Team Fortress
Considering the opportunities and pitfalls of the
contemporary religious scene I have noticed that there is a tempting, indeed
too tempting, option out here that attracts many honest searchers. This is the
temptation to find a wall and hunker down behind that wall. Practical people,
especially, are tempted to do this because they do not have all day to think.
Plus, people need structure and definition and religions that offer this will
always do better than ones that provide endless space to explore but little
concrete guidance. It is the very worst form of contemporary religiosity to
wallow in unmoored subjectivity that is neither theologically nor, for that
matter, politically or ethically focused. This is why people react against it.
One thing they react towards is a fortress mentality. Some progressive
manifestations of Christianity, for instance, seem to have little content
beyond ‘owning the fundies’ and for that reason they accomplish little beyond
generating more fundamentalism. One reaction to this, particularly among
Evangelicals (who by the way are the only people actively generating anything
in the Christian world positive OR negative) is to revert to something called
‘historic Christianity’.[1]
Before I state what is wrong with this let me state what is right. Christianity
does indeed HAVE a history and Christian faith needs to be informed about and
by that history. Christianity is not a feeling that occurs to me in the privacy
of my basement. Nor should people arrogantly dismiss doctrinal and theological
traditions they have not made the least effort to inform themselves about
simply because they predate last week’s fad. To this extent I am all for
‘historic Christianity’. The devil, of course, is in the details for ‘historic
Christianity’ proves to be a somewhat elusive object when one goes searching
for it.
This becomes especially clear if one listens to
conservative evangelicals for their ‘historical Christianity’ is anything but.
In fact, it is an a-historical abstraction. I do not mean to say by this that
such persons are fake or inauthentic Christians. I do not even mean to say they
are WRONG about theological fundamentals. I only mean to say that their
historic Christianity is barely a hundred years old and while it may be the
best Christianity ever devised it is NOT historic in any sense of that term I
can understand. Let me take two pertinent examples. Historic Christianity
insists on a ‘high’ view of scripture. Well, this sounds ‘historic’ enough on
its face. When one teases out what
historic Christians mean by this however we find that their ‘high’ view of
scripture is something rather new and indeed, an essential moment in a new (i.e. 20th Century) theological
synthesis. Scripture, we are told, is inerrant, inspired and authoritative.
Well, Augustine and Damascene certainly do not comb the scriptures for error.
THEIR assumption is that scripture is infinitely rich and that by a variety of interpretive techniques we
can bring wisdom out of even the most unpromising text. Some of these
techniques are allegorical or typological. Others are more direct. This we
might call a fundamental hermeneutic respect, an attitude I will freely admit historic Christians share. They may go farther in this than the average modern theologian might
but this is not QUITE the view that historic Christians seem to put forward as
normative. The historic Christian views the text as infallible and
authoritative in its direct propositional
sense (which, by the way, seems to differ from the medieval ‘literal sense’
which meant ‘the meaning intended in the immediate context’ i.e. as opposed to
the allegorical or tropological meaning). The Bible is a collection of
assertions each one of which has a distinct truth value which truth value is
always T and never F.[2]
Yet Origen, to take one ‘historic’ example, did not think this at all. He was
quite willing to admit that one could reach for a symbolic or allegorical
interpretation when the direct propositional sense was clearly false. Historic
Christians are certainly free to say he was wrong in this but they cannot claim
that there was some ‘historic’ norm from which he simply deviated for in the
Patristic period biblical hermeneutics was very much up in the air with
scholars in Alexandria and Antioch, for instance, taking very different views
of the matter. The ‘historic’ norm of a propositionally inerrant scripture is
just not in history and can’t be justified by a simple appeal to history. IF it
is the correct position it must be justified in some other way.
Things are worse if we take the claim that the
scriptures are authoritative in the sense the historic Christians mean. If I
understand what the historic Christians say (and maybe I do not-feel free to
correct me) the church is under the direct
authority of scripture in its propositional sense because God directly inspires each word written by
the sacred author. Depending on how one parses this claim one might say that Clement or Athanasius
would have agreed to some version of it though the ancient church did not
define the matter in this way or, for that matter, in any other.[3]
Not facing the challenge of 19th century liberalism it did not see
the need to define the precise nature of inspiration. The problem comes when
one adds to this the claim that the scripture so inspired stands over the
church as an all sufficient authority. Again, this may be a perfectly fine
position but it is not ‘historic’ in any straightforward way. Irenaeus could
not simply appeal to scripture to refute the Gnostics because the nature of
scripture was one of the very points in dispute. He had to appeal to the public
proclamation of the episcopal churches in
their totality. This included scripture but it also included oral
proclamation. Indeed, without creeds, doctrinal formulas, prayer and liturgical
practices one could not lay out the rules that governed Biblical hermeneutics.
