Metaphysical Misgivings (Reflections on McCormack's Croall Lectures)

So, over the past two weeks you’ve read more than 15,000 words here about Bruce McCormack’s remarkable Croall Lectures on the person and work of Christ.  But you’ve read only a few hundred words of my opinion about it all; and if you know me, or know this blog, that is quite a remarkable thing.  Many of you may not give a darn about my opinion, given that I’m not only a mere student, but not even a systematic theology student--not nowadays, at any rate.  Heck, I don’t really give a darn about my opinion.  However, it really doesn’t feel complete without some evaluative remarks, does it?  At any rate, I will try to offer a few here, and I’ll try to keep it as brief as possible (ha ha--I'm afraid it turned out to be no such thing); I welcome a free-for-all discussion in the comments section, for those of you who have more to offer than I do.

And once I've got that out of my system, I can get this blog back to its usual business of interrogating the theory of private property, of expounding in tome-like posts the wisdom of Richard Hooker, and of occasional intemperate invectives against the American Right.  

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Reformed Kenoticism and Death in God (McCormack Croall Lecture #6)

In his sixth and final lecture, McCormack’s goal was of course to tie together all the ground he had covered in the previous lectures.  The fifth lecture, he suggested, had adequately shown that the basic paradigm of the Marcan and Matthaean Passion accounts in particular was penal substitution, but not in any of its traditional forms.  He summarized that what he sought to offer was an “ethically-oriented, post-metaphysical theological ontology,” which enabled him to stick within the paradigm of penal substitution while doing justice to the theological values found in moral exemplarist and theosis theories. 

While he did not, perhaps, succeed in tying up all the loose ends in this lecture, he did manage to cover a lot of important ground.  First, he expanded on the actualistic Christological ontology of lecture four via an exegesis of Phil. 2:6-11, against the backdrop of older forms of kenotic theology, seeking to demonstrate how his “Reformed kenoticism” accomplished the goals of older kenotic theology while avoiding its pitfalls.  Armed with this fully-integrated conception of the person and work of Christ, he returned to the atonement specifically to show how his concept of “death in God” successfully avoided what he had in the first lecture flagged as the chief objection to penal substitution--it made God a violent God.  Finally, he sketched some of the implications of this model for ethics, in the process hinting at some ways he thought his conception could incorporate the theological values of ontological and moral theories.

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The Divided Christ (McCormack Croall Lecture #3)

In his third lecture, on Thursday, McCormack turned to views of the atonement with which we are probably more familiar--those of Anselm, Aquinas, and Calvin, for example.  These were all classed under the heading, “Theories which fail adequately to integrate the person and work of Christ”--a criticism which McCormack would apply to the whole tradition of judicial theories.  More intriguingly, though, McCormack classed moral theories of the atonement under the same heading.  Whatever their protestations to the contrary, he said, moral views are not the antithesis of judicial views, but parasitic upon them.  Both sets of views, he said, emerged around the same time--the judicial theory with Anselm around 1100 and the moral theory with Abelard a couple decades later.  And while judicial theories are preoccupied with seeking to explain Christ’s work in such a way that the demands of God’s justice are upheld, this concern is also central to many moral theories, such as those of the liberation theologians.  Likewise, while judicial theories seek to give particular weight to the objective accomplishment of the atonement and moral theories to its subjective appropriation, both have to give an account of both sides.

Calvin served as his key case study for a judicial view, while as an example of a moral theory of the atonement, he considered D.M. Baillie, and he also gave particular attention to a fascinating hybrid view--that of nineteenth-century Scotsman, John McLeod Campbell.  

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Christ as the Puppet of Metaphysics (McCormack Croall Lecture #2)

One of the downsides to whipping out a 2,300-word summary of a lecture within hours after the lecture is that one has to be rather breezy about it.  And that means that one is prone to say things (and think things) rather carelessly.  Unfortunately, I was sorely guilty of this in my summary of McCormack’s first lecture, thrice referring to him as “anti-Catholic.”  I used this term somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it is hardly a term to be used carelessly, and in any case, it would have been much more apt to say, “anti-Catholicizing.”  For McCormack’s beef is not with Catholics per se (for whom he has in fact many times expressed deep respect and appreciation), but with Protestants who carelessly dilute their Protestant heritage with sprinklings of Catholic theology--Protestants who want to have their cake and eat it too, by feasting on the stolen goodies of Catholicism without being willing to actually sign on the dotted line, so to speak, and come under the Magisterium--in other words, one might say, with people like me. :-)  Obviously I think that McCormack’s judgment here is somewhat unfair, and that there are in fact quite good historical and theological reasons for Protestants to seek to find ways to close the theological gap between themselves and Catholics and Orthodox.  However, I think McCormack has a valid point: ecumenical dialogue is only effective when engaged in the way the Catholics engage in it--by mining the resources of their own tradition and using these as a touchstone instead of prematurely jettisoning it for a noncommittal hybrid.  It is this hybridizing woolly-headedness, much more than Catholicism per se, that is McCormack’s main target.  Having realized how misleading my post was in this regard, I’ve removed a few of the most ill-conceived phrases, and would urge you to read the rest with a grain of salt--with this clarification in mind, since the “anti-Catholic” mischaracterization appears at several points.  And I heartily apologize for any confusion or offence caused by this mischaracterization.

Having hopefully set the record straight on that score, I will now move on to attempt to summarize McCormack’s incredibly dense, but lucid as always, second lecture (though I’m afraid I wasn’t able to grasp it fully enough to re-present it as clearly here as I ought to):

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The Suffering God? (McCormack Croall Lecture 1)

At the first of his long-awaited Croall Lectures on the work of Christ yesterday, Bruce McCormack was in top-form--cranky, dogmatic, and brilliant as ever.  Best to begin with the “brilliant” part and return at the end to highlight McCormack’s cantankerous idiosyncrasies, as they appeared particularly in the Q&A session.  

McCormack is one of the few theologians today undertaking serious constructive dogmatic work in the area of Christology, which as I’m sure you can imagine, is a daring and dangerous enterprise.  No other area of Christian theology is hedged in with so many or so ancient credal constraints, making it difficult to find room to maneuver, much less innovate.  McCormack’s overall project could be characterized as attempting to rescue orthodox Christology from the implausibility into which modern theological sensibilities have cast it, and from the underlying tensions that modern attacks have revealed to have been there all along, by bringing the theological resources of Barthianism to bear and remaining faithful to the core confession and trajectory of earlier Christian theology (McCormack is no liberal--that much is for sure).  A tall order, and a noble project.  Even if you ultimately disagree with McCormack’s methods and conclusions, you can’t help but admire the focus and creativity he gives to his task, and be seduced by the just-plain-cool-ness of some of his proposals.  

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