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.

A few more responses on the taxation issue

April 16, 2010

Since a few people have told me they appreciated the stuff I’ve been posting on taxation and theft here, I thought I’d post just a bit more from the Facebook discussion--the text below was in reply to a section of a large rebuttal someone wrote up there, but it should basically make sense on its own.  Also, since it’s that time of the year again, and the Tea Partiers were out in force yesterday, I recall my first little essay on this whole business, which I wrote last Tax Day, and you can find here.

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You then make a statement that my problem is that I “blur the concepts of necessary taxes and redistributive taxes....Taxes for the common defense fall in the first category, taxes for the redistributive principle fall in the second.”  Yes, it is precisely my point to blur these categories.  Why are taxes paid for defense necessary?  Well, they’re not absolutely necessary, but we generally think that they’re important for the preservation of society.  In an economy characterized by dangerous inequality and serious poverty, one might argue that redistributive taxes are just as necessary for the preservation of society.  Moreover, many taxes are “redistributive” in the sense of benefiting some more than others, including taxes for the “common” defense, as I argued in the original post and in my comments after the first post.

Then you extol the virtues of voluntary giving.  Great--let’s have more of that.  If the Church can motivate people to give voluntarily, and care for the poor, then let it do so, and the government will have no reason to get involved.  I remember reading about some 19th-century Scotch Presbyterian who organized such an effective and generous church system of poor relief that the local government was able to vastly scale back their welfare program.  But if the Church is failing, she can hardly complain when other institutions try to pick up the slack.  A couple quibbles with what you said in this paragraph, “None of these services were based on an enforced-tax or upon a social principle of wealth distribution”--neither of those is strictly true; in many nations in Christendom at various times, the tithe was enforced, whether or not it should’ve been; second, in the early Church, church charity was based upon “a social principle of wealth distribution”--many of the Church Fathers called explicitly for the rich to sell all their excess and give the proceeds to the Church for it to distribute equitably, Acts 4 style.  Also, you say, “Nor did the apostles, church fathers, or any others enforce any such standard, but leave it with the conscience.”  Well, it depends what you mean by that; the Church Fathers may have “left it with the conscience” but they raked consciences over the coals regularly on this subject, so you can’t quite characterize it as a hands-off approach.

At this point you move on to make some (to put it charitably) rather ignorant and snarky comments about Popes Pius XI and John Paul II.  If you don’t agree with them, fine, but I think you need to respect them, and the great body of teaching they represent.  I don’t know enough about Pius XI to defend him specifically (but I doubt you know enough about him to attack him specifically) but John Paul II was, by all counts, a very holy man and a noble leader, who devoted himself to the good of the Church, so far as he understood it, and the cause of the oppressed.  The Catholic Church in the past few decades has put Protestants (especially conservative ones) to shame when it comes to defending the cause of the poor, and sacrificing much for them, so let’s not throw around charges of “hypocrisy.” 

Your reading of Pius XI’s quote here was particularly odd.  Pius said, “[the state] does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service; for it thereby effectively prevents the private possession of goods, which the Author of nature in His most wise providence ordained for the support of human life, from causing intolerable evils and rushing to its own destruction.”  You seem to have a problem with the last clause, somehow reading it as if Pius was against “material things.”  What Pius says here seems self-evidently true--that the private possession of goods, in itself a good thing, will, if unrestrained, cause intolerable evils and eventually its own destruction.  Wasn’t it the Apostle James who said “The love of money is the root of all evil”?  Private property is a dangerous thing, because private owners can easily fall into selfishness and greed, and, unless restrained by laws, destroy others in their greed.  There’s no opposition to material things here, just the cold hard truth about human nature.

Then you tell me all this stuff from Richard Bonney’s book.  I appreciate all the extra information, but I’m not sure exactly which parts are relevant to the matter at hand.  Yes, taxes are higher now than historically; yes, Rome had a very oppressive tax system, particularly oppressive because it disproportionately afflicted the poor--it was if anything a reverse redistribution at times, as some of your own citations show.  Indeed, you cite Basil the Great calling for the poor to be exempted from taxes--this sounds like what conservatives would decry as a redistributive system--everyone receiving the benefits of government, though only some people pay for them!  

