Force Becomes Structure: David Bentley Hart on the Cause of Controversy

July 14, 2010

More pressing matters have delayed me from saying more about the controversy conference, but I do want to return to it and say a bit about some of the other lectures while the memory is still fresh.  The afternoon of the first day of the conference was graced by the presence (via videoconference) of David Bentley Hart and Robert Jenson, both titans of the American theological landscape and both known as well for their colorful personalities, which came through even from 5,000 miles away.  

Hart’s lecture was entitled a “Penitential Approach to Controversy,” though that was not really its main focus.  The penitence referred to was his own, coming to us as he did with a  legendary reputation for bombastic theological rhetoric.  We can, he said, invoke the prophets as a model for dramatic controversial pronouncements, but we must acknowledge that most of us are not called to be prophets in this way, and that went for him as well.

Hart proposed in his lecture to offer us not so much an argument as an intuition of why it is that ferocious controversy has been such a perennial feature of the Christian Church’s life, despite the New Testament’s clear calls for peace and unity.  His suggestion was provocative and intriguing, disturbingly similar to liberal reconstructions of the early Church of the von Harnack variety, and yet refusing to grant their apostate conclusions.  

There is a deep tension at the heart of the Christian faith, he suggested, between its apocalyptic other-worldiness and its need to become assimilated to history, to life in this world.  Dogma and cult were the means by which the Church had to tame, as it were, the apocalyptic inbreaking of the Gospel and make it suitable for millenia of waiting for the consummation.  Christianity entered history not as a set of doctrines, but as an apocalypse; it constituted an overturning of history and nature as we know them, or as we think we know them.  There could be no simple return to the sacred as formerly understood, and there didn’t have to be, because history was coming to an end.  Christianity thus accords ill with any purely cultic rationality. 

It would take some time, and some adjustment of expectations, for so singular an interruption of the eschatological into the temporal to be recuperated into a stable institution of words and practices.  Christianity had to become historical again, cultural again, cultic again.  Christianity was forced to take on the morphology of the religions which it had replaced, without compromising its content.  What began as force had to become structure--the event had to crystallize. 

Now thus far, this has a great deal of similarity to certain liberal narratives, but Hart does not take all this to mean that the assimilation to history was wrong, or something that we need to undo.  It is necessary and valuable--dogma and cult and all the rest.  Nonetheless, there is a tragic element to this accomodation between apocalypse and cult.  The apocalyptic force of the Christian revelation, its newness and power, its difference from all that came before, is too volatile to permanently and comfortably sit at ease within its own institutional boundaries.  It is for this reason, suggests Hart, that Christianity has proved so uniquely fissile, and creative even of a militant atheism and nihilism.  There is an ungovernable destructive energy at the heart of Christianity that is always at tension with its constructive impulses. 

Dogma, therefore, the Christian event’s assumption of a fixed, historical, and institutional form, although it can be the poetic discovery of language for speaking about God, is also in some sense the language of disenchantment.  It wants to recuperate the force of a cosmic disruption in the form of institutional formulae.  This is not something to be lamented--we must accept the workings of providence.  But dogma always has some quality of disappointment about it.  We speak in these formal terms because we have not yet seen with our eyes and felt with our hands.  And with this disappointment comes an impulse to anger.

It is this anger, this spiritual discontentment, and not merely the mixing of the Church with politics, that explains part of the violence of the controversy witnessed in the early Church.  Theological hatred, Hart suggested, may be at some level a reflex of fear, fear that the Gospel, exposed to the corrosion of ordinary time, may be reduced only into history.  

Another phenomenon might also be going on: there is something in the pursuit of theology that is a constant frustration of human pride, and thus calls forth ever more assertive expressions of human pride.  We are thwarted by the surfeit of truth over the limits of human language.  But even more importantly, all our attempts to speak about God are overwhelmed by God’s speaking of Himself in time.  It challenges and cancels our customary attempts at meaning, and destroys the human ambition to ascend unaided to the summits of truth.  Theology thus carries with it a certain measure of resentment, a resentment toward grace.  

It is from this resentment, our unspoken recognition of our inability to gain a true grasp of that of which we speak, that leads to the anger that bursts forth so intemperately in the midst of theological controversy.  Controversy must therefore always be carried on in penitence, penitence for our resentment against God.

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I have nothing to add to this fascinating and powerful thesis, except the objection that was voiced by several in the Q&A afterward--namely, that Hart’s thesis is perhaps better seen as a paradigm for understanding what is always true about the Christian revelation, than as a historical explanation of how the Church evolved.  Indeed, that is more how I have presented it here.  But, although he was counseling no return to primitivism, he did seem to claim that the Church was in the beginning characterized by this apocalyptic otherworldiness, in constant expectation of the end of the world, and then only after a century or so realized that it had to settle down and develop doctrine.  This obscures the fact that controversy over doctrine and the institutional shape of the Church is present already in the New Testament itself.  Nonetheless, with this caveat, I find that Hart’s intuition seems to ring true, and promises to perhaps shed a lot of light on the theological experience.

