ, including the Old Testament saints and some of the Greek philosophers whom they admired. Some of these early Christian thinkers supposed that the preaching of the gospel to the dead described in 1 Peter 4:6 (“for this reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead”) referred to the opportunity for these pre-Christian people to recognize that the good towards which they strived in life was fulfilled in Christ. The time spent by Old Testament saints and “holy pagans” in the Limbo of the Just allowed them to expurgate their sins in preparation for coming to saving faith in Christ at the time of Christ’s descent.
For the Early Fathers, the Limbo of the Just was emptied on Holy Saturday. It was not an option for people living after the Resurrection, although the concept of an Infant’s Limbo eventually was developed to deal with the problem of unbaptized infants. However, D’Costa lists three reasons why the “Limbo of the Just” tradition might provide resources for the contemporary question of the unevangelized: (1) it explains how some people who did not know Christ in life could come to know him and his Church; (2) it unites the ontological experience of living a life marked by truth and the good with the epistemological status of knowing Christ as the source of all that is true and good; and (3) it provides for the fact that even those who are in some ways true and good before epistemically knowing Christ may require some degree of purification for sins committed in the flesh.
D’Costa does not suggest a simple restatement of the Limbo of the Just tradition with all of its ancient speculative cosmological baggage. He notes that “we must not imagine this solution as a celestial waiting room under the earth, but a conceptual theological datum based on the tradition that provides an answer uniting the ontological and epistemological to explain the case of [the salvation of the unevangelized.” This dense statement points towards another key to D’Costa’s proposal: a participatory ontology in which temporal, situated human beings participate in the life of the eternal, cosmic Christ. This participatory ontology is one way in which D’Costa explains how the descent of Christ on Holy Saturday can be effective for unevangelized people living in the dispensation of the Church, after the Resurrection.
More on participatory ontology in my next post. For now: Can we make use of a theological method in which traditions not explicitly mentioned in scripture inform our thinking? Does that fact that the early Church Fathers wrestled with the problem of “good” or “just” pre-Christian people, and devised a solution, help in your wrestling with problems such as the fate of the unevangelized? Are you surprised at how the first few generations of Christians interpreted 1 Peter 3-4?
Good post by RJS on Jesus Creed, which incorporates some thoughts of mine:
This post is part 7 of a series The Fall and Sin After Darwin. We’ve been looking at the essays in a book Theology After Darwin centered around a simple question: What are the implications for Christian theology if Darwin was right? In conjunction with this we are also looking at three articles in the recent theme issue of the ASA Journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (v. 62 no. 3 2010) Reading Genesis: The Historicity of Adam and Eve, Genomics, and Evolutionary Science.
In the last post in this series, Did God Create Us Sinful?, we looked at the question of theodicy – wrestling with the concept God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil and the questions human nature and human impulses. The nature and understanding of sin is a big piece of thie discussion. In the course of the discussion I quoted from Dr. Schneider’s article summarizing some of the reasons for the conflict between evolution, common descent, and the traditional view of sin as he sees the issues interacting.
The main point is that recent phylogenetic or cladistic analysis convinces many genetic experts that these detailed similarities of self-serving behaviors can hardly be coincidental—they look like a genetic legacy that has been passed on from one species to the next, including to our own. Domning endorses this as, by far, the best explanation: “The selfish acts of humans are homologous; that is, similar because derived from a common source.” And in any event (so we add, lest one resist that explanation), the traits are genetically common to every individual in all animal species. As members of a species, we are programmed, as it were, or powerfully disposed, to engage in our own genetic self-interest and advantage. We need not endorse the theory of common ancestry in order to respect the force of all this evidence and to begin pondering its implications for theology. (p. 202)
Natural biological response does not need to be limited to the negative of course. Virtue can also be argued to be merely natural biological response. Schneider discusses, not only sin, but also altruism and behavior for the communal good rather than the individual good. He continues after the quote I have above:
It should be noted that geneticists observe, too, that we also share with animals “virtuous” traits involving love, genuine sympathy, and care. If this is selfishness, it proves that selfishness is the source of not only vice, but also virtue. If animals engage in genuinely unselfish acts-disinterested in the general survival of their own germinal DNA—then that is extremely interesting, to be sure. It is nevertheless clear that many animal “virtues” show self interest in a manner that benefits other nonmembers of the species, too. Domning calls this behavior “amoral selfishness.” As for deliberative human altruism (if there really is such a thing), it requires, writes Domning, “an intellect and will of a caliber that does not and cannot exist in the simplest life forms.” The clear implication of the science is that, at the dawn of human consciousness and its moral awareness and capacities for such virtue, altruism was the challenge for humanity in the future, not the original primal condition of human beings in the past. (p. 202)
Recent observations of chimpanzee gangs and food sharing by bonobos are used by some to bolster the argument. Human behavior is simply deterministic and natural. This idea has serious consequences for Christian theology. Much of Schneider’s article is dead-on, insightful, and worth serious consideration. But his emphasis on sin and a sinful nature as equated with “natural” biological urges and tendencies is something of a problem. It strikes me that we have here a serious misunderstanding of sin – and of the relationship between natural biological response and sin. We can not understand Adam, Paul, or the Christian faith if we cannot get a handle on the nature of sin. So I put up the question for consideration:
What is the relationship between sin and natural biological response?
