The Joy of Conflict

One way to tell the story of the church in the middle ages is to make it a story about how Christianity becomes paganized. But another way to tell it is to make it about how paganism is sublimated and incrementally Christianized. The first way we often hear from nineteenth-century historiography, the second I learned from C.S. Lewis.

What is the deciding factor? I have thought that it is a matter of temperament or of preferences, but I don’t think as much any longer. Now I wonder if it isn’t a matter of knowing which is the fundamental power. How can the lesser ever overcome the greater?

It reminds me of something I read in the spring and somebody tweeted a few weeks ago. It is from The Return of the King. Pippin and Gandalf are watching the east from the battlements of Minas Tirith awaiting calamity from Mordor. Gandalf laughs, and Pippin looks at him because the sound was not as he expected. It was glad rather than grim. Peering at Gandalf’s profile, Pippin sees only “lines of care and sorrow” but “as he looked more intently he perceived that under all there was a great joy.” Now, why should this be?

It reminds me of something Jordan Peterson said in his Exodus seminar in reply to a question from Dennis Prager about the concentration camps and gulags. He said that we remember them in order to recognize that the spirit that overcame all that is greater. Gandalf knew that this is a spirit infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, by Timothy J. Keller

I should say I’ve never read through a book by Tim Keller before, other than his book on deacons. I’m neither a fan nor a detractor. I don’t read him looking for problems and I don’t read him as my guru.

I was not expecting to be so impressed by this book, since Keller has attained celebrity, but I found that he has done the work. When you write about prayer you can study all kinds of things and have many borrowed ideas, but what sorts the frauds out of the equation is the actual practice. Prayer is many things, but it turns out that communion with God takes concerted effort. The practical insights and observations and time spent sifting and attempting strike me as tangible and genuine. As far as the study goes, Keller offers good evaluations and synthesizes what expert prayers have said. He has written a book that is explicitly in the tradition of the Reformation and leans heavily on John Owen. Augustine figures in the book a little, Luther and Calvin more, but of all the influences, from casual mention of Aquinas or Kierkergaard, (and even outright disreputable, secondary-literature cliches about Plato and The Cloud of Unknowing—which at least is the mark of genuine evangelicalism) and insights from C.S. Lewis and more contemporary teachers, he leans most on John Owen, who is hard to master.

Keller demonstrates an ability to handle literature and poetry (which anybody who handles the Bible ought to have some competence in), has long pastoral experience on which to draw, has obviously seriously endeavored to get a better grasp on prayer and succeeded, and is well-trained in theology. This may seem obvious to many, but it says something that it is demonstrated just by reading the book. And it is demonstrated to a reader who takes up any contemporary evangelical with a perhaps an over-hearty dose of skepticism. I want to appreciate all good wherever I find it, but I admit that I tend to give the most grudging attention to American evangelicals.

Keller is good at summarizing and characterizing, for example, Luther’s very useful instruction on prayer. Keller is a good reader and a good quoter and puts things in proper sequence. It takes a lot of careful, patient work. (Makes me wish Keller had devoted himself to “translating” and reorganizing John Owen the way Aaron Renn has.) When Keller channels the primary sources, he really is good. He explains Herbert’s poem on prayer with delicate insight. He expands on a statement of George Whitefield in ways that almost elevate Benjamin Franklin’s old buddy to the gnomic realms of Solomon himself. Keller has been significantly penetrated by C.S. Lewis, and nobody who has has ever been lessened thereby. I have no doubt that what Keller demonstrates would constitute for many of us a recovery of something rich and strange which has been neglected and is decayed. This book is inspiring, it is instructive, and it has detailed, useful insights. I doubt a better overall book on prayer exists in contemporary English.

You can find an interesting outline on page 141. Keller summarizes the first part of his book, having richly explained what prayer is, what it requires, what is given through it, and where it takes us. Prayer is a duty and it is a discipline, it is conversation with God in the form of adoration, confession, gratitude and petition. Prayer requires grace, reverence and humility, and it provides the diligent believer with a better perspective of God, strengthens or deepens his union with God and the sense of his presence. Prayer provides self-knowledge, and is what God uses to actuate the virtues of faith, hope, and love. It is a book to keep and to consult.

My main criticism is that I find his strong connection with the Reformation is not really anchored in anything that went before. He deals with Augustine, but that just makes any influence other than Augustine from the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity even more conspicuously absent. I don’t think this will alarm most Reformed people, but if I can be picky, I really think it is a weakness. There is some mention of Carl Trueman who wrote an article suggesting the riches of medieval spiritual writing might be profitable even for Christians today, but that just shows how little Christianity before the Reformation of the sixteenth century is expected to speak to us. What Keller appears to have done (as far as I can tell from the sources he himself provides) is to read Hans Urs von Balthazar on the Catholic tradition of prayer in order to distinguish it from a Reformed within the Protestant tradition. If this is all that he did, then he made his decision based on secondary literature. Page through his end notes and annotated bibliography and see if it is otherwise than it appears to me. When it comes to more ancient contributions, he is drawing on secondary literature seemingly exclusively (and even for a quotation from Augustine’s De doctrina). Big mistake. I think Protestantism is full of such evaluations and it redounds to the credit of no one.

But it is a good book nevertheless. It is a book on prayer that is about the Christian life, in many ways, except that it is not about the church or corporate worship or the sacraments. I think that is where the weakness and the strength combine in this book. The strength being that he shows how prayer is the atmosphere, the breathing in and out, the moment by moment of the Christian life of communion with God in ways that are not often communicated. The heart of prayer has to be intimate and personal: the individual soul that is seen by God and is becoming absorbed in seeing God. And beyond prayer Keller addresses further aspects of communion with God: Bible study, the importance of meditation as the transition from study to prayer, the use of Scripture in prayer, disciplining oneself to write collects and how that will improve one’s public prayer, etc. It is when he speaks about public prayer that one wonders about liturgical prayer, corporate prayer, and prayer meetings. There is a churchlessness that shows an evangelical poverty that is not what traditionally has been understood as evangelical poverty. I think it is the same phenomenon as the disconnection from the tradition, from the practice of the church universal.

In all fairness, Keller did not intend to write a book on the Christian life. He wrote a book that examined what prayer is and how an individual can begin to master it. I think it is good in that it represents substantial and exemplary movement in the right direction.

Provocations and Grumblings of the Unexamined Life

I find Timothy Keller a little more substantial on prayer than others. He’s no Tozer, but he does more work than many do. Can we call him deep evangelicalism? Though he goes through this silly and characteristically evangelical repudiation of mysticism (Tozer did a lot better here, writing the foreword to Moody’s edition of Madam Guyon) at least he connects with Augustine, Luther and Calvin. I’m grateful for his section on Luther as it gives me something to consult that is valuable and looks to have a lot of overlap with the meditative practices of Ignatius Loyola, Francis de Sales and Peter of Alcantara. No surprise there: Luther learned to pray as an Augustinian friar.

