The Question of Ecclesiastical Coercion

March 2, 2010

The modern dichotomy between law and morality, like so much else in the realm of political ethics, can be seen proleptically, remarkably clear and well-developed, in Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis.  He begins, like his good scholastic predecessors, by laying out the various senses of the word law.  The two relevant ones for our purposes are the third, moral law, and the fourth, civil law.  Let’s take a closer look.

“In a third sense ‘law‘ means the standard containing admonitions for voluntary human acts according as these are ordered toward glory or punishment in the future world....In its foruth and most familiar sense, this term ‘law‘ means the science or doctrine or universal judgment of matters of civil justice and benefit, and their opposites.”

So far, not bad, though we may be a bit suspicious about the way he pegs the word “voluntary” on the third, and seems to make it chiefly relevant for the future life. 

He goes on, however, to tighten up his definition of the fourth category, distinguishing law in which “there is given a command coercive through punishment or reward to be distributed in the present world, or according as it is handed down by way of such a command; and considered in this way it most properly is called, and is, a law.”  Here, he has made the crucial decision to designate civil law enforced by coercion as the paradigmatic, proper defintion of law.  “Hence not all true cognitions of civil justice and benefit are laws unless a coercive command has been given concerning their observance.”

But things don’t get really interesting until he returns to distinguish more carefully the nature of ecclesiastical law and civil law.  Before looking at this, however, we should backtrack about twenty years, to look at one of Marsilius’s chief anti-papalist predecessors, John of Paris.  John of Paris too is eager to extricate the kings from papal control, and to draw firmly the boundaries between church and state jurisdiction, but he is much more conservative in how he does so.  

According to John of Paris, the Church has been granted six powers: 1) the power of sacramental consecration; 2) the power of binding and loosing sins (“power in the spiritual forum,” 3) the power of preaching, 4) judicial power, “to coerce in the external forum,” 5) the power of distributing ministers in their various jurisdictions, 6) the power to receive sufficient sustenance to maintain a suitable standard of living.  

“The nub of the difficulty,” he clearly perceives, “lies in the fourth power.”  Now, John is insistent that “its relevance is purely spiritual, for it can impose no penalty in the external forum save only a spiritual one.”  What does this mean?  “It is for the ecclesiastical judge to lead men back to God, preventing them from sinning and correcting them; this function is exercised in the way God had laid down, which is that of excluding sinners from the sacraments and from the community of the faithful and the other penalties appropriate to ecclesiastical coercion.”  

Why is this so important?  Because John recognizes that the difference between church and state is not that the Church’s commands have only voluntary force, while the state’s have coercive force.  Although he wants to be clear that the Church is not licensed to use the same tools of coercion as the state, he nevertheless recognizes that church discipline is a judicial, political action, which has a kind of coercive force.  There is a middle category between voluntary morality that is enforced by God alone and civil law that is coercively enforced by the State.  Not so for Marsilius.   

Marsilius doesn’t leave any ambiguity in stating his position: “Neither the Roman bishop, called pope, nor any other bishop or priest, or deacon, has or ought to have any rulership or coercive judgment or jurisdiction over any priest or non-priest, ruler, community, group, or individual of whatever condition.”  He seeks to prove this by alleging the various passages in which Christ renounces political power, and teaches his disciples to do likewise.  John of Paris, of course, would have granted all these passages, but would have maintained that there is a separate kind of rulership and coercion proper to the spiritual authority, that is not renounced here.  According to Marsilius, priests do have teaching authority (John of P’s 3rd power), but this is pretty much it.  The priest 

“is the teacher in this world of divine law and of its commands concerning what must be done or shunned in order to attain eternal life and to avoid punishment.  However, he has no coercive power in this world to compel anyone to observe these commands.  For it would be useless for him to coerce anyone to observe them, since the person who observed them under coercion would be helped not at all toward eternal salvation....Hence this judge is properly likened to the physician, who is given the authority to teach, command, and predict or judge about the things which it is useful to do or omit in order to attain bodily health and avoid illness or death.”  