I was planning to post on this topic – but was beaten to the punch in the comment section of the last post. David Opderbeck made the key point early in the comment stream (#16) – and I agree with him here.
Schneider makes some excellent points and his pointing towards Job on the theodicy question is exactly right.
However, he is fundamentally and I think dangerously mistaken about the reduction of “sin” to biology.
“Sin” is not merely a natural inclination, and “selfishness,” or better, “self-regard,” is not in itself sin.
When my dog takes food off the kitchen table, she is being a “bad dog,” but that is not “sin.” She’s just doing what dogs do. If I were to steal food from my neighbor’s table, that would be “sin,” even though I’m inclined by my “selfish” instincts to hoard food. Why is it “sin” for me and not my dog? Because I possess a capacity of “will” or “agency” or, if you will, “soul,” that my dog does not possess.
In fact, Augustine noted this distinction well before the challenge of biological evolution. It was the “soul” that, for Augustine, allowed human beings to regulate their impulses in ways animals cannot. This is very important: Augustine and the other Fathers wrestled with this problem of “natural” inclinations, free will, and moral culpability long before evolutionary biology. Contra Schneider, this is NOT a new problem at all, and there are rich resources in the tradition for thinking about it.
The only way in which it could be a new problem is if hard-core sociobiology is right: that is, if human beings have no free will or agency at all — if all our actions could be traced entirely to “hard wired” evolutionary causes. Very few scientists actually think this is true. In any event, I doubt it’s ultimately a “scientific” question rather than a “metaphysical” one.
Christian theology asserts that human beings possess agency such that we are morally accountable for our actions. Christian theology also asserts that God is not the author of evil. IMHO, these are fundamental truths that cannot, and need not, be compromised.
Later – as I was pondering this post and constructing my argument David put up comment in response to the argument that the continuity between animal and human behavior might undermine the concept of sin – and especially Original Sin. It comes down, not to inherited response and biological structures, but to the intrinsic reality of free-will and human agency. (Comment 90)
As to “continuity,” I agree with you, we’ve inherited from our forebears all of the stuff from which our minds emerge. These include the mental structures that support culture making and morality. They also include the mental structures that support behaviors we may deem “immoral”.
I reject any view, however, that reduces what it means to be “human” merely to those inherited structures. I reject strong versions of neurobiological determinism. I believe human beings possess genuine agency. I believe the human mind, with its apparently unique capacities for agency, is an emergent phenomena that exerts downward causality, and therefore that human agency isn’t reducible to biology.
I also reject any view that reduces what it means to be “human” even to biology plus the emergent phenomena of mind. Humans are “spiritual” and “soulish” in ways that other creatures apparently are not. The “mind” and the “soul” are not exactly the same thing. This is a datum, I believe, of revelation, but it also accords with the experience of self-consciousness and God-consciousness.
Finally, I reject any view in which these various aspects of what it means to be “human” — (1) our biological and neurobiological and sociobiological inheritance, (2) our capacity for true agency through the downward causality exercised by the emergent phenomena of “mind”, and (3) our spiritual and soulish nature — are conceived of as divisible. Sort of like the Trinity, the layers of our being interpenetrate and coinhere with each other. We are not dualities or trialities — “body and soul” or “body, mind and soul”. We are integrated creatures though our ontology involves multiple layers.
As to “sin,” that begins not in layer (1), but rather is a product of the willful misuse of human capacities at layers (3) and (2) — and thereby it affects layer (1) (e.g., in the stress and anxiety that are produced when we intentionally harm others and break relationships). Certainly the structures of layer (1) make “sin” possible, but they do not dictate that “sin” must happen. A bodily behavior is only “sin” when the “soul” and “mind” have willfully directed the person to improper ends.
