Category Archives: Peter Lombard

Against the Augustinian-Lombardian Penitential Theology: From the Singular Person of Christ

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TF Torrance often refers to what he calls ‘The Latin Heresy,’ when discussing Western theology; especially with reference to its fountainhead, Augustine. The Latin Heresy for TFT entails the neo-Platonist dualism that funds Augustine’s theology, and all other theologies that follow Augustine’s categories. For TFT, this dualism involves a competitive relationship between God and humanity; such that, humanity is thought in abstraction relative to God’s life, rather than finding its concrete ground therein. This shows up most clearly in Augustine’s doctrine of election. JND Kelly masterfully describes this,

The problem of predestination has so far only been hinted at. Since grace takes the initiative and apart from it all men form a massa damnata, it is for God to determine which shall receive grace and which shall not. This He has done, Augustine believes on the basis of Scripture, from all eternity. The number of the elect is strictly limited, being neither more nor less than is required to replace the fallen angels. Hence he has to twist the text ‘God wills all men to be saved’ (1 Tim. 2, 4), making it mean that He wills the salvation of all the elect, among whom men of every race and type are represented. God’s choice of those to whom grace is to be given in no way depends on His foreknowledge of their future merits, for whatever good deeds they will do will themselves be the fruit of grace. In so far as His foreknowledge is involved, what He foreknows is what He Himself is going to do. Then how does God decide to justify this man rather than that? There can in the end be no answer to this agonizing question. God has mercy on those whom He wishes to save, and justifies them; He hardens those upon whom He does not wish to have mercy, not offering them grace in conditions in which they are likely to accept it. If this looks like favouritism, we should remember that all are in any case justly condemned, and that if God makes His decision in the light of ‘a secret and, to human calculation, inscrutable justice’. Augustine is therefore prepared to speak of certain people as being predestined to eternal death and damnation; they may include, apparently, decent Christians who have been called and baptized, but to whom the grace of perseverance has not been given. More often, however, he speaks of the predestination of the saints which consists in ‘God’s foreknowledge and preparation of the benefits by which those who are to be delivered are most assuredly delivered’. These alone have the grace of perseverance, and even before they are born they are sons of God and cannot perish.[1]

As Kelly describes Augustine’s doctrine of predestination, election-reprobation, what stands out is the way God stands over humanity, as if humanity has no correspondence to God by God’s grace. As if humanity must find a way to God, even as God finds His way to humanity. And for Augustine God only finds His way to humanity through an ad hoc arbitrary election of certain individuals, who he snares out of the ‘massa damnata’ (the ‘mass of damnation’ of humanity). But it is this that represents the inorganic notion of a God-human/God-world relation for Augustine; i.e., that humanity has no ground in God’s life organically, creatively; that it is only by God’s voluntary act that He brings ‘some’ into a contractive relationship with Him—as some would call it later, the absolutum decretum (the absolute decree of election/reprobation/predestination).

So, all of the aforementioned to bring up another application of this type of Augustinianism as it relates to soteriology. In Book 4 of Peter Lombard’s infamous Sentences, he writes the following:

Chapter 2 (110)

  1. CONCERNING THOSE WHO DO NOT COMPLETE THEIR PENANCE. But if it is asked whether those who do not complete their penance in this life will pass through the fire to complete there, as it were, what they have left unfinished here, we say that the same is to be supposed concerning these as of those who repent at the end.—For if their contrition of heart and their disapproval of crime were so great as to suffice for the punishment of sin, they will pass into [eternal] life free from other punishments, even if their penance was not completed, because they perfectly repented and groaned in their heart.—But as for those who are not so contrite in heart, or who do not so groan for sin, if they died before the completion of penance, they feel the purging fire, and are punished more gravely than if they had completed their penance here, for it is an awful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
  2. For since God is merciful and just, he forgives the penitent from mercy, not reserving the sin for eternal punishment; but from justice, he does not leave a crime unpunished. Either man punishes it, or God. Man punishes it by repenting. And penance is inward and outward. And so, if the inner sorrow is such as to suffice as retribution for sin, God, who knows this, does not exact any further punishment from someone who repents in such fashion. But if the inward sorrow does not suffice as retribution for sin, and the external penance is not fulfilled, God, who knows the ways and measures of sins and punishments, adds a sufficient punishment.
  3. “Let each one, then, see to it that he so corrects his crimes, that it will not be necessary to sustain a punishment after death. For some mortal sins become venial in penance, but are not immediately healed. Often a sick person would die, if he were not given medication; but he is not healed as soon as he receives medication: he who is going to live languishes, who before was about to die. But one who dies impenitent, dies wholly, and is tormented eternally. For if he were to live forever, he would sin forever.”[2]

