De Maistre on Tradition and Writing

For some reason, I am always curiously tempted to become Catholic when I read Catholic political theologians. These quotes from de Maistre's "Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions" may begin to illustrate why:

XV: “The New Testament, coming after the death of the legislator and even after the establishment of his religion, offers a narrative, warnings, moral precepts, exhortations, orders, threats, and so on, but certainly not a collection of dogma set out in an imperative form....If the scriptural historian sets out a dogma, it is simply as something already known...Far from the first creeds containing a statement of all our dogmas, on the contrary, Christians of those days would have regarded it as a serious crime to state them all. The same is true of the Holy Scriptures; no idea has been more mistaken than the attempt to find in them the whole of Christian dogma.”

XVI: “Not only does this list of dogmas [the Thirty-Nine Articles] count for nothing, or very nearly, in the country of its birth, but besides it is evident even to a foreigner that the illustrious possessors of this piece of paper find it nothing but an embarrassment. They would like very much to see it go, since it irritates the national good sense enlightened by time, and since it recalls to them an unhappy beginning: but the constitution is written.”

XVII: “Faith, if sophistical opposition had never forced it to write, would be a thousand times more angelic....The state of war elevated venerable ramparts around the truth: they doubtless protect it, but they hide it; they make it unassailable, but at the same time even less accessible. This is not what truth, which would like to clasp humanity in its arms, asks for.”

XX: “Christ did not leave a single writing to his Apostles. In place of books, he promised them the Holy Spirit. It is it, he said to them, that will inspire what you will have to say. But, because in the course of time, guilty men revolted against dogmas and morality, it was necessary to resort to books.”

XXII: “Can this writing [Scripture] be other than the portrait of the Word? And, although infinitely worthy of regard in this respect, does it not need to maintain a divine silence? Finally, if it is attacked or insulted, can it defend itself in the absence of its father? Glory be to truth. If the eternally living spoken word does not give life to writing, it will never become the Word, that is to say life. Let others then invoke as much as they like the SILENT WORD, we shall peacefully laugh at this false god, ever waiting with a gentle impatience for the moment when its partisans will leave their illusions and throw themselves in our arms, extended now for three centuries.”

XXIII: “Since the sixteenth century, a host of scholars have made prodigious efforts of erudition to establish, by going to the earliest days of Christianity, that the Bishops of Rome were not in the first centuries what they have since become, thus assuming as an agreed point that everything that is not found in primitive ages is an abuse. However (and I say this in no spirit of contention and without meaning to shock anyone), they show in this as much philosophy and true learning as if they sought in a babe in arms the real dimensions of a full-grown man. The sovereignty of which I am now talking was born like others and has grown like others. It is pitiful to see powerful minds straining themselves to prove that maturity is an abuse by citing infancy, whereas the very idea of an institution being adult at birth is essentially an absurdity, a true logical contradiction.”

Don't Answer the Question Before You Ask It (O'Don Review, Part 4)

Chapter 4, “Scripture and Obedience”
In chapter 4, O’Donovan turns to reflect on the authority of Scripture, and how it needs to figure into this whole discussion. Again, we will find that the argument of this chapter is primarily aimed at liberals, against whom O’Donovan insists upon a firmly evangelical account of Scriptural authority. But it is worth paying careful attention to the way he lays out his argument.

First, he seeks to guard against neo-orthodox attempts to drive a wedge between God’s authoritative self-revelation on the one hand, and witnesses to that revelation, such as the Bible and Church, on the other hand. “God’s authority authorizes, and it is through authorized persons and activities that we see the effective exercise of God’s authority in the world....Scripture is not the first moment of God’s self-announcement; that is the historical deeds themselves by which he raised up Israel and Jesus. But neither is it a moment after God’s self-announcement, a retrospective commentary that could be peeled away, leaving the core intact. Scripture is, we may say, God’s administration of his self-announcement, the record he has authorized to it and the seal he has set on it to confirm that it is true.” (54-55)