This line jumped out at me: “In the past, as Brad points out, other Christians have failed to realize the full Biblical principle of private property”--OK, so here we have at least a concession that our modern teaching on this matter is not the Early Church’s teaching.  Good.  I do not think that we have to adopt the Early Church’s teaching on this matter wholesale; but my point is that we must acknowledge that some of our claims on this subject (e.g., redistribution=theft) run contrary to their attitudes, and that should cause us to be rather more modest in our claims.

A bit later, you point out that “Nowhere in Chrysostom’s explanation of taxation is any theory about the State providing for the poor to accomplish wealth redistribution or equity, or any other socialist idea.”  To be sure.  Chrysostom wanted the Church to handle all that redistribution--he was thoroughly socialist, actually, but he wanted an ecclesial, not a state socialism.  What I want people to realize though is that the reason no one back then envisioned the state involved in redistribution was because the state had not yet been Christianized.  When the State did increasingly get in the business of supporting the poor, taxing the rich, providing free education and healthcare, etc., the people who were the driving forces behind this were Christians, trying to fulfill gospel mandates in the political sphere.  A pre-Christian state would not be likely to think of redistributing to the poor; for a Christian state, such began to seem like a mandate.  I don’t mean to say that this was the right conclusion to reach--that these socializing Christians had the right idea, but it’s important for us to understand the genealogy of this development.  That’s why, for instance, I cite Martin Bucer, who encouraged aggressive intervention by the civil authorities to protect the poor and control the rich.  But you just breezed over Bucer, surprising, since as a Protestant, he would seem to be the most significant figure to you.

Now, you say some things about Aquinas.  For one, you say that Aquinas is a shaky source because he used Aristotle.  Ah!  But do you not realize that his use of Aristotle in his teaching on property is to moderate the radical stance of the early Church Fathers?  In other words, he uses Aristotle to establish a much more pro-private-property stance than that of the earlier tradition.  So it doesn’t work for you to say, “Oh, we can’t trust his negative attitude toward private property, since he was using Aristotle.”  Now, to be sure, Finnis attempts to make explicit what is merely implicit in Aquinas--or perhaps, to construct an argument out of building blocks that are in Aquinas, and we cannot be sure how much Aquinas would agree with his claims for redistributive taxation (for Aquinas, the Church would’ve been the most natural institution to be handling such things, not the state).  My point though is that the building blocks are there in Aquinas--Finnis isn’t just cooking things up out of thin air; and we as modern Christians need to reckon with Aquinas’s tremendously influential teaching here.

I’m impressed that you consulted Finnis’s book for your rebuttal, and would admire your thoroughness, but I think you were not sufficiently attentive on the subject of superflua.  It is a bit more complicated than this.  I’m running out of time right now, so I will just post the notes and quotes I had taken a few weeks ago on this section of Finnis:

There is a threefold distinction in Thomas between “(a) resources one needs for the very survival of oneself and one’s dependants, (b) resources one needs in order to fulfil one’s responsibilities for the support and education of one’s relatives and household, for maintaining one’s business or profession or other vocation, for launching one’s children in such ways of life, for paying one’s debts, and other such genuine responsibilities, and (c) resources which are left over {superflua} after one has made reasonable provision for both type (a) ‘absolute necessity’ and type (b) ‘relative necessity {necessitas conditionata}.  Then Aquinas’ theorem is twofold: (I) everything one has is ‘held as common (or in common)’ in the sense that it is morally available, as a matter of right and justice, to anyone who needs it to survive; (2) one’s superflua are all ‘held as common’, in the sense that one has a duty of justice to dispose of them for the benefit of the poor.”

I: those in life-threatening need can take whatever will relieve that need, and “this entitlement overrides anyone else’s otherwise legitimate title or property right.” II: Furthermore, if I am aware of someone in such strict need [go take a look at II-II q. 71 a. Ic], and there is no other who is available to provide it, I have a “duty of strict justice (not merely ‘charity’)” to help them, not merely out of my superflua, but out of what I use for relative necessity....when no one is in extreme necessity, property-owners may keep their property “just as far as their type (b) need to maintain themselves (with their dependants) in the form of life which they have reasonably adopted.”  All superflua should then be made available to those who lack the resources for their type b) needs.  “The poor have a natural right that the whole of this residuum be distributed in their favour.”  