Barth's Christological Corrective (VanDrunen Review VIII)

July 12, 2010

There is, I’m afraid, very little to say about this chapter.  Actually, I’m not afraid--that is rather a relief, given how much there has been to say about the previous seven chapters.  This chapter marks a dramatic shift from the chapters thus far, because heretofore, VanDrunen has been attempting to claim a certain tradition--to say, “Here’s what X said, and here’s why it’s part of the Reformed tradition, and (implicitly) that’s why I’m all for it.”  But now, all of a sudden, he isn’t.  Finally, our narrative has a solid villain.  Barth is the fellow who decisively rejected the Reformed consensus, as VanDrunen sees it, who rejected the notion of natural law, who substituted one kingdom of Christ for two kingdoms, and who insisted on a unified Christology, rather than one bifurcated into two mediatorships.  

Now, there is little to say here because I don’t really disagree with this picture; Barth did reject the Reformed consensus, or at least, how VanDrunen has portrayed that consensus, and I have already argued with where I think that portrayal is flawed, so there’s not much point in rehashing it here.  I simply think that those points at which Barth does disagree with this consensus are generally healthy correctives, whereas I’m sure VanDrunen thinks the opposite.  Moreover, in saying that Barth is the “villain” of VanDrunen’s narrative, I don’t mean to imply that VanDrunen is harsh or unfair to him; he is quite objective and even-handed, so there is not a great deal for me to say in terms of contesting his portrait of Barth.  This is especially so as I am, despite spasmodic attempts to reconcile this shortcoming, woefully inadequate in my knowledge of Barth.  So there were a few points at which VanDrunen’s summary didn’t entirely make sense to me, but that was probably my fault, not his.  

My only big question about his portrayal of Barth is that he sees Barth as rejecting the “commonality amidst antithesis” of the Reformers in favor of much greater commonality between believers and unbelievers.  However, my understanding of Barth has always been that he highlighted the antithesis;  others that I know have seen his antipathy toward natural law and his Christocentrism to have the result of implying that outside of specifically Christian truth, there is very little discovery of truth, and so as having a sort of “fundamentalist” edge.  But perhaps I am mistaken here.

In any case, given that there is little need for extended interaction, I shall just return, like a dog to his vomit, to the question of Christology, for it is Barth, of course, who makes precisely the objection to the dual mediatorship doctrine that I have been making, and it is worth attending to VanDrunen’s comments at this point, given that this is the theological fulcrum underlying this book.

On page 342, VanDrunen says, “For Barth, affirming that God, but not God in Jesus Christ the redeemer, is the creator is tantamount to ascribing creation to a false God.”  That is precisely right, I think.  Unless the God who creates is the God who is revealed truly and fully in Jesus Christ the Redeemer, unless this work of creation aims toward the same end as the work of redemption and manifests the same gracious character of God in Christ, then the Creator God is not the Biblical God.  Another way of saying all this is that for Barth, God is defined by his telos, and all God’s works may be read, nay, must be read, in light of the final end of his works--redemption in Jesus Christ.  This endpoint provides the full meaning of all the earlier works, and so it cannot be abstracted out of them.  This seems to me to ring absolutely true, and I’d be interested to hear why, for VanDrunen, it does not.  

Now, let’s hear how VanDrunen contrasts Barth and the Reformed tradition on the “two reigns of God.”  He begins by recapitulating the “Reformed tradition”: 

“For the earlier tradition, the two kingdoms doctrine consisted in a distinction between two reigns of God, one a redemptive reign over his church and the other a providential, non-redemptive reign over civil society and the broader cultural realm.  This distinction often involved the corresponding distinction between the Son as eternal God (and, as such, the creator and sustainer of all things) and the Son as the incarnate mediator, the Lord Jesus Christ (and, as such, the redeemer of his people).  As the eternal Son of God he reigns over the civil kingdom and as the incarnate mediator of redemption he reigns over the spiritual kingdom.  Connected to this basic theological framework was the conviction that creation was an act of God, and therefore an act of the Son, but not a redemptive act of the mediator Christ.  The older Reformed perspective viewed creation as well as redemptive ‘christologically’ or ‘christocentricially’ in this sense.”

First, I must protest against the continued hypocrisy here.  You may recall that at the end of the previous chapter, VanDrunen berated Kuyper for his terminological confusion in using the name “Christ” to refer to the Logos the Creator and Jesus the Redeemer, when in fact the name only applies to the latter.  I pointed out, with a bit of annoyance, that VanDrunen himself (like pretty much every other theologian in history, I might add), had used “Christ” and “Christology” to refer to both, earlier in the book.  And now we see him again indulging in the same ambiguity: early Reformed thought, we are told, had a “christological” or “christocentric” doctrine of Creation, because it taught that the second person of the Trinity was involved in creation.  But, if VanDrunen is to be believed, it taught that, although the second person of the Trinity was involved, He was involved precisely not as Christ, but merely as “Son” or “Logos.”  He wants to have his cake and eat it too.  And this is not a minor point.  VanDrunen seeks to rest a great deal of theological weight on the fact that it was not “Christ” who created, since “Christ” is the Son’s title as king of the mediatorial kingdom, and that kingship has nothing to do with his kingship over creation.  The Son creates, and rules over creation, only insofar as he is “eternal God”--he does not rule as the God-man, but only as God.  Therefore, what we have is a theological account of creation, and the civil kingdom, and a Christological account of redemption, and the spiritual kingdom.  Exactly what we do not have is a Christological account of creation.  

Now, I don’t think this is for a moment theologically coherent, because it effectively treats the Logos asarkos and the Logos insarkos as separate persons, but if you’re going to opt for something theologically incoherent, at least don’t make things worse by making it inconsistent too.  And it is, so far as I can tell, inconsistent for VanDrunen to claim that the Reformed teach that God did not create as Christ, and then to claim for them a “christological” doctrine of creation.   

