A Conference I wish I could go to

The Analogy of Being:
Invention of the Anti-Christ or the Wisdom of God?

A Theological Symposium

Date: April 4—6, 2008

Place: Pope John Paul II
Cultural Center
3900 Harewood Road, NE
Washington, DC 20017

Synopsis of the Conference

Is there any ‘natural’ knowledge of God available to the human person, apart from Christian revelation, or is all knowledge of God given to human beings uniquely in Christ? Is Christianity irrevocably wed to the classical metaphysical tradition, or can God’s nature and character be rethought in distinctly modern ways, based upon a renewed reading of Scripture? What relationship or likeness, if any, exists between created nature and the grace of God? Does Christian theology presuppose a natural philosophical ‘capacity’ for knowledge of God in the human person?

All of these fundamental theological questions are situated at the heart of the famous 20th century debate between Erich Przywara S.J. and Karl Barth, and were treated in Przywara’s famous work Analogia Entis. These topics were also revisited by Hans Urs von Balthasar in his ecumenical landmark, The Theology of Karl Barth. On the occasion of a forthcoming English translation of Analogia Entis by John Betz and David Bentley Hart, this symposium will invite contemporary theologians indebted to Aquinas, Przywara, Barth and Balthasar to discuss these issues. Is the theological concept of the ‘analogy of being’ in fact an ‘invention of the anti-Christ’ as Karl Barth suggested, or is it a truth about creation revelatory of the wisdom of God?

The Annals of Either-Or

Brad has commended this article, "False Dichotomies in Mission," By Christopher J.H. Wright. From my point of view, it is an excellent analysis of the way either-or thinking has affected the life and mission of the church.

Wright lists the following false dichotomies:

1. We have tended to separate the individual from the cosmic and corporate impact of the gospel, and to prioritize the first.

2. We have tended to separate believing from living the gospel, and to prioritize the first.

3. We have tended to separate evangelism and discipleship, and to prioritize the first

4. We have tended to separate word and deed, or proclamation and demonstration, and to prioritize the first.

5. We have tended to separate evangelism from ecclesiology, and to prioritize the first.

Well worth reading and repentance.

Continuity or discontinuity? Defoliation or Weeding?

I've discovered a deep, challenging, humorous and scholarly blog by Tim Enloe entitled Societas Christiana: Adventures in Medieval Protestantism. I really appreciate his historical expertise and am grateful that he is "carrying on his education in public" because I'm eager to learn from him.

To whet your appetite...

What was the Reformation

Protestant apologetics against Catholicism seem in our day to be dominated by the assumption that arguing from historical and theological discontinuity is simply “the” Protestant way of doing things. Many of the “top names” in Protestant apologetics tell a story about the 16th century reformation which I believe gives away the store to the Catholics–who are, if nothing else, unembarassed by the history of the Church and claim it all as their own. By contrast, the typical Protestant story about Church history is founded upon embarassment–embarassment about the “dirtiness” of the pre-Protestant era Church, and a concomitant willingness to embrace all manner of arguments which seek to distance the Protestant reformation itself, and we as its heirs, from the majority of what had come before. I believe that this way of looking at the Protestant reformation is the historiographical equivalent of the very much un-reformational theological approach to the Scriptures which takes the distinction between Old and New Testaments and hardens it into a division across which very little can transfer and even less is really “relevant” to our lives today. In this post I would like to tell a different story about the Protestant reformation, a story not driven by the assumptions of perfectionism to embrace discontinuity and cut ourselves off from the bulk of God’s dealings with His saints in history.....


...No indeed, the Protestant reformers were not Moderns in the sense that the Evangelical Modernists think they were. On the contrary, the reformers thought like Medievals, they acted like Medievals, and they need to be analyzed as Medievals. This means sometimes they challenge us, their self-proclaimed heirs, in ways that make us extremely uncomfortable....

Defoliation or Weeding: Some Problems With the Radical Vision of “Reform

....Nevertheless, is there not a vast difference between weeding the garden (helping it to thrive) and defoliating it (preventing it from thriving)? The history of Radical reforming movements more easily lends itself to the defoliation metaphor than to the weeding one. Some Anabaptist groups dumped everything that had been handed down to them from previous generations and reformulated the Faith from scratch on the basis (they claimed) of “the Bible Alone.” Rationalists such as Michael Servetus eliminated the doctrine of the Trinity and sought a Faith that was so pure it was no longer even Christian. Centuries later, groups from the Campbellites to the Mormons severed themselves from all existing churches on the pretext that they were all “corrupt.” Their answer to the “corruption”? Restarting the Faith from scratch, in its pristine, pure, root form (as they, unaccountable to anyone outside of their own generation, understood that).

Parallel groups can be found in abundance today, not only in backward Fundamentalist sects but in many Evangelical groups as well. The citation above, from a major Evangelical advocate of the Radical program, reveals a concepts of “reform” more akin to defoliation than weeding. For all the appeals to Christ and the Apostles VS. “tradition,” the polemic against “tradition” seems often shallow and forced because of the assumption that “tradition” is all of a piece and always to be suspected of trying to sneak in while no one is looking and “make the Word of God of none effect.”

