My position on the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism is that the more moderate forms of each are both plausible and orthodox. Hyper-Calvinism can slide into the heresy of fatalism, or the denial that God loves all people; hyper-Arminianism slides, of course, into Pelagianism. It is only the moderate forms of each which are, I say, plausible and orthodox. These moderate forms, I hold, represent two different man-made philosophical and theological systems designed to uphold the same doctrines revealed in Scripture. I believe that when the disagreement actually reaches all the way down to Biblical hermeneutics, rather than staying in the realm of systematic theology, it is usually the case that someone has strayed into the "hyper" realm. We ought to be able to state what the Scripture says in a "topic-neutral" way because the Scripture does not reveal to us a theory of grace or of soteriology that reaches this level of detail. Now, the revealed doctrines I'm talking about are often considered to be specifically Calvinist doctrines. The reason for this, at least among the people I talk to, is that all of us find that the majority (though by no means all) of the Protestants we talk to fall into two categories: those who accept various forms of hyper-Arminianism implicitly and unreflectively, and those who accept Calvinism consciously and reflectively.
I believe in the compatibility of the Biblical doctrines of grace and election with a moderate Arminianism. I believe that this compatibility is most clearly seen in two verses: John 6:40 and Romans 8:29. Note that I am not claiming that the Bible teaches Arminianism. (Personally, I believe in the moderate Arminian theory I am outlining on grounds of philosophical considerations related to human freedom and personal responsibility.) What I am claiming is that these two verses (and others) teach a doctrine of election/grace/predestination that is compatible with a moderate Arminianism. In outlining what this moderate Arminianism would look like, I hope to offer Biblical considerations against (1) the view that only Calvinism can adequately account for the Biblical doctrines of grace, and (2) various hyper-Arminian views.
John 6:40 reads, "For this is the will of My Father: that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." Christ says that this is the will of the Father. That is, the Father has made an effectual, sovereign pronouncement. This pronouncement relates to a specific group of people: "everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him." It also has a specific content: they "may have eternal life, and [Christ] will raise [them] up on the last day." There is no natural necessity or connection between seeing the Son and believing (trusting) in Him and having eternal life. Rather, the connection is forged entirely by the sovereign will of God. Those who trust the Son do not thereby work any part of their salvation or come to deserve eternal life. The work of salvation is entirely independent of the individual. In this way, we can, as Arminians, claim that everyone is free to accept or reject Christ, while nevertheless assenting to the Biblical doctrines of election ("You did not choose Me, but I chose you" - John 15:16) and grace (i.e. the view that we are undeserving of God's favor - which is, in fact, the meaning of the word 'grace' as it is used throughout the NT).
Similarly, Romans 8:29 reads, "For those He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers." This passage picks out a specific group of people who God has predestined to be conformed into the image of Christ: "those He foreknew." In order to make sense of this verse foreknowledge must be distinct from, and prior to, predestination. Moderate Calvinist and Arminian views can both do this, but more extreme ones cannot: hyper-Calvinism collapses foreknowledge into predestination, and hyper-Arminianism collapses predestination into foreknowledge. What we need to say in our moderate Arminian theory is that God foreknew something about these people - something they would choose freely - and predestined something entirely unrelated for those people on the basis of his foreknowledge. As in John, we may say that what God foreknew is that they would "see the Son and trust him." The verse itself says what they are predestined for: to be conformed into his image. There is no natural connection or necessity between trusting the Son and being conformed into his image, so by trusting him we do not accomplish our own sanctification. Those who trust the Son do not thereby become worthy to become like him, and therefore we still receive this as a gift of grace.
The core Biblical doctrine that moderate Calvinists and moderate Arminians agree on is this: God, in his sovereignty, has freely chosen, on the basis of his foreknowledge, to save a group of people, the elect, who are unable to contribute anything to their own salvation and are totally undeserving of salvation. The disagreement is over what God foreknew. Our moderate Arminian theory claims that God foreknew decisions which were made freely by the individual members of the group, but which neither contribute to salvation nor render the individual worthy of salvation. The Calvinist denies that the free decisions of humans enter into the equation at any point.
An objection to this view is that human beings are incapable of simply "choosing" to trust the Son:
... both Jews and Gentiles are all under sin, as it is written:
There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands,
there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
together they have become useless;
there is no one who does good,
there is not even one. (Romans 3:9-12)
John Wesley deals with this problem with his doctrine of prevenient grace. This doctrine asserts that God intervenes in our lives by his grace in order to enable us to choose him before we ever begin to seek him. But prevenient grace, unlike the grace of God in the Calvinist conception, is not irresistible. An Arminian Molinist can (but need not) still believe in infallible grace, by holding that God only extends prevenient grace to those he knows will accept it, and denies it to those he knows will never accept it so that it is possible to resist prevenient grace, but this never in fact happens. There are, however, reasons for rejecting this view. The principle one is that God seems to feel the need for what political theorists call public justification. That is, although God already knows the our guilt or innocence, he nevertheless plans to hold a public judgment in order to show us his reasons and his justice (Joel 3, Revelation 20:11-15). So it seems that God might want to go through the motions of offering grace even to those he knows will reject it. The alternative is to hold that every person, at at least one moment in his or her life, is elevated by God's prevenient grace out of his or her bondage to sin to just such a degree as to be able to freely chose to trust, or not to trust, in Christ. Some Calvinists will no doubt object that it is impossible that a person who is free in this way should reject Christ after seeing him. This gets into difficult questions of free wills naturally choosing the good and of akrasia, i.e. weakness of the will. The latter is a big problem, especially for the Augustinian/Platonist account of the will that (I think) most Calvinists hold. Nevertheless, I think it should be evident by the time we get to this objection that I have achieved what I set out to achieve: we are well beyond Biblical hermeneutics and deep into the realm of philosophy, guided not by revelation, but by human reason.
Tim Troutman (formerly known as "The God Fearin' Fiddler") of The God Fearin' Forum has responded to my latest discussion of Eucharistic theology and Aristotle. Perhaps I have not been very clear. Whatever the case, Tim persistently misunderstands both my claim and my argument for it. I am going to try to make what I am claiming very clear here:
The doctrine of transubstantiation, as expounded by Trent, is rendered incoherent by any system of metaphysics sufficiently different from Aristotle's.
Now that I've cleared that up (I hope), let me further explicate my claim and argue for it again. In case you've forgotten, here is my claim:
The doctrine of transubstantiation, as expounded by Trent, is rendered incoherent by any system of metaphysics sufficiently different from Aristotle's.
A lot actually. I don't want to start making a list (I might not stop). Regular readers may wonder why I still use the title so prominently, given my concern for history and tradition, and frequent attempts to distance myself from many elements of popular Evangelicalism. The answer is that I agree with the statements of faith of all the major Evangelical para-church groups, including their view of Scripture (my increasingly great respect for tradition has not altered that), and I continue to believe (perhaps more strongly than before) in "generous orthodoxy" - the view that the collection of doctrines we require all of our church members and leaders to subscribe to should be closer to the length and level of detail of the Nicene Creed than to the length and level of detail of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or even the Westminster Confession. (I say "closer to the length and level of detail of the Nicene Creed" - I certainly don't think that affirming only the Nicene Creed is sufficient for church leadership, and I don't think it's probably enough for membership either - you need at least to hold a view of the authority of Scripture - but I certainly don't think that one should have to affirm a book length statement, even for leadership, unless that book is the Bible itself.)