Keller has more substance because he can mention a Christian from the past other than C.S. Lewis, though he’s skittish about going far from the familiar. The approach of deep evangelicalism might be caricatured this way: there was Jesus and the Apostles, Paul, then Augustine and some others, then came Martin Luther and John Calvin and all the Puritans and John Owen, and then there was George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards and the Marrow men, and then there was Spurgeon, then Martin Lloyd-Jones, and now we have Sinclair Ferguson and John MacArthur.

And that is what is changing.

We have been like Hobbits, suspicious of books that don’t say exactly the things we expect. But like Hobbits, we have to grow up and scour the Shire of what has gotten in in the absence of the rangers.

On the Creatureliness of the Incarnate Son

I have mentioned several times in recent sermons the idea that in his humanity the risen and exalted Christ is the highest created being. As a result, a new member is concerned about Arianism in my expression. He affirms that Jesus Christ is fully human but is leery about ever calling Christ a creature for any reason.

Logically, this is simply proven. There is God and not God, and that is all reality. There is Creator and there is creature. The Eternal Son is not created, he is Creator from all eternity. But in the incarnation he assumes humanity, takes it up and so must enter the category of creature. Somehow, this person can’t accept that human is a subcategory of creature.

I am hoping that I can lead him into the story of Arius and that way on to Athanasius. Because he is lecturing me (!) on church history, I hope he will have some idea of Athanasius. Athanasius has a Statement of Faith in which he argues strongly against the creation of the Son and his eternal generation instead, and in the same paragraph says:

“However, the body which He wore for our sakes is a creature.”

The problem is that Athanasius then gets into a pretty convoluted explanation of Jeremiah 31:22 to back it up, and I don’t know if that will spoil it. I also have two other reasonably clear witnesses, Jonathan Edwards and Louis Berkhof. Perhaps he will find them more trustworthy than me.

“And it was necessary not only that Christ should take upon him a created nature, but that he should take upon him our nature. It would not have sufficed for Christ to have become an angel, and to have obeyed and suffered in the angelic nature. But it was necessary that he should become a man.” – Edwards, History of Redemption, Period II, Part I.

“Heaven is represented in Scripture as the dwelling place of created beings (angels, saints, the human nature of Christ).” – Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 350.

Review and Evaluation of F.P. Harton’s The Elements of the Spiritual Life

A Introduction

B Review

C Evaluation

D More to Come

A Introduction

“It is vital that there should be experts in spiritual direction who can deal with exceptional souls, but the majority of souls are not exceptional, and should be able to find what they need at home if their clergy would take the science of the spiritual life seriously and study to become directors of souls.” (336)

This quotation gives you the burden of Harton’s book. It is a study of ascetical theology, which means three things. First, it means that it is a study. That is, it is based on a careful and thorough examination. “The subject should be studied seriously and in good authorities,” he says, adding that “One good text-book should be mastered to show the way, and then as wide reading as possible in the great masters, the old masters. It is not books about the masters, but the masters themselves that should be read.” (232) I have no doubt he intended his book to provide that good textbook, though he recommends nine others, one of which comes in three volumes. The second thing he means is that it is a study of a particular discipline. Pierre Pourat in his three-tome textbook provides the taxonomic branching that accounts for the subdivision of ascetical theology. There is dogmatic theology which teaches us what to think. Moral theology is concerned with Christian behavior. Spiritual theology coordinates these two: the study of attaining to Christian perfection which coordinates and crowns dogma and ethical instruction. This third branch is subdivided into the study of the disciplines toward that end, which is the concern of ascetical theology, and then mystical theology, which deals with the recondite subject of Christian proficiency or perfection. The third thing Harton means when he says that this book is a study in ascetical theology is that the study of the disciplines given to achieve Christian perfection need to be studied, mastered, understood, handed on, and therefore require direction by directors.

Compare it to the doctrine of the Trinity. This doctrine must be derived from Scripture, from special revelation. If you want to study the doctrine of the Trinity in an advanced way so as to master it and instruct others in this doctrine, you cannot simply study Scripture and hope from that source alone to formulate a robust and comprehensive statement of the doctrine. You will have to study the masters: Hillary, Augustine, the Cappadocians, and Thomas Aquinas, among others. Harton believes the same applies to the subdivision of ascetical theology. This doctrine is latent in Scripture, it is revealed in Scripture, but it is developed and formulated in robust and comprehensive ways as the Holy Spirit guides his people into all truth down through the ages.

B Review

The book is divided into five parts. The first deals with the nature of the Christian life, coordinating the responsibility of the Christian and the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. The supernatural power is grace, which operates in us and ought to become operative in our habits. This results in a “Habitual Grace” which “enlightens the intellect and deepens its intuitive knowledge of God and divine things; it unifies the affections and centralizes them upon the love of God; and it strengthens the will by aligning it with the will of God. Thus the soul in grace is enabled to grow to its full stature.” (17) Full stature is the promise of maturity, perfection. Harton then examines and defines the three theological virtues, follows it with the same for the four cardinal virtues, all compact but with a theological precision I can only call Thomistic. It is an illuminating exposition of how discipline ought to respond to grace, how the believer should be empowered by grace as the natural is perfected.

The second part of the book deals with sin, including an explanation of the three enemies and the three inner sources of sin: lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. One of the great strengths of this book is to write about these things in the context of Christian discipline, as part of a comprehensive understanding of the whole of the Christian’s duty. He defines and explains sin and then explains repentance and mortification. “Christian asceticism is not directed towards the destruction of the body, but its subjection to the Spirit, and this involves the careful regulation of the pleasures of sense.” He divides these pleasures into “sinful and legitimate; with the former the virtue of Temperance is not concerned, they have to be resisted, not used; it is concerned with the right use of legitimate sensible pleasures.” (66-7) That precision in defining the object of temperance, I find, brings everything into focus clearly.

The third section deals with the sacraments. I have questions about this section I will raise later. But what I really need is a Baptist theologian to give me a theological evaluation of this book. I wonder if all Catholic Anglicans (is that the same as an Anglo-Catholic?) would have seven sacraments. More on this below.

Having defined and explained the Christian life as a Spirit-empowered discipline that is constantly at war with sin and constantly endeavoring to develop and maintain the habits of virtue, he comes to the fourth section, prayer. He is very thorough in explaining and subdividing prayer into various kinds. This is the heart of the discipline: the Christian life is a life of prayer. It is a discipline of the will. “By detachment we strive to give our whole self to God, that all our willing, loving and desiring may be in Him. This involves the discipline of the whole man and the collecting of all the powers of the soul into one, that, being detached from the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, the soul may find pleasure in God alone.” (169) This section is rich in practical instruction as well as wise insight, such as this reflection on why we are so often distracted in prayer: “A further and deeper cause of distraction lies in the heart. It cannot be too clearly realized that what we are in the rest of life, that we are too in our prayer.” (269) Much to think about there!