In reality, “tradition” in the New Testament is not quite so simple an affair. Sometimes it is something added to what has been written, something done in contradiction to the written Word by people who nevertheless represent the written Word correctly and who are to be obeyed on that score (Mt. 23:2). Other times “tradition” seems to be verbal teaching purporting to give the sense of the written Word but actually entirely distortive of it (Mark 7:13). Still other times Christ Himself enjoins actions which appear to be contradictory to the written Word, but which actually correctly give the sense of it, even apart from its “plain” meaning (Mt. 12:1-8). “Tradition” is not automatically a suspect category.

In other words, Christ did not command His followers to spend their lives frantically looking for creeping error and always trying to restore things to an original, pristine, undeveloped condition so that said errors would not become a “great tradition” that, just because it is a “great tradition,” makes Scripture of none effect. On the contrary, Christ did not command suspicion of tradition as a mere category of thought and life. Whatever one may think of the content of Paul’s “traditions” in 2 Thess. 2:15, the fact that he positively speaks of things handed down and enjoins obedience to them runs contrary to the Radical’s ingrained habit of instantly suspecting anything which he himself does not see when he “compares it with Scripture.” Indeed, it may be that this entire way of thinking is itself a “great tradition” and an instance of an error that has crept in and failed to be recognized by those who most deeply believe themselves qualified and able to recognize such.

In conclusion, then, the Radical manifesto cited above is untrue to the Scriptures. Watching out for error does not automatically entail defoliating the plant of “tradition.” There is more going on in the New Testament polemic against bad traditions than the defoliation metaphor can handle. This is the fundamental problem with the radical mode of reform. Digging ruthlessly for the root it carelessly uproots the fruit. Nobly seeking reformation it ignobly produces deformation. Chasing hard after purity, it at last grasps only sterility.

Islamic Apologetics: "The Truth About Jesus"

Abdur-Raheem Green, an apologist for Islam, is an entertaining, engaging speaker who deserves our attention. We should listen to him carefully and be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is within us.



From YouTube:

Born in Dar-es-salaam in Tanzania to British parents, Abdur-Raheem Green's father (born in England), Gavin Green, was a colonial administrator in the then extant British Empire. At an early age he moved back to the UK with his parents. His mother is of original Polish origin.

At the age of 10 he attended a Roman Catholic Monastic boarding school at Gilling Castle and then went onto Ampleforth College and went on to study history in the London University. However, he left his education unfinished in an effort to devote himself to Islamic works.

He became dissatisfied with Christianity at the age of 8, with it not making sense to him.

Green researched and practiced many religions, including Buddhism (for 3 years) before embracing Islam.

Whilst in Britain his father got a job in 1976 working for Barclays Bank International and was subsequently sent to Cairo, Egypt, to set up a branch of the Bank there.

His study of the Noble Qur'an immediately attracted him to Islam and he embraced Islam in 1988. He has been a Daw'ah practitioner in Britain since then.

Green now works in the London Central Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre as the Visits and English Dawa Co-ordinator.

Green is seen akin to lecturers such as Dr. Zakir Naik, Dr. Bilal Philips, Khalid Yasin and Yvonne Ridley, doing many lectures on Islam worldwide and also in London's famous Hyde Park, Speakers Corner.

TOWARDS A RESPONSE TO GREEN:

1) Truth = "something we can reason and establish to be a fact;" which doesn't contradict itself. For Islam, THE word of God cannot have any contradictions. The Bible cannot be THE word of God, and an account inspired by God but written by men. "Truth is a matter of facts; faith may or may not lead you to the truth."

TOWARDS A RESPONSE 1:
Islam (as Green presents it) seems to take language to be univocal, not analogous. Why must this be the case? If language is analogous, there can be such things as paradoxes. Paradoxes are NOT contradictions. They are admissions that there are things which we do not (yet) understand, but which are not nonsense. In a zeal to give a transcendent God all glory, Islam actually vaults human reason above divine reason, by limiting truth exclusively to a quality of propositions, instead of understanding it as a quality of being. (For more about "the truth of all things," read sections 31-35 here, in "The Two Sides of the Coin that is Truth," a section in Josef Pieper: an Anthology.)

Facts are not separable from faith. See the work of Alvin Plantinga and others regarding Reformed Epistemology

2) God doesn't need a son. He doesn't need to kill any son to forgive us: the "atonement" would be the greatest of all crimes.

TOWARDS A REPONSE 2:
Read C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity and the pietists. God's killing his son would certainly would be a cosmic crime if eradicating of sin was simply a matter of avenging His wrath. But what if we need someone to be the perfect "link" between God and us, who willingly offered Himself as "bait" in order to trap Satan? There are many other theories of atonement besides the substitutionary model.

3) Protestants had a noble and correct aim: they were right to reject the paganism and corruption of Catholicism, and seek "the Jesus of History." They rejected the worship of the mythological- theological Jesus, Mary, saints, and sacraments, but they failed to be consistent and follow things to their logical end. The Jesus of history is different from the Jesus of theology. Christianity is a paganism, not a monotheistic religion.

TOWARDS A RESPONSE 3:
Read C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of History .

Liberal Protestantism errs in separating Christ's divinity from his humanity because it holds the modernist skepticism about the supernatural. Liberal Protestantism takes the physical as its exclusive default (witness the historical-critical method and demythologizing.) Islam errs in separating Christ's divinity from his humanity because it takes the transcendent as its exclusive default, and understands God purely in terms of His will. volu. (Voluntarism is fundamentally non-physical.)

