Author: Lee M.

Here’s a very interesting article from British Christian writer (and self-described “post-Anglican”) Theo Hobson on what he calls the “ecclesiological fundamentalism” of contemporary theology, specifically among “postliberals” and members of the “radical orthodoxy” school.

I am suggesting that a form of ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism’ presently dominates academic theology; it underlies theological postmodernism. I will demonstrate this in relation to four influential theologians: Barth, Lindbeck, Hauerwas and Milbank.

The basic narrative of twentieth-century theology is the rejection of theological liberalism in favour of a new reliance on the distinctive practice of ‘the Christian community’. Which is to say, the church. But ‘the church’ in a very general, abstract sense. What emerges is a virtual-reality form of ecclesiology that exalts an abstract ideal rather than an actual institution. I suggest that such a theology results from the failure of modern Protestant thought.

Hobson sees Karl Barth as making an ecclesiological “turn” (or quasi-turn) in his thinking, turning from his early emphasis on the Word of God that stands over and above any institution to a more ecclesial stance later in his career. The banner of a high ecclessiology has been picked up by postliberals like Lindbeck, Hauerwas, and Milbank, who emphasize the distinctive practices of the Christian community as the manifestation and the warrant for the truth of the Gospel.

Hauerwas’s emphasis on the Christian community has a corrective function: he is reacting very strongly against the American national ideal, which usurps the role of elect community. To some extent, this resembles Barth’s rejection of liberal Christian culture. But he is far quicker than Barth to identify the positive alternative: the authentic Christian community, distinct from the wider culture. Following Lindbeck, Hauerwas’s alternative polis is left denominationally vague: he does not claim that there is no salvation outside the Methodist Church. Yet he is at pains to emphasise that he means an actual community rather than an abstract ideal. And he makes very great claims for this ‘actual’ entity. Salvation, he asserts, ‘is a political alternative that the world cannot know apart from the existence of a concrete people called church.’

Hauerwas thus makes higher soteriological claims for ‘the community’ than his Yale school predecessors. It is the sole arena of Christian witness, and ‘witness’ is understood in a stronger sense than ‘communication’ or ‘proclamation’ – it is closer to ‘realization’. He therefore politicizes post-liberalism, introducing post-Marxist accounts of church and salvation. His rhetoric constantly flirts with chiliasm, as if salvation is to be achieved through the establishment of a pure Christian community. This vision is indebted to the radical Reformation, of course – and it also draws on Roman Catholic ecclesiology after Vatican II, ie. liberation theology.

Hobson thinks that there are several problems with the postliberal approach. First, it tends to deny that there is anything prior to the church – the church ends up being constitutive of the Gospel rather than a creature of the Word of God, which is always prior to the church in classic Protestantism. Secondly, it tends toward a “chiliastic ecclesiology” wherein the church is identified with the kingdom of God coming in its fullness. Thirdly, and ironically, “the church” in much postliberal theology becomes an idealized abstraction rather than referring to any actually existing institution. Discussing John Milbank’s views for instance, he writes:

Theology for Milbank is a sort of utopian sociology; it reflects on the ideal community of the church, which seems to hover somewhere between existence and non-existence. The introduction to his subsequent collection of essays, The Word Made Strange (1998), acknowledges that the ‘practice’, in which theology is based, is elusive.

For all the current talk of a theology that would reflect on practice, the truth is that we remain uncertain as to where today to locate true Christian practice… . [Consequently] the theologian feels almost that the entire ecclesial task falls on his own head: in the meagre mode of reflective words he must seek to imagine what a truly practical repetition [of Christian practice] would be like. Or at least he must hope that his merely theoretical continuation of the tradition will open up a space for wider transformation.

This is a surprisingly clear admission that his ecclesiology is very largely an exercise of the imagination. These essays repeatedly emphasise the priority of ecclesiology, which is of course understood in a very wide and complex sense. Ecclesiology is the engine of Milbank’s theology; yet he doesn’t deign to get his hands dirty by tackling actual ecclesiological issues (there are a few prickly ones in his own Church of England).