Last of all comes a consideration of perfection. Here there is a lot of instruction for the director of souls, including a summary of the message of the whole book: “The imitation of Christ is not a vague general thing which comes by desire—it has to be deliberately practiced, bit by bit and virtue by virtue.” (316) There is the whole book in one sentence.

C Evaluation

I have some reservations, but mostly commendations for this extraordinary book. Unlike many other books on the related topic of pastoral care, it is not windy. I love the tightness of its argument.

Cautions or Reservations

Because Harton so rigorously integrates theology and ethics into practice, a theological evaluation is necessary. Unless one can be described as a Catholic Anglican, one will find discrepancies. That is why I would like to hear from a Baptist theologian about this particular book. As an aspiring historian I should be better at locating what the Dean of Wells Cathedral, writing in the 1930s, means by a Catholic Anglican; but my interests lead me toward previous eras and denominational intricacies have never been my strength. I find nothing so off putting as the high church, and so I am at sea. I believe that the Protestant denominations are its genius. From what I can gather, Dean Harton thought exactly the opposite.

Explaining the sacraments, Harton says that the holy supper is “primarily sacrifice, and secondarily communion.” (206) He also includes statements early on in his book that seem unnecessarily hostile to the Reformation on account of forensic justification. He somehow turns this into an attack on the idea that adoption is merely forensic (to which he strenuously objects), but I think at that point he is aligning justification and adoption too much. There is a prejudice there rather than clarity. The main problem is that Harton sometimes sounds as if he were not Protestant at all and would like to ignore the whole fact of the Reformation, as if it never occurred. In order to understand his quotation about a sacrifice we must add that he believes that the only thing offered to God in worship at all, ever, is the sacrifice of Christ, to which the believer joins himself (290). Still, his approach raises concerns.

Along these lines there is also the fact that he includes seven sacraments. What he offers is a good explanation, on the whole, of many practicalities. But the question for us who are not Catholic or even Catholic Anglicans is, can we modify and adapt his system? Even if we can’t entirely modify it, one only needs to think about how frequently most of these sacraments can occur. The repeating sacraments remain Lutheran: the Supper and confession. Still, there is perhaps an opportunity to write another similar book that raises fewer questions for protestants. But that could just be a manual for the user, rather than an in-depth study for the guide.

Observations and Questions

What seems to be contrary to the Catholic spirit in Harton is that he believes all Christians should aim at proficiency and that they must know about it. The supernatural should be healing, restoring and perfecting the natural in the average believer, with the goal being to spend hours of each day in prayer, to become increasingly detached from one’s own, natural concerns and more attached to communion with God. The importance of having the goal in view is one of the great things about this book. Whether or not any of us is anything more than advanced, it should be clear that we need to leave the stage of the beginner behind with a clear aim: spiritual maturity. And spiritual maturity needs to be coordinated with a trajectory that understands what is possible in this life short of glorification. That is one of the main things Harton provides: a clear view of proficient Christianity and a logic for all the corresponding, integrated discipline necessary for attaining it.

Harton seems to think that in the seventeenth century (with Loyola, De Sales, and such masters) the reflection on Christian disciplines of ascetical theology reached mature development. I can begin to intuit an argument that goes through the monastic tradition with all of its reforms and still within the context of religious orders codifies the disciplines for all. It is a story worth researching and telling. Besides, who else produces the kinds of manuals they did? What is strange is how much flak Quietism receives in Harton’s asides and how similar to the aims of Quietism his own are. I still don’t understand this and am afraid this also is rather a prejudice than otherwise.

I wonder how much Keswick influence Harton has. There is a strong strain of desiring to be completely yielded. I don’t say this because I find it off putting, quite the contrary. I wish there were more catholicity in this respect. It is one of the great strengths of this book that Harton is theologically rigorous and catholic, universal, or broad rather than narrow and full of suspicions (so that exceptions stand out). The right caution raised against catholicity is of course a loss of theological precision. But you don’t want to sacrifice catholicity to a petty and partisan or sectarian theological precision either.

A system that is tight, theologically integrated, catholic in the best sense of the word (sorry Catholics!), broad because it is free from sectarian idiosyncrasies and distortions is what Harton offers. We have a similar attempt at spiritual guidance in the contemporary counseling movement. It is not, however, known for its theological sophistication but unfortunately the opposite. There is a soft-focus instead of a precise focus when it comes to theology in counseling. It seems to be an attempt to do spiritual guidance without consulting the long tradition and with only a token nod to theology which resembles the ten-bullet point statement of faith: minimalist, undenominational, and lacking precision. This is not something Harton suffers from, and he represents a whole tradition, to judge from his bibliography.

In terms of denominations, one of the salient questions for readers not of the Anglican or Lutheran traditions is going to be the use of confession. I think the practice of pastoral visitation, if done with sufficient frequency and diligence can be sufficient. “Once the director has visualized the state of the soul and decided upon its way, it is not generally necessary to do more than deal with questions and difficulties as they arise, except at long intervals or when a change occurs in the spiritual state of the soul; most of the director’s work can be done at occasional interviews or, in the case of necessity, even by correspondence.” (336) This is one thing the ethos of counseling in the sorts of churches that I am familiar with strengthens.

D What Remains

I still want to go through and outline the argument of the book thoroughly and supplement it with passages from Scripture in order to obtain a primer for the new believer. This is a revelation to me: a thoroughly rigorous, Scriptural and dogmatic account of the spiritual life that explains how to master its disciplines with a view toward proficiency. I have found a key. I have been reading similar literature for decades now, but at last I have an organized and theologically rigorous and coherent approach. Perhaps there are other books, more contemporary books that do the same. I’d be interested to learn about it.

Refutation of All Heresies, translated by M. David Litwa

The book is interesting for several reasons. It provides a catalog of all the Greek philosophers and then sketches out their beliefs. It also describes elaborate magic rituals of the second century and exposes many of the tricks employed by the magicians of the time. (After describing how they unseal and reseal a letter in order to read its contents unnoticed, the author recommends mixing pigs blood and hair when sealing letters, since this renders them tamper-proof.) There is also a book dedicated to astrology, explaining the symbols and numerology. The way the author refutes the heresies is that he demonstrates how the heresies derive from philosophical systems. The magic and astrology also provide antecedents for the derivative thinking and practice of heretics.

This is a compendium of learning, and in some ways it suggests Augustine’s later compendium, The City of God. As in Augustine, there is irony, sarcasm, scorn, and plenty of information. But there is a breadth of soul in Augustine that the author of the Refutation does not have. The sketches of the philosophers do not give one appreciation for that branch of ancient learning. There is more detail sometimes in the description of magical rituals or in recounting admittedly curious anecdotes.

I think the author of the Refutation makes an interesting bridge in the Christian response to Gnosticism between the compendious, often tedious, and categorical rejection of Irenaeus and the more subtle approach of Clement of Alexandria. The Refutation’s description of Gnostic cosmologies and cosmogonies suggest to me that there was in the air a sense of the pagan synthesis breaking down and a common need to give it new vitality. Christianity was in some way captivating the imagination of unbelievers who tried imitations stocked with the mental debris of the age, perhaps the same way that fantasy sprang up in the wake of Tolkien’s irruption: ignorantly and dreadfully. The Refutation is without doubt condescending to philosophy, but it was probably not condescending to the Gnostics. It cleverly penetrates the cheap thinking of cheap thinkers. (It doesn’t help that the author sometimes crows about his own diligence, though it makes it more fun.)