This is even more clear with respect to the divinity of Christ for scripture
had, on this point, to be read in light of practice:
the liturgical practice of addressing prayer to Christ as divine. All of this
is to say that the Bible is the book of a community. That community is shaped
by it but also shapes it by its own praxis.
The community can read in the spirit because the spirit is in the
community shaping not only the text but the hermeneutic of the text without
which there is no text except in a
dead empirical sense.
Things get no better, in fact, they get a good deal
worse when we turn to the historic Christian view of the atonement. Here, alas,
our ‘historic Christians’ are just plain wrong. ‘Historic’ Christians assure us
that the ‘historic’ view of the atonement is what they call ‘subsitutionary’
atonement. This is flat out mistaken. ‘Substitutionary’ atonement may well be
the BEST theory of the atonement but it is NOT the only historic one. Historically,
there are FOUR significant views of the atonement each with important
supporters and important critics. One can indeed defend the view that on the
cross Christ bore the wrath of the Father that was due to us as a ‘substitute’.
One could also, as Anselm did, claim that on the cross Christ performed an
ACTION that made infinite satisfaction for the sins of humanity. One COULD
claim, with Athanasius, that on the cross Christ overcame death by the power of
life. Alternatively, one could claim with Origen and Augustine that on the
cross Christ destroyed the claim of the devil to sinful humanity by his innocent death (a view revived in our
day by Rene Girard). NONE of these views is the ‘historic’ view because in
ACTUAL history all have been defended by great theologians. You may have your preference among these and
you may argue passionately for that preference but none is more ‘historic’ than
the other.
Here, though, we get to the nub of the issue which is
that by historic the historic Christians do not mean what I mean. THEY mean
something very specific. For them, historic Christianity is original
Christianity. The historic Christian claims to be above all a first century
Christian. The first century Christian was closer to Christ and, for that
reason, knew more about him. Kierkegaard explicitly denies this, pointing out
that the person closest to an event may be the LEAST competent person to talk
about it. But, to be fair, the ‘eye-witness’ fallacy seems to be universal in
secular culture so one cannot blame the historic Christians for accepting it
too. At any rate their clear claim is that what a Christian TODAY must believe
is what a historic Christian believed and what a historic Christian believed is
what a first century Christian believed. Here the historic Christian may make a
few indistinct references to the ‘church fathers’ though which church fathers
they mean is left vague. Do they mean Clement? Origen? Chrysostom? Augustine?
This is important because what one finds in the Church Fathers is NOT a
bland unity about norms but an intense and creative struggle to define basic norms. The norms were not
simply provided by some assumed first century standard but had to fought for intellectually and
institutionally.
The reference to the Church Fathers then seems to me to
be distraction. What is really at stake for the historic Christian is not the
first seven centuries of the church (as for Eastern Orthodoxy) but the first
century specifically and the literature it produced in the canon of the New
Testament. History, to quote Joyce, is a nightmare from which the historic
Christian would awaken into the free and pure air breathed by Paul and John. This
is why the history it bases itself on is so narrow and selective. Thus, first
century norms about how women should comport themselves in church are
absolutely binding on us today: as binding as the Sermon on the Mount! Alas and
alack however, any attempt to self-consciously return to the norms of the past
will create a new past that never quite existed in the form I now construct.
This idealized past to which we in the present are unconditionally subject is
not the first century but the first century as seen through three lenses. The
first lens is the lens of the reformation. Historic Christianity is Protestant
Christianity which is supposed to be simply first century Christianity revived
like the phoenix from the dead ashes of the medieval church. Unfortunately,
this not the real ‘historic’ reformation but an imagined one in which Luther
and Calvin held ‘high’ views of scripture they did not in fact EVER hold. This
is because the reformation is being viewed through a second filter. It is being
viewed through the lens of the ‘five fundamentals’ which were never named or
listed as such before the 19th Century but which now seem to
function among historic Christians much as the Apostle’s or Nicene Creed once
did in actual history. [4]The
third lens is a secular one though it is sometimes treated as a distinct stream
of revelation (as if no one had ever uttered the phrase Sola Scriptura). This
is the American Revolution. Historic Christianity is the civic religion of one
nation, the United States, which functions as the new Israel. Thus, the historic
Christian will inform us that things like affirmative action make people
‘over-dependent on government’ as if overdependence on government was EVER a broad
concern in Christendom outside of the politics and indeed rhetoric of one
nation and one nation alone.