Radical Orthodoxy, the school of theology based in Milbank’s work, continues the theological critique of secular modernity as illusory and nihilistic. It argues that modernity results from a series of theological errors in the late Middle Ages, the arch-villain being Duns Scotus. The Reformation and the Enlightenment result from this intellectual Fall. (This denigration of Protestantism and the Enlightenment is reminiscent of the Oxford Movement – another English idealization of catholicism). Radical Orthodoxy wants to revive the ideal (and presumably the reality) of a secular-eclipsing Church, synonymous with culture, learning, civilization. Milbank’s movement therefore has the same theocratic leanings as we observed in Hauerwas’ vision.

The two other principal founders of Radical Orthodoxy are also Anglo-Catholics (Pickstock and Ward), and its godfather is another (Rowan Williams). This is little surprise: Anglo-Catholicism is ideally placed to produce such a theology, being catholic but not Roman Catholic. It has a natural propensity to reinvent theology as ecclesiological idealism.

Hobson concludes that this ecclesiological turn is a result of the failure of Protestant theology, as exemplified in Barth:

After liberalism, theology finds its justification in ‘church’. It fears to stray from ‘the community’, lest it end up back in the clutches of liberalism. But the term ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism’ needs qualification. For, as we have repeatedly seen, this trend does not identify ‘church’ with a particular institution. For all its talk of particularity, it is vague about what ‘Christian community’ it means, or if it really means any concrete one at all.

The triumph of virtual-ecclesiological-fundamentalism must be understood in relation to the demise of Protestant theology. After Barth, Protestant theology takes a very dramatic catholic-ecclesiological turn (which is tantamount to a suicide bid). Ironically, this is largely because of Barth: he was so successful in soiling ‘liberal Protestantism’ that he drove post-liberal Protestants into the arms of catholicism. Barth failed to make it adequately clear what the Protestant alternative to liberalism was: no such thing as Barthianism ever emerged. ‘Post-liberal’, or ‘post-modern’ theology is overwhelmingly catholic, and it is very often openly derisive of Protestantism. As a Protestant theologian, Barth was certainly a failure.

The afterlife of Protestantism is anti-liberalism in search of a church: Hauerwas is the embodiment of this. Post-Barthian theology is only Protestant in the negative sense, of balking at Rome’s claims: it has no substantially alternative vision. For it has effectively repented of the Reformation, which is blamed for the curse of liberalism. It is a less realistic, less rooted version of Roman Catholicism; its dreamy little sister.

I think there’s something to Hobson’s critique; I’ve never been fully convinced by the inflated claims for the church made by some of the “postliberals” whose thought I’m familiar with. The solution to the supposed crisis of authority or unbelief is not, I think, simply to take refuge in the authority of the church, even when it’s decked out with a suitably high “catholic” ecclesiology.

Interestingly, according to Hobson, Bonhoeffer criticized Barth on these very grounds:

It seems that Barth’s rejection of liberal Protestant theology was careless. He threw the Protestant baby out with the liberal bathwater.

Bonhoeffer sensed this. At the end of his life he re-thought his allegiance to Barth, and questioned his achievement as few have done since. He still applauded Barth’s early motivation: the criticism of religion, especially in its liberal Protestant form. He still hailed Barth’s prophetic quest for a renewal of Protestantism. But he now decided that Barth had failed in this quest. His neo-orthodox solution entailed a reactionary reliance upon ‘church’ that betrayed the spirit of his early radicalism.

Barth and the Confessing Church have encouraged us to entrench ourselves persistently behind the ‘faith of the church’, and evade the honest question as to what we ourselves really believe. To say it is the Church’s business, not mine, may be a clerical evasion, and outsiders always regard it as such… We cannot, like the Roman Catholics, simply identify ourselves with the church.