Human agency and free-will, creative, abstract, aesthetic thought. These are really the key ideas. Human beings can respond, create, and imagine – and the results of these processes have a reality that extends beyond the merely chemical, physical, and biological. There is also evidence that human response can intentionally influence the biological ability for response. This came up when I posted last year on an article on the Science of Sin (part 1, part 2,). While it is clear that there is an undeniable connection between human response and natural impulse there is also evidence for an element of control or feedback in human response, albeit imperfect. One of the researchers quoted in the popular level article commented regarding the response in the brain “this network provides us with the evolutionarily unprecedented ability to control our own neural processing – a feat achieved by no other creature.” There is an element of our very being, an element consistent with the idea of humans created in the image of God that is not merely reducible to animal instincts and biological encoding. We can (in theory) choose and we can (in theory) change. This is true of the impulse for altruism as well as for the impulse for envy and self-aggrandizement.
Sin then – and the universal reality of sin – relates to an abuse and perversion of this capacity for agency. I posted last May on an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS 107, 4499, 2010) that dealt with the materialist argument against free will with suggestions for the criminal justice system (Is Free Will Anti-Science?). Christian understanding of reality runs counter to this purely materialist view of action and responsibility. Agency, not just in Adam but in all of us, is a key part of the puzzle. The incarnation and the Christ-centered gospel is not about a return to an “natural-urge-free” existence, but about the ability to stay in proper relationship with God, to make proper choices, and the consequences for making improper choices. The most significant of these choices are relational – first and foremost relationship with God, and then with each other in community extending to the world in which we’ve been placed and in the context of the mission we’ve been given.
For me, the question of “inerrancy” versus not, or the question of how “historical” the Gospels are, or the question of whether or not we should harmonize different passages pushes in this direction: When we push for inerrancy, harmonizations, and historicity, we show that we have a fundamentally different desire for what these texts might give us than the biblical writers themselves had when they composed them.
If the purpose of the Gospels was to give us the historically identifiable account of the anointing of Jesus, then Luke would not have changed the location, host, time frame, and body part on which Jesus was anointed. If the purpose of a Gospel is to give a full, historical account, then Matthew would not go around introducing second things such as a second Gerasene demoniac or second donkey that Jesus simultaneously rode into Jerusalem with the other.
The point is that at various points both Matthew and Luke have decided to tell versions of the story that are in ways major or minor different from the story of Mark–and that in trying to smash them all back together into a coherent unity we show that our own desire for the text is antithetical to the impulse that gave us the texts we actually have.
What the Gospel writers have separated, let no man put together.
And this begins to form my response . . . about where my view ever moves from the messy details to the “high” acknowledgment that this is God’s word for the church, not just a human doing. My response to that is that it is precisely these humans doings that are God’s word to the church. God’s word to the church is Matthew’s post-Torah Jewish Christianity, and Mark’s apocalyptic and surprising messiah, and Luke’s seamless-salvation-history-Davidic-King, and even John’s pre-existent heavenly but now incarnate Son of God.
Honoring them as the word of God means receiving them not only as they are actually given to us, but trusting that God gave us the kind of books he wanted us to have in order to find the salvation that God has on offer in Christ. In other words, it’s precisely by not turning these into history books that I honor them as the word that God has given to guide us into the life that is only found in Jesus the Son.
He continues in a subsequent post:
I would like to put the shoe on the other foot. Why must God be accountable to our modern, rationalistic demands about how the Bible must fit together in order to be trustworthy? Why must the Bible be devoid of human labor, research, and even historical creativity, in order to be worthy of God’s voice to speak through it?
What I am saying is that we trust that the Bible we have is the Bible God wanted us to have, and that we investigate this Bible to learn how it is, in fact, that God has chosen to speak to us. I trust that this Bible we actually have is the Bible God wanted us to have. To respond to this by saying, “If this is what the Bible is then we shouldn’t listen to it” is to say that God must fit certain criteria, established by us, independent of the actual contents of the Bible [!] in order to be worthy of our ear.
It will never do to say that God must speak in x manner in order to be worthy of our ear. It will only do to say, This is actually how God has spoken, therefore if we would hear God’s voice we must accept this mode of divine speech. All this is to say that, as pious as it sounds to demand that “Bible as word of God” dictate our posture toward the text, I will not allow that confession to tell me that the Bible must be something that the data demands be recognized as something else.
But secondly, the reason why it is important that pastors and theologians adopt this stance and not attempt to force the Bible into a preconceived mold is that it is disastrous for the faith of those who then go on to get an education in religious and/or biblical studies.
A professor friend of mine used to say, “A liberal is a fundamentalist who got an education.” What he meant by that is linked to what I said in my first point. Both fundamentalism and liberalism look at the world, and at the Bible, and make the same demands. This includes the demand for historical accuracy, the ability to be harmonized, and all the rest.