It also helps us to understand a confusion that early Christians had when it came to the nature of philosophy. They did not consider the philosophical options assorted metaphysical systems, they considered them rival theologies and often associated them with the hostility of paganism. What the Refutation provides that comes after Irenaeus, whom the author has read, and is before Clement, is someone offering what he believes is a coherent explanation of an incoherent phenomenon: his thesis is that all the heretics come up with doctrines derivative of three polluted sources, Greek philosophy, magical rites, and astrology. In other words, he offers a single explanation for the bewildering phenomenon mushrooming all over the Christian church of the second century, heresy.

The author holds, of course, to some of the philosophical assumptions he catalogs. He is willing to pronounce that out of the four elements, angels and heavenly bodies are composed of fire, that fish and fowl are both composed of the element of water, and that earth makes the substance of creatures that go on the land. This is to be expected, he was a man of his times. But he is beyond that so Hellenized that he thinks Christianity is the real answer to the Hellenic project of knowledge, its true rival. In other words, he is framing Christianity as an answer to a question posed by Greek philosophers. And what he shows is how vulnerable Christianity was at a moment in which theology was undeveloped and the church therefore weak and susceptible to all kinds of distortions. He barely escapes Gnosticism when he understands salvation merely as rescue from evil.

This scholarly and recent translation comes with a good introduction, the Greek text facing the English, copious annotation, and is quite lively and entertaining.

Ascetical Theology

From the Confession

“The way appointed by Christ for the calling of any person,” explains the Baptist Confession, includes that person being “solemnly set apart by fasting and prayer.” (2LBC 26:9) It is one of my regrets that both times I have been appointed to a pastoral situation the fasting has not been observed. I don’t know how much it has to do with subsequent trials, but I have resolved that this observance should be omitted never again.

I did ask about it on both occasions and was told it was not a custom to observe the confession too closely at that point. This may be, in the wider world, an exception. For all I know, most Reformed Baptists follow the confession at this point more seriously than me and than the places I have been: I can easily believe that.

We who live in our times understand many things that are assumptions. In this case it may be laziness, it may be inertia, it may be an underdeveloped understanding of the confession or of its authority (how much indwelling biblicism do I have yet to mortify?). I suspect, for all that, that this ascetic practice is sporadically observed. It could be in large part due to living in an age of luxury. I remember my Roman Catholic teacher at a class I took in Villanova saying that Catholics don’t follow a pattern of fasting at all rigorous nowadays.

A Recent Connection

A footnote near the end of Andrew Davison’s book on participation mentioned a book by Frederick Percy Harton: The Elements of the Spiritual Life. I have been studying this book and hope to write somewhat extensively on it. It is a manual defining the spiritual life, explaining mortification, sin, penitence, prayer, and many other things. It is anything but shallow. It has Thomistic precision and rigor, bringing theology to bear in ways that are refreshing and very informative. It makes me grateful to read. I have not often encountered books like this, except when I was reading mystics and quietists and their followers and friends. It is consistent with this tradition and subtitled: a study in ascetical theology.

Ascetical Theology

The lineage of mysticism and quietism is the lineage of Christian Platonism. I predict that ascetical theology is going to be a developing interest to the degree that Christian Platonism is taken up. No doubt others have indicated it (maybe this is why some schools have degrees in spirituality), but the connection has just been brought home to me, thinking about Harton.

Anytime you resurrect something from the past it comes with unforseen connections. Digging up more information about the Second London Confession is going to lead to other things. The hierarchy of values that Christian Platonism must bring with it is going to lead to a renewal of interest in what can legitimately be called ascetical theology.

Seasons of the Unexamined Life

At the end of suburban sidewalks, through a band of woods wild with blackberries and honeysuckle, the springtime sound of birds warbling and chirping in the foliage settles in. Green fields sway beyond the trees and small creatures rocket over them. Unceasing birdsong is the quality of the luxuriating spring.

The summer sun comes glaring fatuously down. A restless and vague rustling hangs in the air, amounting to stillness as monotonous and unnatural as baseball. Nothing, as C.S. Lewis observed, seems to happen except decline.

The autumn commends fresh and remote blue skies as the foliage dwindles and collects below. Insects clamor in the overgrown, collapsed undergrowth. The world hears the collected rabble of summer that screech and bicker about conditions moribund, crowded, and doomed.

Then comes the spell of winter. Rigor grips the waters with sounds of cracking ice. The gunshot abruptness of the striking ax alone punctuates the dominion of silence. The slow smoke drifts through empty skies.

A History of the Island, by Eugene Vodolazkin

It is taking fewer years for a Vodolazkin book to reach us, and that is good news. Perhaps it is the function of alternating translators. Vodolazkin is a master craftsman who knows his trade, and his completed work should be made available as widely as possible.

Vodolazkin writes about difficult and subtle things with success, filling the story with wonder and interwoven mystery. It begins as a return to the world of Laurus, for which he has taught us, it is worth underscoring, to long. It is something on the order of what Tolkien did, the recovery of a vanished, magical realm. The way Vodolazkin reports supernatural events with unassuming acceptance awakens the reader’s desire. This summoning is one of his great powers and perhaps the full blossoming of what magical realism was all along groping toward. The effect of what Vodolazkin does with words creates a longing to belong to that medieval place and time. There is a reason for doing so: this is nothing other than to put in our hearts a proper dream of home. His vision nourishes and strengthens something inward. As the novel enters the calamity of the collapse of the Middle Ages the main question it raises is, what must we give in order to regain a home? This is a history of the overwhelming and lasting power of sacrifice since sacrifice is at the heart of the central relationship and is the culmination of the story. Sacrifice is how something temporal connects with eternity, climbing the mountain that is a smoking altar and ascending as smoke to God.

The history begins with the Christianization of the Island. This includes a chapter with the story of Noah that is primeval and crucial, a comment that is a seed about history and historiography. A long conflict is then set up between the north and south of the Island which includes manufactured evidence for royal bloodlines tracing back to the mythical legitimacy of Augustus Caesar. The civil strife is eventually quelled by the marriage of the two main characters, Parfeny and Ksenia begin their marriage in sacrifice and ultimately preserve the Island through their final sacrifice. Out of the primeval mists, then, comes the medieval period of the Island, with wars and angels. Subsequently comes the revolution, toppling the old order. This is when the satire, never heavy-handed, truly blossoms and flourishes, along with the plant growing from the seed of historical reflection. The vanity of merely temporal aims, madness and folly in government, manipulation and glibness and the distortion of language, all these things are shown in ways that make you think. This satire is a tonic against many human excesses, clarifying and convicting.