The reason I bring this up (besides the need to define myself in relation to our recent fascinating Ecumenical discussion), is that I've just read a review by Carl Trueman of a book entitled Is The Reformation Over? on Reformation21 (the magazine not the blog), which was recommended to me by a friend. The review is very well written and I think it does a good job of describing some of the shortcomings of modern Evangelicalism, and giving reasons for nevertheless not giving up on the Reformation. I agree with nearly everything he says.
The God Fearin' Fiddler has a post up on the historical significance of transubstantiation which has led to some interesting discussions. The principle problem with this post and the discussion that follows it, however, is that no one seems to understand the difference between transubstantiation and the Real Presence. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on this either, but I do think I know enough to clear up some historical and metaphysical confusion. I am going to use two principal sources - session 13 of the Council of Trent, and the relevant article from the Catholic Encyclopedia - to explain the historical development and specific content of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and then attempt to show two things: (1) no such doctrine is affirmed by Ambrose in the passage the Fiddler likes to quote in this connection, and (2) it would be very difficult for Christians with strong Platonist leanings, such as Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and most early Christian theologians, to even make sense of this doctrine, which renders it highly unlikely that they implicitly accepted it, or that they would have accepted it had it been explained to them.
Let us begin with an outline of the history. From the beginning, Christians used the words Christ himself used in describing the Eucharist. Christ himself said "this is my body" and "this is my blood." This is in essentially all of the records of the words of institution, including 1 Corinthians 11:23-29, the passage most churches read before serving the Eucharist. Christ also speaks this way in John 6, which is one of the most important texts on the theology of the Eucharist.
Now, all Christians, including even Zwingli, have used and still use this language in describing the Eucharist, so it is important to note that if Zwinglian or similar interpretations will work for the text of the New Testament, they will also work for most writers who merely adopt the New Testament's language and don't attempt to describe it in any more detail. Zwingli specifically argued for a symbolic interpretation by pointing out all the places in Scripture where "is" is used to mean "signifies." There appears to be a more or less uncontestable example of this even in the words of institution themselves, as they are recorded in Luke. Jesus says "this cup is the new covenant" (Luke 22:20, emphasis added), but the cup clearly isn't actually the new covenant (how could it be?). Rather, it is the sign and seal of the new covenant. I don't think that either Catholic and Orthodox believers, who like to interpret the words of institution literally, or fundamentalists, who like to interpret everything but the words of institution literally, would want to say that the cup literally is the new covenant.
I am not an expert on patristics (though I am working on it), but I suspect that most of the fathers, especially the earlier ones, simply used the same language as Christ and didn't provide or attempt to provide much further analysis. The question at issue here doesn't hinge on whether we affirm these words to be true. All Christians agree on that. We all agree that these words express some important truth; we don't agree about what truth they express. (Actually, there is some agreement, but there is a lot of disagreement about the details.)
That said, a case can probably be made that many of the fathers explicitly affirmed the doctrine of the Real Presence (certainly at least a few of them did), and that no writings survive from an otherwise orthodox writer in the early period of Christianity who denies this doctrine. The doctrine of the Real Presence is simply the claim that these words are to be interpreted literally: the bread is the body of Christ and the wine is the blood of Christ. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, any attempt at further analysis meets with suspicion. However, as we shall see, the Roman Catholic Church has not only given a metaphysical theory of this doctrine, but has elevated that theory to the status of dogma (that is, all members of the Church are in principle required to assent to it).
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia article, transubstantiation properly so-called (at least the details of the theory) is a uniquely Western doctrine. The word was first used by Hildebert of Tours around 1079. Note that this is contemporary with Anselm, the first of the Scholastics, but before the wide availability of the words of the Arab Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (aka Averroes) and through him the works of Aristotle in the West. This will become significant later.
Of course, the history of the word is not a history of the doctrine. I have already outlined the doctrine of the Real Presence (it really is that simple). The Catholic Encyclopedia states that "the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation sets up a mighty bulwark around the dogma of the Real Presence and constitutes in itself a distinct doctrinal article, which is not involved in that of the Real Presence, though the doctrine of the Real Presence is necessarily contained in that of Transubstantiation." So when did this distinct doctrine develop? Before or after the use of the word? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find an answer to that question, and I don't know enough about Anselm and friends to know whether the philosophical commitments of the 11th and 12th century Western Christian philosophers and theologians left room for full transubstantiation. However, the Catholic Encyclopedia informs us that the word first entered Catholic dogmatic definitions at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, but the text of that council says only "[Christ's] body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine; the bread being changed [Lat. transsubstantiatio] by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood, so that to realize the mystery of unity we may receive of Him what He has received of us." Here we do have the word "form" (presumably Latin "forma") which is often a synonym of "species", a Scholastic/Aritotelian technical term used in later discussions of the doctrine. Nevertheless, since outside the technical jargon of scholasticism, "forma" just means "shape" and "species" just means "appearance," in order to show that the Fourth Lateran Council actually affirms transubstantiation as we know it today, rather than just using the word, it would have to be shown that the word already had the present day meaning. On the other hand, the word itself would seem to have some Aristotelian baggage (I promise I'm about to explain all of this - I apologize if anyone has to read this long post twice due to my poor organization): the bread and wine are not trans-formed - they retain their original form. Rather they are trans-substanced. The form remains the same, but the substance changes. This is the essence (that's another loaded term in Aristotle/Aquinas talk) of the doctrine. So it is probably affirmed by the Fourth Lateran Council.
At any rate, it is quite clear in the Council of Trent in 1563. Here are some excerpts from the thirteenth session (translated by Philip Schaff):
Chapter I ... after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ ... is truly, really, and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things ...Chapter IV On Transubstantiation. And because that Christ, our Redeemer, declared that which he offered under the species of bread to be truly his own body, therefore has it ever been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy Synod doth now declare it anew, that by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood; which conversion is, by the holy Catholic Church, suitably and properly called transubstantiation.
The Canons anathematize anyone who disagrees with this (Canon II even anathematizes anyone who doesn't want to call it transubstantiation!), but don't really add anything.
Here is the metaphysical background: Aristotle was a proponent of what is called a "hylomorphic" metaphysics. That is, he affirmed that material objects were made up of "matter" (Gr. hylas) and "form" (Gr. morphos). There is a lot more complexity than this, but this is the basic idea. This is related to his distinction between "substance" or "essence" (Gr. ousia) and "accident" (I don't know the Greek word for this). The matter of an object is the stuff it's made out of, and it's form is its shape or organization. For the Scholastics, the Latin "species" seems to have been related to Aristotle's "form" but been more closely related to our cognition (the Catholic Encyclopedia article on this didn't make that much sense to me). Objects also have an essence, which is that in virtue of which it is the thing it is, and various accidents, or properties that could change without the object being destroyed. Often, the essence of an object is thought to be a collection of essential properties; thus I might be essentially human.
For the Scholastic/Aristotelian, the doctrine of transubstantiation is kind of weird, but no weirder than the Incarnation of the Trinity, and, more importantly, it is coherent. It is to be explained as follows: the substances or essences of the bread and wine are fully replaced by the substances or essences of the body and blood of Christ (I'm not sure if the matter is also replaced), but there is no change to the accidents, or to the form/species. Thus it still appears to be bread and wine, but it actually is the body and blood of Christ, since essence is what determines identity. Technically, the bread and wine are not changed into the body and blood, but replaced with the body and blood, since you can't change the essence of a thing and still have that same thing. Let me note that, while I'm not an expert on Aristotle, I suspect he would find it preposterous to claim that the essence of a material object could be replaced with another essence (and thus the material object be replaced with a different object) before our eyes without any perceptible difference in the matter before us.
Now we are going to examine Ambrose, and then the philosophical commitments of Augustine and his fellow Christian Platonists.