Once a thusly educated fundamentalist leaves the friendly confines and starts wrestling with the data in some other venue (such as an undergraduate or seminary New Testament Intro course), they discover that by those standards the Bible simply doesn’t measure up.
The problem is not that I’m saying that “the Bible doesn’t measure up to the historical standard,” the problem comes in when we affirm that in order to be truly apprehended as the word of God the Bible must live up to this preconceived historical standard. It’s that demand, made to my right and my left, that will cause people’s faith in the God of the Bible to be shaken when they wrestle with the tensions, not the reality of the data itself.
Allowing the data of the Bible to set our expectations about the kind of history we find there is essential–both for duly honoring the God who gave us this particular Bible and for speaking of scripture in such a way that followers of Jesus can maintain their faith even when they discover that the Bible does not live up to one set of preconceived expectations.
Somewhere in America right now, there is a little girl locked in a dog cage. A man will bind her with duct tape. The man will sexually abuse her while another takes pictures and videos. The men will distribute these materials over a vast network of child pornography file sharing servers. Tens of thousands of other men will look at the pictures and videos, discuss them in chat rooms, use them as masturbatory tools, and demand more. And they will get more, much more.
I know this is true because I’m teaching a course this semester on “Cybersecurity Law.” Most of the course focuses on commercial and public espionage – hacking, data theft, and so on. This week, however, the topic has been online safety – cyberstalking, harassment, obscenity and child pornography. Our guest speaker yesterday was the Brian Sinclair, Chief of the Computer Crime Prosecution Unit in Bergen County, New Jersey. While he mercifully didn’t show us any of the volumes of child porn his unit has seized over the years (it is technically a felony to display such materials even in an educational setting), he described in general terms the sorts of things that commonly appear, including what he noted as “disturbing recent trend” towards the literal caging of victims.
It is nearly impossible to theologize about something like this without becoming either morose or trite. Bergen County is a wealthy suburb of New York City, and most of the perpetrators of child pornography and child cyberstalking here are educated middle-aged men. I could write about how the corruptions of wealth and power tempt these men to think of themselves as above any sense of law, morality or decency. Or, I could write about the perversion of the mainstream entertainment media, and how it feeds into far darker “entertainments.” I could explore how these sorts of practices explode whatever reticence I might have about the personal reality of the “demonic.” These are worthy topics.
But I feel compelled to write today about the victims. The girl in the cage is rarely rescued. As Assistant Prosecutor Sinclair explained, in the rare cases where the prosecution is able to obtain a victim statement, the victim usually has already grown to adulthood.
Where is “Justice” for these victims?
This is a piercing theological question. Any wise theologian will first admit that he or she cannot really offer anything like a satisfying answer. As a Christian, I cannot offer a satisfying answer. I can offer a Lament. I can offer some action, even the meager offering of a law school course that maybe helps raise awareness. And I can cling to a glimmer of hope, which I know with the heart of faith is more than a glimmer: Christ will return and make this right. Indeed, I can pray for these victims, and as I do so I can strain forward with the Church and the saints throughout all the ages towards the day when Christ will bring final justice into this world, the day of his return.
We Christians have lost, I’m afraid, the “blessed hope” of Christ’s return (Titus 2:13). On the one hand, this is because the dispensational “Left Behind” theology has perverted this hope into a wish for me to be “raptured,” leaving the world – including the girl in the cage, if she has not made a “conscious decision for Christ” (and how could she, being locked up and tortured?) — to burn in dramatic High Definition and Dolby Surround Sound. It’s a sort of parousia porn. On the other hand, the this-worldly rendering of the parousia popularized by figures such as Jurgen Moltmann and N.T. Wright, while offering a valuable and necessary correction to dispensationalism, at times seems to mitigate the drama and decisiveness of Christ’s personal return.
The Biblical drama of the parousia is that it is a final unveiling of what is trulyreal. Evil and injustice and the powers of this world are to be unmasked and shown for what they truly are. Christ is to be shown fully for who he truly is. The Church is to be shown fully for what it truly is. All will see and know.
The girl in the cage will see and know. If the Bible’s claims about God’s unwavering compassion for the poor and oppressed are true, then I have a confident hope, indeed a kind of certainty, that the girl in the cage will recognize Christ the Lamb, will be drawn into his blessed presence, will be welcomed into the company of the saints who have held her in their prayers, will be marvelously healed.
The men with the duct tape and cameras will see and know. I won’t presume to know the fate of any such individual person. Yet I am certain, based on the Biblical witness, that many of them will gape in terror and hatred at Christ the Lion, and will justly be devoured.