Both liberal protestants and Moslems are "either/or" people. Only Christians (Catholics, Orthodox, some Protestants) are able to be "both-and" people, and do justice to the complexity of what is real, and our God-given ability to know it.

4) It is a contradiction to believe that Jesus Christ is both God and man. (45:45) What defines a human being is different from what defines a God.

TOWARDS A RESPONSE 4:
Steve Evans does a thorough job of responding to the charge that the incarnation is logically impossible in chapter 6 of The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith, mentioned above.

See also Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate.

5) The canon grew up alongside the church. This does not establish truth.

TOWARDS A RESONSE 5:
Again, this assumes a very narrow definition of truth, one which gives primacy to ratio and not to intellectus. (Look here ) Furthermore, is this any more problematic than the situation Islam presents: in itself, the Koran may be true and inerrant, but how does a mere mortal sort out what is true? Do the Sunnis or Shi'as have the correct interpretation? Which clergyman is right? Bottom line: we can't avoid appeal to the Holy Spirit, whether it is in overseeing the establishment of the canon, or in assisting our understanding of that canon.

6) God cannot do anything. He can't do something stupid/contradictory. He can't make square circles, yet this is what Christians believe!

TOWARDS A RESPONSE 6:
Yes, there are some muddle headed Christians who do believe God can do contradictory things. But again, C. S. Lewis offers a clarity in The Problem of Pain: "Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God." (One of my most popular entries in this blog concerns this very issue. Read it here).

Analogy of Being or Analogy of Faith? Both, Please!

I've discovered a fascinating blog, Millinerd, and highly recommend perusing Mathhew J. Milliner's musings. Milliner is a graduate of Wheaton and the Princeton Theological Seminary, and is now pursuing his doctorate in art history at Princeton.

Last Thursday night at Free Range, I gave my spiel about premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism. There wasn't time to go into detail, but I tried to suggest that one way of understanding premodernism is that it affirms the analogy of being, whereas the other periods do not. Tonight I stumbled on Milliner's blog entry that provides further support for this idea. I reproduce it in its entirety below, and encourage you to check this fellow out for yourself. He's a both-and kind of guy, without being wishy-washy.

Who's Afraid of the Analogia Entis?
Saturday, December 16, 2006

For those wondering what the analogia entis is (the "analogy of being"), allow me to explain in a way that probably won't satisfy full-time theologians (whom I respectfully don't intend to satisfy), but hopefully will satisfy newcomers to the term: It is the notion that the very being (entis) of the created world offers an analogy by which we can (in a very limited way) comprehend God. For example, if you've looked at a sunset and wondered that perhaps God is similarly beautiful, you've intuitively employed what theologians call the analogia entis.

This way of thinking is well expressed in contemporary idiom in addresses like this, but because of its heyday in the Medieval world, the analogia entis is best articulated by Medieval theologians such as Bonaventure: (continue...)

"All created things of the sensible world lead the mind of the contemplator and wise man to eternal God... They are the shades, the resonances, the pictures of that efficient, exemplifying, and ordering art; they are the tracks, simulacra, and spectacles; they are divinely given signs set before us for the purpose of seeing God. They are exemplifications set before our still unrefined and sense-oriented minds, so that by the sensible things which they see they might be transferred to the intelligible which they cannot see, as if by signs to the signified" (Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, 2.11, as quoted p. 165).

For those pleased by the preceding passage, it may surprise you that the analogia entis comes under severe Protestant attack. Why? Because of the dangers of abuse.

The 20th century Protestant theologian Karl Barth, in an overstatement that recalls Luther's remarks on the Mass below, called the analogia entis the "invention of the antichrist"(x). I imagine he did so because of its potential to obscure the mediating role that belongs to Christ alone. Instead Barth proposed the analogia fidei, (the "analogy of faith"), meaning the only link between ourselves and God is one of faith in Christ, recalling of course the Reformation's sola fide. In so doing, Barth burned all bridges but one, remembering that there is "one mediator" and "one foundation."

And in this Barth was right.

But consider the words of Pope Benedict in his recent Regensburg address, which, were they paying attention might have upset world Barthians as much as Muslims:

"The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason, there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf" (9/12/06).

Benedict, speaking for the largest Christian tradition on the globe, makes three essential moves that when properly understood reasonably alleviates the fear of abusing the analogy of being:

1. First, he recalls the words of the Fourth Lateran Council ("maior dissimulitudo in tanta similitudine"), explaining that the church has for quite some time been on record saying that the world's dissimilarity to God is somewhat greater than the similarity to God. Woops - did I say somewhat? I misquoted. Let me start again: He said "unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness." This is, after all, a fallen world. Anyone therefore fearing that the analogia entis obscures God's transcendence, or leaves no room for apophatic (negative) theology, needs to run by Benedict's statement again.

2. Secondly, in words that could be addressed directly to postmodern reductionists, Benedict shows that the analogia entis is important because it's easy to overdose on negative theology (a danger especially near to wounded ex-evangelicals on a positivist hangover who just discovered that negative theology exists). Benedict says that "God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism," by which I take him to mean that the analogia entis safeguards us from the dangers of mysticism and subjectivism, thereby indirectly securing the essential benefits of both.