Second, what is at issue here is not a “distinction” between the Son as eternal God and the Son as incarnate mediator, nor a “distinction” between the two kingships this entails.  Distinctions are fine.  Distinctions are useful.  Not always, of course; often they are harmful.  But in principle, there’s nothing wrong with this distinction.  The question is: what kind of distinction is this?  Is this a heuristic distinction, useful for limited conceptualizing, or is it an ontological distinction, positing separate realities in the life of the Logos?  And if it is the latter, then just how separate are these?  This, you see, is the problem--not that VanDrunen (or the Reformed) perceives a distinction here, but how much they want to rest on the distinction.  VanDrunen at least wishes to use the distinction as the argument for the complete autonomy of the two kingships from one another, so that neither has any effect on the other or any dependence on the other.  This is not the same as just making a distinction.  For instance, we might want to distinguish between me as writer of my book on the Mercersburg Theology and me as writer of this review.  These are two separate works I have done at different points in time, for different purposes, in different manners, etc.  And so we can draw some useful distinctions, rather than blurring them together.  But you would be foolish to pretend that the one work couldn’t tell you anything about the other, or that they didn’t depend on certain common assumptions or manifest a common set of goals and a common personality.  Of course, I might’ve changed my mind a lot in between, but this doesn’t happen to Jesus; he is the same yesterday and today.  But, of course, the connection between creation and redemption is much closer than that, because, if Scripture is to be believed, the latter is the restoring and bringing to fulfillment of the former.  So the analogy would be more like the distinction between my writing this initial rambly review and my final refined review of VanDrunen.

But with that remark about ramblyness, I should perhaps stop rambling and move on.  

Now, I don’t really think that VanDrunen thinks that redemption is the restoring and bringing to fulfillment of creation; but if that isn’t the case, then I can’t really guess what redemption is for him.  In summarizing the “Reformed tradition,” he says.”  “After the fall, God not only initiated the covenant of grace for the purpose of establishing the spiritual kingdom but also preserved the creation order through the establishment of the civil kingdom” (344).  Now, notice this language: God “initiated the covenant of grace for the purpose of establishing the spiritual kingdom.”  See, I’d always been under the impression that God initiated the covenant of grace in order to redeem creation, and in particular mankind its head, from the sin and death into which it had fallen, implying a certain measure of continuity with the original creation.  But now we learn that actually, God decided to whip up some Plan B--this new thing called a “spiritual kingdom,” having decided, apparently, that creation wasn’t really the best place for man after all.  I’m probably distorting things here, but I really don’t know how to make sense of this narrative that VanDrunen is giving me--what is redemption, if not new creation?  

To move on, VanDrunen says that, in contrast, 

“Barth distinguished God’s work of creation from his work of redemption, but he did so only while insisting that they are both Christological in a way such that they can never be separated.  The orders of creation and redemption are united in Christ and to know God as creator is also to know him as redeemer.  To deny this, according to Barth, is to speak of two gods, to combine Yahweh and Baal.” (344)

Exactly!  Thank you, Barth!  Yahweh and Baal--I couldn’t have said it better!  Distinguishing without separating--exactly!  Now, what part of this does VanDrunen disagree with?  I want to understand, but I don’t.  

Perhaps this is what he didn’t like: “Barth himself understood that the older Reformed ideas about a pre-incarnate Son (the so-called logos insarkos), the distinction between a protological covenant of works and a subsequent covenant of grace, and the natural law were intertwined and to be rejected together” (345). Now, if Barth really had rejected the idea of a pre-incarnate Son (who, by the way, is the logos asarkos--the logos insarkos is the incarnate Son...this faux pas does not reassure me about VanDrunen’s grasp of Christology), then we should have serious objections.  But of course Barth did no such thing, and I’m not sure where VanDrunen got that from.  Perhaps all he is saying is that Barth rejected the particular things that the older Reformed said about the work of the pre-incarnate Son, but, if so, the phrasing was rather too ambiguous.  

In any case, that pretty much wraps up the Barth chapter.  I apologize that this review was not very well-structured, but at this point, I’m just in a hurry to get on to the end of the book.  And we’re almost there.  Two chapters on the neo-Calvinists, an epilogue on the recovery of a Reformed two kingdoms theory, and then I can go back to the beginning and write the concise review.

The "Christian" vs. "The Secular Person" (Sermon on the Mount IV)

July 10, 2010

In Luther's later treatise, entitled “The Sermon on the Mount,” we see an unfortunate shift from the promising (if somewhat disorganized) start of “On Temporal Authority.”

Having started with the Beatitudes, he asks, 

“What does it mean, then, to be meek?  From the outset here you must realize that Christ is not speaking at all about the government and its work, whose property it is not to be meek, as we use the word in German, but to bear the sword (Rom. 13:4) for the punishment of those who do wrong (1 Pet. 2:14), and to wreak a vengeance and a wrath that are called the vengeance and wrath of God.  He is only talking about how individuals are to live in relation to others, apart from official position and authority.” 