None of this is comforting to the girl in the cage right now – again, how could it be, while she is locked up and tortured and unaware of her own hope for redemption? None of it excuses the work that must be done right now to free her. But it should compel Christians to echo on of the concluding prayers of the Christian scriptures, without which no Christian account of “justice” is complete:
He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming quickly.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. (Rev. 22:20-21.)
The first talk in our “Faith, Law and Culture Speaker Series” at Seton Hall Law School will be held today, September 15, at 4:30 p.m. in the Faculty Library. The speaker series will feature theologians whose work focuses on the connections between faith, reason, law, reconciliation, and justice. Today’s speaker is Dr. Stephen Long of Marquette University (bio here: http://www.marquette.edu/theology/long.shtml). He describes himself as follows: “Steve was baptized by the Anabaptists, educated by the evangelicals, ordained and pastorally formed by the Methodists and given his first position as professor of theology by the Jesuits, which makes him either ecumenically inclined or theologically confused.” Dr. Long’s topic for today’s talk is “Being a Christian in Modernity: Nominalism, Politics and the Christian Life.”
The year-long series schedule is available here: http://law.shu.edu/About/News_Events/faithlawculture/index.cfm. All of our speakers, including Dr. Long as well as Miroslav Volf, David Bentley Hart, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, are distinguished and internationally recognized theologians.
Whether you’re a theologically-minded person or someone who thinks “faith and reason” is an oxymoron, we think you’ll find these talks stimulating. There is still time to register and attend.
Inside the lecture room we make a distinction between biblical scholars and theologians. The former are either Old Testament or New Testament, and the latter specialize in systems of thought, whether they focus on telling us what theologians teach (Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Barth) or what is to be taught (systematics).
But outside those walls, and particularly in the local church, that distinction vanishes quickly when folks want wisdom or answers to questions. They don’t care if I’m a New Testament guy, they might ask me about Genesis or about Jonathan Edwards. Sometimes, frankly, Christians disparage the academic life of a theologian; they can put-down those who have intellectual pursuits; they can even get into the “real life” vs. the “speculative” stuff. This is not particularly helpful to anyone, and so we need to chase down a better way.
He discusses what theologians– and I post a pic to the right of Miroslav Volf, one of America’s premier theologians — can provide for the church under four categories, but before I get there I wonder what role a theologian plays in your local church? Does your church have a “theologian”? What if you have questions … to whom do you go? What advice do you have for theologians? Which theologians do you think are really of help to the church today?
McGrath sees four components of the professional theologian’s contribution to the life of the church, and in this neither he nor I are diminishing the theological role of the pastor – and in some ways the pastor as theologian plays the same role as the professional theologian:
First, the theologian can be a resource person for the local church. Every church and every pastor has questions; often the pastor is in communication with a college professor, a seminary professor or even an author who happens to know a subject.
Second, the theologian can be an interpreter of the Christian tradition for the local church. Just recently I got a note from a pastor friend who got a letter from a parishioner who took her to task for something she said, and sent me the note — not for gossip but for genuine help with a perplexing set of inquiries. I was able to sort through some of the letter because I had been there and knew the subject and I made a few suggestions. But the whole issue came down to the letter writer having a substantially different theology than the pastor. Theologians can help here, and they can often bring the history of theology to bear on a particular issue.
Third, a theologian can be an interpreter of the Christian tradition to those outside the church. We often call these “public intellectuals” today, but think about the number of times that Christian thinkers are called into play when questions arise, and what I’m seeing in the age of the internet is the presence of theologians now on the internet and on cable TV — though sometimes the theologian is one person removed for a pastor is the one who is called into play (and the pastor has been in touch with some theologian). We needed theologians for the DaVinci Code fiasco.
Fourth, a theologian is a fellow traveler with and within the community of faith. Augustine and JI Packer are theologians who were (and are) involved in the local church — theologizing and pastoring and mentoring. Yes, some theologians seem not to care about the local church but far more care and care deeply. What happens in the community often shapes what the theologian cares about and thinks about and writes about.
There has been some good conversation on Jesus Creed recently about scripture. Here is a post I contributed, including some additional material I put into the comments.
Our recent conversation about inerrancy generated lots of discussion. Although the conversation about this question often becomes heated and difficult, there is one positive note: everyone on this blog is concerned about truth, the authority of the Word of God, the welfare of the Church, and the quality of the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel. In that spirit, I’d like to offer a perspective that seems helpful to me: “dynamic infallibilism.” I came across this term in a wonderful essay by Bruce McCormack in a volume titled “Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority, and Hermeneutics” – a volume I highly recommend, if nothing else for the excellent and well-balanced introduction by the editors.