3. Finally, and most importantly, Benedict explains that the analogia entis is related to the logos - the ordering principle by which God created all that is. And this logos is none other than the Logos, Jesus Christ. The reason the analogy of being makes sense, even after God has definitively revealed himself in Jesus Christ, is because Christ is the one "through whom all things were made" and in whom "all things hold together."Therefore to contemplate an analogy between the being of the created world and the being of God is, properly understood, not something done independently of the Logos, Jesus Christ.

So, who'll it be? Bonaventure, Barth or Benedict? I'll take 'em all, the Barthian insight being wonderfully framed by the wider perspectives of Bonaventure and Benedict. All shed important light on an enormous truth. What cannot be accepted is Barth's (or Luther's) hyperbolic desertions of large swaths of the tradition. Just as Protestant condemnations of the Mass cannot reasonably be sustained in light of the Catholic Church's emphatic clarification (see pt. 1367) that the Mass is not a repeated sacrifice (which was the basis of the original protest), so Protestant condemnations of the analogia entis cannot in my judgment be sustained in light of Benedict's qualifications without running on the fumes of anti-Catholic prejudice (of which there is plenty).

For a more heavyweight discussion of this issue, consider how Hans Urs von Balthasar (p. 163) suggested that he could subsume Barth's analogia fidei into the Catholic analogia entis, or how David Bentley Hart (see p. 242) playfully turns the tables on Barth (a move which was debated at a recent session covered here and here), but as stated above, that may be more interesting to full-time theologians.

The matter is not whether there is more than one mediator or more than one foundation, but just how big that mediator and foundation is. The question is not which of the two analogies is true. They both are (with priority, I would submit, going to the analogia fidei). The question is in which can we afford to neglect. The answer is neither.

Why Catholicism makes Protestantism Tick

apropos a recent post by Scot McKnight about Thomas Howard, I reproduce this essay by Mark Brumley.


Why Catholicism Makes Protestantism Tick: Louis Bouyer on the Reformation

Mark Brumley

http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features/mbrumley_bouyer1_nov04.asp

Interpreting the Reformation is complicated business. But like many complicated things, it can be simplified sufficiently well that even non-experts can get the gist of it.

Here's what seems a fairly accurate but simplified summary of the issue: The break between Catholics and Protestants was either a tragic necessity (to use Jaroslav Pelikan's expression) or it was tragic because unnecessary.

Many Protestants see the Catholic/Protestant split as a tragic necessity, although the staunchly anti-Catholic kind of Protestant often sees nothing tragic about it. Or if he does, the tragedy is that there ever was such a thing as the Roman Catholic Church that the Reformers had to separate from. His motto is "Come out from among them" and five centuries of Christian disunity has done nothing to cool his anti-Roman fervor.

Yet for most Protestants, even for most conservative Protestants, this is not so. They believe God "raised up" Luther and the other Reformers to restore the Gospel in its purity. They regret that this required a break with Roman Catholics (hence the tragedy) but fidelity to Christ, on their view, demanded it (hence the necessity).

Catholics agree with their more agreeable Protestant brethren that the sixteenth century division among Christians was tragic. But most Catholics who think about it also see it as unnecessary. At least unnecessary in the sense that what Catholics might regard as genuine issues raised by the Reformers could, on the Catholic view, have been addressed without the tragedy of dividing Christendom.

Yet we can go further than decrying the Reformation as unnecessary. In his ground-breaking work, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, Louis Bouyer argued that the Catholic Church herself is necessary for the full flowering of the Reformation principles. In other words, you need Catholicism to make Protestantism work–for Protestantism's principles fully to develop. Thus, the Reformation was not only unnecessary; it was impossible. What the Reformers sought, argues Bouyer, could not be achieved without the Catholic Church.

From Bouyer's conclusion we can infer at least two things. First, Protestantism can't be all wrong, otherwise how could the Catholic Church bring about the "full flowering of the principles of the Reformation"? Second, left to itself, Protestantism will go astray and be untrue to some of its central principles. It's these two points, as Bouyer articulates them, I would like to consider here.

One thing should be said up-front: although a convert from French Protestantism, Bouyer is no anti-Protestant polemicist. His Spirit and Forms of Protestantism was written a half-century ago, a decade before Vatican II's decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, yet it avoids the bitter anti-Protestantism that sometimes afflicted pre-conciliar Catholic works on Protestantism. That's one reason the book remains useful, even after decades of post-conciliar ecumenism.

In that regard, Bouyer's brief introduction is worth quoting in full:

"This book is a personal witness, a plain account of the way in which a Protestant came to feel himself obliged in conscience to give his adherence to the Catholic Church. No sentiment of revulsion turned him from the religion fostered in him by a Protestant upbringing followed by several years in the ministry. The fact is, he has never rejected it. It was his desire to explore its depths, its full scope, that led him, step by step, to a genuinely spiritual movement stemming from the teachings of the Gospel, and Protestantism as an institution, or rather complexus of institutions, hostile to one another as well as to the Catholic Church. The study of this conflict brought him to detect the fatal error which drove the spiritual movement of Protestantism out of the one Church. He saw the necessity of returning to that Church, not in order to reject any of the positive Christian elements of his religious life, but to enable them, at last, to develop without hindrance.