In other words, your claim that Aquinas says that we are only responsible to give what is left over after we have tended to all reasonable needs and responsibilities is oversimplistic--that is only true if you know of no one in extreme necessity, and quite possibly that is true for most of us (though in an era of globalization, the question can be asked how far our responsibility extends to global neighbors).  Plus, I do not, I’m afraid, share your rosy reading of Christian America: “Now, that rather sounds to me like how most Christians today live – we pay for our expenses, and tithe, and give of what was left over to the church, to family, to friends, to mission work, and other things. Most people do not have much, if any, ‘superflua’ in this sense. After all, if you’re saving up for a house to provide for your family, that clearly falls under the necessities of life. If you’re saving up for a new car because the one you have is suffering, that’s clearly providing for your family, and in my case, providing for my livelihood since I drive to the businesses I meet with.”  My experience of Christian America (and I do not in any way exclude myself from this indictment) is that we convince ourselves that we “need” any number of little luxuries--a new article of clothing every couple weeks, several cups of coffee a day, an iPhone, a flat-screen TV, a rather large house, a rather nice car, a generous supply of junk food, etc.--and then, if all that is covered, we might reach into our pockets and call ourselves generous.  This is not an easy teaching, and I don’t pretend that it is; it’s given me a great deal of pause and hard thinking over the past few months.  

Christians in the Military?

February 28, 2010

There's a lot of debate right now over whether or not we should openly permit gays to serve in the military; but hardly any Christians seem to be asking the much more important question--should Christians serve in the military?  The early Church Fathers, as a general rule, thought not.  Ah, we say, but that's because they were pacifists, and we know better than that now.  Well, no, not necessarily--for one thing, opposition to killing is not the primary reason they cite for their concern.  Rather it is, as we see in Tertullian's The Military Chaplet, a concern that enlisting in the military would require a kind of allegiance and loyalty that only God could properly command, that it essentially committed one either to idolatry, or to invite severe punishment by refusing to engage in the practices required of a soldier.  Ah, we say, but this does not apply now.  Rome was pagan, and so their military was deep in idolatry, but we're secular, and so none of our practices can be idolatrous.  

Unfortunately, it's not that simple.  
So-called "secular" phenomena can be every bit as religious as those associated with traditional religions.  After all, the main idolatry that the early Christians were concerned about, and martyred for refusing, was the emperor-idolatry--declaring absolute loyalty to the state and its rulers, and participating in rituals and symbols designed to enact their allegiance and reverence to the state.  How different really are things now?  Not very, if you listen to William Cavanaugh in The Myth of Religious Violence.  He cites the historian and US diplomat Carlton Hayes, who identified "the American religion's saints (the founding fathers), its shrines (Independence Hall), its relics (The Liberty Bell), its holy Scriptures (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution), its martyrs (Lincoln), its inquisition (school boards that enforce patriotism), its Christmas (the Fourth of July), and its feast of Corpus Christi (Flag Day).  According to Hayes, the flag occupies the same central place in official ritual that the eucharistic host previously held: 'Nationalism's chief symbol of faith and central object of worship is the flag, and curious liturgical forms have been devised for 'saluting' the flag, for 'dipping' the flag, for 'lowering' the flag, and for 'hoisting' the flag.  Men bare their heads when the flag passes by; and in praise of the flag poets write odes and children sing hymns.  In America young people are ranged in serried rows and required to recite daily, with hierophantic voice and ritualistic gesture, the mystical formula: "I pledge allegiance to our flag and to the country for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."  Everywhere, in all solemn feasts and fasts of nationalism the flag is in evidence, and with it that other sacred thing, the national anthem.'"

It is truly bizarre that Protestants, with all their paranoia about any hint of Catholic Eucharistic devotion, have no objections about any of this except the omission of "under God" from the pledge, since they feel that we need to bolster the sacral dimensions of the pledge by affirming that God himself has commissioned this nation.  

But, I stray from the matter at hand.  What about Christians in the military?  Well, Tertullian has an interesting concern about the crown of laurel leaves that soldiers were to wear: "Is the laurel of the triumph made of leaves, or of corpses? Is it adorned with ribbons, or with tombs? Is it bedewed with ointments, or with the tears of wives and mothers? It may be of some Christians too; for Christ is also among the barbarians. Has not he who has carried a crown for this cause on his head, fought even against himself?"  

How dare Christians wear a symbol that commemorates the state's slaughter of its enemies? Tertullian asks.  This seems like overkill to us, but we need to ask ourselves--should Christian American soldiers object to bedecking themselves in apparel and symbols that honor the triumphs of US soldiers against its enemies in many unjust wars?