The Fiddler quotes Ambrose as saying:
Perhaps you will say, "I see something else, how is it that you assert that I receive the Body of Christ?" And this is the point which remains for us to prove. And what evidence shall we make use of? Let us prove that this is not what nature made, but what the blessing consecrated, and the power of blessing is greater than that of nature, because by blessing nature itself is changed.... [Ambrose discusses miracles performed by the prophets] ...
We observe, then, that grace has more power than nature, and yet so far we have only spoken of the grace of a prophet's blessing. But if the blessing of man had such power as to change nature, what are we to say of that divine consecration where the very words of the Lord and Saviour operate? For that sacrament which you receive is made what it is by the word of Christ. But if the word of Elijah had such power as to bring down fire from heaven, shall not the word of Christ have power to change the nature of the elements? You read concerning the making of the whole world: "He spoke and they were made, He commanded and they were created." Shall not the word of Christ, which was able to make out of nothing that which was not, be able to change things which already are into what they were not? For it is not less to give a new nature to things than to change them.
But why make use of arguments? Let us use the examples He gives, and by the example of the Incarnation prove the truth of the mystery. Did the course of nature proceed as usual when the Lord Jesus was born of Mary? If we look to the usual course, a woman ordinarily conceives after connection with a man. And this body which we make is that which was born of the Virgin. Why do you seek the order of nature in the Body of Christ, seeing that the Lord Jesus Himself was born of a Virgin, not according to nature? It is the true Flesh of Christ which crucified and buried, this is then truly the Sacrament of His Body.
The Lord Jesus Himself proclaims: "This is My Body." Before the blessing of the heavenly words another nature is spoken of, after the consecration the Body is signified. He Himself speaks of His Blood. Before the consecration it has another name,after it is called Blood. And you say, Amen, that is, It is true. Let the heart within confess what the mouth utters, let the soul feel what the voice speaks.
In order to show that Amborse accepts transubstantiation, we have to show that he explains the words "this is my body" by the claim that the form and accidents of the bread remain, but its essence has been replaced by the essence of the body of Christ. Do you see that in the above quotation? I don't see any such thing. Ambrose certainly affirms the Real Presence: he says that if God can become human flesh, certainly he can become bread. He says that we shouldn't be surprised if Christ's body doesn't follow the ordinary course of nature, since God often performs miracles in Scripture, and since even Christ's human birth did not follow the ordinary course of nature. But I see nothing here about form and matter, or about substance and accident, or about species. And I'm not just looking for the words, I'm looking for the content. All Ambrose says is "this may look like bread, but it's actually the body of Christ, and God certainly has the power to make what looks, feels, and tastes like bread into the body of Christ." That is the doctrine of the Real Presence.
The last thing I want to cover is the issue of the Platonist leanings of many of the early fathers, notably the Alexandrians and Augustine. I shouldn't have to take pains to show this, because the Catholic Encyclopedia says, "even Augustine was deprived of a clear conception of Transubstantiation, so long as he was held in the bonds of Platonism." Nevertheless, I will at least try to explain it.
Platonism holds that material objects are what they are in virtue of their "participation" (more literally: "having a share") in a transcendant, changeless, immaterial "form" (not morphos, but eidos or idea, which Aristotle also uses, but in a somewhat different meaning than morphos, I think). You and I are both human because we participate in the form of Human, or, as Plato often says Humanity Itself. The bread is bread because of its relationship to Bread Itself. Things are, of course, generally participants in multiple forms, and everything is a participant in Goodness Itself to a greater or lesser degree because Plato holds to a privation theory of evil (which is where Augustine got it), so anything that had no goodness at all would not exist. Christian Platonists generally want to avoid the idea that the forms are co-eternal with and independent of God, so they say that they exist in God's understanding.
A Platonist does not have a concept of an essence as an Aristotelian does. Furthermore, Plato himself, and I believe most Platonists following him, generally cashes out "participation" in terms of "being patterned after." It is very difficult to see how the bread could change from being patterned after bread to being patterned after the body of Christ without any perceptible change. In what would the patterning consist? How does this object resemble a human body, and how Christ's body in particular? Now, there must be some way of getting this to work, because Father Nicolas Malebranche was a very intelligent Platonist Catholic priest in the 17th/18th century, after the Council of Trent, and he must have come up with something, but I don't know what he said.
At any rate, it is highly unlikely that any Christian Platonist held to anything like transubstantiation prior to Malebranche, and a great many of the early fathers, including, as I have said, the Alexandrian school and Augustine, were Platonists.
The situation is even worse for idealists such as myself (or 18th century Anglican Bishop George Berkeley). We don't believe that there is any such thing as the essence or substance or matter of the bread. All that exists, according to idealism, is what the Scholastics would call the "species." Transubstantiation is thus puzzling for the Aristotelian, more puzzling for the Platonist, and completely incoherent for the idealist. I should also note that most contemporary philosophers don't believe in any of these three theories, but transubstantiation is probably also incoherent for them, since material objects don't have undetectible essences (though they may have essential properties).
Now, a Christian idealist does have to come up with some explanation for the bodily resurrection and be able to say that the body that is raised is in some sense the same body although it is radically transformed in terms of its phenomenal properties. Whatever solution one comes up with for this problem could probably also be used to make sense of the doctrine of the Real Presence. However, this view cannot possibly look anything like transubstantiation, for the reasons discussed above.
Last night, I had a brief friendly debate with some Calvinists, which has me thinking about theological method. Briefly, I approach the issue of Calvinism and Arminianism from the perspective primarily of philosophy rather than revealed theology. That is, I argue that libertarian free will, which is incompatible with most (but, surprisingly, not all) versions of Calvinism, but is central to Arminianism, is a philosophically attractive thesis on grounds of, for instance, human moral responsibility, the problem of evil, and the phenomenology of choice. (I don't claim that Calvinists can't provide accounts of these things, I simply claim that Arminians are able to provide better accounts. I also acknowledge that Calvinists might have better accounts of other things.) As an Evangelical, I have to justify this approach, and I generally justify it by arguing that the answer is simply not, or at least not clearly, revealed to us; that the Scriptural arguments pro and con balance, or at least nearly balance. Because I don't believe the answer is revealed to us, and also because of the nature of the question, I don't think this issue is that important, as theological claims go (but it is still a theological claim, and therefore matters). As a result, when it comes up in theological contexts my approach is generally to argue for a claim that I do think is important: the claim that this is not a matter of dogma, i.e. that churches ought not to enforce uniformity of belief on this issue among their members or even among their leadership. I've been trying to think through my reasons for this, and I've realized that they have a lot to do with theological method, so in this post I am going to develop an account of an idealized theological method (still very much a work in progress - objections or suggestions are extremely welcome!), then briefly attempt to identify where in this method Calvinism and Arminianism enter the picture, and suggest that their position ought to disqualify them from being considered dogma. (Wayne Leman's five part series on what the Bible "explicitly" teaches about headship and submission, discusses what it means for the Bible to explicitly teach something and so has also helped to get me thinking about this subject.)
I have wrestled on this blog with questions about Scripture and tradition, and have usually been short on answers. In the context of the present discussion, I am going to venture an answer to the question of how the two relate to one another: tradition, I claim, enters the picture in that the method described below is to be applied primarily by the Church rather than the individual. In saying it is applied by the Church, I mean to include the entire Church, from the beginning to the present. Because the process is iterative and further stages build on past stages, awareness of Christian tradition will be critical if an individual's efforts are to contribute to the total process. (It should be noted that this is not a general answer to the question of the relationship between Scripture and tradition because, as those who have read my Why Believe the Bible? series are aware, I think that the Church and its traditions have something to do with how we know that the Bible should be central to our theological method.) It is a good intellectual exercise, I think, for an individual to start, as it were, from scratch in theology, but we ought not to base our doctrine or our lives on the conclusions that we have drawn from scratch without awareness of the total process being done by the Church.