O’Donovan is quite aware that we must deal with the Scriptures as historical, human writings, but he insists that this detracts in no way from their authority: “If we glide from speaking of their humanity into implying some kind of inadequacy in them, as though their being human were a shameful secret that we have laid bare, a deficiency we are now in a position to patch up, then it is we, not they, that must stand charged with ignorance and superstition. The humanity of the Scriptures does not entitle us to patronize them….God truly attests himself and his deeds through this poetry, these letters, this history.” I don’t care where you’re from, but that’s a mighty fine statement of Scriptural authority, and I don’t want to hear any crap about “sick unto death.” (55-56)

O’Donovan notes that the liberal stance toward the authority of Scripture now stands in uncomfortable contradiction to its past. In 19th and early 20th-century liberalism, “the moral authority of the Bible, or at least of the New Testament, was simply self-evident.” Doctrinally, the Bible might be full of superstition; historically, it might be quite fanciful, but morally, it was reliable and authoritative. “So far have liberal convictions undergone a sea change,” O’Donovan notes—now it is precisely on matters of morality that liberals contest the Bible’s authority (of course, this is not to say that they have softened their judgments about its doctrinal and historical authority; no doubt it was to be expected that once those were tossed out, the moral authority would not be far behind).

In the present, O’Donovan asserts, we have rightly abandoned our pretensions (formerly shared by liberals and conservatives) that moral truths and ethical judgments were self-evident. We are recognizing again that our moral path lies dark before us unless illumined by the Word.

However, the illumination is not that simple…on moral matters, in particular, we have a double difficulty in discerning what Scripture has to tell us—we must first struggle to interpret what Scripture means, and then we must struggle to interpret what our current situation means, so that we can properly apply Scripture to it, or, as O’Donovan puts it (he’s always so precise in his wording that I might as well quote him): “There is the interpretative task of discerning what the text means, and there is the conscientious task of discerning ourselves and our position as agents in relation to the text, on the other.” (58) So, to use the example he gives, I must first interpret what the Bible means when it says “Do not bear false witness” and I must then determine whether the ambiguous statement I am planning to make is deceitful, or merely discreet.

The second question, the question of what our situation means, is usually much more challenging than the interpretive question of what Scripture might mean. Therefore, it is usually quite foolish to act like the answer to this question is clear, and then to come to Scripture armed with this “knowledge,” as, he says, has been a common temptation for many, whether liberal and conservative. “It hardly matters which,” he says provocatively, “since the two come closest to each other precisely at the point where they are both furthest from the truth. If the conservative thinks that all the scriptural witness to moral behavior can and must be honored somehow, and the liberal that only some of it, or only most of it, must be honored, what difference does that make if each thinks that conclusion has been reached from some self-evident intuition about what the times require, so that the appeal to the Scripture merely confirms what has already been decided? This is not to take Scripture seriously as an authority. And it is not to take living in the present seriously as a risky business.” (59-60)

But now he turns to address specifically liberal errors, since the next chapter will be primarily devoted to guarding against the dangers in the other direction. O’Donovan tackles head-on the liberal claim that “among the particular New Testament values and precepts….there are time-bound judgments of value and fact, and they show that the Holy Spirit has deepened moral sensitivity through the course of the Church’s history and the history of mankind.” (60—here he is quoting Heinz Schurmann) That we may need to say something of this sort of the Old Testament makes sense…indeed, the New Testament requires us to. But “to take the same way with the teachings of the New Testament, on the other hand, would be self-subverting. And to avoid this fall into incoherence, the liberal hermeneutic proposal faces, it would seem to me, a simple alternative. Either it posits some further climax of salvation-history over and beyond Christ, some ‘age of the Spirit’ such as Montanus or Joachim conceived of, or a Hegelian dialectical history with an Absolute Future, something, at any rate, that will allow a ‘deepened moral sensitivity’ to which the revelation of the incarnation looks immature and outgrown. Or else it makes a distinction between the normative position of Jesus himself and the subnormative position of the apostolic authors, refusing to claim on their behalf the kind of finality it claims for him. The difficulties into which each of these courses leads are too well known to be pursed in detail at this point.” (62)