For these reasons it is clear as a bell to me that
historic Christianity is a specific theological construct belonging to one time
period and one geographic area. I mean this only as an assertion of fact not as
a criticism. If anyone reading this grew up in this construct, converted to
this construct or loves this construct it is no part of my intention to deprive
you of it. I only challenge the assumption that by means of this construction
you have something universally and historically normative. I especially
challenge the assumption that it is a fortress to rally around and a wall to
defend. Of course I know why you regard it as such and to an extent you are
expressing a reasonable concern. You fear being conformed to the alien values
of contemporary secular culture. You are concerned with compromising the Gospel
out of a desire to please others and avoid criticism. You view the ‘inerrant
and authoritative scripture’ as your hedge against this. Conform to that and
you will not risk conforming to the world!
Well here, I fear, is where your first Century paradigm
fails you. The world to which you are opposed is not the ancient world of
Greco-Roman Paganism but the secular expression of Christianity itself. You
cannot (and to your credit do not) dismiss concerns with race and social
justice though you offer no counterproposals of any substance to the people who
anger you by pushing social justice claims in what you regard as an
‘un-biblical’ manner. Look in your heart and find Jesus is fine as a principle
of personal conduct but does not answer a single political or social question
of consequence. Here you only reject what others propose and refuse to
construct anything yourselves because you are ‘above politics’. This is because
you have classed a certain range of approaches to social problems, like
Critical Race Theory as ‘secular’ and thus (I heard one of you use the word)
Satanic. What is not ‘confessionally’ Christian and indeed ‘confessionally’ Evangelical
is unchristian and what is unchristian is inspired by the devil. I reject this
formula. Again, it simply ignores history. The schematic that has the spirit
operating only in the church and in which legitimate social demands cannot be generated
from the secular side of the ledger ignores the fact that even from a strict
biblicist perspective (read Amos!)
the demands of minorities for justice and especially ACTION towards justice
(rather than handwringing and endless injunctions to meditate and pray on the
subject) are basically just. This is so however wayward the expression of this
spirit may be in detail.[5]
In other words, there is more of the spirit in the world and less of it in the
church than is conveyed by an abstract schematic that opposes the two. Simply
put, the first century schematic is no longer adequate to our epoch which has
passed through 2000 years of Christendom. This is NOT to say that you or I or
anyone should use no discernment regarding the contemporary world. One form of
discernment however is to discern the unique demands of the time you are in and
not impose alien demands from a distant, earlier phase of culture. For
instance, one cannot go on about ‘government’ from a ‘first century perspective’
for which the modern democratic nation state did not exist and for which a
multi-national empire was the only current form.
This brings me to a final word about ‘fortress culture’
as I have come to call it. Historic Christians in North America at least, I
can’t speak about elsewhere, have built a parallel world with its own books,
its own cinema and, especially its own music. You would think that the historic
Christian would model these things on an aesthetic rooted in the ‘historic’
Christian past but curiously she does not. These art forms simply imitate the
reigning aesthetic in the general culture (so much for not conforming to the
world). They do so, moreover, unsuccessfully if by success one means aesthetic
not financial success. Fortress culture, in this sense, is limp and dull to
anyone outside the fortress. The best Christian bands I have heard are about as
good as the average secular one. There is no Christian Radiohead. This is not
because Christianity cannot inspire great contemporary songs either as a look
at the catalogue of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings will confirm. It is because
Historic Christianity has no history and thus no aesthetic traditions to root
itself in. It is pale secondary culture because all it does is appropriate: it borrows
the Devil’s tunes and tames them down, draining them of the primary creative
energy that shapes and defines a culture. It makes historic Christianity look
like a bubble in which nothing vital or pressing to the business of the day can
emerge. For this reason the primary contribution historic Christianity is
making to the world right now is a negative one: it is driving vengeful
populism and undermining centuries old traditions of democratic governance.
This indicates to me that historic Christianity will never be truly historic,
in the sense of being faithful to the past AND being the force driving the
future, until it gets its head out of the First Century.
