It seems this blog has somewhat died out, but I figured I’d post this anyway. I am pleased to announce that Wipf and Stock publishers has just released my first book: Incarnation and Sacrament: The Eucharistic Controversy between Charles Hodge and John Williamson Nevin. The book is an adapted and updated version of the Master’s thesis I wrote at Gordon-Conwell in 2008.

Here’s the link to it on Wipf and Stock’s website.

It will also be available through the Westminster Theological Seminary bookstore in about a week. It’s currently listed as “coming soon” on their site.

And it’ll be up on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online outlets in around 5 weeks or so.

In an interesting essay titled “He is Outwith the World…that He Might Fill All Things” (in This is My Body, Baker Academic, 2008, 127-139.), Thomas J. Davis suggests that Calvin’s frequent emphasis on the spatial distance between Christ and the world is actually an accommodated way of speaking which metaphorically communicates an indescribable reality in a way we can understand it. The key to this interpretation of Calvin, for Davis, is found in certain passages in his commentaries.

Davis rightly points out that Calvin’s Eucharistic theology is conditioned by the dialectical tension of absence and presence. There are two seemingly antithetical points which Calvin was most concerned to uphold: 1. “[I]t is absolutely essential for the ascension to be understood as the removal of Christ’s body from earth to heaven so that it is corporeally absent from believers. Calvin’s understanding of salvation depended on this.” And 2. “[I]t is absolutely essential that believers have access to the body of Christ in heaven so that it is present corporeally to them. Calvin’s understanding of salvation depended on this.” (130)

We see both points being affirmed throughout Calvin’s writings. The clearest affirmation of the first point may be found in the Consensus Tigurinus

I see that it’s been over a month and half since the last post here, and it was Part IV of my series providing the Medieval background to Steven’s post on the Reformation “two kingdoms” doctrine. I do have more material to present, which takes the story through the Church-State controversies of the High Middle Ages, but due to full time teaching responsibilities I have as yet been unable to get this material into a form suitable for this blog. School begins on Monday, and so I’m afraid it may be a while longer before that material can appear. My apologies for the delay – and of course, for the terminal slowness of this blog in general.

By the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, political discourse in the West had for several centuries been engulfed by numerous controversies between the papal and royal powers of the one Christian society. The typical Roman Catholic way of telling the story of these centuries (and indeed of all the centuries before and after) magnifies the authority claims of the papacy above all others and treats all others as if they were mere will-o-the-wisps advanced by novelty-loving heretics.

This is far from the truth, and if the preceding parts of this series have not yet demonstrated this, this part and the ones that follow should do so. In this part of the series, we will look at one of the most pivotal series of events that shaped Christian political discourse in the “High” Middle Ages, and which, in terms of the monistic doctrine of the papacy which emerged from it, substantially prepared the ground for the Reformation’s attempt to recover a more healthy “two kingdoms” viewpoint.

The ambiguity of Gelasius’ dualistic political theory created a great deal of intellectual and cultural fermentation in Christian society during the eighth and ninth centuries, when, as one scholar puts it, “Theocracy thrived: but so did the seeds of constitutionalism.”[1] The crowning of Charlemagne as “Emperor of the Romans” by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day, 800 was a portent of much confusion to come. Viewed from a papalist perspective, it very much looked as if the spiritual power was conferring an authenticity upon the temporal power that the latter would not have had without the former. Viewed from a papalist perspective, it seemed as if the Bishop of Rome possessed both “swords,” the temporal and the spiritual, and that the former was his to give to or to withhold from anyone he wished.

In the first part of this series, we looked at Augustine’s epochal work the City of God which was enormously influential on the political thought of the Middle Ages. Of course, Augustine was not the only influence on Christian political thought, nor was the the first to try to formulate a theology of how Christians should interact with the civil power. As one scholar puts it, for the first three centuries of the Faith’s existence, “Christians did not engage in anything that one might recognise as political reflection or activity.” [R.W. Dyson, Normative Theories of Society and Government in Five Medieval Thinkers (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), pg. 71.] Generally speaking, thanks to repeated persecutions and to their own expectation of the imminent return of Christ to judge the world, Christians thought of their relation to the Empire in an adversarial manner. Christianity had literally to fight tooth-and-nail for its mere survival. Her apologists, though great and godly men, were hard pressed to offer defenses against the attacks, and had little, if any, time and energy to construct what we might call a “positive theology” of the state.