The above longform to simply point out one simple, but profound reality: if humanity is not thought from God’s grace for us in His hypostasized life for us in the person of Jesus Christ; if humanity is not from God’s unilateral givenness for us in His election to be for all of humanity, indeed as He assumes all of humanity into His vicarious humanity pro nobis (for us) in Jesus Christ; then, humanity will always be left destitute, even ‘elect’ humanity, not to mention the mass of humanity who God does not elect, to pursue God and fill up the gap between God and humanity through the various means of grace God has given them. The dualism, if not obvious, is present in the penitential theology of Augustine, and the Latins, both on the Catholic and Protestant sides, insofar that the human being must constantly strive, and constantly reach out and hope that ‘they’ have done enough to be found worthy before God; even in the supplicant of His freely given grace. Grace in this frame becomes detached from God’s personal and triune life in Christ for the world, and instead it becomes a created grace, a quality, that the elect (they hope they are) must rightly habituate in and handle in the right ways if they ever hope of being in the Beatific Vision, and maybe, just maybe getting to avoid the ‘purging fires’ (Purgatory) along the way.

It ought to be clear though, in a soteriological frame, how Augustine’s “individualistic” understanding, as detailed by Kelly, and illustrated by Lombard in an Augustinian penitential theology, throws the would-be elect individual upon themselves, rather than upon Christ, in their pursuit of salvation and eternal life, coram Deo. God forbid this! God has singularly brought Godself and humanity together in His pre-destination, within His own life, in His elected elect humanity in the eternal Logos, the Son of God, as He hypostatically united His divine life with our human life, in His assumptio carnis (‘assumption of the flesh’), and made His human life our life, as we rose from the dead with His humanity, which is total humanity, by which all of humanity has been objectively saved (note: this does not entail a universalism, per se).

[1] J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, Revised Edition (New York: Harper Collins, 1978), 368-69.

[2] Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 4, On the Doctrine of the Signs, translated by Giulio Silano (Toronto-Ontario Canada: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2010), 122–3.

The Lombard, An Origenist Analogy On the Church Catholic the Church Protestant

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Peter Lombard (ca. 1095-1160), bishop of Paris. Lombard taught theology at the school of Notre Dame and his text Four Books of Sentences was the key theology text of the Middle Ages. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

I was just pondering how all of us Protestants (Reformed, Lutheran, evangelicals et al.) are still members of the Latin/Western church (normally understood to be the Catholic church). As Providence would have it, as I’m reading Book 4 of Lombard’s Sentences (in my quest to become a mediaeval doctor of the Church), I came across the following citation from Lombard on and from Origen:

ORIGEN, ON LEVITICUS. And so those whom the Church’s sentence strikes and wounds according to what they deserve are outside also before God. Whoever did not deserve it, is wounded by the Church’s sentence, unless he holds it in contempt. Hence Origen: “One has gone out from truth, from faith, from charity: on this account, he goes out of the encampments of the Church, even if he is not cast out by the bishop’s voice. Likewise, on the contrary, another is sent outside by a judgement which is not right, but if he did not do anything to deserve to go out, he suffers no wound. And so, at times, one who is sent outside is within; and one who is outside, appears to be kept within.” (Lombard, Sentences, 4.18.7 (103).3)

In context this is referring to the binding and loosing power that the Catholic church believes priests have, in regard to forgiveness and confession of sins. But on analogy, it could also be observed, in principle, that there remains this type of “outside/within” dynamic even within the broader catholic Western church (and beyond). Of course, how this outside/within dynamic is affirmed, perspectivally, will determine who the outside and within are. From a historical perspective it would be the Catholic church within which the Protestant church, while outside, is still within in certain important ways. Indeed, in the way Luther had originally intended: to be a reformer from within rather than outside the church. Hence, Exsurge Domine notwithstanding, I would argue, de jure, the Protestants are still within even while outside.

The Original Sin of Sex in Augustine, Ambrose, and Lombard

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It is no secret, for those whom it is no secret, that Augustine believed that original sin was a genetic material stuff that was propagated in and among the human mass through the lust of sexual intercourse. Indeed, some of this, no doubt, was developed in the context of his Manichean background; but also, Augustine believed that the passions themselves were ultimately representative of the very base of sin, or what he identified as concupiscence (self-love). He wasn’t the only one who believed this, there were many others, following, like Ambrose, and later Peter Lombard, who affirmed the same in regard to the relationship between post-fall sexual relationships and the propagation of original sin sired in that act. Here is Lombard in his Sentences giving his own view on this, followed by prooftexts from both Ambrose and Augustine.