Although tradition thus has an important place in theology, I suspect that the nature of the method is such that anyone who believes that this is the correct method for the Church to apply agrees with what the Reformers meant by sola scriptura (but I am not an expert on Reformation theology). Also, it is critical to realize that the individual and, especially, the Church is to be guided by the Holy Spirit throughout the process.
Here, then, are the steps in my proposed theological method:
Step 1 is harder than it sounds. For one thing, language and culture come in here. (Fortunately, the Church started the process when the cultural and linguistic context of at least the New Testament was familiar.) For another, we have to be careful not to take things out of context. However, I'm pretty confident that even an individual acting alone could read through the Bible, especially the epistles which are the most explicitly theological portions, and take the general points (without getting bogged down in details) and have enough to go on to get started, and a significant enough percentage of this would be correct that the process would be able to self-correct in later iterations.
In step 2 our primary concern is to form general theories, resolve apparent contradictions, and interpret at a slightly deeper level. In step 3, we wish to know if there are any further points to which we are rationally comitted by accepting the theological points we have earlier discovered. At either of these steps, we may decide that what we previously thought was clear is no longer so clear. Finally, we return to Scripture and begin again by looking at those portions which were previously unclear to us to see if further learning has made them any clearer. From here, we iterate through the process again. Further iterations may lead to modify our previous conclusions, and this is ok.
This is a process that the Church is to undertake communally. We might try (but there are a lot of fuzzy concepts here) to say that someone is within the bounds of historical orthodoxy if and only if he or she shares the general views of the community to a great enough degree to be able to participate meaningfully in the process.
Now, the claim of a belief to be dogma should, it seems, be judged on two closely related issues: first, how early in the process is it discovered, and, second, how confident is the Church about it. These are closely related, because the Church is, in general, most confident about things that can be drawn immediately out of Scripture or derived with very little interpretation and which have not been subject to credible challenges in later iterations. (A third issue, which I will ignore here, is the degree of practical importance attached to the doctrine; if a doctrine has a lot of practical importance in terms of ethics or religious practice churches may be forced to take a position on it.)
As an example, doctrines like "all humans are sinners" (Romans 3:23, etc.) or "those who trust Jesus are not condemned for their sin" (John 3:18, etc.) come from step 1. On the first iteration of step 2, we might get doctrines like the trinity, a basic concept of propitiation (subject to refinement in future cycles), and such things. Then we'll go back and read confusing passages in light of these discoveries.
Now, my claim is that Calvinism and Arminianism are late-comers in this process; an ideal reasoner might get one or the other on the third iteration of steps 2 and 3. One point in support of this is simply that basic exegesis and preaching is rarely directly effected by one's views on this issues; they come in at the level of systematic theology (steps 2 and 3), and even then they are relatively advanced subjects in systematic theology. Another point is that they are late-comers historically. Now, it is important to note that the discussion is not without precedent in Church history, but before Arminius challenged Calvin's views on the subject, the debate was not carried on the way it is today, and it wasn't nearly as focal. Thus, even though some of the issues were around earlier, the actual debate is relatively recent. However, this could have at least two other explanations (and there exist debates having each of these explanations): the first is that prior to that time it was simply assumed that everyone held one view rather than the other, and the second is that some outside circumstance cause the debate to come to prominence. The first I find implausible (though if it were the case, it wouldn't go well for the Calvinists, as their position is an extreme one in the total context of Church history). The second is possible, since the discussion is partially a reaction against perceived Pelagianism in the Roman Catholic church. In short, between the antecedent debates and the outside circumstances, the recentness argument is a relatively minor consideration.
I do think, however, that, on balance, this discussion shows some reason to suppose that the issue of Calvinism or Arminianism is not a good candidate for the status of dogma.
Peter Kirk has posted a discussion of the Latin text Augustine was familiar with and its effect on his doctrine of original sin. The claim is, effectively, this: Augustine believed in the doctrine of original guilt because of an ambiguity introduced by an excessively literal Latin Bible which persists in the Vulgate and later theologians have a propensity to read original guilt into the text of Scripture because Augustine did. The passage in question is the end of Romans 5:12. The English translations are pretty much all the same: "in this way death spread to all men, because all sinned." But Augustine's translation says "in whom all sinned." The English translations are certainly more accurate. It is true, however, that many theologians, following Augustine, have claimed that everyone sinned in Adam. For instance, Michael Rea's paper "The Metaphysics of Original Sin" (which I highly recommend, if for no other reason than because it's fun) discusses several Western accounts of original sin and finds it necessary to examine various accounts of personal identity, since some of these theories require that we actually each be identical with Adam at the time of his first sin, and not identical with him at his second sin, i.e. that in Adam's eating of the fruit we literally all sin in him.
Now, in the comments, Jeremy and others argue, and Peter concedes, that no contemporary Protestant theologian actually makes the argument Augustine makes and, in fact, have other arguments for this conclusion, but Peter nevertheless (plausibly) claims that we tend to be more inclined to accept this view because of Augustine's influence on the tradition.
Peter's claim is supported by the fact that in the Christian East, where Augustine's influence is considerably less (though he is still a canonized saint), theologians have generally accepted original sin while denying original guilt, which, if I read him correctly, is also Peter's view. I have been told that this view was also held by John Wesley who got it from the various Eastern Christian writers he read (he was particularly fond of the Macarian Homilies). The view is this: because of Adam's sin, human nature is corrupted so that none of us is able not to sin (Romans 3:23); however, contra Augustine, we are held guilty only for our own particular acts of sin (which we all necessarily commit due to the corruption of our natures) and not for Adam's sin.
Now, I see the doctrine of original sin as very strongly supported by Scripture, whereas I think the doctrine of original guilt is something that comes primarily out of systematic theology rather than the clear teaching of specific passages of Scripture. (Augustine, of course, had a specific passage teaching this view in his Bible, but that was due to a misleading translation.) In fact, Romans 5:12 seems rather supportive of the original-sin-without-original-guilt view under consideration as against the Augustinian view. For the record, I regard both views as plausible and orthodox, provided that those who deny original guilt make strong enough claims about depravity.
Throughout Romans 5, Paul sets up a parallel between Adam and Christ, the new Adam. "if by the one man's trespass the many died, how much more have the grace of God and the gift overflowed to the many by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ ... from one sin came the judgment, resulting in condemnation, but from the many trespasses came the gift, resulting in justification." (vv. 15 and 16) And the correspondance is real: indeed, there is a theological debate directly parallel to the debate about original guilt, and this is the debate about imputation of righteousness. "To impute" is a King James term for the Greek logizomai which can mean "to charge to one's account" (the word at Romans 5:13 is ellogeo, a cognate that means just exactly and only "to charge to one's account", whereas logizomai is a broader term and can also mean "to reckon," "to add up," "to consider," "to think," etc.). The doctrine of imputation of righteousness says that we are credited ("to credit" is a good translation of logizomai when used with a positive connotaton in some contexts) with Christ's righteousness; that is, in judging us, God considers Christ's righteous life as if it were ours and so acquits ("justifies" - Greek dikaioo) us, rather than condemning us for our sins.