"The writer, who carved out his way step by step, or rather, saw it opening before his eyes, hopes now to help along those who are still where he started. In addition, he would like to show those he has rejoined how a little more understanding of the others, above all a greater fidelity to their own gift, could help their ‘separated brethren' to receive it in their turn. In this hope he offers his book to all who wish to be faithful to the truth, first, to the Word of God, but also to the truth of men as they are, not as our prejudices and habits impel us to see them."

Bouyer, then, addresses both Protestants and Catholics. To the Protestants, he says, in effect, "It is fidelity to our Protestant principles, properly understood, that has led me into the Catholic Church." To the Catholics, he says, "Protestantism isn't as antithetical to the Catholic Faith as you suppose. It has positive principles, as well as negative ones. Its positive principles, properly understood, belong to the Catholic Tradition, which we Catholics can see if we approach Protestantism with a bit of understanding and openness."

The Reformation was Right

Bouyer's argument is that the Reformation's main principle was essentially Catholic: "Luther's basic intuition, on which Protestantism continuously draws for its abiding vitality, so far from being hard to reconcile with Catholic tradition, or inconsistent with the teaching of the Apostles, was a return to the clearest elements of their teaching, and in the most direct line of that tradition."

1. Sola Gratia. What was the Reformation's main principle? Not, as many Catholics and even some Protestants think, "private judgment" in religion. According to Bouyer, "the true fundamental principle of Protestantism is the gratuitousness of salvation"–sola gratia. He writes, "In the view of Luther, as well as of all those faithful to his essential teaching, man without grace can, strictly speaking, do nothing of the slightest value for salvation. He can neither dispose himself for it, nor work for it in any independent fashion. Even his acceptance of grace is the work of grace. To Luther and his authentic followers, justifying faith . . . is quite certainly, the first and most fundamental grace."

Bouyer then shows how, contrary to what many Protestants and some Catholics think, salvation sola gratia is also Catholic teaching. He underscores the point to any Catholics who might think otherwise:

"If, then, any Catholic–and there would seem to be many such these days–whose first impulse is to reject the idea that man, without grace, can do nothing towards his salvation, that he cannot even accept the grace offered except by a previous grace, that the very faith which acknowledges the need of grace is a purely gratuitous gift, he would do well to attend closely to the texts we are about to quote."

In other words, "Listen up, Catholics!"

Bouyer quotes, at length, from the Second Council of Orange (529), the teaching of which was confirmed by Pope Boniface II as de fide or part of the Church's faith. The Council asserted that salvation is the work of God's grace and that even the beginning of faith or the consent to saving grace is itself the result of grace. By our natural powers, we can neither think as we ought nor choose any good pertaining to salvation. We can only do so by the illumination and impulse of the Holy Spirit.

Nor is it merely that man is limited in doing good. The Council affirmed that, as a result of the Fall, man is inclined to will evil. His freedom is gravely impaired and can only be repaired by God's grace. Following a number of biblical quotations, the Council states, "[W]e are obliged, in the mercy of God, to preach and believe that, through sin of the first man, the free will is so weakened and warped, that no one thereafter can either love God as he ought, or believe in God, or do good for the sake of God, unless moved, previously, by the grace of the divine mercy . . . . Our salvation requires that we assert and believe that, in every good work we do, it is not we who have the initiative, aided, subsequently, by the mercy of God, but that he begins by inspiring faith and love towards him, without any prior merit of ours."

The Council of Trent, writes Bouyer, repeated that teaching, ruling out "a parallel action on the part of God and man, a sort of ‘synergism', where man contributes, in the work of salvation, something, however slight, independent of grace." Even where Trent insists that man is not saved passively, notes Bouyer, it doesn't assert some independent, human contribution to salvation. Man freely cooperates in salvation, but his free cooperation is itself the result of grace. Precisely how this is so is mysterious, and the Church has not settled on a particular theological explanation. But that it is so, insist Bouyer, is Catholic teaching. Thus, concludes Bouyer, "the Catholic not only may, but must in virtue of his own faith, give a full and unreserved adherence to the sola gratia, understood in the positive sense we have seen upheld by Protestants."

2. Sola Fide: So much for sola gratia. But what about the other half of the Reformation principle regarding salvation, the claim that justification by grace comes through faith alone (sola fide)?

According to Bouyer, the main thrust of the doctrine of sola fide was to affirm that justification was wholly the work of God and to deny any positive human contribution apart from grace. Faith was understood as man's grace-enabled, grace-inspired, grace-completed response to God's saving initiative in Jesus Christ. What the Reformation initially sought to affirm, says Bouyer, was that such a response is purely God's gift to man, with man contributing nothing of his own to receive salvation.

In other words, it isn't as if God does his part and man cooperates by doing his part, even if that part is minuscule. The Reformation insisted that God does his part, which includes enabling and moving man to receive salvation in Christ. Man's "part" is to believe, properly understood, but faith too is the work of God, so man contributes nothing positively of his own. As Bouyer points out, this central concern of the Reformation also happened to be defined Catholic teaching, reaffirmed by the Council of Trent.

In a sense, the Reformation debate was over the nature of saving faith, not over whether faith saves. St. Thomas Aquinas, following St. Augustine and the patristic understanding of faith and salvation, said that saving faith was faith "formed by charity." In other words, saving faith involves at least the beginnings of the love of God. In this way, Catholics could speak of "justification by grace alone, through faith alone," if the "alone" was meant to distinguish the gift of God (faith) from any purely human contribution apart from grace; but not if "alone" was meant to offset faith from grace-enabled, grace-inspired, grace-accomplished love of God or charity.

