"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.  

Two Kingdoms=Two Christs? (VanDrunen Review V.3)

June 24, 2010

In the section on the doctrine of the two kingdoms in the age of Reformed orthodoxy, my suspicion is immediately aroused by VanDrunen’s invocation of the Scottish Presbyterians as leading proponents of two kingdoms thinking.   These Scottish Presbyterians are often known as “Covenanters” for their signing of the National Covenant in 1638, a document that united both civil rulers and churchmen in the task of protecting the Reformed religion in Scotland.  This document repeatedly blurs together civil and ecclesiastical concerns, going so far as to cite passages such as these from Parliamentary Acts: 

“Seeing the cause of God's true religion and his Highness's authority are so joined, as the hurt of the one is common to both; that none shall be reputed as loyal and faithful subjects to our sovereign Lord, or his authority, but be punishable as rebellers and gainstanders of the same, who shall not give their confession, and make their profession of the said true religion” and “That all Kings and Princes at their coronation, and reception of their princely authority, shall make their faithful promise by their solemn oath, in the presence of the eternal God, that, enduring the whole time of their lives, they shall serve the same eternal God, to the uttermost of their power, according as he hath required in his most holy word, contained in the Old and New Testament; and according to the same word, shall maintain the true religion of Christ Jesus, the preaching of his holy word, the due and right ministration of the sacraments now received and preached within this realm, (according to the Confession of Faith immediately preceding,) and shall abolish and gainstand all false religion contrary to the same.”  These passages are quoted, mind you, not in order to contest them, but as the legal basis upon which the Covenanters take their stand.  They go on to pledge their resolve to faithfully serve both the King and the cause of true religion, since these two are inseparably conjoined, and to resist equally enemies of the king and of the true religion.  

Documents like this should be enough to tell us that, whatever the sense in which these fellows may speak of “two kingdoms,” it is certainly not in the sense VanDrunen has in mind.  Nevertheless, it is certainly true that some of these fellows have some troubling things to say.  For instance, we again find some strikingly dualistic language.  Turretin is at pains to state that the redemptive kingdom “is not mundane and earthly, but spiritual and celestial” (177) and “Rutherford distinguished between one kingdom ruled by God as creator (and hence temporal and mundane) and the other kingdom ruled by God as redeemer (and hence spiritual and heavenly)” (177).  Now this “and hence” befuddles me--both of them do.  Why should creation necessarily be merely “temporal,” and thus, in this context, temporary?  In this picture, it is as if God just created a physical world for kicks as something he was just going to dispose of a little later on in favor of a “spiritual, heavenly” world.  On such a model, how are we to take the current creation seriously at all, or attribute any significance to life in the body?  And why should redemption be necessarily “spiritual” and “heavenly,” as if God could not possibly redeem this earth or our earthly existence, but could only redeem us out of it, or redeem some “spiritual” dimension of our existence that floats uneasily above this world?  This sounds more like Manichaeanism than Christianity.  Of course, Turretin and Rutherford are far from the only Christians to speak this way--such dualism has been a long-standing malady in the Church.  But inasmuch as much recent theology has helped us to break free of it and return to a more Biblical, creation-affirming stance, I find it bizarre that VanDrunen wants to lead us back into captivity, as it were.

But there are still more troubling problems in this section.  Remember that whole scary bit about the extra Calvinisticum and the dual kingship of Christ back in the chapter on Calvin?  Well, VanDrunen finds all this more systematically and explicitly stated by Turretin.  He summarizes Turretin’s statements thus: “Christ rules the one kingdom as eternal God, as the agent of creation and providence, and over all creatures.  Christ rules the other kingdom as the incarnate God-man, as the agent of redemption, and over the Church.  The latter kingdom is redemptive, the former is non-redemptive.  The latter is exclusive, the former is inclusive” (177).  This kind of sharp separation of two distinct roles in Christ raises significant questions of Christology and Trinitarian theology.  Such sharp discontinuity implies that these two different kingships of Christ have no essential relation to one another; they are just two different offices that happen to be filled by the same person, just as (to use the example I used above in chapter 3) I happen to be both an investment advisor and also a research student in Reformation political theology, two widely distinct roles that have little effect on one another.  Such hat-wearing may be common enough in human affairs, but orthodox theology has long recognized that it is problematic for theology.  The heresy of modalism was condemned precisely for such a hat-wearing view of God.  God, the modalists claimed, was not really three distinct persons, but was one person who opted to reveal himself under three different guises, carrying out three different offices.  Now, that’s not what’s going on here, but the same basic concern presents itself.  The problem with modalism, orthodox theology contended, was that it asserted a sharp discontinuity between the immanent and economic trinity, between who God was and how he revealed himself.  God manifested himself in history as three agents, and yet he was only one agent--if this was true, then God had not truly revealed himself.  Don’t we have the same the same problem with this bifurcation in Christ?  Christ manifests himself in Jesus of Nazareth as redeemer, and this self-revelation bears little or no relation to his pre-existent role as the eternal Son who governs a creation without redeeming it.  How does Jesus Christ faithfully reveal to us the Father, then, if he is not even a faithful witness of himself?  