This is not an uncommon route to take--insisting that different ethical standards apply in private life vs. public life--and I am not going to contest that there must be some difference, because there is still a provisional task of judgment to execute until the fullness of the Kingdom comes.  The question we must ask, though, is whether it is an absolute difference;  should the commands of Christ have no effect on how a government decides to execute vengeance?  Do the priority of peacemaking and the value of mercy have no purchase in the public sphere?  Moreover, we must beware of articulating this eschatological distinction in terms which suggest it is simply a public/private distinction, as Luther appears to do here: do Christian ethics cease to have any relevance once we move from the individual level to the level of any institution?  The CEO of Enron had “official position and authority,” he was working not as an individual, but as representative of an institution.  Did the same ethics no longer apply?  As we go on, we will see that our concern here is not unwarranted.

Luther goes on to draw a sharp distinction between office and person: 

“The man who is called Hans or Martin is a man quite different from the one who is called elector or doctor or preacher.  Here we have two different persons in one man.”  Jesus, is not talking about the office-person: “He is not talking about this person here, letting it alone in its own office and rule, as he has ordained it.  He is talking merely about how each individual, natural person is to behave in relation to others.”  

See, now this is a very troubling move.  We have shifted from contrasting civil government and private life to contrasting any “office” such as “doctor or preacher” with private life.  While clearly every man has certain functions which belong exclusively to a particular office that he executes, and are not relevant outside of that office, it is rather more problematic to assert that different ethical principles apply within and without the office.  Moreover, if we are speaking about “offices” of this sort, it seems that very little of our lives indeed lie under the commands of Jesus.

All this is simply under the discussion of meekness.  Later, as he turns to consider the difficult commands of 5:38-40, he insists that this doesn’t mean a literal turning the other cheek-- 

“it was enough for a person to be ready in his heart to offer the other cheek....We say, therefore, that all it does is to proclaim to every Christian that he should willingly and patiently suffer whatever is his lot, without seeking revenge or hitting back.

“But the question and argument still remain.  Must a person suffer all sorts of things from everyone, without defending himself at all?  Has he no right to plead a case or to lodge a complaint before a court, or to claim and demand what belongs to him?  If all these things were forbidden, a strange situation would develop.  It would be necessary to put up with everybody’s whim and insolence.  Personal safety and private property would be impossible, and finally the social order would collapse.”

This new move is also quite troubling.  To take Christ “literally” here would mean that we would constantly have to suffer from “everybody’s whim and insolence,” and so it is clear that Christ merely means that we should turn the cheek of our hearts, so to speak, that we should be willing to suffer passively, but should not actually do so.  Such bifurcation of action and intention seems to rob these commands of most of their force, relevance, and value.  

In the following paragraphs, Luther combines the two approaches he has taken here--the distinction of civil government and private life, and the distinction of heart and outward action.  The earthly regime, we are told, must continue to “administer law and punishment,” maintain distinctions of ranks, etc.  

“But the Gospel does not trouble itself with these matters.  It teaches about the right relation of the heart to God, while in all these other questions it should take care to stay pure and not to stumble into a false righteousness.  You must grasp and obey this distinction, for it is the basis on which such questions can easily be answered.  Then you will see that Christ is talking about a spiritual existence and life and that he is addressing himself to his Christians.  He is telling them to live and behave before God and in the world with their heart dependent upon God and uninterested in things like secular rule or government, power or punishment, anger or revenge.”  

We begin, it seems, with a distinction between civil government and the kingdom of Christ, but this latter gets defined as “the right relation of the heart to God,” suggesting that, as Luther has already ventured, what matters is not that our actions conform to Christ’s commands, but that our hearts do.  

Of course, it is possible to read this at first in an Anabaptist way; Christians are to be “uninterested in things like secular rule or government, power or punishment” because they live according to a different kingdom.  However, we are going to see that he does not mean that Christians are to stay aloof from such things--of course they are to be involved in such things, but as secular persons, not as Christians.  As a Christian, we must love our enemies.  But  Christian could be, in addition to being a Christian “a prince or a judge or a servant or a maid--all of which are termed ‘secular’ persons because they are part of the secular realm.”  One’s identity in relation to other people, in this portrait, is not part of one’s being a Christian--one is a secular person inasmuch as one stands in relation to other people.  We may then ask how it is that a Christian could love his enemies, because inasmuch as he relates to his enemies, he must do so as a secular person.  You will see soon that I am not overstating the problem...Luther just plunges further and further into it.  

He expands upon the bifurcation of person and office, and considers the office to be a “secular person”:  “There is no getting around it, a Christian has to be a secular person of some sort.”  In this role, “your name is not ‘Christian,’ but father’ or ‘lord’ or ‘prince.’  According to your own person you are a Christian; but in relation to your servant you are a different person, and you are obliged to protect him.”

He continues, 

“You see, now we are talking about a Christian-in-relation: not about his being a Christian, but about this life and his obligation in it to some other person, whether under him or over him or even alongside him, like a lord or a lady, a wife or children or neighbors, whom he is obliged, if possible, to defend, guard, and protect.”  

In such cases we are told that it is wrong to apply the turn-the-other-cheek principle.  Is it wrong because the principle is in abeyance when you are acting in an office, or because the principle is about self, not others? 

He no longer draws the distinction clearly.  Observe, for instance, where he says:

“What kind of crazy mother would it be who would refuse to defend and save her child from a dog or a wolf and who would say: ‘A Christian must not defend himself’?  Should we not teach her a lesson with a good whipping and say: ‘Are you a mother?  Then do your duty as a mother, as you are charged to do it.”  