In order to introduce my thoughts, let me start with a question: is William Shakespeare’s play Henry V inerrant? Shakespeare’s Henry V includes the famous “Crispin’s Day” speech, one of my favorite blood-stirring dramatic passages (played in the clip above by Kenneth Branaugh):
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother
It also includes glorious nuggets such as these: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more / Or close the wall up with our English dead!” and “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’”
The play is one of Shakespeare’s “Histories,” a number of which dramatize the life of “Prince Hal.” Henry V, of course, was a historical person, who really did defeat the French at Agincourt on Crispin’s Day in 1415. But did the real Henry V actually give the famous Shakespearian speeches? No — at least not in the words attributed to him by Shakespeare. And there are a number of historical problems with the plot as a whole.
Is Shakespeare’s play, then, “in error?” At least concerning the great speeches, I think we would agree that Shakespeare properly employed genre conventions. The play Henry V is designed as an entertaining drama rooted in historical events, not as a detailed “scientific” account of what happened. One could suggest, therefore, that Shakespeare’s play is not “errant,” despite its questionable facticity and embellishments at many points.
Many conservative evangelicals make the same sort of move with Biblical texts such as the histories in the Hebrew Scriptures. For example, the overlapping histories of Kings and Chronicles cannot be “harmonized” in detail, but this is not necessarily a problem because they reflect a particular type or genre of history that is properly told from a particular perspective for religious and polemical purposes.
This sort of genre criticism can be very helpful. At some point, however, genre criticism seems like a wax nose. As the Shakespeare illustration suggests, almost any text can be called “inerrant” if we allow that the author’s genre permits imprecision or literary license. The only exceptions might be the genres of scientific and technical academic literature and factual news reporting, which are among the very few literary genres in which no imprecision or license are supposed to be tolerated.
Certainly, we cannot claim that any part of scripture is a type of literature akin to scientific and technical academic literature or simple news reporting. No capable inerrantist scholar would make any such claim. But if the flexibility of genre conventions means that Shakespeare’s plays could be “inerrant” in the same sense as scripture, does the concept of “inerrancy” retain any useful content?
This comparison suggests to me that we need a “higher” view of scripture than inerrancy as typically formulated. We need to be clear that scripture is like no other text in all of literature, because scripture is the only literary text through which God reveals Himself to us in a way that is finally authoritative for the Church. God does not speak to us through Shakespearian plays, at least not in the sense that He speaks through scripture.
How, then, is scripture different? The difference, I think, comes through the dynamic action of the Holy Spirit speaking in and through the text of scripture as the Spirit’s instrument for the instruction of the Church. Without the Spirit, the Bible is only a human book. It may contain “inspiring” bits akin to Shakespeare’s Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V, and it may provide remarkable historical, religious and moral insights, but could not be considered truly theopneustos, breathed-out by God. As Karl Barth put it:
We can even hear Holy Scripture and simply hear words, human words, which we either understand or do not understand but along with which there is for us no corresponding event. But if so, then neither in proclamation nor Holy Scripture has it been the Word of God that we have heard. (Church Dogmatics 5.3).
Scripture does not “err” because it is uniquely used by the Holy Spirit to reveal to us who God is, what God is done, and how we are to live in response to God’s glory and grace. Scripture unfailingly – infallibly – directs us to faith in Jesus Christ and to living conformity with the image of Christ. However, this is a dynamic event that occurs only as we listen prayerfully to what the Spirit is saying in and through scripture. It is a theological mistake, I believe, to try to locate the “inerrancy” or “infallibility” of scripture in the organic quality of the words on the page. Rather, scripture is unerring and unfailing in its application to the believer and to the Church through the instrumentality of the Spirit.
This does not mean – as some interpreters (or perhaps mis-interpreters) of Barth suggest – that the organic nature of scripture is irrelevant. No – we carefully study the organic qualities of scripture, including its genres, cultural settings, languages, historical construction, and so on, because all of this is essential and preparatory to sitting under the teaching and revelation of scripture. God has chosen to communicate in the creaturely medium of scripture, and therefore God has limited His freedom in this regard and has tied Himself to the organic qualities of this particular set of texts. If we think we hear the Spirit saying something that is dramatically different than an organic reading of the text would suggest, we are most likely not listening to what God is saying.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that it is a mistake to tie the text’s infallible function as the rule of faith and practice completely to its organic qualities. This is the mistake – in my judgment – made by B.B. Warfield in his notion of “concursus,” a mistake grafted into the conservative evangelical view of organic inerrancy. Scripture is not “inerrant” like a Shakespearian history could be “inerrant,” merely as a function of its genre conventions. Rather, scripture is unerring, never failing, and always true, as and because it is the Spirit’s instrument and as and because we hear and obey the Spirit speaking through it.