In Bonhoeffer’s judgement, and mine, Barth’s very Protestant revolution failed. His high ecclesiology (‘high’ in an abstract, quasi-Hegelian sense) drowned out his original vision. Bonhoeffer might not have been surprised to learn of Barth’s strange legacy: a golden age of catholic theology.

• Clark Stooksbury has a great take-down of spurious appeals to federalism by some of the President’s defenders:

Are [Hugh] Hewitt and [Christopher] Ruddy so deluded that they believe that the president and his advisors carefully read through the Constitution and the opinions of Learned Hand before deciding if they have the power to act? Bush had no concerns about federalism when he signed the No Child Left Behind Act, or when they went to the Supreme Court to override state governing the use of medical marijuana.The real issue concerns the President’s leadership.

It is hard to imagine any other plausible president — Clinton, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Buchanan — dithering the way that President Bush did in the aftermath of the hurricane. If Louisiana state officials were dragging their feet; I’m sure that President McCain, for example, would have got on the horn and found out what the hell the problem was, instead of waiting for paperwork to be filled out in triplicate. I doubt that President Kerry would stand around, patting his FEMA director on the back, or look forward to sittin’ on Trent Lott’s porch while people were still dying.

• Jesse Walker asks if the chaos in New Orleans represents the rule or the exception to what usually happens after major disasters.
• A disturbing account of people flipping out because Thomas Nelson Publishers is donating 100,000 Bibles to victims of Katrina in addition to a matching contribution plan for donations made by their employees.

Will Pennsylvanians ever be free from the despotism of our commonwealth’s ridiculous blue laws? Here’s a step in the right direction anyway.

Russ Feingold (D-Wis) could be the antiwar candidate in 2008. He was one of only three senators to vote against the authorization of force in Iraq, so he has the kind of credibility that someone like Kerry lacked. He was also the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT (sic!) Act that was rammed through congress immediately after 9/11 (say what you will about the act on its merits, its passage was hardly a model of democratic deliberation).

All of which suggests Feingold has a refreshing independent streak. He has also bucked his party on Clinton’s impeachment, NAFTA (he was against it), and gun control. Hey, how about a Feingold/Hagel maverick-fusion pro-peace ticket?

Pro-war bloggers and pundits have made much hay of George Orwell’s dictum that pacifists are “objectively pro-fascist” because their aim is to obstruct the war effort and, thus, aid the enemy. This bit of rhetoric got particularly nasty during the run-up to the Iraq war when war opponents (pacifist or not) were routinely characterized as being “pro-Saddam.”

I always thought this was a weak (not to mention insulting) argument, but in addition, it’s interesting to note that Orwell himself later repudiated it:

We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are ‘objectively’ aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the ‘objectively’ line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore ‘Trotskyism is Fascism’. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated. This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions. For there are occasions when even the most misguided person can see the results of what he is doing. Here is a crude but quite possible illustration. A pacifist is working in some job which gives him access to important military information, and is approached by a German secret agent. In those circumstances his subjective feelings do make a difference. If he is subjectively pro-Nazi he will sell his country, and if he isn’t, he won’t. And situations essentially similar though less dramatic are constantly arising.

In my opinion a few pacifists are inwardly pro-Nazi, and extremist left-wing parties will inevitably contain Fascist spies. The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. It is this habit of mind, among other things, that has made political prediction in our time so remarkably unsuccessful.

(Orwell links via Hit & Run.)

You are a Black Coffee

At your best, you are: low maintenance, friendly, and adaptable At your worst, you are: cheap and angsty You drink coffee when: you can get your hands on it Your caffeine addiction level: high

(via Lutheran Chik)

Now I think Peter Singer is a philosophical and moral disaster. He has consistently applied utilitarian principles to argue, for instance, that infanticide is justifiable in some cases, and that human beings are not intrinsically more valuable than other animals. Indeed, I would regard that as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism.