(A brief note on this word: "justified" is often glossed as "declared righteous," and that's not so bad, except that "righteous" is also a technical theological term, and is also originally a legal term in the Greek, and we don't necessarily know what it means. To be righteous is to be on the right side of the law. To be justified means to have a judicial declaration state that you owe no (further) civil or criminal penalty. This can mean one of two things: either you have been found innocent or the penalty has been paid in full and you can now be released. I've used the translation "acquitted," which is footnoted in the HCSB, because it is easy to understand in this context, but I think Paul plays on the broader semantic range of the Greek word: on the one hand, we are acquitted because of Christ's innocence, but on the other hand, we were guilty and Christ paid our penalty for us. I think these are two different metaphors that Paul intentionally merges in his overally view of "justification.")
While Paul speaks of God "imputing" (or, rather, not imputing) sin in several places, the only talk of "imputing" righteousness in the New Testament centers around Genesis 15:6, which uses that wording in the Septuagint. The longest such discussion is Romans 4, immediately before our passage. This verse, as quoted by Paul at Romans 4:3, reads "But Abraham trusted God, and it was counted toward his [being] on the right side of the law" (my translation - traditionally, "Abraham believed God and it was credited to him for righteousness"). At 4:24-25, Paul connects this back to us and to Christ: "[Our trust] is about to be counted in our [favor], since we place our trust in the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead. [Jesus] was betrayed on account of our violations [of God's law] and raised on account of the full payment of our penalty [or 'on account of our acquittal']." (With the traditional theological vocabulary: "[Our faith] is about to be imputed to us [as righteousness], since we have faith in the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead. [Jesus] was betrayed on account of our transgressions and raised on account of our justification.")
This, as I said, leads directly into Romans 5, the first verse of which says, "Therefore, since our penalty has been declared 'paid in full' because we have trusted him [lit. 'from trust' or 'because of trust'], we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." (Side note: I'm beginning to understand why translators use the traditional theological vocabulary - translating into plain English is hard work, and I'm not sure I'm even succeeding!) The traditional Protestant view can be seen as a pretty straightforward inference from this passage: because we trust in Christ's rigtheousness rather than our own, God judges us on the basis of Christ's righteousness, rather than on the basis of our own. There is a lot of Biblical support for this kind of idea, especially in the prophetic books, often with the metaphor of clothing (e.g. Isaiah 61:10, 64:6, Zechariah 3) - I have no intention of tracking down every passage to this effect, because there are a lot of them. In fact, I think this is strongly enough supported that the parallel to imputation of righteousness can be used as an argument in favor of original guilt! Nevertheless, it remains an inference from the text, rather than the immediate teaching of the text. The immediate teaching of the text is something more vague and general, as original sin is more vague and general than original guilt. The text teaches that Adam's sin brought sin and death into the world for everyone, and Christ's righteousness brings life, peace, and justification into the world for everyone who believes.
As this is an inference, there is room for a view parallel to the original-sin-without-original-guilt view: the Christ's-righteousness-without-imputation view which, if I understand this article correctly, may be the view of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The author says "For a Christian, the beginning of eternal-life is the beginning of his belief in Jesus Christ. For him a promise has been given, a reward for eternity because, 'Who soever liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die' (John 11:26)." Later he also says, "Repentance is the exercise of the free will of man, without which there is no salvation ... Repentance is ... the human reaction to the appeal of Jesus Christ." Christ, his righteous life and sacrificial death, his promise, and our trust in him are thus all seen as essential ingredients in salvation. Later, however, judgment is said to be according to "faith and deeds on earth" and reference is made to "the moral progress of the soul." Now, this is admittedly a little vague, and I'm going to interpret it charitably, keeping in mind that the Orthodox theologians who say these things intend them to be compatible with Scripture, including Romans. What could this possibly mean that would be compatible? Well, first we note that repentance and faith are seen as the beginning of this process - no good deed or "moral progress" occurring before this can please God in such a way as to acheive salvation - and that repentance is seen as a "reaction to the appeal of Jesus Christ." We further note that Pelagianism - the view that man is capable of initiating and/or accomplishing his own salvation - is regarded as a heresy in the East just as in the West. The story of salvation begins with "the appeal of Jesus Christ." Only after Christ makes his appeal to us can there be good deeds and "moral progress." We can then understand this Christ's-righteousness-without-imputation view by comparison with the original-sin-without-original-guilt view. Remember that because of Romans 5 we ought to say that we have Christ's righteousness in the same way we once had Adam's sin. As a result of Adam's sin, "death spread to all men because all sinned." We now claim that because of Christ's righteousness life can spread to all who believe, because all can live righteous lives. After repentance and the new birth, the believer can say "I have been crucified with Christ; and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." (Galatians 2:19-20) Christ in the believer now does what the believer could not do for himself - lives the life pleasing to God. On account of this life, the believer is judged to be righteous and acquitted of his sin. (Everyone who has begun the process - who has repented and believed - counts as "saved" in the Evangelical sense of that term. The Orthodox writer combines the "Great White Throne" judgment by which one enters heaven [Revelation 20:11-15] with the bema judgment for the heavenly reward [2 Corinthians 5:10].)
Now, what this theory needs, which is not mentioned in the article I linked, is an account of atonement. I don't necessarily mean penal substitution - I regard the doctrine of the atonement as an essential point of orthdoxy, but penal substitution as a probably correct but certainly incomplete account of the atonement. If this theory is to work, we cannot claim simply that the believer is "a new creation ... the new things have come;" we must also claim that "old things have passed away" (2 Corinthians 5:17), and the clear Biblical teaching is that, one way or another, it is the death of Christ that takes away our old sins (Romans 6:1-11, Ephesians 2:14-16, etc.).
By way of conclusion, let me say that I regard the traditional Protestant view as solidly Biblically and historically orthodox, whereas the view that I've been sketching here I say might be made to be both plausible and orthodox if sufficiently strong pictures of depravity and atonement can be annexed to it. This is far from an endorsement of this theory, but I present it for your consideration in the hope that it will cause you to reexamine your assumptions and think through the Biblical and rational grounds of your beliefs. Good luck!
While listening to a sermon on Colossians 1:24-29 yesterday, I had some thoughts about the nature of the Church. In particular, I am thinking of four ways of looking at the Church which, as it turns out, are very tightly interwoven. I call these somatic ecclesiology, apostolic ecclesiology, evangelistic ecclesiology, and eucharistic ecclesiology. Somatic ecclesiology is based on the idea of the Church as the "Body of Christ," which is one of the most common descriptions in Scripture. Apostolic ecclesiology is based on the idea of the Church as that structure which has the apostles and prophets as its foundation (Eph. 2:19-22; see also 1 Cor. 12:28). Evangelistic ecclesiology views the Church essentially as the proclaimer of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Finally, eucharistic ecclesiology views the Church as the assembly which comes together in faith to celebrate the Eucharist.
These aspects are, as I have said, tighly interwoven. Somatic ecclesiology seems to receive the greatest emphasis in Scripture, but the question of what it means to be the Body of Christ is nearly as great as the question of what it means to be the Church, and the other views of the Church provide some insight into this. Christ came to earth to preach the Gospel, to be the Gospel, and to give his body and blood as a sacrifice, and the Church as evangelistic and eucharistic continues these ministries as the body of Christ on earth.
Apostolic ecclesiology is, of course, highly emphasized in those churches that believe in the importance of historical continuity of organization - i.e., what is commonly called apostlic succession. However, as is clear from the verses cited, the basic idea of apostolic ecclesiology - that the true Church, whatever that may be, is founded on the apostles and prophets - is an idea that anyone who takes the Scripture seriously must accept, regardless of their views on the more specific question of apostolic succession as understood by, for instance, Roman Catholicism. But what was founded upon the apostles and prophets? It was the body of Christ, which continued the ministry of Christ in its evangelistic and eucharistic aspects.