Chapter 4 (209)

HE SHOWS THE CAUSE OF THE CORRUPTION OF THE FLESH, FROM WHICH SIN OCCURS IN THE SOUL. For the flesh became corrupt in Adam through sin. Before sin, a man and a woman could join together without the incentive of lust and the burning of concupiscence, and there was a marriage bed without stain; but after sin, there cannot be carnal joining without lustful concupiscence, which is always a flaw, and even a fault, unless it is excused by the goods of marriage. And so it is in concupiscence and lust that the flesh is conceived which is to be formed into the body of the offspring. And so the flesh itself, which is conceived in vicious concupiscence, is polluted and corrupted. From contact with such flesh, the soul, as it is infused, derives the stain by which it is polluted and becomes guilty, that is, the vice of concupiscence, which is original sin.

  1. THAT BECAUSE OF THE CORRUPTION OF THE FLESH, WHICH IS THE CAUSE OF SIN, SIN IS SAID TO BE IN THE FLESH. And that is why sin is said to be in the flesh. And so the flesh which is sown in the concupiscence of lust has neither guilt nor the action of guilt, but its cause. Therefore, in that which is sown, there is corruption; in that which is born by concupiscence, there is vice.
  2. Hence Ambrose, on the words of the Apostle, says as follows: “How does sin live in the flesh, since it is not a substance, but a privation of the good? In this way: the body of the first man was corrupted through sin, and that corruption remains in the body through the nature of the offense, preserving the force of the divine sentence promulgated against Adam, by association with whom the soul is stained by sin. And so it is because the cause of the deed remains that sin is said to live in the flesh.” This is the law of the flesh.—The same: “Sin does not live in the spirit, but in the flesh, because the cause of sin is from the flesh, not from the soul; because the flesh is, from its origin, of the flesh of sin, and through its transmission all flesh becomes [flesh] of sin.” But the soul is not transmitted and so it does not have the cause of sin in it.
  3. Augustine too, in a sermon On the Words of the Apostle, shows that the soul contracts sin from the flesh; he says: “The vice of concupiscence is what the soul contracted, but from the flesh. For human nature was not first established with vice by God’s work, but it was wounded by vice coming from the choice of the will of the first humans,” so that there is not good in the flesh, but vice, by which the soul is corrupted.[1]

A truly unbiblical development and accretion, but one that Augustine, and those following, felt needed to be pressed in order to keep the heretical teachings of Pelagius, and the Pelagians at bay. This is what happens when an imbalance is presented into the mix of theological development, particularly as that obtains in the heat of polemical relationships. Not to mention, by time the Augustinian and Pelagius disputation occurred, theological matters had also become a deeply political aggression.

Clearly, from Scripture, the Apostle encourages sexual intercourse (not to mention the epistle to the Hebrews) as a duty, and yet a pleasure, to be had in the marriage bond between a man and a woman.

Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. 2 But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband. 3 The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife, and likewise also the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5 Stop depriving one another, except by agreement for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer, and come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6 But this I say by way of concession, not of command. 7 Yet I wish that all men were even as I myself am. However, each man has his own gift from God, one in this manner, and another in that.[2]

Not simply as an act for reproduction, as Augustine would press. But indeed, as an act of undefiled and pure intimacy; i.e., the two become one in the ‘flesh’ in the communal bond of the love of the Holy Spirit. Latterly, Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther, Puritans like Richard Sibbes et al. would pick up on what came to be called ‘Marriage Mysticism,’ in regard to the relationship between Christ and His Bride, the Church. In other words, the intimacy envisaged by the act of sexual penetration in the bonds of holy matrimony were so (and are so) sanctified, that it could be the symbol of the intimacy that Christ and His Bride have within the bond of God’s Holy Life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (whose life itself is known to be perichoretic and interpenetrative in a Subject-in-Being fellowshipping relationship) (see Eph. 5:18ff). All of this to underscore that sex within marriage coram Deo is a peak event in the human experience in regard to attesting to the very triune life of God itself; inclusive of God’s life with us (Immanuel) and in us in Christ.

Augustine, Ambrose, Lombard et al. couldn’t get everything right.

[1] Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 2 On Creation: Distinction XXXI, trans. by Giulio Silano (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012), 154–55.

[2] I Corinthians 7:1–7, NASB95.

Lombard’s Mediaeval Anthologizing As Corrective For Understanding ‘Begottenness’ and the Eternal Generation of the Son

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“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” –John 3.16

‘Begotten’ language can be rather confusing to some, particularly as it is situated in what is referred to as the Mysterium Trinitatis, or the mystery of the Trinity. It might sound like the Son was subordinately generated from the Father, and thus send us into a theological tizzy of dilemma and heterodoxy. Indeed, we get this sense in what some evangelical theologians have offered in their view that the Son is eternally in submission to the Father (ESS), or eternally and functionally subordinate to the Father (EFS); this could tie into a notion of begottenness that would fit with the concern that such language generates in regard to thinking the relation between the Father and the Son in subordinationist terms. But historically, this has not been the way the so called Great Tradition of the Church has understood the language of begotten in an origin of relation between the Father and the Son; indeed just the opposite of what we get in subordinationist environs of thought.