Nevertheless, you don’t need to accept his more dubious principles to agree with the thrust of this op-ed. In fact, anyone minimally committed to opposing cruelty to animals and a posessing a certain consistency (e.g. why is it ok to treat a pig in ways you would never dream of treating a dog?) should look askance at many American farming practices.

One of the great things about a long weekend is the chance to catch up on my reading. I’m one who’ll go to library and check out an armfull of books, intending to get to them all…eventually. This weekend I finally got to John Wesley’s A Simple Account of Christian Perfection. It’s basically a collection of reflections, sermons, hymns, and essays on Wesley’s distinctive doctrine.

In a nutshell, Wesley’s claim is that it is possible for Christians to attain perfection in this life, in some cases many years prior to death. By perfection Wesley means, essentially, to be so completely full of love for God and one’s neighbor such that one no longer commits sin (in the sense of an intentional infraction of the moral law). Perfection, he is careful to point out, does not free us from ignorance or other weaknesses that belong to our status as finite embodied beings per se. Perfection also has a strong doxological and eucharistic aspect as we come to accept all things that happen to us with praise and thanksgiving, seeing them as God’s will.

For Wesley, justification means the remission of guilt on account of Christ’s atonement, whereas sanctification is the regeneration of the heart whereby we are “cleansed from all unrighteousness.” He thinks that it is very clear from the Bible that God promises to do this – not merely to save us from the consequences of sin, but to save us from sin itself.

It’s important to note that Wesley doesn’t think that perfection of total sanctification usually comes immediately after justification. There may be, and often is, a long period of growth toward perfection during which we still struggle with sin (though he doesn’t rule out that God may act on someone to bring them to perfection almost immediately). However, the final transition to perfection is an instantaneous movement even when it is preceded by a long period of growth. He also points out that, once attained, this state can be lost, but it needn’t be.

Wesley seems to have a synergistic account of sanctification – while justification is by faith alone, he thinks that the human will cooperates with God’s grace in attaining perfection. Though at times he suggests that it is entirely God working in us. So I’m not sure if he was unclear on this relation, or if he clarifies it elsewhere. He also thinks that we can know both that we have been justified and that we have attained total sanctification. This knowledge seems to come from self-examination, though others can corroborate it to a certain extent. Though he doesn’t claim to have attained this state himself, he does claim to know of people who have.

What to make of Wesley’s account? First of all, I think he’s right that the Bible (and tradition) holds that we are not just forgiven our sins on account of Christ, but God wants to actually deliver us from our sin. I think most Christians would agree that justification & the forgiveness of sins inagurates a new life in which we participate in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. And it has usually been taken that some progress in sanctification is possible in this life, that Christians are empowered to live according to God’s standards of rigteousness.

Does that mean, though, that it’s possible to attain perfection in this life? Here I think Wesley may overreach. First of all, I think his epistemology is a bit questionable. Is it really possible to determine by self-examination that we have been justified and/or attained perfection? This seems like a notoriously unreliable procedure. Once we make our own internal states the test of how we stand with God, we seem to be in danger of building our house on some pretty unstable sand.

This is where I think Luther’s emphasis on the “external word” can have a salutary effect. According to Luther we should not look inward to try and determine if we really have faith, but rather we should look outward – to Christ and to the promises God makes to us, which we receive through the preached word and the sacraments. These external means of grace have a solidity and objectivity that we can trust. Luther well knew the dangers of excessive self-examination.

Even if we could verify it by self-examination, I wonder if asserting that some do in fact attain perfection is to claim to know more than has been revealed to us. Exegetical considerations aside, it seems safer to say that one may attain perfection, and that it is something to be strived for, but we should be agnostic about whether this in fact occurs. We could draw a parallel with the question of universalism. Some want to positively assert that God will or must save everyone. But this seems to be more than we can know, and in fact an attempt to tie God’s hands by appeal to some abstract notion of justice. Better, I think, to say that we should hope and pray that God will save everyone, without asserting that we know this will in fact happen.