What the liberals must learn to do, he says, is to bring to the text genuinely open questions—“one must purposefully look to the source from which an answer is sought, an answer not already contained in the question, which is therefore capable of reforming and refining the question, which is therefore capable of reforming and refining the question. And that is precisely what is meant by the authority of Scripture in Christian ethics.” (62) The liberal paradigm, he says, has been unwilling to live with the danger we all must face…the danger that we might be wrong. Instead, it takes its morality for granted, and is prepared to shove everything aside, including Scripture, in favor of that morality.

Scriptural authority, of course, is not an easy thing for us to live with—authority, we feel, takes away our freedom. But the authority of Scripture also sets us free to live well. We must accept its judgment upon us if we are to judge rightly how to live. But, of course, this applies to all of us. We are not free to use Scripture as a hammer of authority on others, while holding ourselves above judgment: “We had better not approach the famous biblical texts on homosexuality as though we were not personally affected! What business could we possibly have with them if our only interest were to frame a theory of sexuality, or perhaps a history of sexuality, for scientists and philosophers to discuss? We had better come to them knowing that we need the help of God’s word if we are to find our way through this idol ridden sphere, and that our own sexuality and idolatry—nothing less!—are under scrutiny in those texts....We had better stumble across homosexuality, our own or other people’s, as a genuinely unknown quantity; we had better ask about it as those who need to be told, rather than reckon we already know all there is to know.” (66-67) To do otherwise—to ask questions of Scripture when we have determined that we already know all the answers, is not to take its authority seriously.

O’Donovan’s words in this chapter ought to be heartening for evangelicals, representing as they do an uncompromising insistence on Scripture’s infallible moral authority, against all who would seek to gainsay or ignore it. But they are also a challenge—a challenge that we remember that if we appeal to Scripture, to Scripture we must go! Appealing to Scripture to justify our fears or prejudices cannot be substituted for actually submitting those fears and prejudices to what the whole of Scripture actually wants to teach us. We must be patient and thorough in discerning Scripture, rather than taking a cursory proof-text approach. We must realize that the Scriptures stand in judgment of us just as they do of homosexuals, and we must be able to learn how the condemnations of homosexuality include condemnations of our idolatries as well. And we must remember that crucial point that O’Donovan makes earlier in the chapter—discerning the meaning of our own situation is far more complex than discerning the meaning of Scripture, and we must be patient and careful as we bring Scripture to bear upon it.

It annoys me to have to say this, but since there has perhaps been some confusion on this matter thus far, none of these closing comments should be taken as hinting at any need to revise the Church’s teaching and stand against homosexuality, and I don’t think O’Donovan’s argument in this chapter is aimed that way at all either. Nor do these comments imply that evangelicals have failed to take note of these things—as my dad always used to tell me, “Just because I’m telling you to avoid something doesn’t mean I think you’ve been doing it.” These are simply valuable things to be mindful of in the midst of debate.

Addendum to Sola Scriptura post

So I've been meaning to post this quote for a while, but all my time has been taken up in other wranglings and writings of late.

The Venerable Cardinal Newman put the question of the relation of Church and Scripture very well:
"Surely the sacred volume was never intended, and is not adapted to teach us our creed; however certain it is that we can prove our creed from it, when it has once been taught us, and in spite of individual producible exceptions to the general rule. Fromt he very first, that rule has been, as a matter of fact, for the Church to teach the truth, and then appeal to Scripture in vindication of its own teaching. And from the first, it has been the error of heretics to neglect the information provided for them, and to attempt of themselves a work of which they are unable, the eliciting a systematic doctrine from the scattered notices of the truth which Scripture contains. Such men act, in the solemn concerns of religion, the part of the self-sufficient natural philosopher, who should obstinately reject Newton's theory of gravitation, and endeavour, with talents inadequate to the task, to strike out some theory of motion by himself. The insufficiency of the mere private study of Holy Scripture for arriving at the exact and entire truth which it really contains, is shown by the fact, that creeds and teachers have ever been divinely provided, and by the discordance of opinions which exists wherever those aids are thrown aside; as well as by the very structure of the Bible itself. And if this be so, it follows that, while enquirers and neophytes used the inspired wriings for the purposes of morals and for instruction in the rudiments of the faith, they still might heed the teaching of the Church as a key to the collection of passages which related to the mysteries of the gospel; passages which are obscure from the necessity of combining and receiving them all."