What does this concept of “dynamic infallibility” mean for the hotly disputed historical-critical questions that arise in most discussions of the doctrine of inspiration? It does not “solve” the problem of scripture’s historical content. The organic content matters. But it does mean that we should not expect the organic content to take on a super-human quality in its own right. If we investigate the Biblical texts as human documents and find them to be thoroughly human, that is not a problem – it is expected, and even helpful. We are in trouble, however, when the Bible remains for us only human, when we do not allow the Spirit to wield it as an instrument that cleanses, clarifies, challenges and comforts. The Holy Spirit is our infallible tutor, and the instrument of the Spirit’s teaching is the Holy Scriptures, such that the Bible’s character as unique, unfailing and true derives from the ongoing action of the Spirit.
There’s an important nuance here for me: the Bible is not infallible in an ontological sense as it sits on the shelf, as though we could open it to any random page and select from it some scattered propositions, all of which would correspond to everyday empirical observations in any and all fields of human rational inquiry. That is the view of scholasticism.
Rather, the Bible is infallible as it is employed by the Spirit in the economy of God’s salvation to teach us. “Word” and “Spirit” cannot be separated in God’s action of “revelation,” and the proper “location” of scripture is Church proclamation. This nuance on the one hand rebuffs the kind of rationalism inherent in “scientific” exegesis — which rules any Divine agency in connection with the text out of court — and on the other hand rebuffs the kind of rationalism inherent in very conservative evangelical approaches ala the Chicago Statement. (For a great example of the rationalism of “scientific” exegesis, check out this article in the current edition of Biblical Archeology Review, in which any belief in divine agency with respect to the Biblical text is branded as fundamentally irrational.)
I should note that the view I’m trying to explore here isn’t that scripture only becomes God-breathed as it is read. It’s more subtle than that, and has to do with what McCormack calls the “ontology” of scripture. Probably better to let McCormack speak for himself here (pp. 62-64 of the essay):
For Warfield . . . once the last of the writings found in the New Testament canon was finished . . . revelation was complete. As complete, it was — from that point on — the secure ‘possession’ of men. . . . For Barth, by contrast, what completes the circle of revelation is the creation of the human subject who hears and receives the word of God in faith and obedience, which means that the work of the Spirit in revelation is not complete once the Scriptures have been written. To use the traditional language, illumination is just as decisive a moment in the process of revelation as inspiration.
McCormack further explains how Barth’s prioritizing of Christology facilitates an ontology of scripture that incorporates both its human and divine elements:
As the Word of God in the sign of this prophetic-apostolic word of man, Holy Scripture is like the unity of God and man in Jesus Christ. It is nether divine only nor human only. Nor is it a mixture of the two nor a tertium quid between them. But in its own way and degree, it is very God and very man, that is, a witness of revelation which itself belongs to revelation. Now, to be sure, the “union” of the divine and the human in Scripture (of God’s Word and human word) does not result in the divinization of the human element any more than it does in the case of Christ’s humanity.
McCormack notes — and I agree — that there is not a huge gulf between the view he is proposing and the conservative evangelical view. However, he goes on to distinguish the “essentialism” inherent in Warfield’s view from the “actualism” underlying Barth’s, and suggests that Barth’s insight about prioritizing Christology in the doctrine of revelation was correct — and that seems right to me as well.
Folks who lean more towards Warfield on this point usually express a concern about the Bible as a fixed standard of reference. It is a fair concern and indeed was one of the basic theological issues implicated in the Reformation. Without the Church’s Magesterium, the Reformation emphasized the primacy of scripture (sola scriptura). All of us who are not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, it seems to me, need to have some similar kind of understanding.
But, the Magesterial Reformers also were clear about the need for “illumination” by the Spirit in order to fully understand what the text is teaching. So, at least for the Magesterial Reformers, “sola scriptura” was never divorced from the ongoing action of the Spirit in illuminating the reader as to the text’s meaning. For them, scripture was fixed, but the human understanding of the text was not fixed, because understanding came not through human reason but through the illumination of the Spirit.
I think it’s difficult for us to put ourselves back into the Magesterial Reformer’s shoes to imagine why they had to make these moves. Their break from the Roman Church was monumental — far more traumatic than, say, some theologian today losing a job at a fundamentalist school because his doctrine of scripture smells fishy to them. The religious power, wealth and authority of the Roman Church from the time of Augustine to the time of the Reformers was truly universal in the West (though of course the Papacy had endured various crises mostly relating to relations with secular rulers). They had to explain why the institution was heir to the line of Bishops going back to Peter, that was extolled by all the great Patristic minds including Augustine, that produced the ecumenical councils, was no longer authoritative.