Rather than taking the obvious route with this example and saying, “Christ says a Christian must not defend himself, but clearly he should defend his child, so there is no contradiction,” Luther imagines that we must, as it were, suspend the Sermon on the Mount because we are talking about someone acting as a secular person.  We are to neatly distinguish two different identities for the Christian and two different sets of ethics for these identities: “Now, with this distinction of the boundary between the province of the Christian person and that of the secular person you can neatly classify all these saying and apply them properly where they belong, not confusing them and throwing them in one pot, the way the teaching and the administration of the pope has done.”  

What, we must ask, remains in the province of the Christian person, if we have bracketed out every aspect of his life that is in relation or in obligation to others?  It would seem that Christ’s commands are still to apply when it is solely oneself who is threatened, and Luther says so.  But having said this, he then immediately flip-flops and says, “It is permissible to use orderly procedure in demanding and obtaining your rights, but be careful not to have a vindictive heart.”  It’s fine to use the law simply for your protection, only not for vindictivenss.  “When the heart is pure, then everything is right and well done.”  

So the Sermon on the Mount does not offer us instruction when it comes to living in relation to others, and, even addressing us as individuals, it should be taken only as speaking to our hearts, our intentions, not our outward actions.  This is because any of our outward actions, it appears, are part of our “secular person.”:

“He lives simultaneously as a Christian toward everyone, personally suffering all sorts of things in the world, and as a secular person, maintaining, using, and performing all the functions required by the law of his territory or city, by civil law, and by domestic law....A Christian should not resist any evil; but within the limits of his office, a secular person should oppose every evil.  The head of a household should not put up with insubordination  or bickering among his servants.  A Christian should not sue anyone, but should surrender both his coat and cloak when they are taken away from him; but a secular person should go to court if he can to protect and defend himself against some violence or outrage.”

Since we are all secular people, we should all go to court to defend ourselves, but in our hearts, we should still live as Christians.  Here is an ethics that has been entirely emasculated and robbed of any livable form.  Here the Catholic counsels/precepts distinction gets turned on its side, separating each individual into a spiritual person who inwardly follows the counsels--the hard teachings of Christian ethics--and outwardly follows the precepts--more basic, natural law teachings.  

This is, of course, not Luther at his best, and we mustn’t imagine that Luther actually consistently applied such a bizarre and schizophrenic ethic.  Nevertheless, this sort of inward/outward ethical dualism has exerted a very strong influence on Protestantism and we must be alert to its presence.  A common form it takes in the modern world is in the dual standards we apply to the world of business: as a private individual, I am not greedy, nor combative, I seek peace with all men, but as a businessman, I can be a cutthroat competitor, seeking to destroy the competition and wring the last cent out of my customers, always seeking more and more profit.  

For Luther, the attempt to escape the hard words of the Sermon on the Mount has led him to destroy the foundations of Christian ethics.  Clearly, we need a better interpretive solution.

"Theology and the Peace of the Church"

July 8, 2010

John Webster kicked off the proceedings at the Controversy Conference with his lecture “Theology and the Peace of the Church,” and as one might’ve expected from a man like Webster, it was profound, sophisticated, systematic, and rooted thoroughly in the doctrine of God.  I might add that it was rooted in a thoroughly metaphysical doctrine of God, though I do not mean that pejoratively (a caveat one has to make in this anti-metaphysical age).  His argument was essentially methodological, and sought to make two main points. 

First, attempts to discuss the issue of controversy and conflict in the Church generally move immediately to the ethical, the imperative, without first establishing the theological, the indicative.  Exhortations to overcome conflict thus degenerate into empty moralizing.  Instead of this, we must, like St. Paul, first establish who God is and what He has done, and then we can construct ethical imperatives to act in accord with what is already the case by virtue of God’s character.  

Second, this theological account which we must first provide is one in which peace is ontologically prior to violence, where being is good and evil is a privation of being, not a counter-being, in other words, the venerable Augustinian account of evil, enriched by his discussion of peace from City of God 19.  Anything else ends in Manichaeanism, in which conflict is just as basic to the world as peace, intrinsic to the Church’s life and inescapable.

Webster began by contesting the common claim, mentioned in the introductory post about this conference, that it is through conflict that truth comes to light, that conflict makes clear what would else have remained obscure.  We may think this is so, he said, but this is an illusion that comes from the dramatic oversimplification of the options that conflict engenders.  In the midst of conflict, we artificially draw black-and-white distinctions that, while they appear to facilitate a triumph of rationality, are actually its downfall.  We have two basic options, according to Webster: either we can see conflict as the natural condition of reason, or else it is an aberration from God who is the principle of order and peace.  We must see it as the latter, because peace is ontologically prior to violence, and is indeed the guarantee of the possibility of reason.  “An account of peaceful conduct,” he said, “rests upon a dogmatic account of the peace that God is and bestows.” 

 

God is both the principle and the pattern of creaturely peace, but the former, said Webster, is generally ignored in favor of the latter.  In other words, we exhort ourselves to be ethically conformed to the pattern of God’s peacefulness, without first meditating on how God provides the source and foundation for peaceable being.  To do this requires that we reflect on who God is in himself.  But of course we run into an immediate problem--we cannot know God as he is in himself.  We must, said Webster, let this inhibition stand, but nonetheless recognize that God summons us into his inner presence by his outward activities.