Evangelisitc ecclesiology is, unsurprisingly, the emphasis of the Evangelical church. The Church is most truly the Church when it fulfills its mission as the proclaimer of the Gospel. This is what the apostles did, and what they taught others to do (after all, the word "apostle" means "ambassador" or "emissary"). It is what Christ did, and it is his work which the Church as his body continues.
Eucharistic ecclesiology is particularly interesting and is something Protestants don't typically think much about. However, it is generally regarded as the view of the Church most emphasized by the early Fathers. The Church on this view is most fully constituted when it comes together to celebrate the Eucharist. This view is, again, intimately related to the others. When, in the Eucharist, we once again receive into ourselves the body and blood of Christ in the form of bread and wine, we are once again received into the body of Christ in the form of the Church. The apostles taught the celebration of the Eucharist in the Church. Finally, although the Eucharist is generally (and correctly) regarded as a service for Christians, and in some times and places (incorrectly, in my view) those who were not members of the Church in good standing were even physically excluded from the building during the celebration of the Eucharist, the celebration of the Eucharist has an evangelistic function: regarding the institution of this sacrament, Paul says, "as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes" (1 Cor. 11:26).
I want to make an important point about something that is either a reasoning mistake (if done accidentally) or an underhanded rhetorical trick (if done intentionally). I've seen it a lot (and done it myself, accidentally) in debates between Calvinists and Arminians (mostly on a popular level, but sometimes even in the writings of philosophers and theologians), so I'm going to use this debate to provide examples. Before beginning, however, I want to give a terminological note: in popular theological discussions the term 'Arminian' is normally used to refer to any Protestant (or, sometimes, any Christian) who believes in libertarian free will and/or the resistability of grace. I will refer to such people as "Arminians" (in scare quotes). Others use it to refer to any Protestant (or any Christian) who denies one or more of the five points of Calvinism. Still others use it to refer only to those who reject all five points. However, strictly speaking, it really ought to refer only to those who accept the Remonstrant Articles (note: the link just provided is to a truly virulent Calvinist site which calls the document "perverted" - but the text of the document is there, which is what matters). For the record, the five points of Calvinism were formulated in response to the Remonstrant Articles, and not vice versa, but the five points of Calvinism and the Remonstrant Articles are not simply denials of one another. The disagreements are much more nuanced than that. I will refer to those who accept the Remonstrant Articles as proper Arminians, or just Arminians (without scare quotes) - although I won't have much cause to refer to them in this post. Now, what's interesting about this is that relatively few "Arminians" are proper Arminians. A few are further to the Calvinist side than the Remonstrant Articles, but most (including me!) are in fact hyper-Arminian on one or more points (for instance, Article 5 says "But whether [Christians] are capable ... of forsaking again the first beginning of their life in Christ [etc.] ... that must be more particularly determined out of the Holy Scripture, be fore we ourselves can teach it with the full persuasion of our mind." - so anyone who actually rejects the doctrine of Perseverance of the Saints, as I do, is a hyper-Arminian; in order to be a proper Arminian you must remain agnostic about it). Now, the vast majority of Protestants - especially non-denominational Evangelicals - are "Arminians," but, as I have said, relatively few are proper Arminians.
Ok, now that we've got that out of the way, let's proceed to the issue at hand, which is of general, and not just theological, interest. The issue is this: all of us believe implicit contradictions, because we are unable to determine all the consequences of our beliefs. This means that there is a big difference between rejecting a belief p and accepting a belief q which, unbeknownst to you, logically entails not-p. So, if you believe, as a result of some abstract reasoning, or an attempt to systematize your beliefs, or some such, that q entails not-p, and then go around accusing people who accept q of rejecting p, you are making the wrong objection. The right objection is that people who believe q&p have internally inconsistent beliefs - but this inconsistency has to be proven if it is not obvious. We will now consider a series of common objections - two by "Arminians" against Calvinists, followed by two by Calvinists against "Arminians" - that make this mistake: each side rhetorically accuses the other of rejecting some important Christian doctrine when, in fact, both sides accept that doctrine, and the real disagreement is over whether that doctrine is compatible with certain other beliefs which one side accepts.
This fallacy does not, as far as I know, have a name, unless we want to call it a species of Strawman (which I suppose is fairly accurate). At any rate, staying away from it will, I hope, make debates far more civil and productive.
The God Fearin' Fiddler has a post up on why Protestants are offended by Mariology. This was one of the issues that came up in our previous debate, so I would like to address it briefly here. Before I do so, I want to make a few preliminary remarks. The first is that the assertion that Mariology is offensive to Protestants contains a terminological mistake, but it is a mistake that is also made by many Protestants. "Mariology" is the branch of theology that deals with Mary. Protestants are not offended by this subject of study. In fact, there is such a thing as "Protestant Mariology." I shall have more to say about this shortly, but for now let me give as an example that Protestants are not Nestorian: we do indeed believe that Mary was theotokos - she carried God Himself in her womb and gave birth to him. This is a statement of 'Mariology' and one which is not offensive to Protestants. Now the particular doctrines of Catholic and Orthodox Mariology, and the practices associated with them, are indeed offensive to Protestants (or, at least, Protestants disagree with them), so we do still have something to discuss. Second, I'd like to point out that in our discussions so far it has become clear that when the Fiddler was a Protestant, he was more 'Reformed' than I am. By 'Reformed' (in scare quotes) I mean two things: first, that on certain issues (which issues these are will, I hope, emerge in coming discussions) his version of Protestantism was further away from Catholic views than mine (of course, on other issues - sacraments, for instance - Presbyterians are closer to Catholicism than I am); second, I mean that his views were more similar to those of Calvin and of prominent Calvinists of later times. As a result, we have sometimes in this discussion found ourselves in unexpected agreement (though I'm not sure we've always realized it).
Having said those two things, let me proceed to the task at hand, which is a brief (I hope) examination of the Protestant view of Mariology and it's differences from the Catholic view.
As I have already stated, Protestants are not Nestorians: we do affirm that Mary gave birth to God. While, as the Council of Ephesus affirmed, Mary is indeed theotokos (lit. "The God-Bearer" - where "bear" means "to give birth to" unlike in the name "Christopher," sometimes translated "Christ-Bearer," where "bear" means "to carry") , many Protestants have objected to the traditional English translation "Mother of God" (from the Latin translation Mater Dei) as it has seemed to some to imply that Mary is the ontological source of God (though clearly no one has ever intended the phrase in this way) or, less radically, that some continuing relationship between Mary and the Godhead is present as a result of her role as theotokos. To this latter claim more attention will be given shortly, but suffice it to say that we all agree that Mary gave birth to God in the flesh.
Now, Protestants have been cautious in making any statements about Mary probably due to what they see as the excesses of Catholicism and so, unfortunately, not much thought is devoted to her in most Protestant circles. There is, however, an urgent need for Protestants to recover the theology of the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), and, of course, in the preceeding passage, Elizabeth says to Mary "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!" (Luke 1:42) Compare this to the text of the traditional Ave Maria:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
(It is also of interest that Elizabeth says eulogeo in v. 42, but Mary says makarioo in v. 48 - but that's a discussion for another time.)