For Catholic theologians of the time, the term "faith" was generally used in the highly refined sense of the gracious work of God in us by which we assent to God's Word on the authority of God who reveals. In this sense, faith is distinct from entrusting oneself to God in hope and love, though obviously faith is, in a way, naturally ordered to doing so: God gives man faith so that man can entrust himself to God in hope and love. But faith, understood as mere assent (albeit graced assent), is only the beginning of salvation. It needs to be "informed" or completed by charity, also the work of grace.

Luther and his followers, though, rejected the Catholic view that "saving faith" was "faith formed by charity" and therefore not "faith alone", where "faith" is understood as mere assent to God's Word, apart from trust and love. In large part, this was due to a misunderstanding by Luther. "We must not be misled on this point," writes Bouyer, "by Luther's later assertions opposed to the fides caritate formata [faith informed by charity]. His object in disowning this formula was to reject the idea that faith justified man only if there were added to it a love proceeding from a natural disposition, not coming as a gift of God, the whole being the gift of God." Yet Luther's view of faith, contents Bouyer, seems to imply an element of love, at least in the sense of a total self-commitment to God. And, of course, this love must be both the response to God's loving initiative and the effect of that initiative by which man is enabled and moved to respond. But once again, this is Catholic doctrine, for the charity that "informs" faith so that it becomes saving faith is not a natural disposition, but is as much the work of God as the assent of faith.

Thus, Bouyer's point is that the doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola fide) was initially seen by the Reformers as a way of upholding justification by grace alone (sola gratia), which is also a fundamental Catholic truth. Only later, as a result of controversy, did the Reformers insist on identifying justification by faith alone with a negative principle that denied any form of cooperation, even grace-enabled cooperation.

3. Sola Scriptura: Melanchthon, the colleague of Luther, called justification sola gratia, sola fide the "Material Principle" of the Reformation. But there was also the Formal Principle, the doctrine of sola Scriptura or what Bouyer calls the sovereign authority of Scripture. What of that?

Here, too, says Bouyer, the Reformation’s core positive principle is correct. The Word of God, rather than a human word, must govern the life of the Christian and of the Church. And the Word of God is found in a unique and supreme form in the Bible, the inspired Word of God. The inspiration of the Bible means that God is the primary author of Scripture. Since we can say that about no other writing or formal expression of the Church’s Faith, not even conciliar or papal definitions of faith, the Bible alone is the Word of God in this sense and therefore it possesses a unique authority.

Yet the supremacy of the Bible does not imply an opposition between it and the authority of the Church or Tradition, as certain negative principles adopted by the Reformers implied. Furthermore, the biblical spirituality of Protestantism, properly understood, is in keeping with the best traditions of Catholic spirituality, especially those of the Fathers and the great medieval theologians. Through Scripture, God speaks to us today, offering a living Word to guide our lives in Christ.

Thus, writes Bouyer, "the supreme authority of Scripture, taken in its positive sense, as gradually drawn out and systematized by Protestants themselves, far from setting the Church and Protestantism in opposition, should be the best possible warrant for their return to understanding and unity."

The Reformation was Wrong

Where does this leave us? If the Reformation was right about sola gratia and sola Scriptura, its two key principles, how was it wrong? Bouyer holds that only the positive elements of these Reformation principles are correct.

Unfortunately, these principles were unnecessarily linked by the Reformers to certain negative elements, which the Catholic Church had to reject. Here we consider two of those elements: 1) the doctrine of extrinsic justification and the nature of justifying faith and 2) the authority of the Bible.

1. Extrinsic Justification. Regarding justification by grace alone, it was the doctrine of extrinsic justification and the rejection of the Catholic view of faith formed by charity as "saving faith." Bouyer writes, "The further Luther advanced in his conflict with other theologians, then with Rome, then with the whole of contemporary Catholicism and finally with the Catholicism of every age, the more closely we see him identifying affirmation about sola gratia with a particular theory, known as extrinsic justification."

Extrinsic justification is the idea that justification occurs outside of man, rather than within him. Catholicism, as we have seen, holds that justification is by grace alone. In that sense, it originates outside of man, with God’s grace. But, according to Catholic teaching, God justifies man by effecting a change within him, by making him just or righteous, not merely by saying he is just or righteous or treating him as if he were. Justification imparts the righteousness of Christ to man, transforming him by grace into a child of God.

The Reformation view was different. The Reformers, like the Catholic Church, insisted that justification is by grace and therefore originates outside of man, with God. But they also insisted that when God justifies man, man is not changed but merely declared just or righteous. God treats man as if he were just or righteous, imputing to man the righteousness of Christ, rather than imparting it to him.