(Sounds just like a modern liberal!)   

The priest’s job is to offer moral doctrine as advice for believers to follow, but not to offer any kind of coercion.  Let me keep quoting Marsilius, since he states his position so unambiguously: 

“The evangelic law can stand in a twofold relation to men....In one way, it can be related to them in and for the status of the present life; and in this way it has in its various parts the nature more of a doctrine, theoretic or practical or both, than of a law taken in its last and proper sense...as a coercive standard, that is, a standard in accordance with which its transgressor is punished by the coercive force which is given to the man who must judge in accordance with it.  But now the evangelic doctrine, or the maker of that law, does not command that anyone be compelled in this world to observe the things which it commands men to do or omit in this world.  Consequently, in its relation to man’s status in and for this world, it ought to be called a doctrine, not a law.”  

The second relation, Marsilius goes on, is that of the future life, over which the evangelic law does have a coercive power; but in this case, the coercive function is exercised by Christ alone.  

In this present life, the law which the Church propounds has a mere admonitory function.  But surely, Marsilius believes that common doctrinal and moral standards must be enforced--that heretics and great sinners may need to be excommunicated, and binding standards may need to be laid down?  Why yes, of course he does, in which case the church will need to summon the civil magistrate to its aid to carry out these coercive duties for it, or else receive authorization from the magistrate, since all power of coercion belongs to the civil authority.  Hence, inasmuch as bishops are teachers of the gospel, they are agents of the Church, but inasmuch as they should wish to have administrative authority over the churches in their diocese, or to carry out church discipline on notorious sinners, or to make authoritative doctrinal pronouncements, they must operate solely as duly authorized agents of the State.

  

It was this model, of course, that many of the Protestant reformers, particularly in England, seized upon, such that the Church of England was really conceived of as kind of two-natured entity, on the one hand exercising purely spiritual teaching authority directly from Christ, and on the other, as a department of the English state, responsible for the public administration of religious affairs and answerable to Parliament for it.  

I will not go so far as to say that this is the inevitable result of driving a sharp wedge between law and morality, and restricting the Church to the latter, but the conception is clearly a dangerous one.  We need to recover a robust idea of church authority as something lying somewhere between the pure coercion of “law” and the pure voluntarism of “morality.”  We need to somehow pull back together these threads that Marsilius has so thoroughly separated--future life vs. present life, spiritual vs. political, sacred vs. civil, teaching vs. legislation.  Above all, we need to get a clear idea of what we mean by the term “coercion,” and what we think the alternatives to it are.

Caritas in not-quite-enough Veritate

Some thoughts I typed up in response to the recent encyclical Caritas in Veritate for Theology and the Global Economy class:

Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate is in some ways a breath of fresh air, but in other ways, leaves a nagging sense of “more of the same that got us into this mess.” It is refreshing to hear a Christian leader speaking out so authoritatively for causes that would be considered “liberal” or even “socialist” in my background, deemed to have little or nothing to do with Christianity’s values. It tickled me that Benedict speaks so casually at a number of points of the need for “redistribution of wealth”--a phrase that would give conservative American Christians a heart attack, or perhaps we should say a Red Scare. I appreciated in particular his emphasis on the need for both commutative and distributive justice in the marketplace, which really helped some things click into place for me. Capitalist ideology has insisted on the need for only commutative justice, and treated distributive justice only under the heading of “mercy,” and for whatever reason, conservative American Protestantism has leapt on board with that definition, jettisoning the traditional emphasis on the need for both.