Their views, which we protestants today take for granted, were shockingly radical: the Bible, read by ordinary people aided by the Holy Spirit, was the final word. But if that was so, how could they explain centuries of the Roman Church getting it wrong and reading the Bible incorrectly? They had to argue that in more recent times, the Papacy and the Church had become corrupt, to the extent that the Spirit was now leading the invisible Church — a new concept — in a radically different direction. They could not neatly separate Word and Spirit because otherwise they’d be left to contend with the Roman Church’s magesterial interpretation of the Word.
By the 19th Century, Warfield and others like him were dealing with a different problem: the discoveries of science and the rise of higher criticism in protestantism. One could argue, in fact, that Warfield’s view reflects a later scholasticism that downplayed (but even then, didn’t eliminate) the Magesterial Reformer’s emphasis on the Spirit.
In this regard, we have to bring in the notion of the “perpiscuity” of scripture. For scripture to function as a final authority without a Church Magesterium, scripture must be clear or “perpiscuous.” The Magesterial Reformers held that scripture was sufficiently clear that anyone could learn by reading it the basics of salvation. This did not mean, however, that all parts of scripture were equally clear or easy to understand — indeed, many parts of scripture remained opaque without lots of study and the Spirit’s illumination.
The later scholastic Reformed divines, and the 19th Century Princetonians, including Warfield, agreed with this notion of perpiscuity, but arguably they expanded it somewhat by tying it to the prevalent “common sense realist” epistemology of their day. They assumed that the meaning of scripture would be evident to anyone with common sense once the necessary background information was understood. This assumption also carried with it a certain view of language and authorship that presumed essentially a one-to-one correpsondence between the “meaning” of a text and the “author’s” “intentions.” And this in turn reflected an assumption about the “authorship” of the various Biblical texts — that for the most part we can identify an individual human “author” of the various parts of the Bible (e.g., Moses as author of the Pentatuech). In effect, they tried to combat the higher critics on their own turf, using the tools of common sense realism.
It’s debateable whether the Princetonian Divines’ views were fully consistent with the Magesterial Reformers. From my reading of Luther, at least, I don’t think so. Luther was, in my view, quite pre-modern in his understanding of divine action and language. Calvin perhaps was more essentialist, but when you start reading the Institutes for the first time (at least for me) Calvin’s emphasis on the role of the Spirit is substantial.
None of this is to suggest that Barth’s “actualism” simply recovers the ground of the Magesterial Reformers. Barth is taking a different tack than Warfield in response to 19th and 20th century liberal protestantism, and is also working from a different, European intellectual milieu. As I’ve begun reading Barth, however, I’ve been struck by his continual references to Luther and by the extent to which Luther and Barth’s thought are consonant.
All of this backround is to say that, yes, the stability of revelation is an important concern. Yet, at the same time, the ongoing work of the Spirit in relation to scripture has always been an important Reformational theme. (Actually it’s always been an important theme in Catholic and Eastern theology as well….)
So why would the nuanced view of Barth that McCormack offers and that I’m exploring here matter? I think it matters if you are trying to deal with the scholarship about the Bible’s human construction and sources with integrity.
Take as just one example the debates about the “days” of creation. If you are a Warfieldian and not a YEC, eventually you’ll have to argue that “the author” of Genesis 1 “intended to communicate” a non-literal message about the “days.” That’s a tough row to hoe, not the least because we have no certain idea about the origins and authorship even of the canonical form of the text (though there are good, but debated, reasons to believe it was redacted by a “Priestly” community later in Israel’s history). (If you want to assert that Moses is basically the sole author of the Pentateuch, then you really have to reject essentially all contemporary scholarship about those texts and retreat into an intellectual bunker, which in my mind is not an option).
If you’re more of a Barthian, you’ll probably be more comfortable acknowledging that there is no single identifiable “author” of the Gen. 1 narrative, and that the many people and communities responsible for the construction and transmission of the story — in its earlier oral forms and then eventually, probably much later, in its final redacted canonical form — may have had very different ideas about the meaning of the “days.” We understand this text as “non-literal” not necessarily because we know for sure what some “original author” intended, but because the Spirit has been working in the Church to supply more information about the text, its relation to other ANE creation stories, and about the natural world, and is leading the Church to develop an understanding of what God reveals about Himself through this text.
You could look at this under the rubric of “illumination,” but it seems to me this requires the kinds of untenable assumptions about authorship that I mentioned above. But either way, the organic text remains central and the Spirit’s action is essential. McCormack’s approach seems to me much more honest, and more true, than Warfield’s.
. The first post is 
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