For many, especially within the ‘Reformed faith’, there is a genuine failure to recognize that what they believe to be pure Gospel, from ‘scripture alone’, is actually informed, potentially, anyway, from an intellectual context that might not be ‘pure Gospel’. I would claim to be a ‘Reformed Christian’ (even an ‘Evangelical Calvinist’), so I’m not knocking the Reformed tradition; rather I want to alert us to the fact that some catechisms, some Confessions might not be as ‘pure’ bible as many folks think they are. In other words, there is a conceptual background to these respective confessions that might serve the Gospel; but sometimes (and esp. within one dominant development in the ‘Reformed tradition’) some of the conceptual background might ‘dis-serve’ the Gospel. Denis Janz makes this point about the development of Reformed theology:
If there is one thing that can be called a genuine breakthrough in the last half-century of Reformation studies, it would be the ‘discovery’ that the Reformation had a background. The reformers, all of whom were theologians, and a good number of whom had formal academic training in the discipline, emerged out of a theological landscape that profoundly shaped their horizons. Some elements from this late medieval theological bequest they rejected; some they appropriated; and still others they sublated by taking something old and fashioning from it something new. In other words, their ideas did not spring to life ex nihilo, or descend from above, or emerge full-blown from an ‘objective’ study of the Bible alone. They worked in the intellectual context of late medieval theology, and consequently, without some grasp of this context , there can be no adequate understanding of their theology. By today, this realization has had an impact on every area of Reformation studies. (Denis J. Janz, David Bagchi and David Steinmetz, eds., “The Cambridge Companion To Reformation Theology,” 5)
The problem is, especially amongst the popular level, this “breakthrough” that Janz speaks to is unrealized. When folks conceive of God in terms of decrees, for example, they assume that this comes straight off the pages of scripture. There is little, or no recognition that in fact Reformed theology has an intellectual history (see Stephen Strehle’s: The Catholic Roots of the Protestant Gospel); and that that history is not necessarily self-same with scripture (i.e. there are competing intellectual histories).
Until this general thesis is acknowledged, what we are calling Evangelical Calvinism will never get a fair hearing. Why? Because Federal Calvinism (Classic) will continue to assume that their reading of scripture is scripture; without any critical recourse to the fact that maybe their perspective actually has background.
This is one of the burdens of this blog; to inform folks of the “background” within the “Reformed tradition.”
Bobby, you are articulating here with scholarly references a maxim that I have colloquially expressed as “If all’s you got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!”. Another version of this homespun wisdom gained from observation is “Where you start from determines where you can go.” We fool ourselves when we believe that we can freely “think” outside the structures of our individual place in history. Think of all the philosophical and theological developments since Dort. But this situation also inspires me, reminded of something an astronomer answered to the question “Why do you spend time looking into the heavens?”. His answer, “Because I might see something that nobody else has seen yet!” Each of us is situated in a unique place in history with our collection of experiences, knowledge, and personal relationship with the Holy Spirit. Nobody else has the same mixture! And from that can come something fresh and new and vital as we seek to express what we “see” as we engage the Father as His adopted children. I find this idea something rich and deep and sacred that bestows respect and dignity to each person’s struggle to apprehend and express our inheritance in Christ.
In the Lutheran tradition, I find this most true when it comes to Law/Gospel dialectic. As a Lutheran Barthian, both halves of me are perfectly willing to countenance “Gospel and Law” as the most appropriate scheme. But for Luther, and consequently for the Lutheran ordo salutis, “law” isn’t equal to Barth’s redefinition. It belongs to the Roman concepts of juris and legis. This is the ground of the classic phrase, “lex semper accusat.” And so many of our (mis)readings of Paul on Torah come from exactly this problem: we believe Luther and the other 16th-century reformers, who believed the Church of their day, when it comes to what “law” means. But it’s an alien concept to Paul and the Hellenistic world, even in Rome — this is not what nomos means! And so we wind up fighting over a juridical-ecclesial concept of law in an age of enforcement, when what Paul was talking about was a concept of cultural practices as a specific way of life. And so, of course law is a form of the gospel — the cultural form the gospel takes — but not for Luther, and not for the majority culture of the church. And it’s a very hard breakthrough to make, when we’ve been doing it the other way for centuries!
Things are further complicated when this assumed medieval background is applied to modern or postmodern cultures that don’t wrestle with the same issues. Too bad “Semper Reformanda” wasn’t one of the “Solas.”
@David,
Hey, great to hear from you, it’s been quite awhile! I agree, we are all situated in particular contexts, and those contexts bear upon the way we think communicate etc. Praise the Lord, he is not bound by our contexts, but breaks anew into them for us. This inspires hope in me as well. That said, I do think there is a wealth of theological wisdom, in the past, and in different contexts that as of yet needs to be tapped into and constructively engaged. We need to build on what the Holy Spirit has provided Christ’s Church in the preceding millennia, and bring that into our contexts.
@Matt,
Are you sure you’re not Wrightian π ? I’ve heard you say that you’re Lutheran-Barthian more than once; how do you synthesize those two given Barth’s Reformed trajectory?
@Steve,
I agree that we no longer inhabit the ecclesiopolitical situation that the “background” to the Reformation period did. And so you’re right, this reality impinges upon even the same doctrines in different ways. I.e. Perserverance of the Saints no longer carries with it the socio-cultural specter it once did, say in Puritan England or America. We are too individualistic in America to feel the full implications of this as “they” did in the 17th century. I wish more folk, who claim to be Calvinists today could actually existentially “feel” the weight of their theology as their theological parents once did (like William Perkins). Yes, Semper Reformanda has fallen on hard times in somequarters.
@Bobby: Dialectically, of course! π And Tom Wright is as much trouble as he is use. Perhaps that’s appropriate — so are most people who’ve taken the time to develop a personality in their disciplines. Like, say, Luther and Barth.
You saw a bit of my synthetic work after the theses on Torrance post, discussing the extra Calvinisticum and the infra Lutheranum. The real answer is that I subordinate both of them to their contexts, and to the necessities of confessing the faith to which they both subscribe, in their own ways. And I continue to be myself. It helps, of course, that Luther didn’t care about Calvin the ways the political factions of Lutherans and Calvinists came to, and that Barth was as deeply concerned to rehabilitate Luther as to be Reformed. There is a striving for the catholic faith present in both, built on deep and engaged reading of sources and deep and engaged questioning of assumptions. And deep and engaged attention to God!
And I call myself both because I can’t deny either — but being both, I can’t follow either uncritically. I have to be an unusual Barthian and an unusual Lutheran to remain faithful to both. I learned from the story of Cardinal Newman, very early on, that conversion is one of the dangers of polemical opposition — because we are inevitably wrong, and the shock of dissociation that comes with that delayed realization can be truly self-destructive! Dialectic is better. Barth provides me a world where Calvin and Luther sensibly coexist, no matter what their epigones have done.
@Matt,
I can appreciate all that you’ve said. I really like the point from Newman, that is undeniable. I live dialectically myself. And I agree about Luther and Calvin and politics; the men are above the theopolitical hype in their own respective theologies. People so often, wrongly, associate things with the man Calvin or the man Luther simply because they have theological constructs named after them; which of course these constructs most often do not adequately reflect what in fact the theologian himself articulate or emphasized. Which is why I think people who are “popular” Calvinists would be shocked to actually read and start to grasp some of Calvin’s personal theology (like his unio mystica or duplex gratia, which both are transformative concepts).