However, despite being quite pleased with the document as a whole, I was left with some nagging concerns. First, what is the role of the State, and of large-scale political organizations, in all this reform that needs to happen? It seems to be a very large role for Benedict. He assumes the central importance of the State, and indeed, in many places, seems to want to increase its role as the institution that oversees justice in society and in the marketplace. In many places, he seems to be addressing this encyclical more toward national governments than to individuals, telling them the reforms they need to implement. But this seems to contradict his repeated insistence that economic justice is not possible without Christian truth and Christian love, in other words, the Augustinian dictum that we encountered in week 1 of this term--true justice between men is not possible unless God is being given his due. Now, if all this is true, and we can’t simply expect justice to come from improved human wisdom or good intentions, then how could we possibly expect economic justice to come from some of the most corrupt and godless engines of secularism in history--namely, national governments? Now, I admit my American anti-government bias, but still...it would seem that, on Benedict’s own principles, the state could not be the main source of this justice unless it first confessed Christ. Of course, he also puts a lot of faith in the UN, which seems to me even more dubious than most nation-states.

Second, what is the role of the Church? I was surprised that a Catholic--the Pope no less--who should have as high an ecclesiology as anyone, barely mentioned the Church as a social body. Is the Church’s role simply to act as the conscience of economic society, giving moral advice about how to run things better? Or is the Church supposed to act as a visible social body in economic society, acting out and living out more just means of exchange? It seems to me that the latter is more effective, and more in line with what we see in Scripture. I am willing to grant that the Church may well need to do both, but Benedict hardly mentioned the latter. I would like to see a creative exploration of the way in which the Church, as a body, can encourage just economic arrangements which lead to human flourishing, both in local congregations, and on a worldwide institutional level. I mean, the Catholic Church is a bigger worldwide institution than the UN, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t it be a greater institutional engine for bringing about charitable economics than the UN?

Church as/and/against/? Polis

Peter Leithart's recent tantalizing post, "Church and City" has set of a flurry of online discussion, as such a post from the author of Against Christianity might be expected to. In suggesting that there might "be a better way to say it" than that the Church is an alternative polis, Leithart seems to be retreating from at least a literalistic reading of the argument of Against Christianity. This makes sense, because, as we discussed last March, the Church as polis would seem to suggest that all (or a great many) of the features of the earthly polis simply get reincarnated within the Church--does this then mean an ecclesiastical postal service, an ecclesiastical road maintenance service, etc.? There are ways to avoid this conclusion, perhaps, but perhaps the simplest is to clarify the initial claim. The alternative, though--that the church is simply the new cultus at the center of the earthly polis--seems unsatisfactory as well. So why not say that the church is the cultus of the heavenly polis yet to come, which currently sits somewhat uncomfortably in the midst of the earthly polis? This certainly seems to reflect Biblical language pretty well.

However, I'm not sure where Leithart's clarification here leaves us. In saying, "The political order to which the church belongs is the eschatological political order of the heavenly city. The church isn’t defined over-against the earthly city, but as the sacrament and “cult” of the city that is to come," it seems that Leithart leaves unsolved the question of the relationship of the Church's social space to that of the surrounding world.

We could take a very amillenialist Augustinian route, and say that the earthly city still serves the useful function of providing a modicum of peace for the Church while she awaits the advent of the City to come. In this case, the antagonism between Church and earthly city is limited, but so, it seems, is the extent to which the Church ever achieves a social incarnation in this age. Alternatively, we could say that the Church, while itself only a cultus of the City to come, nevertheless seeks to live out, here and now, the political life of the City to come and hence achieves a kind of social incarnation as a shadow of the City to come. If this is so, however, it is hard to see how we have changed much from the "Church-as-polis" view, with its strong antagonism between Church and world (although we have re-emphasized the pilgrim character of the Church in this world). Or, thirdly, we could say that the Church's task, as the cultus of the heavenly polis, is to seek to the earthly city to transform its political forms, inasmuch as is possible in this life, into forms which mirror those of the City to come. If this is how we take it, we are back at a fairly Constantinian convergence of the aims of Church and world. So I, at least, find myself no closer to deciding amongst these three options than before Leithart's intriguing post.

If I've missed something and should be closer, please illuminate me.