Furthermore, many (though not all) Protestants have affirmed a tradition regarding the interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:15 which would translate it as something like "But she [i.e. Woman in the abstract] will be saved through the birth of a Child, if they [women, individually] continue in faith and love and holiness with prudence." Obviously, Mariology won't solve every difficulty with this extremely puzzling verse (at least as confusing as the passage immediately preceding it!), but the idea, which is developed in many of the Church Fathers, is that Mary is, in some sense, the new Eve (just as Christ is the new Adam - Romans 5:12-21). Now, this must be carefully developed in a Protestant direction: it is (for reasons I don't particularly understand) Adam who is responsible for the Fall, but Eve took the fruit first, and handed it to him. So there is an idea here of a reversal of sorts. The first Eve took the fruit first, and handed it to the first Adam, and he fell. The second Eve suffered first (in the pain of childbirth - contrary to some ancient and Medieval writers who said that since Jesus was free from the curse of sin his birth must have been painless) in order to bring the second Adam into the world, so that, just as the first Eve put the first Adam in a position to fall, the second Eve put the second Adam in a position to redeem. Nevertheless, it is the first Adam who is responsible for the Fall, and the second Adam who brings about redemption. Mary's suffering does not accomplish or in any way contribute to redemption.
It is also critically important the Christ is unique. No one else could have brought about our salvation. But God could have chosen someone else than Mary, just as he could have chosen someone else than Abram. He could not have chosen someone else than Jesus. Mary, like Abram, is to be praised for her obedience in the face of bizarre divine commands, and for her faith that God would bring about his promise. Protestants should not shy away from making these kinds of assertions.
I am told that Calvin even saw Mary as a type of election. That is, like Mary, each of us is chosen by God to bring Christ into the world around us in our lives and actions; like Mary, we are undeserving.
It will be noted that none of the above squares well with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. There is a further problem with that doctrine as well: it places Christ at a further remove from humanity. By calling Mary a perfect vessel and denying that Christ was born through any ordinary woman, Christ is separated from us not only by his own perfection, but by the perfection of his mother. And how is his mother free from original sin? Some Medieval Catholic writers claimed that this was because Saint Anne (the mother of Mary) was also a virgin at the time of Mary's birth, so that there was no male line to transmit Original Sin, but this was eventually repudiated by the Church (at least that's what Wikipedia says). Furthermore, this contradicts what Paul says throughout Romans (and what is taught through the rest of Scripture) about all humans being sold under sin. Furthermore, it should be noted that, in Luke 1:28 the word translated 'favored' or 'highly favored' in most translations is the Greek charizomai, so that Mary is addressed literally as "woman to whom grace is shown;" but grace (Gr. charis) is by definition undeserved! The Scripture does not treat Mary as "immaculate" but as graciously chosen by God.
A related doctrine is the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary. This one is very common from very early times in the history of Christianity, and it doesn't explicitly contradict any Scripture, nor, I suppose, does it have any particular theological problems, but it requires highly unnatural interpretations of Scripture in a number of places. Firstly, right at the beginning of the New Testament in Matthew 1:25 it says that Joseph "did not know her [Mary] intimately until she gave birth to a son." This is not an explicit contradiction, but in the most straightforward interpretation it implies that he did know her intimately after she gave birth (and this is where Catholics start to be offended by Protestant Mariology!). Second, there are all the references to Jesus' siblings (Matt. 13:55-56, Mark 6:3, etc.). Catholics usually point out (rather questionably) that adelphos can also mean cousin or (less questionably) half-brother or step-brother or brother-in-law (the last of these is, of course, not relevant). So the claim that these were Jesus' cousins doesn't hold any water, but the half-/step-brother claim (that is, the claim that the children were Joseph's by a previous marriage) is a possible interpretation, although it is not the most straightforward one.
The final and, in my view, most important consideration is simply that Mary and Joseph were married. Paul gives the following moral command: "A husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise a wife to her husband. A wife does not have authority over her own body, but her husband does. Equally, a husband does not have authority oover his own body, but his wife does. Do not deprive one another - except when you agree, for a time, to devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again; otherwise, Satan may tempt you because of your lack of self-control." (1 Cor. 7:3-5) It is true that the next verse says "I say this as a concession, not a command," but that most likely refers back to verse 2, where he talks about people marrying at all. Even within Catholicism, a marriage is only valid if it is consummated by intercourse. How, then, could Mary and Joseph be married? And, make no mistake, they were married: the angel commanded Jospeh, "don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife" (Matt. 1:20). There is no ambiguity here. So the doctrine of perpetual virginity is no good Biblically. It probably comes from the similarly unbiblical idea that sex is somehow evil, which was popular among certain segments of early Christianity and in late Medieval (and later) Catholicism.
The other doctrine in this cluster is the Assumption. I have no argument to make against that, other than that it isn't recorded in Scripture. Nothing that happened to me today is recorded in Scripture, but it still happened. Elijah and Enoch were 'assumed' into heaven bodily. In short, my answer to this one is "whatever." I see no good reason to believe that it happened, but I suppose it could have.
Of course, none of these doctrines is the central issue. The really central issue is the differing treatment of the Communion of Saints, and the practice of 'veneration' of saints and icons, as well as prayer to saints. The Fiddler mentions that, during the course of his conversion, he discovered that he was comfortable with prayers to Michael the Archangel for protection, but not prayers to Mary. I suggest that this is actually not because of the general Protestant discomfort with Mary, but because there is good Biblical/theological reason to suppose that Michael the Archangel and hear us and does protect us, but no similar reasons with regard to Mary.
This post has already gotten quite long, so I'm not going to include general arguments about prayers to saints. I've already dealt briefly with the issue of the supposed distinction between 'worship' and 'veneration' in my post on icons. I'm not convinced that the distinction is real, and I think this is the real reason why even some informed Protestants (and not only the ignorant ones) claim that Catholics worship Mary. I would not say this in the context of a discussion with a Catholic, but only because it would be begging the question: we all agree that worshiping Mary would be wrong, but we disagree on whether official Catholic practice (what actually happens in, e.g., Latin America is another story altogether) constitutes the worship of Mary. That, as I have said, is a topic for another post.
As previously promised, this post will treat the presence of the doctrine of Sola Scriptura in Augustine. First, let me state that by Sola Scriptura I do not necessarily mean a particular formulation by Luther or Calvin or any particular church, but rather I mean to show that the cluster of doctrinal positions into which all of these fall exists in the early church. So I really mean the doctrines (plural) of Sola Scriptura, and not some particular doctrine. I define these as follows:
A teaching is a Sola Scriptura doctrine if and only if it asserts that the contents of the canonical books of Scripture possess divine authority* and/or sufficiency for Christian faith and practice in a manner and/or to a degree which is unique and which exceeds, excells, or is otherwise superior to any other religious authority.*By "authority" I mean "the quality of being authoritative," not "the right to command." God has the right to command, and the Scriptures are the authoritative source as to what it is he commands.
I mentioned two Sola Scriptura doctrines, one of which I think is good but incomplete and in general need of refinement, and the other of which I think is totally indefensible, in my post on Church dogma. The good but incomplete one says "Scripture alone is binding on the believer." The indefensible one says "Scripture alone is the source of all our knowledge of God." Another example of a Sola Scriptura doctrine is this excerpt from James Montgomery Boice's Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace, which I got off a bulletin from Tenth Pres.:
the Bible alone is our ultimate authority - not the pope, not the church, not the traditions of the church or church councils, still less personal intimations or subjective feelings, but Scripture only. Other sources of authority may have an important role to play. Some are even established by God - such as the authority of church elders, the authority of the state, or the authority of parents over children. But Scripture alone is truly ultimate. Therefore, if any of these other authorities depart from Bible teaching, they are to be judged by the Bible and rejected.
I would want to change this, as you will have noticed from my footnote above, to "God alone is our ultimate authority, and only the Bible is the ultimate authoritative source as to what he has commanded" (so as not to give the Bible authority separate from God's authority), but this is nit-picky. Let me give one more example of a Sola Scriptura doctrine, this time from the Westminster Confession (note: I like to cite the Westminster Confession because on issues other than soteriology it usually provides succinct and precise summaries of standard Protestant positions on issues. I'm not actually a Clavinist):
The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men ... All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them ... The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture. (1.6-7, 10)
Now, my question at present is very restricted in scope: it is whether Augustine' teaches a doctrine somewhere in this general cluster. I do not propose in this post to examine whether any of these doctrines is precisely the same as Augustine's, whether they occur elsewhere in Church history, or even whether they are true. All these things should be examined diligently, but I'm trying to do one thing at a time.