The Reformers held this view for two reasons. First, because they came to think it necessary in order to uphold the gratuitousness of justification. Second, because they thought the Bible taught it. On both points, argues Bouyer, the Reformers were mistaken. There is neither a logical nor a biblical reason why God cannot effect a change in man without undercutting justification by grace alone. Whatever righteousness comes to be in man as a result of justification is a gift, as much any other gift God bestows on man. Nor does the Bible’s treatment of "imputed" righteousness imply that justification is not imparted. On these points, the Reformers were simply wrong:

"Without the least doubt, grace, for St. Paul, however freely given, involves what he calls ‘the new creation’, the appearance in us of a ‘new man’, created in justice and holiness. So far from suppressing the efforts of man, or making them a matter of indifference, or at least irrelevant to salvation, he himself tells us to ‘work out your salvation with fear and trembling’, at the very moment when he affirms that ‘. . . knowing that it is God who works in you both to will and to accomplish.’ These two expressions say better than any other that all is grace in our salvation, but at the same time grace is not opposed to human acts and endeavor in order to attain salvation, but arouses them and exacts their performance."

Calvin, notes Bouyer, tried to circumvent the biblical problems of the extrinsic justification theory by positing a systematic distinction between justification, which puts us in right relation to God but which, on the Protestant view, doesn’t involve a change in man; and sanctification, which transforms us. Yet, argues Bouyer, this systematic distinction isn’t biblical. In the Bible, justification and sanctification–as many modern Protestant exegetes admit–are two different terms for the same process. Both occur by grace through faith and both involve a faith "informed by charity" or completed by love. As Bouyer contends, faith in the Pauline sense, "supposes the total abandonment of man to the gift of God"–which amounts to love of God. He argues that it is absurd to think that the man justified by faith, who calls God "Abba, Father," doesn’t love God or doesn’t have to love him in order to be justified.

2. Sola Scriptura vs. Church and Tradition. Bouyer also sees a negative principle that the Reformation unnecessarily associated with sola Scriptura or the sovereignty of the Bible. Yes, the Bible alone is the Word of God in the sense that only the Bible is divinely inspired. And yes the Bible’s authority is supreme in the sense that neither the Church nor the Church’s Tradition "trumps" Scripture. But that doesn’t mean that the Word of God in an authoritative form is found only in the Bible, for the Word of God can be communicated in a non-inspired, yet authoritative form as well. Nor does it mean that there can be no authoritative interpreter of the Bible (the Magisterium) or authoritative interpretation of biblical doctrine (Tradition). Repudiation of the Church’s authority and Tradition simply doesn’t follow from the premise of Scripture’s supremacy as the inspired Word of God. Furthermore, the Tradition and authority of the Church are required to determine the canon of the Bible.

Luther and Calvin did not follow the Radical Reformation in rejecting any role for Church authority or Tradition altogether. But they radically truncated such a role. Furthermore, they provided no means by which the Church, as a community of believers, could determine when the Bible was being authentically interpreted or who within the community had the right to make such a determination for the community. In this way, they ultimately undercut the supremacy of the Bible, for they provided no means by which the supreme authority of the Bible could, in fact, be exercised in the Church as a whole. The Bible’s authority extended only so far as the individual believer’s interpretation of it allowed.

The Catholic Church and Reformation Principles

As we have seen, Bouyer argues for the Reformation’s "positive principles" and against its "negative principles." But how did what was right from one point of view in the Reformation go so wrong from another point of view? Bouyer argues that the under the influence of decadent scholasticism, mainly Nominalism, the Reformers unnecessarily inserted the negative elements into their ideas along with the positive principles. "Brought up on these lines of thought, identified with them so closely they could not see beyond them," he writes, "the Reformers could only systematize their very valuable insights in a vitiated framework."

The irony is profound. The Reformation sought to recover "genuine Christianity" by hacking through what it regarded as the vast overgrowth of medieval theology. Yet to do so, the Reformers wielded swords forged in the fires of the worst of medieval theology–the decadent scholasticism of Nominalism.

The negative principles of the Reformation necessarily led the Catholic Church to reject the movement–though not, in fact, its fundamental positive principles, which were essentially Catholic. Eventually, argues Bouyer, through a complex historical process, these negative elements ate away at the positive principles as well. The result was liberal Protestantism, which wound up affirming the very things Protestantism set out to deny (man’s ability to save himself) and denying things Protestantism began by affirming (sola gratia).

Bouyer contends that the only way to safeguard the positive principles of the Reformation is through the Catholic Church. For only in the Catholic Church are the positive principles the Reformation affirmed found without the negative elements the Reformers mistakenly affixed to them. But how to bring this about?

Bouyer says that both Protestants and Catholics have responsibilities here. Protestants must investigate their roots and consider whether the negative elements of the Reformation, such as extrinsic justification and the rejection of a definitive Church teaching authority and Tradition, are necessary to uphold the positive principles of sola gratia and the supremacy of Scripture. If not, then how is continued separation from the Catholic Church justified? Furthermore, if, as Bouyer contends, the negative elements of the Reformation were drawn from a decadent theology and philosophy of the Middle Ages and not Christian antiquity, then it is the Catholic Church that has upheld the true faith and has maintained a balance regarding the positive principles of the Reformation that Protestantism lacks. In this way, the Catholic Church is needed for Protestantism to live up to its own positive principles.

Catholics have responsibilities as well. One major responsibility is to be sure they have fully embraced their own Church’s teaching on the gratuitousness of salvation and the supremacy of the Bible. As Bouyer writes, "Catholics are in fact too prone to forget that, if the Church bears within herself, and cannot ever lose, the fullness of Gospel truth, its members, at any given time and place, are always in need of a renewed effort to apprehend this truth really and not just, as Newman would say, ‘notionally’." "To Catholics, lukewarm and unaware of their responsibilities," he adds, the Reformation, properly understood, "recalls the existence of many of their own treasures which they overlook."