I'll Take the High (Church) Road #4: Reshaping Sola Scriptura

Disclaimer:
Just so anyone stumbling upon this doesn't misunderstand, I'm not saying all this stuff here as some kind of arrogant rebellion against my tradition. I know the importance of being submissive and respectful to your pastors, friends, and counselors when coming to these kind of convictions, and the discussion here is part of that kind of dialogue, open to revision and correction; it is not intended as a "Behold I have found the light, now hearken, all ye."

One of the issues that my new perspective has finally helped me gain clarity on is the issue of sola Scriptura, and how we as Protestants are to understand it. Unlike most of the other issues I’m discussing here, this was not one that has been nagging me for a long time, surprisingly. It seems that somehow I thought we had it all figured out. But last month, I became greatly unsettled by some conversations I had with a friend, and then by listening to a debate between Bahnsen and a couple Catholic dudes. I hadn’t heard much Bahnsen before, but I’d heard that he usually wiped the floor in his debates. But when he tackled sola Scriptura with these two Catholic dudes, he got his butt kicked all the way back to Escondido (funny thing is, I don’t think he realized it). He completely failed to respond to many of their arguments, and didn’t really even seem to see the force of those arguments. By the end, the Catholic guys were understandably rather frustrated with him for mindlessly repeating the same maxims, heedless of all the devastating counterarguments they’d raised.
I hoped that returning to Keith Mathison’s The Shape of Sola Scriptura might give me some comfort. After all, it was from a much higher-church perspective than Bahnsen and so was fairly balanced and respectful toward church tradition, and I remembered having loved it as a freshman. Alas, I had to depart from my earlier optimistic judgment. In the end, Mathison too collapsed into fuzziness and seemed to have few real answers to offer. I’ve been stewing on the shortcomings of his treatment for a while and planning to write something up about it, and recently, after coming to Anglo-Catholic convictions, a fairly clear solution to the quandary has finally presented itself. So I’ll first take on the problems with Mathison, and then (what I think) is the solution.

First, Mathison adopts the categories of “Tradition 1,” which is to say that Scripture alone is authoritative, but must be interpreted within the subordinate “rule of faith”—Tradition and Scripture coincide as two faces of the same authority here; “Tradition 2,” which is to say that two separate authoritative streams exist—the written Scriptures and the unwritten traditions; and “Tradition 3,” which says that only the traditions of the church are finally authoritative (supposedly the modern Catholic position). This way of putting things seems to me a bit baffling and artificial, and when he tries to put the early Church Fathers and most medieval thinkers into this mold (always fitting them into Tradition 1, mind you). After all, if church tradition as an authoritative interpretation and application of the apostolic proclamation be admitted (Tradition 1), then necessarily, this must have relied on certain unwritten traditions and practices, at least so long as the canon was still being compiled—indeed, such traditions were necessary to help decide what the canon was (Tradition 2); and, because Scripture is not to be interpreted outside of the traditional teaching of the church, many of these traditions, then, should be given full authority (Tradition 3). Or, perhaps I should just say that Tradition 3, as he explains it, would be held by very few, I think, and that Tradition 1 and Tradition 2 are not so easily distinguishable. Especially problematic are the places where he dismisses something that looks like Tradition 2 in the Fathers by saying that these unwritten traditions were simply liturgical and practical traditions, not traditions of doctrine. But liturgy is doctrine! The lex orandi was a huge way in which unwritten apostolic traditions were passed down and passed into an authoritative lex credendi.