De Doctrina Christiana 2.24-29 famously discusses the contents of the canon. Augustine is one of the first to describe a canon nearly identical to our present-day canon. (He of course includes the deuterocanon ["Apocrypha"] and doesn't distinguish it from the protocanon, but the contents of the canon is a separate question from how those contents should be treated.) After this, Augustine says:
These are all the books in which those who fear God and are made docile by their holiness seek God's will ... the matters which are clearly stated in them, whether ethical precepts or articles of belief, should be examined carefully and intelligently. The greater a person's intellectual capacity, the more he finds. In clearly expressed passages of scripture one can find all the things that concern faith and moral life. (2.30, tr. R. P. H. Green)
This already is a Sola Scriptura doctrine by our definition. Augustine says first that the canonical books are unique among all books in that they are the only ones in which we are to seek God's will. Secondly, he says that the canonical books are totally sufficient (even if we only consider the "clearly expressed passages") for our religious and moral instruction. It might, however, still be disputed whether this is really "to a degree which is unique and which exceeds, excells, or is otherwise superior to any other religious authority" because Augustine only explicitly says that it is unique among books and that it is sufficient.
Jeremy Pierce recently had a post on Augustine's belief in the doctrine of inerrancy which quoted a letter Augustine wrote to Jerome:
I have learned to yield this respect and honour only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error ... As to all other writings, in reading them, however great the superiority of the authors to myself in sanctity and learning, I do not accept their teaching as true on the mere ground of the opinion being held by them; but only because they have succeeded in convincing my judgment of its truth either by means of these canonical writings themselves, or by arguments addressed to my reason. I believe, my brother, that this is your own opinion as well as mine.
I don't have a copy of this in Latin (nor can I read Latin well enough to do me any good in this discussion) but the English translation of this passage makes a stronger statement than the English translation of the other: it says that only the authors of Scripture (and not anybody else!) are free from error. The Scripture we believe because it is the word of God. Any other person or text must make an argument from Scripture or from reason in order to gain our assent. Surely this qualifies as a Sola Scriptura doctrine. Augustine has claimed something like the following: Scripture alone is inerrant and the proper source of knowledge about God's will for our lives, and the clear statements of Scripture are sufficient as a rule of faith and practice.
I have recently been participating in a little debate over at The God Fearin' Forum on some of the issues of Church history (primarily history of doctrine) that are significant to Protestant-Catholic (and Orthodox!) disagreements. I encourage you all to head over and read the debate so far, and perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I will jump in! Later today (if I have a chance) I'm hoping to get a case put together for the historical foundations of Sola Scriptura (to show, contrary to GodFearinFiddler's claim, that this doctrine was around prior to the invention of the printing press). If anyone feels like beating me to the punch on that, consider yourself invited.
Jeremy Pierce of Parableman has an excellent post refuting the claim that the doctrine of inerrancy was invented in the 19th century as a response to theological liberals. I intend someday to get back to my long-stalled Why Believe the Bible? series, and when I do some of what Jeremy says here will be important for the next post, which is supposed to be on the witness of the Church to the Scripture. My one complaint about this post is that, in a fashion that is unfortunately typical of my fellow Protestants, it jumps through Church history from the New Testament, to Augustine, to Luther and Calvin, as though there was nothing in between. To remedy that briefly, let me add a few additional quotations (these are from David W. Bercot's book, A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs):
"These were men who declared things about God and the things of God. They were guided by the Spirit of God ... It would be irrational for us to disbelieve the Spirit from God and to give heed to mere human opinions. For He moved the mouths of the prophets like musical instruments." - Athenagoras 2.132
"I could produce ten thousand Scriptures of which not 'one tittle will pass away' without being fulfilled. For the mouth of the Lord, the Holy Spirit, has spoken these things." - Clement of Alexandria, 2.195
"These fathers were furnished with the Spirit, and they were largely honored by the Word Himself. They were similar to instruments of music. For they had the Word always in union with them ... When moved by Him, the prophets spoke what God willed. For they did not speak of their own power. Let there be no mistake about that. Nor did they speak the things that pleased themselves." - Hippolytus, 5.204
"Either [heretics] do not believe that the divine Scriptures were dictated by the Holy Spirit (and are thus infidels), or else they think that they themselves are wiser than the Holy Spirit (which makes them demoniacs)." - Eusebius, quoting Caius, 5.602 [An editorial note is in order on just how strong this claim is - Caius is claiming (1) that thinking anything in the Scripture does not record what God believes to be true is tantamount to denying the doctrine of inspiration, and (2) that anyone who denies the doctrine of inspiration is an 'infidel.']
Of course, these brief quotes don't prove that these are precisely the detailed, considered views of these people, but they certainly contribute usefully to the cumulative case that the doctrine of inerrancy has been around from a very early point in Church history.
At the new blog Metaphysical Frameworks, Johnny-Dee (also of Fides Quaerens Intellectum fame) discusses the meaning of sola scriptura in its application to the practical methodology of Protestant theology. His suggestion is that "protestants consider the Bible to be like the Constitution, and the theological tradition to be like legal precedents from the Supreme Court." In other words, the determinations made by previous generations of Christians as to the teaching of Scripture are to be given great weight and not overturned lightly, but, ultimately, they are interpretations of Scripture and it is Scripture that is ultimately authoritative. Therefore, as much weight as they may be give, there are indeed cases where such traditions can be overturned.
I think this is, overall, an excellent interpretation of the sola scripture principle. However, I would like to point out one thing that Western Christians frequently miss due to our fixation on the Catholic-Protestant Scripture vs. tradition debates: at least the canon of Scripture, and probably also the idea of its inerrancy, are themselves extra-Biblical traditions. Perhaps we would like to say that it is an interesting theoretical property of the system of Protestant theology that all of its views can be derived from Scripture - and, indeed, it does seem that at least inerrancy can be so derived - but these are postulates which we, in practice, take prior to our study of Scripture, on the authority of tradition. What I here mean by tradition is not the particular interpretation of Tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church which I have argued for, but simply the literal, etymological meaning of the word: that which is handed down from one generation to the next. Ultimately, we believe in the canon on the authority of the Church; we believe it because we were told by people we believe to be in a position to know. This is even acknowledged by the Westminster Confession which, after stating in 1.4 that Scripture does not depend on the Church's testimony for its authority, nevertheless goes on in 1.5 to list the testimony of the Church as the first of the several means by which we know the truth of the Scripture. I will discuss this and its relation to the other means listed at greater length if I ever get around to writing the fourth part of my Why Believe the Bible? series, but the point for me is that I think it is highly unlikely that any of the other means would be likely to provide rational ground for belief in precisely the canon we have with no more and no fewer books.
The real point that I'm trying to make here is that the strict disjunction of Scripture and tradition in the West is not actually an accurate way of speaking, but is a product of a particular historical (and continuing) debate. It would be more accurate, I think, to view Scripture as the Constitution and tradition as the total legal system (of course, there is no legislative process in this analogy; only judicial intepretation of the Constitution).
I think Protestants and Eastern Orthodox Christians can agree on this picture; where we will disagree is on the degree of authority of various interpretations (as I understand it, the Orthodox tradition holds the seven ecumenical councils to be totally infallible, and anything contained in the liturgy to be as good as infallible for practical purposes).