Only if Catholics are fully Catholic–which includes fully embracing the positive principles of the Reformation that Bouyer insists are essentially Catholic–can they "legitimately aspire to show and prepare their separated brethren the way to a return which would be for them not a denial but a fulfillment."

Today, as in the sixteenth century, the burden rests with us Catholics. We must live, by God’s abundant grace, up to our high calling in Christ Jesus. And in this way, show our Protestant brethren that their own positive principles are properly expressed only in the Catholic Church.


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Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles:

• Has The Reformation Ended? An Interview with Dr. Mark Noll

• Evangelicals and Catholics In Conversation, Part 1 Interview with Dr. Brad Harper

• Evangelicals and Catholics In Conversation, Part 2 Interview with Dr. Brad Harper

• Thomas Howard and the Kindly Light IgnatiusInsight.com

• Objections, Obstacles, Acceptance: An Interview with J. Budziszewski IgnatiusInsight.com

• Thomas Howard on the Meaning of Tradition IgnatiusInsight.com

• Surprised by Conversion: The Patterns of Faith Peter E. Martin

• Reformation 101: Who's Who in the Protestant Reformation Geoffrey Saint-Clair

• The Tale of Trent: A Council and and Its Legacy Martha Rasmussen

Rehabilitating Luther

From The Times March 6, 2008

That Martin Luther? He wasn’t so bad, says Pope

Richard Owen in Rome

Pope Benedict XVI is to rehabilitate Martin Luther, arguing that he did not intend to split Christianity but only to purge the Church of corrupt practices.

Pope Benedict will issue his findings on Luther (1483-1546) in September after discussing him at his annual seminar of 40 fellow theologians — known as the Ratzinger Schülerkreis — at Castelgandolfo, the papal summer residence. According to Vatican insiders the Pope will argue that Luther, who was excommunicated and condemned for heresy, was not a heretic.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, the head of the pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said the move would help to promote ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and Protestants. It is also designed to counteract the impact of July's papal statement describing the Protestant and Orthodox faiths as defective and “not proper Churches”.

The move to re-evaluate Luther is part of a drive to soften Pope Benedict's image as an arch conservative hardliner as he approaches the third anniversary of his election next month. This week it emerged that the Vatican is planning to erect a statue of Galileo, who also faced a heresy trial, to mark the 400th anniversary next year of his discovery of the telescope.

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The Pope has also reached out to the Muslim world to mend fences after his 2006 speech at Regensburg University in which he appeared to describe Islam as inherently violent and irrational. This week Muslim scholars and Vatican officials met at the pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue in Rome to begin laying the groundwork for a meeting between the Pope and leading Muslims, also expected to be held at Castelgandolfo.

Cardinal Kasper said: “We have much to learn from Luther, beginning with the importance he attached to the word of God.” It was time for a “more positive” view of Luther, whose reforms had aroused papal ire at the time but could now be seen as having “anticipated aspects of reform which the Church has adopted over time”.

The Castelgandolfo seminar will in part focus on the question of apostolic succession, through which the apostles passed on the authority they received from Jesus to the first bishops. After the Reformation Protestants took the view that “succession” referred only to God's Word and not to church hierarchies but some German scholars have suggested Luther himself did not intend this.

Luther challenged the authority of the papacy by holding that the Bible is the sole source of religious authority and made it accessible to ordinary people by translating it into the vernacular. He became convinced that the Church had lost sight of the “central truths of Christianity”, and was appalled on a visit to Rome in 1510 by the power, wealth and corruption of the papacy.

In 1517 he protested publicly against the sale of papal indulgences for the remission of sins in his “95 Theses”, nailing a copy to the door of a Wittenberg church. Some theologians argue that Luther did not intend to confront the papacy “in a doctrinaire way” but only to raise legitimate questions - a view Pope Benedict apparently shares.

Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X, who dismissed him initially as “a drunken German who will change his mind when sober”.

BOUYER 1: Grace as objective/Faith as subjective

I've begun reading Bouyer:

These two expressions ["salvation by grace" and "justification by faith"]...do not indicate two distinct principles, but two aspects of the same principle--the objective aspect being the gift of God; and the subjective the appropriation of the gift by man. Nonetheless, the two aspects are not the same: though we may not separate them entirely, we have to study each in turn. Clearly, it is the first, objective aspect that determines the second; so we begin with the study of the gratutious nature of salvation. A later investigation into the part played in Protestantism by the faith through which salvation is appropriated will, moreover, bring to our notice a marked tendency, running through the whole course of Protestant history, to a separation, in effect, of "grace" and "faith." In principle, however, they are intimately united, and it is quite certain that faith derives its content from grace, and not vice versa. (Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, p. 33-34)

Beth:

Hmm. So is this one way of understanding the differences between Catholics and Protestants? Do Catholics see "salvation by grace" and "justification by faith" as two sides of the same coin, while Protestants see them as two different coins?

The old medieval motto was "distinguish in order to unite." Is there a corresponding "motto" for Protestantism? "Separate in order to purify?"

Why the need for separation? Or should the question instead be, why the need to unite? How do ones' metaphysical presuppostions color even the way the question is framed?

Hmmm. I'll have to read on.