Vodolazkin eventually brings our long-lived medieval couple into the present and makes them the subject of a film. I feel like predicting that people will one day write doctorates just on this.

It is hard to describe all that Vodolazkin does right; one of the pleasures of reading him (and in translation–the parallel wonder to the existence of Vodolazkin is the existence of Lisa Hayden) is how deftly he undertakes everything. One of the devices is that the chronology is narrated by self-deprecating monks because “only someone focused on eternity is capable of depicting time.” The very first chapter is a meditation on history, on writing and remembering, which sets us up for recurring expansions on the theme throughout. The monks’ acceptance of the supernatural strikes the modern reader both as naïve and also wonderful, and this effect in turn suggests the openness to mystery, to the supernatural, that is such an important aspect of human holiness. Holiness is one of Vodolazkin’s great themes. There are also those in this tale who exhibit qualities which are antithetical to this holiness. The power of this satirical work is the conflict in history which is caused by wickedness and the peace brought about by holiness, which effect is beyond ordinary causality. It is what makes the conclusion satisfactory.

Can you imagine, a novel written in 2021 and translated for the English market in 2023 concerned with time, eternity, divine causality, and creaturely holiness? It is a wonder verging on the miraculous. Vodolazkin has to be the greatest living writer, and we should be grateful for such a gift.

Participation

Andrew Davison’s Participation in God is a very thorough work. Participation is a Platonic concept that remained hazy in the writing of the founding Platonists. It was that medieval Platonist, Aquinas, who gave participation its clear definition. Davison’s book, like so much worthwhile theology in our times, is a retrieval of Aquinas’ Christian Platonic concept of participation.

In order to understand participation, all you need to do is review some basic concepts from theological discourse and then apply that review in a new way. I mean the terms: univocity, equivocity, and analogy.

Univocity

When we speak univocally we speak in terms that mean the same wherever they are applied. I can say that I have hunger in the same way other human beings have hunger. In theological discourse, univocity would mean that we speak of God existing or in some way being just like us. When we try that, we find that we are imprecise. If we say that God is hungry, we can’t mean that he is hungry the way we are. God does not exist as we do: his being is underived and ours is derived. Nothing exists as he does. Univocity says too much while also managing to leave everything important out. We can’t say that God loves just as we do. God loves impassibly, and we only wish we could love that way. God loves eternally, and that is not something we can ever do.

Equivocity

So we can try equivocity. You can say that being Joel is like being a taco. That is equivocal in the extreme! We can say that God’s being is so unlike our being that God is non-being. Some people get a thrill out of saying things like that, but these people are not usually ranked among the great (or qualified) theologians. We end up saying nothing meaningful about God other than that God is an enigma. If we say that God’s love is unlike that of any creature so much that it is not at all related to love as we consider it, that doesn’t help us really talk about God’s love.

Analogy

Because we do not want to univocate or equivocate, theologians use language of analogy. Analogy is likeness. God’s existence is like our existence; God loves, and his love is meaningfully like the love we know. God’s underived and infinite being is not the same as ours, but ours is like his. God’s love is splendid above all we can experience, but ours is analogous, it is like and we can in some way know the love of God which surpasses knowledge.

Participation

Participation is likeness.

That is it.

Participation is likeness. Participation is analogy. All you have to understand is that analogy is participation. We participate in God, all things participate in God, because they have the likeness of being and the unlikeness of a being that is not his being. Analogy, as Davison points out, is as much about dissimilarity (not univocity) as it is about similarity (not equivocity). All things participate in God in that all things are like him: like him in being, like him in their own creaturely goodness. Creaturely goodness is not God’s goodness but it is goodness which comes from God. This derived goodness is manifested in a limited thing and therefore in a limited way but still a whole, good way.

Participation means that all things manifest God. Obviously, being in God’s image man does so more. I actually think this means that the form of man is the form of the forms (or, to use Plotinus categories, man is Nous as Nous is the image of the One), that man is in some way the sum of all created essences. Whether you accept this or not, all forms are informed by God. All that exists that is not God is, I sometimes like to think, filtered God: limited, reduced, and yet like.

Here is how it lands:

We are like God in that we exist. We participate in being and therefore participate in God. Distinguishing being and essence, following Aquinas, Davison says, “The essence of the creature might determine its particular form, and the limits of its creaturely being, as this particular thing, but being remains the active principle.” And that is participation: active being limited by form or essence. Like and unlike. Analogy. Brilliant! In this way, Aquinas makes the concept definite and useful for theology, crowning the work of Plato and Plotinus with some practical assistance from Aristotle.

Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, by Vigen Guroian

“When the moral imagination is wakeful, the virtues come to life, filled with personal and existential as well as social significance” (25).

In this book Guroian explains what the moral imagination is and why it is important (in the first chapter), and then exposits different stories that awaken the imagination to virtue, to love, immortality, friends and mentors, evil, redemption, heroes, courage, beauty, goodness, and obedience.

Guroian explains why a more didactic, simple instruction in ethics is not enough (it can even be counterproductive). It is not a good way to persuade or to get results. Stories are better since they win us over. They awaken “the very process by which the self makes metaphors out of images the memory supplies” (20). Good stories are crucial for acting responsibly because only through the imagination do we understand invisible realities. We need to be able to grasp realities such as virtue, love, immortality, friends and mentors, evil, redemption, heroes, courage, beauty, goodness, and obedience firmly. We need them to be portrayed with deft moral precision, and Guroian explains why these stories do that.

Among other things, the reader of this book comes away with a good list of rich stories, not only as he goes through the chapters but with the final bibliographical chapter and the concluding list of anthologies (284).

And the cover of this book is amazing!

Reflections on the Recrudescence of Theonomy

The parable of the unjust steward (also called the dishonest manager) found in Luke 16:1-13 is difficult to interpret. The difficulty lies in that Christ seems to be commending the unscrupulous behavior of the main character, as if the end justifies the means. But Christ cannot be teaching that the end justifies the means.

The point of the parable is that the steward acts shrewdly within his temporal considerations: he’s lost his job, he’s not getting it back, he starts living for the next job. Jesus is saying to the children of light, those who understand that this present age (this generation, this world) is doomed: cease living for it. Cease living as if it will last and instead live already for the world to come.

I thought about it because we had a gathering to hear about the recrudescence of theonomy. It appears the old idea has been repackaged and there are believers who think civil government should enforce as law only what the Old Testament law prescribes. That God’s law revealed in the OT should be the law of the land today. The motivation seems to be the dismay many feel at the decline of America (I keep telling people that in the third world the food is better and this country could certainly use that). It is exacerbated by the idea that America is exceptional to the point of being indispensable. These are people who want to save the social, economic, and political order they have enjoyed in the past, or perhaps to achieve the unfulfilled promise of America. The rationale depends on postmillennialism and this, we concluded, is a misunderstanding of the nature of Christ’s dominion.