Tertullian (160-220), who famously wondered what Jerusalem had to do with Athens, also made it plain that “Nothing is more foreign to us [the Christians] than the State.” [Apologeticus 38.3, as cited by Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pg. 10.] Origen (185-254) thought of the Empire as having brought “a milder spirit” without which the spread of the Gospel would have been much more difficult,[Contra Celsum, ii.30.] On the other hand, Cyprian (d. 258), wondered how something that “had originated as a refuge for robbers” could be in any sense eternal.[W.H.C. Frend, “Church and State: Perspective and Problems in the Patristic Era,” in Studia Patristica Vol. XVII, Part One, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1982), pg. 44.] Later, the apologist Arnobius (d. ca. 330) wrote that the Roman Empire was “a curse to humanity…born for the destruction of the human race.”[Frend, ibid., pg. 42.]

“No bishop, no King,” James VI of Scotland and I of England famously stated in his controversy with the Presbyterians. But his statement could just as easily be reversed. Without a King, or perhaps better, without a Caesar, would we have bishops? Would we have sees? In asking these questions, one learns that in so many ways, the Reformation mirrored the climate of Late Antiquity and the early Church.

Without the Roman Empire, would Christendom ever have been? The question goes beyond mere politics or church government. The imperial church granted us the creeds and unified the liturgy (with certain notable exceptions which themselves display socio-political lines). It gave us the legacy, the narrative, by which we now teach our children who they are. And this is both a blessing and a burden.

Peter Heather, in his The Fall of the Roman Empire, describes the way in which the Christian Church came to enjoy its role as a public institution. He notes, “After Constantine’s public adoption of Christianity, the long-standing claims about the relation of the state to the deity were quickly, and surprisingly easily, reworked” (123).

Rather than a clash, there is a coalescence.

The June TLS has an article version of Richard Seaford’s Presidential Address to the Classical Association, given earlier this year, on the Greek discovery of money and their wisdom of limits, freedom, and desire. He says

Among the ancient Greeks there is what I call a culture of limit. By contrast, our culture is characterized by hostility to closure (limit) in various
spheres: economic, metaphysical, conceptual , narrative, and others.

This opposition is related to an opposition in the basic forms of life. For the Greeks, the realm of freedom (economic and ethical) was stable self-sufficiency; and this determined the manner in which they (or at least those whose voices have survived) reacted to the unlimitedness of money. But we react to it in a manner determined by the fact that for us the realm of freedom is constant exchange. “Metaphysical categories”, wrote Adorno, “are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about it and in their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences.” The same is true of the modern theoretical hostility to metaphysics, the postmodern fetishization of fragmentation, depthlessness, and indeterminacy, and its sublimation of the universe of free-floating images.

The postmodern devotion to abolishing “Western” (that is Greek) metaphysics would be illuminated by considering the economic conditions of its genesis. Just as our politico-economic discourse assumes the maximization of of earning and expenditure (even of borrowing) by groups and individuals alike, so our theoretical discourse is hostile to all forms of closure.

Earlier, he remarks that what makes the Greeks figure so largely in our memory is that they are enough like us to be easily enough intelligible, yet unlike us enough to exercise and challenge our minds. Because of this, there has been a whole history of hastily generalized “Greekdoms,” each of which have been made to play one role or another in European and American Christendom’s conversation about itself. In one recent episode of that history, Oswald Spengler famously emphasized the idea of limit as definitive of the Greeks, as opposed to the drive for the infinite and the dissolution of all boundaries supposedly characteristic of Western, “Faustian” communities.

Seaford is wiser by far than Spengler; Seaford, like the Greeks, is not dealing in essentializations. He is simply suggesting that the Greeks, through custom and circumstance and reasoning and choice, were disposed to limits, and that the modern West, from a similar combination of factors, is much less so. These aren’t necessary effects of any supposed cultural “nature” (which is a contradictio in adjecto), but are rather contingent effects of chosen policies. The Greek leaders contemplated and deliberated, as men are meant to do, and what they saw of God’s pattern for creation- what Lewis in The Abolition of Man called the “Tao”- they put into practice as best they could. They were often muddled and certainly made many mistakes, but they arrived at a sort of real wisdom. Seaford explicitly, and rightly, denies that the Greek culture of limit is wholly imitable by us. It is not imitable by us in many of its neutral particulars, and certainly not in any of its vicious particulars. But he does suggest it as an edifying model in certain respects. He calls the Hellenic legacy “one of a number of precious resources”, and so it is; we have many others, too, which might help us in our civic conversations about the nature of freedom, society, and the role of money and wealth.