Announcing the Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity

(Because of all the craziness in packing and moving, this comes a few days late.) My first book, The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity, is now out, and ready to buy . It has received remarkably positive reviews from Mercersburg scholars and Reformed theologians, and I hope will be a valuable contribution to the growing discussion on Mercersburg, and on the need for a Reformed catholicity.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

Protestantism in America today is in trouble; or rather, it might be more accurate to say, protestantisms in America are in trouble. Liberal, Evangelical, Reformed, Charismatic—as we look around, it is apparent that the Protestant Church has lost a clear sense of its own identity. Denominations continue to proliferate, and many churches, too independent even to feel at home in one of these new micro-denominations, choose to act as their own “non-denominational” body. Even Reformed Presbyterians, with a supposedly “higher ecclesiology,” have so thoroughly lost sight of the deeper issues of the Church that they are reduced to wrangling with their Baptist brethren over the superiority of their presbyterial form of polity (which they then proceed to demonstrate eloquently by leaving it every few years and setting up a new one with “tighter doctrinal standards”). An increasing number of exasperated and disillusioned Protestants, in the search for something at least vaguely resembling the mystical Body of Christ, have turned to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.
This unhappy turn of events is not as new as it may seem. More than 150 years ago, it was foreseen and prophesied by the great Reformed theologian John Williamson Nevin. In his day, for the most part, the Reformed churches of America still had enough lingering sense of the high majesty and history of the Church that they remained outwardly the stalwart heirs of the Reformation that they claimed to be. But Nevin knew that the reigning Reformed scholasticism did not possess the theological resources to cope with the swelling tide of sectarian subjectivism and arid rationalism, the twin daughters of the Enlightenment which threatened to overwhelm American Christianity. He saw that Princeton Seminary’s great war against revivalism was no more than a little scrap between consistent individualism and schizophrenic individualism. On his reading of the American religious climate, the only solution to the woes coming upon American Christianity was a return to the historical Reformational faith in the visible Church as the true Body of Christ, and an embrace of the whole of that Body’s history and members, including Catholicism. And, so far as he could tell, there was no one left in the American Reformed corridors of power who would still stand for such a faith, or venture such an embrace.

Cavanaugh Chapter 5 (at last)

Ok, so, I'm finally posting some Cavanaugh. This is going to be a monumental task, so I'm starting with the most important chapter, Chapter 5. This is just the first installment, of what will hopefully be many such posts, just from chapter five.
This is basically a walking through the chapter, mostly by means of key quotes (the bold headings are Cavanaugh's). (Note: I'm going to have to go back through here soon and italicize all the italicized words)

Eucharist is the church’s “counter-politics” to the politics of torture
The Eucharist makes real the presence of Christ in the Church; resists the disappearance of the Body.
“Where torture is an anti-liturgy for the realization of the state’s power on the bodies of others, Eucharist is the liturgical realization of Christ’s suffering and redemptive body in the bodies of His followers. Torture creates fearful and isolated bodies, bodies docile to the purposes of the regime; the Eucharist effects the body of Christ, a body marked by resistance to worldly power. Torture creates victims; Eucharist creates witnesses, martyrs. Isolation is overcome in the Eucharist by the building of a communal body which resists the state’s attempts to disappear it.”

“Whereas New Christendom ecclesiology would cordon off the Kingdom of God into a space outside of time, in the Eucharist the Kingdom irrupts into time and ‘confuses’ the spiritual and the temporal. The Eucharist thus realizes a body which is neither purely ‘mystical’ nor simply analogous to the modern state: the true body of Christ.”

“In the Eucharist the church is always called to become what it eschatologically is. The Eucharist does make the church ex opere operato, but the effects are not always visible due to human sin. Christians are called to conform their parctic to the Eucharistic imagination. . . . the Eucharistic imagination is a vision of what is really real, the Kingdom of God, as it disrupts the imagination of violence.”