Now a premillennialist is usually not going to fall for this, since those tend to be dispensationalist and have adopted as a rule of interpretation that anything the Old Testament commands needs to be repeated in the New Testament for it to apply to believers. Handy, but you have to adopt the hermeneutics. There is a better way: there is something the premillennialist shares with the postmillennialist: the social and economic and political nature of Christ’s dominion, the non-spiritual dimensions. This is precisely what amillennialism denies. Amillennialism is even handier, and you get the hermeneutics employed in the development of Christian doctrine down through the ages.

You would think then that all amillennialists would therefore be immune to theonomist encroachments. But this does not obtain, mainly because people don’t understand the nature of Christ’s dominion (or they just switch to premillennialism, adopting the combined notions of a kingdom not of this world and yet of this world because in this world). The problem with a spiritual (not of this world) interpretation is that people find it harder to hold and articulate because it is harder to hold and articulate and there are simpler results obtained through hermeneutical arrangements that amillennialists cannot encourage. What is the kingdom of God, I might ask a Reformed Baptist congregation. I don’t know how many would give a clear answer.

(The kingdom of God is the dominion of Christ over me, which I daily pray will increase in me and in others who have been conquered as well as in the number of people conquered. This is not a social or political or economic thing. It is Christ’s rule in my heart. Nor, let me add, is there a day in which Christ does not triumph, expanding his dominion from the throne he quite ably occupies.)

There is another immunity which we Reformed Baptists can enjoy, however (you can be or not be a millenarian, though most of us aren’t). That is what is called 1689 Federalism, recovered from the times of the Second London Confession and exposited in our day by the diligent Samuel Renihan. This is an approach to Covenant Theology which is suited to Baptist considerations, as opposed to Presbyterian and Reformed. We do not believe that the Mosaic Covenant was the old dispensation of the Covenant of Grace. We believe that the Old Testament covenants (those mentioned in Scripture after the Covenant of Works was broken in Eden) all are typical. They are outward, symbolic, and representative of the New Covenant, which is none other than the Covenant of Grace. That is a bulwark against theonomy: our system has too much discontinuity. The promises to Abraham and his family and the civil law are external, they manifest outwardly the inner, spiritual reality of the New Covenant, but they do so as patterns and types. Circumcision in the flesh is an outward shadow of the circumcision of the heart, rather than the old administration of Christian baptism. Those old covenants were shadows of the substance of the Covenant of Grace. When the antitype comes, the type is fulfilled; its function is done and there is no need to continue with it. We no longer stone people, we excommunicate them from the congregation, and that is quite enough.

It is like the parable of the unjust steward in that we no longer live for this present age. America will rise and America will fall; it matters to children of this generation more than it does to the sons of light. We have a better kingdom in comparison to which America is not that much different from Assyria. I have a feeling a lot of American Christians do not see it that way, and that may be a great part of the problem. God does not need America and we do not need to be rich and powerful in this present age. We can’t desperately cling to America as if it were the only necessary plan. We are free to be cheerful warriors in America, prudent conservatives, but not to implement the Old Testament civil law in order to safeguard our material prosperity or help Jesus to economic and social conquest. Worldly wealth is going to fail, like America and its customs. We can lament the end of an extraordinary 200 years (or 300 if we manage to prolong it), like the Christian author of Beowulf laments the passing of a heroic, pagan way of life. Mexico was extraordinary too in that its food is way better. We can fight for it because it is the right thing to do (the American constitution and the Mexican taco, I mean). But we can’t cling to it because we can only delay the moment or trade it for one that is slightly worse rather than much worse, or maybe even better but for all that not enduring. The unjust steward must be our example.

Spend your money on things that will last, not on dollars or on gold which also perishes. Direct all your resources toward growing spiritually and toward exercise yourself in godliness (support seminaries, persuade your government to be more rather than less just, write novels like Jane Austen did, laying up for herself abundant treasures in heaven). If this age continues another thousand years or two, it will still perish. You have been called to a life that will make all the best of the present seem mean and squalid in comparison, not to mention worthlessly short. This is the point of making a parable with a guy like the unjust steward: he saw the gig was up.

A Big Problem

For me, one of the greatest problems with conservative Christianity in our times is its neglect of philosophy. It is, as a result, much dimmer than it ought to be.

I can think of two causes for this neglect:

One has been the unfortunate prevalence of presuppositionalism with its attending attitude of contempt for anything done by anyone not of its own camp, and therefore its sectarian and therefore wonky and uninformed attempt to supply what is needed. This explains why presuppositionalists are so addicted to jargon: they need to seem philosophical (an example is the seldom necessary adjective ‘ontological’ when speaking of the Trinity; in most instances, the proper noun would be sufficient).

In this first instance it may be that the real reason is sectarian and that presuppositionalism is a congenial approach to the expression of sectarianism, and that I am guilty of putting the cart before the horse.

The second cause is simply the activist contempt of anything contemplative or not immediately practical.

Observations about Preparing Worship Services

1. One of the main things to say is that the Lord himself says the most astonishing things to his people. I have not yet managed to make it unemotionally through the words that we say to believers when they take their vows of membership: Rest assured, that if you confess Christ before men, he will confess you before his Father who is in heaven. Words adapted to the situation, but adapted from Scripture, and a great and precious promise made by Jesus Christ. The words of Scripture in invocation, in confession, in adoration, in assurance of pardon, in the reading of the Bible, in adapted Psalms and in hymns contain the most astonishing things. This is what most enriches worship. My policy is the policy all good liturgy everywhere seems to follow: get the things you say from Scripture.

2. There are too many hymns. You have to understand that I have a thing against supplementing the hymnal and multiple hymnals. One of the reasons for that is that I hate clutter. The fewer things the better and it just drives me crazy that people multiply clutter. But another thing is that we have hymnals with too many good options. How many times a year, for example, do you need to repeat a good hymn? Twice seems too little. Three times? Quarterly? How many hymns do you need if you sing three per service and have two services per week, if you repeat all your hymns four times a year? 78. That sounds low! Try three times a year and you get 104. Do the math. You could sing 100 choice hymns year in and year out and need no more. Not that you do that exactly or for every hymn, but think about it! I think you can see why the Psalms are 150. It is a good number. I think if I were putting together a hymnal, I would draw a firm line at 200 hymns.

3. In the evenings we sing Psalms. Psalms are just weird and different compared to hymns. They don’t have the same emphases for example, and the flow of thought is often unlike that of hymns. Try finding hymns under the topic of mercy in your hymnal versus judgment. Then compare with the Psalter. Not that I want a Psalter beside the hymnal. We have a whole bunch of Psalms and adaptations in the Trinity Hymnal Revised Edition that we use, and we do not know them all yet. We are adding gradually, but I find you have to consolidate, you have to review and make sure you retain. Repetition, obviously, is key for that. I do four songs in the evening because we don’t otherwise take up the whole hour of worship, and so we cycle through the Psalms that we do have, but not all 150. It would be interesting to have a hymnbook with 350 entries, max. More than enough for me.

4. Singing Psalms in some way creates an expectation of richer theological or allegorical interpretation. Classical theists will be well served to make sure they have a Psalm-rich worship.