I think John Keble puts it very nicely, so I will stop trying my clumsy attempts at clarifying the matter: “Because it is affirmed that the full tradition of Christianity existed before the Christian Scriptures, and so far independent of them, we are charged with alleging two distinct systems or words of God, the one written, the other unwritten, running as it were parallel to each other quite down to our own time. But this, by the terms of the case, is plainly unwarranted. If a man were to say that the Severn and the Wye rise separately in the same mountain, one higher up than the other, must he therefore maintain that they never meet before they reach the sea? Tradition and Scritpure were at first two streams flowing down from the mountain of God, but their waters presently became blended, and it were but a vain and unpractical inquiry, to call upon every one who drinks of them to say, how much of the healing draught came from one source, and how much from the other. On account of those who would poison the stream, it is necessary from time to time to analyse it, and show that it contains no ingredients which were not to be found in one or other of the two Mountains; and in so doing, it becomes incidentally manifest, at least in some mass; it is manifest, for example, that all necessary credenda, all truths essential to salvation, are contained in the Scripture itself; and is it not equally manifest, that many helps of greatest consequence, nay I will say generally necessary, to the right development and application of Scripture, are mostly if not entirely derivable from Tradition? And is it not a poor kind of reasoning to say, Tradition would have been worthless had we been left to it alone, therefore it cannot be of any value, now that Scripture has been all along at hand, to check, to sustain, to interpret, to rectify it, as the several occasions might require?”

Also problematic is how Mathison deals with Scripture itself in formulating his position, which is pretty important considering what he’s trying to do. Over and over, he turns to a passage commonly used in the debate and seeks to demonstrate that “you cannot simply get from this passage to the full-blown Catholic teaching on tradition and the magisterium.” So what? It’s awful hard to simply get from any given passage straight to the doctrine of the Trinity, but that doesn’t mean it’s not firmly and absolutely true. I’m not arguing for the Roman doctrine; I’m just saying that Mathison’s way of arguing against it is rather unhelpful and weak-looking. To show that other assumptions will need to be part of the argument is not an effective way of showing that the argument is necessarily wrong. Mathison spends most of his time showing what the passage doesn’t necessarily mean, but precious little time showing what it does in fact mean.

And this is my major beef with his whole book, and with our whole doctrine: it’s very focused on showing what we most certainly DON’T believe, and very weak on showing what we do actually believe. If Scripture doesn’t lead us to the Catholic position, what does it lead us to? If we don’t believe in Tradition 2 or Tradition 0 (that is, “tradition be damned”), then what does Tradition 1 really look like? I hoped to find answers in Mathison, but I found few. Basically, the position seems to be: Scripture must be interpreted by authoritative church teaching. Such an authoritative tradition existed in the early Church, and helped give us the major creeds. We call this tradition the regula fidei, and we rely on it as our foundation in interpreting Scripture. But other traditions not contained in this regula fidei are not authoritative. The problem here is that the regula fidei seems very arbitrarily limited both in scope and time. This authority of the Church appears to extend only to a few select doctrines which Mathison is comfortable including in the regula fidei—Trinity, Incarnation, etc., and it extends only till about the 5th century. In other words, the Church wields a lot of authority until it creates the canon, and then all its authority disappears. This seems rather odd. Mathison gives very little coherent account of what the continuing authority of the Church and its tradition looks like.