 

In his account of the immanent Trinity, Webster’s hidden interlocutors were surely modern “dynamic trinitarians” (to coin a phrase, if it isn’t already one) like Moltmann and Jenson.  The works of the Trinity, he said, are fully harmonious; there is no disorder, disruption, or contradiction in God’s making of the world, and thus not also in the inner life of God.  At this point I found myself torn; on the one hand, of course--how could it be otherwise--God is perfect peace and harmony.  On the other hand, I have learned too much at the feet of “dynamic trinitarians,” people who emphasized the ways in which the Godhead is also the archetype of diversity and creative tension, to be wholly satisfied.  No disorder in God’s making of the world, sure; but could we say there was tension?  And likewise in the inner life of God.

 

But let us let these objections rest for a moment, and follow Webster’s account out into the world of created being.  Here he founded his case firmly on the Augustinian premise: Peace is intrinsic to creaturely being.  Chaos is not a mode of being, but a declension from being.  Conflict is devoid of ontological weight, because created nature is peaceful.  Because of this, peace is first a property in the order of being, and only secondly a precept in the order of obligation--this is his recurring point about the indicative preceding the imperative.  

 

In the New Testament narrative, peace is integral to grace;  it is the chief product of Christ’s work of reconciliation.  Peace is not first announced as a precept for the Church, but as a condition of the Church.  The Church exists in peace as a function of the reconciliation of peace accomplished by Christ on the cross.  This statement seems to locate the true being of the Church behind the visible church, and this will be troubling to many.  The church that matters, many will object, is the actual visible church, and this is not peaceful; it is torn by conflict; we must seek to address this conflict, rather than offering ourselves false comfort that the Church really does exist in peace.  An understandable objection, said Webster, but one that falls into the error of making practical ecclesiology the first theological science.

 

The summary precept of peacemaking, he said, is “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts”--and this is not directed toward making peace real, but toward making peace visible.  We must insist upon this, that our task is simply to make visible a peace which already defines the Church’s being, instead of manufacturing a peace where one does not yet exist; otherwise, our task is hopeless from the start.  To be sure, conflict remains a present ecclesial reality, but what kind of reality?  We must not assume, said Webster, that we can straightforwardly interpret the reality.  We must read it in light of the illumination of the gospel of peace, by which we can see conflict for what it is: sin against peace.  We must remember that vice is always contra naturam; it is not an ugly mode of being, but as a contrary to the mode of being.  Conflict must not be described in a Manichaean way, as an eternal parallel to peace. 

 

This all sounds great, but what does it really mean in practical terms?  Does the rubber here ever meet the road?  I was skeptical at this point in the lecture, but Webster went on to draw some very fruitful applications.  

 

First, we must deploy intelligence to penetrate through the phenomenon of conflict to the peaceful nature underlying.  That is to say, we must remember that, despite our conflict in the Church, we share a unity in Christ, and because of that, there is much else that we share.  We must seek to discover this source of peace and unity that underlies our disagreements, and recognizing our conflict as a temporary aberration, seek to uncover its cause and dispel it.

 

Second, we must not attribute to conflict an irreducibility that it does not possess.  If we get too worked up about conflict, then we attribute to a being that it lacks.  If evil is non-being, then ultimately it is nothing to fear.  If conflict is but a temporary aberration, then we can rest in confidence that it will be dispelled by faithful waiting upon Christ.  We must see conflict for what it is, which is to say, as Webster put it with surprising eloquence, “The afterlife of what the gospel has already excluded, the lingering shadow that the rising sun has yet to chase away.”  Therefore, in a sense, we do not need to make an assault upon conflict, but rather to reassure ourselves in confidence that no such assault is required.  

 

None of this means that we are to blithely and complacently dismiss the fact of conflict, the fact that we may need to enter controversy at times to defend the peaceable kingdom, but it dramatically changes our attitude to it.   

 

It means that we can lay down these three basic precepts for conflict and controversy:

1. It must be a work of charity, for the Church and our neighbors.
2. It must be exercised in common pursuit of divine truth.
3. It must arise from and attend toward peace.

 

In order to approach controversy in this way, what kind of person does the theologian need to be? Webster asked.

Theological science requires grace-character.  It requires tranquillity of mind, lack of ambition, competitiveness, and vain curiosity.  

At this point, Webster paused to reflect on zeal--is zeal a virtue or a vice?  How may zeal promote the peace of God in the Church?  Zeal is a righteous form of anger, but an unstable one.  What is the distinction between righteous and unrighteous anger?  Corrupt anger corrodes both rational and common life; it reduces controversy to a hopelessly conflictual affair, and destroys the clear vision of intelligence.  Righteous anger is cooler and more objective.  It follows a judgment of reason.  It is a public passion for Gospel truth.   Anger through zeal does not destroy the operation of reason, but nevertheless it may impair its performance; therefore, zeal must be moderated by our recognition of the ontological priority of peace.

 

What should the conduct of theological controversy be?  The Church does not dispute according to the fashion of the world.  Four rules for edifying controversy can be laid down: 

First, it must display and magnify the truth of the Gospel, whose author is peace.  Controversy will only serve peace in the Church if it has an external orientation, toward an object outside of the disputing parties.  It must not become reduced to a simple party strife. 

Second, theological controversy must not allow divergence of opinion to become divergence of will.  Concord in the Church is a union of will, not of opinion.  We must recognize that those who differ from us in opinion often share the same will toward the same good.  There are of course, cases in which this is not the case, where we do not share a common object of love; but when this is the case, these are disputes not in the Church, but about the Church, and here we must await the converting work of the Spirit. 