5. I print out most of what I say in any service. After the first few years, I was able to recycle, but I still add to it and have built up quite a lot of material. With Ryan Kelly’s new book on Calls to Worship, Invocations, and Benedictions, I hope to have a good twelve week cycle of material in the next few months. Variety and repetition are the watchwords.

6. As a very low church Baptist I don’t do the liturgical calendar or wish to. One has to make concessions, and I don’t mind conceding Christmas and Easter in mostly anemic and token ways. I actually believe there is wisdom to the great tides and seasons of the liturgical calendar. But I do not understand it, and I am wary because I think the benefit of a liturgical calendar is that you have to do it all, with all that goes with it, and not in idiosyncratically selective flashes. My Christian Platonism finds expression mostly the way seventeenth century Congregationalists seem to have done.

A Christian-Platonic Theme through the Apostle John, Augustine, Aquinas, Cusanus, and C.S. Lewis

On a Theme from Nicolas of Cusa
by C. S. Lewis
(De Docta Ignorantia, III. ix.)

When soul and body feed, one sees
Their differing physiologies.
Firmness of apple, fluted shape
Of celery, or tight-skinned grape
I grind and mangle when I eat,
Then in dark, salt, internal heat,
Annihilate their natures by
The very act that makes them I.

But when the soul partakes of good
Or truth, which are her savoury food,
By some far subtler chemistry
It is not they that change, but she,
Who feels them enter with the state
Of conquerors her opened gate,
Or, mirror-like, digests their ray
By turning luminous as they.

____________________

Thus, in reference to Christ as contained and signified, one eats his flesh and drinks his blood in a spiritual way if he is united to him through faith and love, so that one is transformed into him and becomes his member: for this food is not changed into the one who eats it, but it turns the one who takes it into itself, as we see in Augustine, when he says: “I am the food of the robust. Grow and you will eat me. Yet you will not change me into yourself, but you will be transformed into me.” And so this is a food capable of making man divine and inebriating him with divinity.

– Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, Chapter 6, Lecture 7, https://isidore.co/aquinas/english/John6.htm

Rich and Strange

Scripture has a complex texture. It is a theological book, principally. To say this is to deny that the plain or normal or literal meaning is sufficient. Merely literal interpretation amounts to a nominalist hermeneutic that denies the layered reality God addresses. What saves us is that we are not consistent, as Craig Carter has pointed out.

The attitude of modernity is reductive. It exists to reduce complexity, and it reduces the complexity of Scripture. Modernity reduces in two ways, which is to say that it denies wonder, or that which is magical, by two means: one is by excluding and the other is by explaining away. The excluded part is the metaphysical source of wonder, the supernatural, that which should permeate human intellection because it shines down from above. Attention is turned definitely away from this and toward the physical. Efficient and material causality become paradigmatic, and this is used to explain away, to scrub from a reduced reality all contact with wonder.

Literal, grammatical-historical interpretation is a responsible beginning, but it is not a satisfactory end. You need formal and final causality to lead you to a goal in which you can rest. You need to understand the spiritual intent of Scripture and hear the voice of God.

And so we should all welcome the accusation of spiritualizing Scripture. I hope I do it every time I preach. The Bible is a spiritual book. It has been given to us by God to tell us about spiritual realities: sin and redemption, God’s being and his purposes, are just a few spiritual matters that stand out. In other words, it is not mainly about a geographical Jerusalem, but mainly about a spiritual one that is heavenly. So that the allegory is in focus in a hermeneutic that takes into account what Scripture is.

But allegorical interpretation has been systemically excluded, downplayed, and ridiculed. This has been done by redefining something rich and strange as simply irresponsible, irresponsibly. Notice the reductive method. We claim to retain the corals and pearls, the theological wealth of ancient theologians, but have rendered the whole process submarine and unapproachable and baffling. As a result, we have invented preposterous explanations of theological method that are thin as air and vaporous, and the rich historical process from which we inherit the sound words of advanced doctrinal formulation has been rendered inexplicable and even unpalatable. We have ignored the fact that the development of doctrine which historical theology endeavors to understand is our theological method, preposterously suggesting that it is something we constantly do ourselves. (This is my claim: prove me wrong.)

And so contemporary theologians endeavor to fill the city of theology with skyscrapers of this curious and idealized design: exegesis, biblical theology, historical theology (by which they often mean asking the questions that arise from their own concerns of times and places with unexamined concerns), and if they actually develop anything, develop what is deficient and unstable. Fortunately they don’t mean theological method when they speak of theological method, they speak of demonstrating to their own satisfaction that which they inherit but approach with something like methodological mistrust.

What outcomes will that obtain?

What Is Next?

That is my mom’s question. Having defended my dissertation, what is next?

Someone more acquainted with the process suggested rest. Rest and minor corrections ought to fill up the whole month of April, besides Sunday school, AM and PM worship, bulletins, Bible studies, and all that. And then we’ll see what May brings.

It was great while it lasted to be connected with research libraries and scholarly people. You need all kinds of people, but you don’t always get scholarly ones. In this case, I was for four years in contact with a public intellectual and that was interesting. I shall  miss it, but with a terminal degree I guess my thirty year stint as a student in higher education is over. I feel a bit at a loss.

Being Reformed

One of the earliest things mentioned in a long conversation this week was that my interlocuter (a faithful pastor) identified himself as reformed. “I’m reformed,” he told me, and that always prompts the question. I have a question because I’ve studied the reformation, I suppose, and probably because I want, among other things, to be a follower of Socrates and maybe also die honorably of hemlock poisoning. Not everybody wants to be associated as much with Socrates, but there is some prestige to being reformed, or being called ‘reformed.’ What exactly people mean by it excites curiosity. Some, for example, just mean that they love Banner of Truth merch.

I actually do not call myself reformed, perhaps from having ingested too much of Richard Muller. You go up against Richard Muller at the peril of being overwhelmed by a wave of careful research in primary sources that you might not even be able to read. Not advisable.

I am of course a Christian, that is my faith. I do not think the expression “the Reformed faith” is an acceptable one and I react to it. There are rare occasions when it is useful or tolerated, but on the whole, I think it is sectarian. I also think the sectarianism is sometimes why people call themselves reformed (this was not the case in the conversation that sparked my musings), thus excluding Wesleyans and Arminians and others from Christianity. I want to be dissociated from that impulse.

I am not just a Christian, I am a protestant, and beyond that, a Baptist. If you want further qualifications, I would say I am a confessional Baptist, or a Reformed Baptist (the epithet exists and I don’t mind it, but Richard Muller does!). My ordination vows were taken on the Second London Baptist Confession and I firmly believe it is a faithful symbol of the whole teaching of Scripture. That is what I teach.