Moreover, we might well ask, what exactly is the theological point in asserting that it is Christ, the second person of the Trinity, who executes this kingship over creation, “as eternal God, as the agent of creation and providence, and over all creatures”?  This office bears no relation to his distinctively Christological work, to his distinct second-personhood within the Trinity, but rather appears simply as a function of his generic God-ness.  In what sense is it Christ who exercises this particular kingship and not rather God the Father?  This turns out to be no mere idle question when we see how Samuel Rutherford assigns the two kingships--to “God as creator” and “God as redeemer.”  VanDrunen takes note of the distinction in language: “while Turretin speaks of the temporal kingdom as ruled by Christ as God, with the Father and Spirit, Rutherford simply speaks of this kingdom as ruled by God (the creator).  But the theological idea expressed by these theologians is substantively identical” (178).  

He returns to it later, at more length: “Rutherford’s language is similar though not identical to Turretin’s, and their substantive theological claims are the same.  As noted above, Rutherford put the temporal kingdom under ‘God the creator’ and spiritual kingdom under ‘Christ the Redeemer and Head of the Church.’  In speaking futher about the former, he writes that it is ‘not a part’ of Christ’s spiritual kingdom and thus states bluntly that the civil magistrate ‘is not subordinate to Christ as mediator and head fo the church.’  Along similar lines, he says later that ‘magistrates as magistrates’ are not ‘the ambassadors of Christ’ but ‘the deputy of God as the God of order, and as the creator.’... In light of this evidence, I suggest that Turretin and Rutherford teach the same doctrine in these passages, though from somewhat different angles.  Turretin answers Yes to the question whether Christ rules the temporal kingdom, but with qualifications (i.e., that he does so only as eternal God, with the Father and Holy Spirit, as creator/sustainer); Rutherford answers No to the same question, but with qualifications (i.e., that God the creator does rule this kingdom).  When the qualifications of each are compared to the other’s, the effect is the same.  To put it as precisely as possible, they both teach that the Son of God rules the temporal kingdom as an eternal member of the Divine Trinity but does not rule it in his capacity as the incarnate mediator/redeemer” (181).  

In his haste to reconcile Turretin and Rutherford here, VanDrunen has, in my view, stumbled headlong into what looks like serious Trinitarian heresy.  Rutherford’s viewpoint, whatever its weaknesses, seems to me to at least be theologically coherent and safe, if I am correct in interpreting “God the creator” to mean for him “God the Father.”  In this model, God the Father creates and governs the world, and delegates authority to magistrates as governors of the world,  and God the Son redeems this creation, and delegates authority to the Church as a redeemer of the world.”  This basic model certainly needs work, but it is reasonably stable and has been frequently employed in political theology.  But what Turretin (and certainly what VanDrunen) is saying seems different.  They posit a disjunction between what the Son does in his own person, and what he does as a member of the Trinity, as generic God.  This suggests that there are four agencies in the Godhead--one for each of the persons, and one for “eternal God”--the unity of the three persons, thus turning the three-in-oneness of orthodox theology into a three-plus-oneness.  Moreover, it suggests that, while one of the Son’s offices is executed coordinately with the Father and Spirit (that of governing creation), another is unique to him as Son (redeeming the world), thus violating the fundamental dictum of Trinitarian orthodoxy: “in the opera ad extra, the works of God are undivided.”  We must affirm that, in all his work, the Son works both uniquely as himself, and coordinately with Father and Spirit as a member of the Trinity.  Finally, we have here what looks like undisguised modalism: a sharp rift between what the Son does (and thus, who he is) as incarnate mediator, and the Son as “eternal member of the divine Trinity”--in other words, the incarnate mediatorial work of Christ turns out to just be a hat-wearing, an identity fundamentally separate from the eternal life of the divine Trinity, and of the Logos himself.  To put it simply: for VanDrunen, Jesus Christ the Son of God does not even really show us himself, the Logos, much less show us the Father, as he claimed to do.  He is merely an avatar.  

The only way to avoid this frightful conclusion, it seems to me, is to insist, with the New Testament, on the deep unity between Christ’s work as creator and as redeemer, as the one “by whom all things were made” and the one who “makes all things new.”  The opening to the Gospel of John makes this all as clear as one could wish (what follows is my own translation, as literal as possible): 

“1 In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. 