1: The Mystical and the True
The Church, with the coming of modernity, can no longer be seen as political institution of its own, but as consisting more in the invisible communion with believers.
Henri de Lubac pointed out that a dichotomy was created between the external institutional church and the invisible interior church. “In the term ‘mystical body,’ the adjective had swamped the noun.”

For this dichotomy,
“The church does not constitute a social body. Its visibility and unity rather consists in the external bonds of sharing the same profession of faith, the same rites, the same church laws, and above all the same allegiance to the Pope’s guidance.”

Beginning in the twelfth century, there begins to be an inversion of corpus mysticum and corpus verum. Corpus mysticum is now applied to the Church, corpus verum to the elements of the Eucharist.

“In the older understanding, according to de Lubac, the sacramental body and the church body are closely linked, and there is a ‘gap’ between this pair and the history body. The Eucharist and the church, both of which are understood by the term communio, are together the contemporary performance of the historical body, the unique historical event of Jesus. Christians are the real body of Christ, and the Eucharist is where the church mystically comes to be. The church and the Eucharist form the liturgical pair of visible community (corpus verum) and invisible action or mystery (corpus mysticum) which together re-present and re-member Christ’s historical body. The gap is a temporal one. The link between past event and the present church is formed by the invisible action of the sacrament. The ‘mystical,’ then, is that which ‘insures the unity between two times’ and brings the Christ event into present historical time in the church body, the corpus verum.”

In the inversion, “The Eucharistic host has become corpus verum, and has now taken on a ‘thingly realism,’ a visible and available sign in the here and now which produces reverence and awe. Eucharist is increasingly described in terms not of action but of object, such that the scholastic concentration is on the miracle produced in the elements, and not on the edification of the church by the presence of Christ in the sacrament. At the same time, the church is identified as corpus mysticum, whose essence is hidden. The visibility of the church in the communal performance of the sacrament is replaced by the visibility of the Eucharistic object. Signified and signifier have exhanged places, such that the sacramental body is the visible signifier of the hidden signified, which is the social body of Christ. . . . The real life of the church is relegated to the ‘mystical,’ the hidden, that which will only be realized outside of time in the eschaton. Rather than linking the present with Jesus’ first – and, we should add, second –coming, the mystical is now cordoned off from historical space and time. At this point in Christian history the temporal is beginning to be construed not as the time between the times, but as an increasingly autonomous space which is distinct from a spiritual space.”

Cavanaugh pauses here to clarify that this is not intended to undermine the doctrine of transubstantiation, only to guard against misguided emphases. He clarifies that de Lubac “thought that the best way to emphasize ‘eucharistic realism’ was precisely through an ‘ecclesial realism’ which sees Christ’s real presence in the elements as dynamic, working toward the edification of the church. What concerned de Lubac about the inversion of verum and mysticum was its tendency to reduce the Eucharist to a mere spectacle for the laity. The growth of the cult of the host itself in the later medieval period…was not necessarily an advance for Eucharistic practice. As Sarah Beckwith puts it, ‘the emphasis was increasingly on watching Christ’s body rather than being incorporated in it.’ ”

This discussion is of particular relevance for Protestants. And indeed, Cavanaugh goes on to critique the late medieval practice of the Eucharist (which Protestantism was a reaction to) in terms that are no less applicable to the modern Protestant practice:
“Laypeople were increasingly left to silent contemplation of the awesome spectacle, and this corresponded with a diminishing of the communal nature of the Eucharist and an individualizing of Eucharistic piety. Dom Gregory Dix describes this period in these terms: ‘The old corporate worship of the eucharist is declining into a mere focus for the subjective devotion of each separate worshipper in the isolation of his own mind. And it is the latter which is beginning to seem to him more important than the corporate act.’ . . . The individual Christian relates not to other Christians but directly to Christ as to the center of the circle, instead of incorporation with one’s fellow Christians into the body of Christ, which has a head, but no center.”