Third, it must recognize the catholicity of the truth, a truth that exceeds any representation that we may make.  This object of love over which we contend is one too profound for us to rightly grasp.  We cannot ever “end our dealings with it.”

Fourth, it must be undertaken in tranquil confidence that the Spirit will illuminate the Church.  We often let ourselves fall into a barren naturalism, in which appeals to Scripture founder on irreconcilable exegetical conflict.  We lose faith that there is an efficacy in the Word, a Word that will make itself clear to us, and will resolve this conflict.  We may be confident that exegesis, rightly pursued, will, by Christ’s aid, lead us to peace and resolution.

-----

All that by way of exposition.  Now some evaluation is in order.  First, some words of ringing endorsement:

Although I might’ve wanted to put it in somewhat different, more Christocentric terms--Christ has conquered, he has brought us peace and guaranteed us peace--I thought his insistence on the priority of peace over conflict, the essential impotence of conflict, was fantastic.  Too easily we get depressed over the conflicts all around us in the Church, or mired down in the midst of them, and forget that they are ultimately frivolous and insubstantial, Christ will preserve his Church, the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it, and any divisions that appear to loom large for us now will ultimately be reconciled in perfect harmony.  Or else some of us get so intoxicated with the fumes of conflict that we come to imagine it as a positive good, as a joy to be indulged, rather than an aberration to be deplored.  Certainly Webster provides us a wholesome corrective here.  Conflict must never become an end in itself, but must be oriented toward peace, and that a just peace, not the peace of the merciless victor who has silenced all opposition.  Nor is conflict inevitable or irresolvable--patient waiting upon Christ will reveal a resolution.

 

In particular, I liked Webster’s final point about the efficacy of the Word.  Too true it is that, for all our passionate insistence on the authority of Scripture, we treat it as a dead letter.  One side alleges texts that prove their point, and the other side insists upon other texts, or demands a better exegesis of the opponent’s texts.  Both seem trapped by certain hermeneutical assumptions, and conclude that it is hopeless; the text remains silent about its interpretation, and so the quarrel will never be adjudicated.  But in Scripture we do not have a dead letter to reckon with, but a living Word, a Word continually made efficacious by the Spirit who breathes it and the Son about whom it speaks.  This Word will reveal itself to those who wait patiently upon it in faith.  The perspicacity of Scripture is not immediate, perhaps, but it is in the end real.  

 

But then there are some objections to raise, or rather, not objections, merely questions.

First, on a minor note, although I liked his point about recognizing that there can be concord--unity of will--amidst diversity of opinion, so long as we share the same object of love, this leaves a large part of our question unsolved.  After all, at some vague level, we share a “common object of love” with anyone who seeks truth, or wants to serve some kind of God.  If the presence or absence of a common object of love determines whether we have a dispute within the Church or a dispute about the Church, as Webster so meaningfully put it, then how do we define this common object of love?  I talked to him about the problem afterward, and he recognized that this object “had to have some shape to it”--a creed, for instance.  But then, how do we know that we are merely united in will and that we are not confessing the same words with very different concepts or intentions?  The problem is not so easily resolved.  This is not a fault with Webster’s presentation, merely a call for further elaboration.  

 

But there is a much more significant objection, one that I knew Leithart was going to raise, so I asked it for him and beat him to it: while it may be true that God is peace, and that Christ’s redemptive work is a work of peace, how do we maintain this while simultaneously doing justice to the fact that this is not exactly how Scripture often speaks.  The Old Testament is full of war, and Yahweh is described as a warrior; even in the New Testament, Christ says that he comes not to bring peace, but a sword, and Revelation pictures him as a conquering warrior destroying his foes.  Or, to put this problem as Webster preferred to put it--how do we reconcile the immanent reality of peace with the economy that is dominated by drama and conflict?  Leithart pursued the same point further with Webster after the formal Q&A session, and the three of us discussed it on the way over to lunch.  In some ways, this is merely a methodological question, but it seems to make a lot of difference to our paradigm.  After all, if conflict is integral to the economy of redemption, then perhaps we should embrace it with more gusto than Webster would seem to advocate, perhaps seeking peace with the serpent, as Adam did in Genesis 3 (Leithart’s example) is a failure, and seeking conflict is a truer imitation of the divine character.  

Webster acknowledged that it was a thorny problem, and did not want to minimize the fact that, whatever may be the case on the immanent plane, on the level of the economy, peace is only reached through a great deal of “drama and conflict.”  However, he wanted to insist that the crucial point is that peace is the starting point, and peace the endpoint, and conflict is an aberration, it is not eternal, it is not integral.  It all comes down, he said, to whether you accept a privative account of evil, or not.  On a phenomenal level, such an account is deeply unsatisfactory, because it seems to deny the reality of the evil we encounter, but ultimately, he didn’t see how you could do without it; otherwise you end in Manichaeanism.  And he didn’t want to risk going there.  