2 This one was in the beginning with God.

3 All things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be that came to be. 

4 In him was life and the life was the light of men.

5 And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness overtook/understood it not.

6 A man named John came to be, being sent from God.

7 He came for a witness so that he might bear witness concerning the light that all might believe through him.  

8 That man was not the light but he came that he might bear witness concerning the light.

9 He was the true light who lightens every man who is coming into the world.  

10 He was in the world and the world through him came to be and the world did not know him.

11 He came unto his own and his own received him not.
12 As many as received him, to them he gave power to become sons of God, to those who believed in his name, 

13 those who not from blood nor from the will of the flesh nor from the will of man but from from God were born.  

14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the unique one from the Father, full of grace and truth.

15 John bore witness concerning him and cried out, saying, "This was of whom I said to you that he coming behind me should become before me, because he was earlier than me." 

16 And from his fullness we have all received and grace because of grace.

17 For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth through Jesus Christ.

18 No one has seen God at any time, but the unique Son, who is in the bosom of the father, that one has exegeted him.”

This passage is uncompromising: it is the Word who was God and through whom all things came to be that himself became flesh, whose glory, that is to say, whose true dynamic identity, we witnessed, from whose fullness we received grace.  In him from the beginning was the life that by his life he brought to the world.  From the beginning he shed the light of his grace in the world, and finally he came to offer in himself the fullness of grace to the world which he had created.  In so doing, he perfectly revealed (“exegeted”) not only himself as he had been from all eternity, but also God the Father.  This Word who becomes flesh is not only the Creator from all eternity, but is redeemer from all eternity, and comes into the world so that men his creatures might become “sons of God”--what they were created to be in the beginning. 

Now, how exactly all this cashes out in terms of the nitty-gritty of political theology, and of Church and State, still needs a lot of work.  But it is at least clear that, however we cash this out, we cannot do so in a way that seeks to drive a wedge between Christ the creator and Christ the redeemer.  

Ratzinger on the Trinity

Ok, so, as an intermission between barrages of Cavanaugh, I have another Catholic to bring to you--namely, the Pope.

In his Introduction to Christianity, he has a positively amazing section on the Trinity. I have here a whole bunch of quotes from it, selected mainly because I've already typed them up for other arenas--though you can be sure they represent some of the best selections:

"We can only speak rightly about Him if we renounce the attempt to comprehend and let him be the uncomprehended. Any doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, cannot aim at being a perfect comprehension of God. It is a frontier notice, a discouraging gesture pointing over to unchartable territory. It is not a definition that confines a thing to the pigeonholes of human knowledge, nor is it a concept that would put the thing within the grasp of the human mind."

"In other words, all these statements [of heresy] are not so much gravestones as the bricks of a cathedral, which are, of course, only useful when they do not remain alone but are inserted into something bigger, just as even the positively accepted formulas are valid only if they are at the same time aware of their own inadequacy."

"Faith consists of a series of contradictions held together by grace."

"He who tries to be a mere observer experiences nothing. Even the reality 'God' can only impinge on the vision of him who enters into the experiment with God--the experiment that we call faith. Only by entering does one experience; only by cooperating in the experiment does one ask at all; and only he who asks receives an answer. . . . Indeed, we must go a step farther: that we put any questions or make any experiments at all is due to the fact that God for his part has agreed to the experiment, has entered into it himself as man. Through the human refraction of this one man we can thus come to know more than the mere man; in him who is both man and God, God has demonstrated his humanity and in the man has let himself be experienced."

----

“God as substance, as ‘being’, is absolutely one. If we nevertheless have to speak of him in the category of triplicity, this does not imply any multiplication of substances but means that in the one and indivisible God there exists the phenomenon of dialogue, the reciprocal exchange of word and love in their attachment to each other.

They are not substances, personalities in the modern sense, but the relatedness whose pure actuality (‘parcels of waves’!) does not impair the unity of the highest being but fills it out. St. Augustine once enshrined this idea in the following formula: ‘He is not called Father with reference to himself but only in relation to the Son; seen by himself he is simply God.’

Here the decisive point comes beautifully to light. ‘Father’ is purely a concept of relationship. Only in being for the other is he Father; in his own being in himself he is simply God. Person is the pure relation of being related, nothing else. Relationship is not something extra added to the person, as it is with us; it only exists at all as relatedness.

“Expressed in the imagery of Christian tradition, this means that the first Person does not beget the Son as if the act of begetting were subsequent to the finished Person; it is the act of begetting, of giving oneself, of streaming forth. It is identical with the act of self-giving. Only as this act is it person, and therefore it is not the giver but the act of giving.

In this idea of relatedness in word and love, independent of the concept of substance and not to be classified among the ‘accidents’, Christian thought discovered the kernel of the concept of person, which describes something other and infinitely more than the mere idea of the ‘individual.’ Let us listen once again to St. Augustine:

‘In God there are no accidents, only substance and relation.’ Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the sole dominion of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount what we call today ‘objectifying thought’; a new plane of being comes into view.

It is probably true to say that the task imposed on philosophy as a result of these facts is far from being completed—so much does modern thought depend on the possibilities thus disclosed, without which it would be inconceivable.”

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Relational ontology, man!