As always, the Greeks do have something to tell us; everybody does, really, but the Greeks are by Providence among our nearest historical neighbors and antecedents, and thus our Reformers took them as teachers in matters of cosmic and civic wisdom. Not their only or even primary teachers; but eminent teachers nonetheless.

Seaford’s own observation about certain fashions of our time should not go unremarked. He is very shrewd to see that the “postmodern” hostility to the tradition of Western metaphysics expresses the still very modern hostility to all forms of limit. Limits, where they are real, are from being; being, whose lineaments are traced by wisdom. Some would-be orthodox theologians seem to think that rejecting the Greeks and their ongoing legacy is a useful move in combatting what Seaford, at the end of his essay, calls “our hyper-monetized , atomized, and self-destructive culture of the unlimited”. They are only too happy to avail themselves of the postmodernist toolkit’s chisels and hammers of deconstruction in this undertaking. But by rejecting the wisdom of being, they are forced to posit categories of faith in their stead. The true wisdom of revelation, however, is not opposed to the wisdom of being which man can attain by reason; it presupposes it. Thus a faith-knowledge which rejects philosophy  is not truly a knowledge from revelation; it is simply “faith” in the modern sense- unaccountable, arbitrary personal preference, an idiosyncratic “value”, which is just as subjective and wilful as the worst aspects of modernity it claims to want to oppose. Francis Schaeffer was absolutely right to always insist, against certain kinds of modern theologizing, on “true truth”; and to insist on that is to find one’s self, consciously or not, as both disciple and fellow student of the Greeks.

Randall Balmer, Episcopal priest and American church historian, relates here an encounter with the notorious Ten Commandments Judge of Alabama, Roy Moore.

Balmer takes some easy shots at Moore in his description of him and his campaign. One wishes that Balmer’s Coastal condescension were not so evident as it is; I, for one, don’t like to wince when I read things, but perhaps the priestly historian is working especially hard to insure that his readers won’t mistake him as somehow being the same sort of Christian as Judge Moore. The description of Moore seems meant to emphasize more than differences in theology proper. Balmer, for some reason, finds it necessary to tell us that Moore is a “former kickboxer”. The suggestion seems to be that Moore’s Christianity is aggressive and visceral, one might even say primitive- as opposed, I take it, to a more scholarly and cosmopolitan and unassuming style of belief, exemplified, I take it, by Balmer. More basically this implicit comparison seems to serve as a figure for the purported red/blue division of the United States; and Balmer seems to be taking pains to let us know where he lives. I’m not at all persuaded of the usefulness of the boxing criterion as an indicator of one’s intellectuality or politics. The Leftist academic sociologist Loic Wacquant, for example, took up boxing, and even wrote a book about it; and I’ve known a number of brainy and left-leaning boxers myself. The really primitive sport here is Balmer’s unkind jabbing at what Moore supposedly represents. Given his picture of Moore as an affable and naive, but nevertheless primitively severe magistrate, Judge Moore comes out looking like- I believe the comparison has been drawn before- that other Judge Roy of Western legend, the ridiculous but no less dangerous Hanging Judge Roy Bean.

In this post and several to follow, I’d like to give some of the Medieval background to Steven’s post below entitled “Reformation And The Two Kingdoms of Christendom.”

Behind all of this, as is the case with so much of Christian theology, is the epoch-making work of St. Augustine. Here the work of most importance is the City of God, written between 413 and 426 A.D. to answer the charge of educated pagans that the city of Rome, mistress of the whole world, had fallen to the barbarians because she had abandoned her ancient gods and embraced the novel God of the Christians.

In the City of God, Augustine divides God’s creation into “Two Cities,” the City of God and the City of Man. He defines and explains these two cities in several places throughout the work. Basically, the City of God is that entity made up of all the elect angels and elect men, while the City of Man is that entity made up of all the non-elect angels and non-elect men. The City of God is characterized by its love of God above all things which God has made, while the City of Man is characterized by its love of things which God has made above God Himself. At the same time, however, in terms of their membership both cities are mixed (permixta): the City of God gets her converts from the City of Man, and likewise, some members of the City of God on earth will turn out to have been non-elect men who in truth belonged to the City of Man.