 

I am quite sympathetic to this outlook, and it does seem that you have to maintain a privative account of evil, but it also seems to me that you have to be careful about not letting that affirmation loom too large in your theology, or else you end up minimizing large sections of Scripture.  I suggested that perhaps this was just one of those many paradoxes that we have to live with in theology, affirming both seemingly opposing truths--God is peace, God is a warrior--without ever satisfactorily synthesizing them.  I think both Webster and Leithart were, at some level, satisfied with this way of putting it

 

Yet, a real difference of theological method persists.  For Webster, we must begin with the immanent and let that condition our interpretation of the economic; we must begin with an account of who God is in Godself, and then use this as an interpretive grid for making sense of what Scripture says that God does.  A cynic would say that this means we begin with philosophy and let this set the parameters of Scripture.  Webster stated his determination to avoid that error, but nevertheless insisted on what he called “a very dangerous, but a very important principle”: the proportions of dogmatics do not have to match the proportions of the economy.  Scripture may tell us very very little about who God is in Godself, but dogmatics needs to talk about it quite a great deal.  As he charmingly put it: “Your conclusion will in the end be that of Job--‘God is great, and we know him not.’  But you still have to spend a few hundred pages saying ‘God is great, and we know him not.’”  Ultimately, I wouldn’t want to deny any of that, and I don’t think Leithart would either.  But Leithart, I know, would be a lot more comfortable starting from the economy, learning that Yahweh is a warrior, that we are called to imitate him in that, and only then seeking to establish the senses in which God is peace, and we are to imitate him in that (of course, it is also possible that one could take Leithart’s method of starting with the economy, but still argue that in the economy, God reveals himself as peace much more than he does as warrior).  

 

In any case, some of the crucial lessons of Webster’s lecture would remain--conflict is not the starting point or the endpoint, peace is.  Conflict is not therefore irresolvable, it is not to be sought for its own sake, and it must only be engaged in with patient faith that God is a God of reconciliation.  

Luther on the Sermon on the Mount

July 6, 2010
Now, let’s turn to look at Martin Luther’s expositions of the Sermon on the Mount.  We find the first of these in his treatise Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, and the second in, unsurprisingly, The Sermon on the Mount.  The first, while troubled by a number of inconsistencies (some simply the result of Luther’s characteristic lack of rhetorical caution), offers a much more satisfactory account than the second.  I shall resist the temptation to dwell on the inconsistencies and will stick to the core argument.

In this treatise, Luther beings by rejecting the “counsels of perfection” idea.  We must, he says, find a way to make these words “apply to everyone alike, be he perfect or imperfect.”  

All Christians then are bound by the commands of the Sermon on the Mount, and for themselves have no need of “prince, king, lord, sword, or law.”  However, the majority of those who live here in the world are not Christians; they do not observe Christ’s commands, but are full of violence and evil.  We cannot insist on applying these commands across the board in a society that is not ready for them.  “Certainly it is true that Christians, so far as they themselves are concerned, are subject neither to law nor sword, and have need of neither.  But take heed and first fill the world with real Chrsitains before you attempt to rule it in a Christian and evangelical manner.”  And so it is necessary that for such people there be a temporal sword “to bring about peace and prevent evil deeds,” while the spiritual does its work of “producing righteousness.”

Now, at this point, the argument is looking quite unsatisfactory.  You are tempted to scribble in the margin (as I did), something along the lines of, “But Martin, Jesus knew that not everyone would do good when he gave the command to resist not evil; otherwise, there would have been no need for the command.  He’s presuming that we’re surrounded by violent men, but we’re supposed to overcome by love, not a sword.”  But then things become much clearer.  Luther says, 

“Since a true Christian lives and labors on earth not for himself alone but for his neighbor, he does by the very nature of his spirit even what he himself has no need of, but is needful and usefu to his neighbor.  Because the sword is most beneficial and necessary for the whole world in order to preserve peace, punish sin, and restrain the wicked, the Christian submits most willingly to the rule of the sword, pays his taxes, honors those in authority, serves, helps, and does all he can to assist the governing authority... Although he has no need of these things for himself--to him they are not essential--nevertheless, he concerns himself about what is serviceable and of benefit to others.”  

In other words, Christ has forbidden his followers to use the sword to defend themselves, he has counselled them to give up their own cloaks when demanded, but he has never said that they cannot defend others, or track down and punish the thieves who take the cloaks of others.  He finally states this clearly a couple of pages later: 

“From all this we gain the true meaning of Christ’s words in Matthew 5:39, ‘Do not resist evil,’ etc.  It is this: A Christian should be so disposed that he will suffer every evil and injustice without avenging himself; neither will he seek legal redress in the courts but have utterly no need of temporal authority and law for his own sake.  On behalf of others, however, he may and should seek vengeance, justice, protection, and help, and do as much as he can to achieve it.  Likewise, the governing authority shoud, on its own initiative or through the instigation of others, help and protect him too, without any complaint, application, or instigation on his own part.  If it fails to do this, he should permit himself to be despoiled and slandered; he should not resist evil, as Christ’s words say.”  

Now this is quite interesting, and in fact, quite different from what he started out by saying.  You will see that as he reaches his conclusion, the two kingdoms schema he had begun with proves irrelevant.  For it is not that Christians don’t use the sword, and unbelievers do, or that Christians mustn’t use the sword against one another, but must against unbelievers who do, or even that Christians don’t use the sword for themsleves, but do use it for unbelievers.  Rather, it is quite simply, no Christian uses the sword for himself, or is anxious for his own rights and well-being, but all are anxious for the rights and well-being of others, Christians or worldlings, and will use the sword to protect them if necessary.  

This solution then qualifies, under the schema identified in the first part of this essay, as the fourth approach to dealing with the Sermon on the Mount.  It has the strength of having not added to or detracted from Christ’s words there--he means exactly what he says: “If you are attacked, turn the other cheek.  If you are stolen from, give to your enemy.”  However, Luther does not stick to this solution, as we will see in the next segment.