But here's Tertullian's biggest concern: "Do we believe it lawful for a human oath to be superadded to one divine, for a man to come under promise to another master after Christ, and to abjure father, mother, and all nearest kinsfolk, whom even the law has commanded us to honour and love next to God Himself, to whom the gospel, too, holding them only of less account than Christ, has in like manner rendered honour?... Shall he carry a flag, too, hostile to Christ? And shall he ask a watchword from the emperor who has already received one from God?"

Is this kind of loyalty a thing of the past, or do modern militaries also go too far in the allegiance they demand?  It's certainly a question worth asking, as, when you look at the kinds of loyalty oaths that the various branches of the military demand, and how they describe the kind of allegiance they involve, it certainly borders on idolatry.  I won't name any names here, but it's certainly worth reading up on some of the material on the US military websites.

Bad Eschatology=Bad Political Theology

Last spring when Dr. Leithart was teaching on "Constantine and Constantinianism," he put up a number of quotes from early Church Fathers such as Tertullian and Irenaeus, which were propounding remarkably pro-Empire positions. The principle point was to show that, historically, the "Constantinian" way of thinking predated Constantine; but there also seemed to be some suggestion that, because we could show that even pre-Constantinian Christians thought this way, then it was a solidly Biblical way to think.
Theodor Mommsen, in his article, "Augustine and the Christian Idea of Progress" offers a more cynical reading of these pro-Rome pronouncements, showing that they stemmed from a syncretism of Biblical and pagan prophecy. Mommsen is not making a theological argument, but if he is correct, then we must certainly object theologically that these fathers were operating with a confused and poorly-developed eschatology, and didn't seem to have understood either Daniel or Revelation very well--they failed to understand that they were living after the downfall of the Fourth Monarchy, after the Messiah had begun to reign.

"Many Christians...actually hoped and prayed for the continuance of the Roman empire. This affirmative attitude grew out of certain historical and eschatological ideas which went back to both pagan and Jewish traditions. In the Hellenistic era there had developed in the East a theory which saw history take its course in a sequence of great, or, rather, universal monarchies. Four of these empires were to follow one another, and the series was to conclude with a fifth monarchy which, it was believed, would last to the end of the world. This idea of the four or five monarchies was adopted by some of the Roman and Greek historians, and it appeared likewise in Jewish literature. For the great image seen in a dream by Nebuchadnezzar and the four beasts seen by Daniel himself were explained by the pre-Christian tradition in terms of an interpretation of world history: these visions were believed to signify symbolically that history takes its course through the succession of four universal monarchies; the disintegration of the last of the four empires was assumed to usher in the end of the world.

In the latter part of the second century and in the first part of the third century Christian theologians like Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertulllian and Hippolytus adopted these pagan and Jewish traditions and expressed their opinion that the Roman empire 'which now rules' should be considered to be the fourth monarchy. All these Christian authors shared the belief that the fall of the last empire would be a most ominous event. Thus, Tertullian said in his treatise On The Resurrection of the Flesh (ch. 24) in which he interpreted a passage in St. Paul's 2nd Thessalonians (2:7) that the Antichrist will appear after the Roman state has been scattered into ten kingdoms. On the basis of this eschatological belief Tertullian declared very emphatically in his Apology (ch. 32.1): "There is another and greater necessity for our praying in behalf of the emperors and the whole status of the empire and Roman affairs. For we know that only the continued existence of the Roman Empire retards the mighty power which threatens the whole earth, and postpones the very end of this world with its menace of horrible afflictions." In the early fourth century Lactantius stated even more explicitly in his Divine Institutions (7.25, 6-8): "The fall and the ruin of the world will shortly take place, although it seems that nothing of that kind is to be feared so long as the city of Rome stands intact. But when the capital of the world has fallen . . . who can doubt that the end will have arrived for the affairs of men and the whole world? It is that city which still sustains all things. And the God of heaven is to be entreated by us and implored--if indeed His laws and decrees can be delayed--lest sooner than we think that detestable tyrant should come who will undertake so great a deed and tear out that eye by the destruction of which the world itself is about to fall."

To be entirely fair, though, I should say that Mommsen gets Augustine pretty atrociously wrong at points later on in this article, so it is possible that he has misrepresented Tertullian, Lactantius, et. al., though those quotes speak for themselves to a degree.