Another reason to be agnostic about the attainment of perfection is that making perfection the telos of our life may, ironically, lead us to an excessive self-concern. This is another point where the Lutheran tradition has a contribution to make. Rightly understood, justification by faith alone ought to inculcate in us a certain self-forgetfulness. Since my destiny is secure, because my life is “hidden with Christ in God,” I don’t have to worry about traversing some path of holiness or climing some spiritual ladder. Again, the Christians attention is turned outward toward the neighbor and his needs. Precisely because I don’t have to worry about myself I am free to serve the neighbor in love.

That said, I think Wesley has a word to say to us as well. Lutherans, perhaps becuase they have tended to focus so much on justification, have downplayed sanctification. This can result in a certain complacency about sin, whereas Wesley reminds us that it is always possible to press on further toward the goal, even if we don’t attain it in this life.

Another contribution that Wesley’s emphasis on holiness can make is that it can give shape to Christian love. In emphasizing the neighbor and his needs, a Lutheran ethos may fail to provide us with a way of distinguishing genuine from spurious needs. “Love and do what thou wilt” may be a sufficiently concrete ethic for saints, but I suspect that the rest of us need more guidance than that. Lutherans have often fallen back on the “orders of creation” as specifying in more detail the obligations we have to others. But this can blunt the radicalness of Christianity and sanctify the status quo. By contrast, the Wesleyan emphasis on the imitatio Christi can give a more particularly Christian shape to works of love directed toward the neighbor.

Open Court Press appears to have stumbled on to a publishing goldmine with their Popular Culture and Philosophy series – each title offers a collection of essays reflecting on some aspect of pop culture. Initially I was suspicious that anything good could come of this, but a friend bought me The Simpsons and Philosopy as a birthday present and it was surprisingly good.

So, when I found myself at Borders last night with a 30% off any item coupon in my hot little hands, I was pleasantly surprised to come across Mel Gibson’s Passion and Philosophy. The essays offer philosophical reflection on the film itself, but also on the broader topics it raises like the Atonement, artistic depictions of the Passion, Jesus and violence, and so on, all written by serious scholars. I’ve only read one essay so far, but it was a really excellent one by Loyola University of Chicago philosopher Paul K. Moser on “The Crisis of the Cross: God as Scandalous” (which you can also read online here).

Obviously the Passion of Our Lord has a rich history of providing fodder for deep thinking, so maybe the quality of this volume exceeds such titles as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy or The Atkins Diet and Philosophy(!), but based on my limited sample I have to say that they’ve produced some quality material.

“Fr. Jape” has a long, rambling, at times snarky, critique of the new “chastity movement” among hip young evangelicals in the latest New Pantagruel. This, however, is a good point:

Much of the energy of the purity brigade is generated by the opposite notion—that it is the chaste, rather than the unchaste, who suffer. Thus, as opposed to their happy-go-lucky-rutting-round-the-clock counterparts, the chaste require “intentional communities,” as Winner makes it, for constant group therapy. Being consigned to a life cut off from human contact would entail suffering. But trying to avoid sin is hardship, not suffering. The idea that you are suffering is just your dirty “old man of sin” talking, as the Apostle names the bugger. You should want him to suffer and drop dead. His pain is your gain! But don’t try to make an epic tale out of it. In the history of the church, many people have truly suffered, but the struggle for chastity seems to rate as a particularly saintly, heroic enterprise only among the evangelicals and Jesus freaks—and only in recent decades. They need to grow up.

Now, at the risk of offering more information than readers care to have, I’m in no position to lecture others on the virtues of pre-marital chastity. But it does strike me that we’ve lowered our standards quite a bit when simply managing not to have sex is taken to be an exercise in heroic virtue!