[1] I
have heard any number of You Tube
preachers (the kind that interest me!) use this phrase including the forthright
and assertive Christian musician cum ‘Mama Bear’ apologist Alicia Childers.
Noting this I have consulted other sources and it seems to be that defenders of
‘fundamentalism’ do indeed, in spite of their commitment to Sola Scriptura,
defend their views as conforming to Christian history as an assumed norm. Of
course, if one gave these views a charitably broad definition there MIGHT be
some justification for this but one finds that when the fundamentalists spell
out what they mean by things like ‘scriptural inerrancy’ this impression of ‘historicality’
evaporates.
[2] This, at least, is what they SEEM to be
claiming. However, I assume they would admit that many statements in the Psalms,
say, have an expressive function. How, then, an expressive statement can be
propositionally inerrant seems a little hard for me to grasp. Other statements
in the Bible are addressed to one time period and not another as with the
external prescriptions of the law. These too are clearly not propositionally
inerrant in any sense I can understand even if they are of great spiritual
value understood in context. Also, I believe even they do not commit the heresy
of the anthropomorphists and take statements about the ‘arm of God’, say, as
figurative. Also, many of them admit that certain astronomical statements are
true not literally but phenomenally for a human observer. I can only suppose,
then, that they regard a certain subset of Biblical texts as uttering inerrant
propositions but then I have to ask how they differ in that from their liberal
or progressive opponents. Augustine held that there are certain ‘control’ texts
like the injunction to love God, self and neighbor against which the external
sense of other propositions or expressions in scripture have to be measured.
Texts that failed this measure might then, as Origen held, have to be
redeployed in a typological or allegorical mode. Yet I doubt the historic
Christians would accept this theory if it meant categorizing Paul’s injunctions
about women as historically contingent rather than universally binding or as
speaking of something OTHER than the empirical behavior of men and women in
church. All of this, perhaps, represents my ignorance of a tradition I was not
raised in and if any ‘historic Christian’ has a more nuanced understanding of
biblical hermeneutics than I have claimed here please share it with me.
[3]
The ancient view seems to be that the inspiration of the Spirit fills the
sacred author with the illumination and insight necessary to reveal the divine
Word in the sacred text. This text contained all that was pertinent and necessary to salvation and was 'infallible' in this particular sense at least. Humanity could learn what it needed to know about God and his plan from scripture properly read. Nothing in this view seems to necessitate that God
also determine the human author to specific words and phrases though I suppose it
doesn’t absolutely preclude it either. Nor does it seem to require factual inerrancy though, again, it may not specifically exclude it. I believe most theologians today, even
many evangelical ones, will admit that inspiration does not supervene over the
free will or even the individual character or style of the author. I actually
think the ancient church was wise to leave this suitably vague.
[4]
Versions of these claims about ‘scriptural inerrancy’, ‘substitutionary
atonement’, or ‘physical resurrection’ can no doubt be found at various places
in history. Taken singly, they may even approximate to common positions, as in
belief in the miracles of Jesus. HOWEVER, if one takes THESE specific propositions
and elevates them to the norm that defines Christianity as such, one has done
something new. The historic creeds, for instance, emphasize the dynamic
structure of sacred narrative rather than abstract statements of theological
principle. The ‘abstract’ character of the five fundamentals is a function of
their role in opposing the perceived evil of liberalism. The counter-reformation
reacted to a harder and more rigid Catholicism than existed before the
reformation and it seems to me at least that the same thing has happened here. This
is evident from the fact that the nature of the ‘fundamentals’ is determined by
what theological liberals were perceived to deny or denigrate. Thus ‘inspiration’,
which Christians in the past accepted, becomes hardened into a definition; ‘literal
inerrancy’ accomplished through direct divine dictation. Time after time, it seems
to me, these new definitions are sharper and more determinate in their
expression than the ‘historic’ views they are purportedly defending. Again, let
me emphasize that I am NOT saying this view of scripture is WRONG. I am simply
pointing out that if you claim it is the historic norm I think the evidence for
that is at very best ambivalent.
[5]
Some of you complain that the ‘religion of social justice’ is a merit based ‘works’
religion and to an extent this claim is correct. Indeed, I have noted that
tendency myself in several places. However, this says nothing about the ends
such people pursue, only the spirit in which they pursue them, and there is
PLENTY of self-righteousness and smug moralism on the other side as well.
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