As a Baptist with a bit of historical consciousness, due exclusively to years of being knocked around in schools, I realize we Baptists are only obliquely heirs of the Magisterial Reformation, that high and lofty and admirable event. I have no impulse to go up against the Reformed Baptist historians who demonstrate lack of continuity between our forefathers and the Anabaptists, though there are affinities. I do not want to be directly identified, only obliquely, with that crowd any more than the peeved Orthodox Radical pamphleteers of 1646 did. And yet, we Baptists owe them something. Cranky English separatists have strong affinities with the Orthodox Radicals, and we are from those regions.

In fact, I think I would be willing (with a lot of preparation) to go up against Reformed Baptist historians on documentable evidence that the First London Confession of the credo-baptizing Congregationalist ice-choppers was not entirely separable from the disreputable fringes of theology (I know Van Dixhoorn was not persuaded that it was last time it came up, though that was a while back). I’m no expert, but I think the Assembly’s Divines reaction seems enough to conclude that the so-called First London Confession only became demonstrably orthodox when under the tutelage of the Westminster Confession of Faith the Second London Baptist Confession of 1677 (aka the 1689) arrived. Yes, I think Baptists are a very late stage of the reformation; but whatever accomplishments may be credited to me, a Baptist Historian I am not.

But what did he say, my interlocutor? Thanks for your patience, reader. He said he held to the five solas. This prompted me to exclaim, wondering whether anybody at all would deny the five solas. I unfortunately put him on the spot with that one. But it is not uncommon to believe that these are the slogans that most accurately frame the accomplishment of the reformation.

Not that Martin Luther was unconcerned about faith alone. Clearly he was, but these five slogans of nineteenth century historiography were not the slogans that the reformers themselves used to encapsulate their message on banners, mugs, or even their T-shirts. Judging by the amount of time spent in travel and debate, by the amount of ink spilt, a representative slogan might have been about the real presence of the Lord’s body and blood. That is: the orthodox formulation of the doctrine of the sacraments. The problem I have there is that I can’t come up with a slogan!

Carl Trueman used to tell us in class, “Historians exist to say no to the dogmaticians.” I may not understand entirely what he means, I don’t speak for him, but I understand him to be saying something that can be seen in the field of historical theology. Dogmaticians, or systematic theologians, come to church history with these kinds of questions: what does Augustine say about salvation? What does Tertullian say about the Trinity? Etc. The difference is that a historian is trained to ask: what was Augustine talking about? What were his concerns, what was the situation, how did he address his concerns, what were his purposes in speaking or writing? The dogmatician is focused by theological concerns as the historian is not. Focus is a good thing, generally speaking. It is a good technique for zeroing in on an issue. But focus, we have to remember, is also a way of excluding. That is the whole point, and, to mix my cliches, it cuts both ways.

The dogmatician may be impatient with crucial factors: literary, economic, geographical. Augustine may not have been interested in justification (I don’t know, just putting something out there). Tertullian may actually believe that God is an infinitely subtle gas, being a materialist because in his scorn for philosophy he has done what those who are scornful of philosophy often do, he has smuggled in some philosophical fragments from the philosophy that prevails or which he is predisposed to by nurture and nature (which I believe is a demonstrable observation).

In this sense the historian says no to the dogmatician: No, you are distorting. No, you don’t understand. No, you can’t have that. No, you cannot go there. Sure, Tertullian came up with the word “person,” but there is the consideration that he still believed God to be an infinitely subtle gas. And no, we can’t hold him to later orthodox formulations anymore than we can find out what Origen would have thought of John Calvin’s Institutes. That impulse arises from asking the wrong questions, or more specifically and somewhat technically (at least for me), that impulse arises from not answering the right questions in the proper order (Socrates, again).

I am sure that Trueman mainly had in view the function of reminding dogmaticians who are eager to systematize and proceed “by equation,” as an ironic historian once put it, historians exist to remind dogmaticians that heresy was obtained by the means they are employing, by a similar neglect or a similar addition previously committed (is this sentence too much? Do grammarians exist to tell bad historians, No!?). Human systematizing often leads to overreach—look at the whole recurring phenomenon of Universalism plaguing Christian Platonism down through the ages. But saying no, for the historian, also means wrestling over the contested territory of historical theology, which overlaps because it is mainly about the development of doctrine. What questions are asked and what order they are asked in is all. Whether it is properly dominated by the noun or the adjective is a question of what the discipline is: what questions in what order will predominate. The set of questions, after all, constitute the discipline, don’t they? Defending the modifier rather than the substantive is somewhat awkward and puts us into the position of saying no a lot.

Which brings me back to the original conversation. The five solas of nineteenth century historiography can summarize the achievements of that age, but also serve to subsume the concerns of the reformation to the concerns of the nineteenth century. The reformers themselves produced writings and summary statements, the problem is they were not mere slogans. They cannot even be put on ten bullet points on your website, like a contemporary doctrinal statement somehow can. Do you know what impulse arose out of the reformer’s burden to reform and distinguish true from false? It is called confessionalization. They summarized in paragraphs and chapters and systems (like properly trained dogmaticians, to whom we historians of course give a resounding yes, with the proviso that said dogmatician is actually and certifiably dead).

There are four tomes of translated and (briefly) introduced Protestant confessions for you to peruse, thanks to James Dennison, the perusal of which will enrich you, will deliver you from the miasma of biblicism, and will connect you with what has been confessed and believed always, everywhere, and by all. These provide a good introduction to what might be called ‘reformed.’

R.S. Thomas

Well, I know a little more about the suspicion for the machine (that Paul Kingsnorth channels) now. I should say the literary suspicion of the machine. It depends on symbols, and these are conjured by literary means. The most powerful symbols are stories. After reading him, I have found that R.S. Thomas set about suggesting stories with his poems.

Is it just me or do others find modern poems characteristically enigmatic? My experience has been that one has to struggle to read and re-read and to apply concentration because modern poetry is in some way more grudging. There is a surliness to the thing, and something of a camaraderie of misanthropy about being a reader of a modern poem.

Why don’t they elicit attention more? In some ways it has to be a response to the saturated world of advertising and self-promotion that thinking persons shrink from. And yet when I read modern poetry first and then pick up something old I always feel a contrast. I find the old far more accessible, there is a charm and winning appeal to it. Now this is not altogether true, only mostly true–when I look at Shakespeare’s sonnets and some other things I find a density that requires persistence on my part. It is true enough, however, because what I don’t find is the enigmatic surliness that seems to me a deliberate feature in modern poetry.

I don’t mean to suggest that the fundamental character of R.S. Thomas is surly. I think more fundamental to R.S. Thomas is ambivalence and because of that a winning honesty and a persistent fortitude. The surliness is there though, often ironical and persistently featured. At the Poetry Foundation’s page on Thomas a critic is quoted describing the poet’s approach as a “cold, telling purity of language.” To me this sounds like praising him for his grudging approach.

And it makes him a grudging story teller. One who suggests stories rather than telling them. He is not sure the soil that represents the farmer’s hard and bitter life is better, but he is even more ambivalent about the machine than the soil and more persistently ambivalent about the machine, even, than the persistent dubieties of the religion which he has not the fortitude to abandon.