I am in the early process of reading through Peter Lombard’s Sentences. The first book has to do with the Triune Life of God, as such, and accordingly, we come upon our issue with reference to the language of begottenness and the Son/Father relation. Let me share from Lombard, as he shares mostly from Gregory, Augustine, and Chrysostom, in regard to the Son’s relation to the Father, and how to be begotten in the Trad has everything to do with the eternal origin of relation that coinheres between the Father and Son (and Holy Spirit), rather than referring us to the lamentable accouterments we are given through proponents of EFS; or other like heretical notions of subordinationism in a doctrine of God. Lombard writes:

Chapter 4 (32)

  1. WHETHER IT OUGHT TO BE SAID ‘THE SON IS FOREVER GENERATED’ OR ‘WAS FOREVER GENERATED.’ Since the Son’s generation from the Father is eternal, and so has neither beginning nor end, it may now be asked whether we ought to say: The Son is forever generated, or was forever generated, or will forever be generated.
  2. Concerning this, Gregory on Job says: “Jesus, Lord and God, insofar as he is the power and wisdom of God, was born of the Father before all time, or better, because he neither began nor ceased to be born, let us more truly say ‘was forever born.’ For we cannot say ‘is forever being born,’ lest he seem to be imperfect. Indeed, in order that he may be known to be both eternal and perfect, let us say both forever and born, seeing that ‘born’ pertains to his perfection and ‘forever’ to his eternity. And yet, even by our use of ‘perfect,’ we depart much from the enunciation of the truth of the matter, because whatever is not made cannot properly be said to be perfected. It is with stammers that we sing out, as best we can, the high things of God; and “the Lord, with words of condescension toward our weakness, says: Be perfect, as your Father is heaven is perfect.”
  3. Augustine addresses this question of begetting of the Son in his comments on that phrase of the psalm: Today I have begotten you. He says: “The term today may also designate that day on which Christ was born according to the flesh. But because today indicates the present, and in eternity there is neither something that is past, as if it had ceased to be, nor something that is future, as if it did not yet exist, but only the present, because whatever is eternal always is, that is why today is more divinely applied to the eternal begetting of the wisdom of God.” Note that, by these words, Augustine clearly shows that the begetting of the Son always is; it neither ceased to be, nor is in the future, because it is eternal. That is why he said I have begotten, lest it be thought to be a new thing, in other words, lest it be thought to have had a beginning; he said today lest the begetting be thought to be past.—From these words of the Prophet, as John Chrysostom says, “nothing else is manifested than the fact that the Son is forever generated from the very essence of the Father.”[1]

What we gather from this mediaeval anthologizing from Lombard is that when we hear the language of ‘begotten,’ of the Son, we ought to first recognize that we are pressed up against a mystery indeed; that we are pressed up against the ultimacy of God who by nature defies being read into by social analogies (which is what we get from the ESS proponents). If we follow the ancient writers we will recognize that for the Son to be begotten is to realize that this has been the eternal reality, the very inner-fabric that constitutes the eternally Triune Divine Nature of the Living God. For the Son to be begotten, as our writer’s have identified, is to recognize that the Father has never been the Father without the Son, and the Son has never been the Son without the Father, and the Holy Spirit has not been the Holy Spirit without His bonding relationship in and with the other two.

It is the processions of God’s inner life that is the referent point of begotten language that serves as the antecedent basis for the missions of God life (ad extra) in the economy. But we ought to recognize that this anteriority of God’s life is the definitive reality of the economic reality revealed in salvation history; and as such even while He stoops to interface with us in the flesh and blood of the only begotten Son, this accommodation ought not to be misunderstood as something circumscribable by the social nodes of our own frail and weak understanding. To be begotten, for the Son, does not entail subordination (functional or otherwise) to the Father. Instead, to be begotten, for the Son, represents how the Son is the Son in relation to the Father, but in an equi-distant sense, insofar as the Father could not be the Father without the Son; and the neither the Son nor the Father could dwell in this filial bond of eternal fellowship without the Holy Spirit’s ubiquitous parousia of eternal love-making.

At the end of the day: to be begotten is not subject to the machinations of the feeble Christian. It is not something that has an analogy available for it in the created realm. Instead, for the Son to be eternally begotten of the Father represents an ontological-limiting reality that can only be adored and wondered at in jubilant praise and worship before the living God who sits enthroned under the covering wings of the Cheribum’s ministry. In other words, the language of begotten is sacrosanct reality that remains unassailable to creaturely appropriation. It is a hands off reality that we have been graciously invited into as we participate in and from the humanity of Jesus Christ. As such, it is a mediated reality for us, and gives us a portal into an eternal reality that is not of this world. Here we are to be silent.

 

[1] Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 1: The Mystery of the Trinity, trans. by Giulio Silano (Toronto, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2007), 54-5.