Now, at the risk of making Mathison’s mistake and simply saying what I don’t believe, rather than what I do believe, let me make a stab at something which seems to have become very clear to me recently:
It all comes down to burden of proof. It seems quite clear to me that our attitude even as high-church Reformed Christians is, “I won’t accept it or submit to it until it is clear to me that Scripture teaches it.” In other words, the burden of proof is on church tradition—it is assumed to be false until Scripture establishes it. Guilty until proven innocent. Is this how you treat your Mother? Dad’s off at work, Mom tells you something to do, and you say, “Well, I don’t know if Dad would agree with what you’re telling me, so I can’t obey in good conscience until he weighs in on it.” Kids try this all the time, and it is NEVER a sign that their respect for Dad is that much greater; on the contrary, it usually means they will, in the end, have just as hard a time respecting Dad’s authority as Mom’s, when the chips are down. Cyprian said, “You cannot have God for your Father, unless you have the Church for your Mother.” Christ has made promises to the Church, that she bears the truth, that he lives in her and upholds her, inspires her with his Spirit, and you dare to tell her, “Sorry, I’m not listening unless I’m certain that the Bible tells me that you’re right.” Mathison may want to try to distinguish this kind of respect for a subordinate church tradition from the cavalier individualism of popular evangelicalism, but it’s hard for me to see that the result is much different—look at the history of Presbyterianism—respect for authority lasts only as long as complete agreement.

No, the burden of proof goes the other way—if the Church has clearly taught something throughout her history, admittedly with occasional disagreements and variations, but with remarkable unity and persistence, then that doctrine is taken as true and binding unless Scripture can be shown to disprove it. Innocent until proven guilty. The Church should never refuse to go back to Scripture to make sure, when challenged, that her doctrine is not in violation of what is clearly taught there—that’s what the Reformers were originally asking for: “Ok, maybe you’re right about this, but can you please show us how it is not in violation of Scripture?” That needs to be done from time to time, but if the answer comes back, “It looks like Scripture does not condemn this teaching, and indeed, we believe it can be discerned by implication from what is there,” then no one has the right to reply, “Well, until you can prove that this doctrine or practice is absolutely propounded by Scripture, then I can’t accept it.”

This really came home to me when we were debating 2nd commandment issues with a number of the priests. A couple were a bit baffled—“didn’t the Church already settle this at the 7th ecumenical council?” Now, they went on to say, “Of course we need to be willing and able to go back to Scripture and demonstrate that we are not in violation of its teaching,” but their point was, “This has been the teaching of the Church for ages, and you’d better have a darn good reason to disagree. We must look at the 2nd commandment carefully, but we don’t start with an interpretive blank slate. That’s impossible. Our interpretive parameters must be established with submission to the Church’s historic teaching.”

Of course this can be abused. I’m not so naïve as not to see that. But, if the leaders are godly and mature and have the attitudes of servants, I am not too afraid. On the contrary, I think such teaching is a great comfort to the faithful. In my experience, there are generally two types of people in our churches, the sort who care about what they believe and therefore have to learn how to defend it and justify it at every turn against all objections, and those who don’t care, and just coast along with little concern for theology. Generally, the only “serious” Christians in our tradition are the first kind…the second kind are generally looked on with suspicion, and often rightly so. In our doctrine, everything always has to be proven and argued, because there is no clear standard to look to. As soon as I became really interested in my faith, at age 12, I found myself having to argue and justify doctrines at every turn, and though a more ecumenical attitude has prevailed in my current setting, this is still the general ethos of the Reformed tradition. If your belief is important to you, it has to be thrashed out and fought out at every step of the way. No one can say, “I really care about what I believe, I really know what I believe, and I can rest in it and focus on living out my belief; I don’t need to fight for it.” We can’t rest because there is no bosom of the Church to rest on. I’m not saying the Church need not fight for its doctrines, that it need not always carry the Sword of the Word in its hand, to fight for the Truth, but every Christian need not be a soldier. There are other roles in the body. But, if we cannot look with confidence toward the Church our mother, trusting that there are other soldiers that have fought for us and are fighting for us, then no Christian can be a committed Christian without having to fight anew each step of the way. I know I’m sounding unKierkegaardian here, and I shall probably struggle with the tension between Kierkegaard and Newman throughout my whole life, but I think that we need to have a way for a believer to have comfort and confidence in his beliefs, a confidence which does not depend on his own ability, or even his particular church community’s ability, to articulate and defend those beliefs against all comers.