Knit with Love & Consent: Grounds for Divorce

Martin Bucer as an intermediary between Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, by Josef Ehrismann

Here we finally get to what Martin Bucer wrote about divorce (and remarriage), which helped me along in my journey through divorce. For those wanting the complete story, check out Marriage and Divorce in the Thought of Martin Bucer by Herman J. Selderhuis. What follows has been culled mostly from this book (the page numbers throughout correspond to it).

BUCER'S GROUNDS

Irreconcilable Differences:

As a result of a lack of love and good will, a marriage has irreparably broken down. In this instance (which is decidedly not a matter of trifling disagreement), while the divorce is as yet unofficial, the marriage in fact has ceased to exist, in that personal relations are essential to the existence of a marriage.

. . . there is no true marriage between them, who agree not in true consent of mind; so it will be the part of godly magistrates to procure that no matrimony be among their subjects, but what is knit with love and consent.

(Lifted from chap. XIX of John Milton's translation of Bucer's De Regno Christi.)

Adultery:

This entails the obvious—extramarital sex—but also the withholding of sex, according to Bucer. The withholding of sex also includes being guility of driving the other toward sexual immorality, which marriage in part is meant to thwart. "Unilateral abstinence not only leads to but is adultery" (p. 289). (How's that for a response to being caught sleeping with the neighbor's wife? "You drove me to do it with all your conveniently placed headaches!")

Desertion or Banishment:

Included here is geographical separation, either deliberately or as a result of a cause out of their control (e.g., imprisonment, soldiers of wars, commercial travelers who fail to return, etc.). Deserters are "certifiable marriage-wreckers" (p. 293). Such "unchristian conduct is proof of unbelief," Bucer wrote (p. 294).

Sexual Relations:

"Conjugal work" is so important for marriage, said Bucer, that where it is refused or cannot be rendered, a divorced has to be legitimated.

Psychological and Physical Factors:

If sexual intimacy is rendered impossible due to psychological or physical illness, then a divorce is to be legitimated (clearly this is a pre-Viagra world). Bucer's thinking primarily of all forms of "dementia" here. Physical illness refers to anything that renders sexual intimacy permanently impossible. (But note, where Bucer saw a legitimate grounds for divorce, Luther saw an opportunity to serve God by serving the spouse in his or her illness, and thus the opportunity to live up to one's salvation, p. 295.) Both Bucer and Luther in the end agreed that indefinite impotence was grounds.

The Pauline Privilege:

Apparently at the time among Protestants, a divorce was permitted when an unbelieving partner no longer wished to live together with the believing partner (i.e., desertion; 1 Cor. 7:15). But this only applied if the deserting spouse was an unbeliever from the beginning. If he or she becomes an unbeliever after the marriage, then the only recourse is legal separation, with no possibility of remarriage for either parties.

Bucer took umbrage with this common interpretation: if an unbelieving spouse divorces, he argued, then the believing spouse is free to remarry. Unbelief in this instance is seen in the fruit—one who leaves his spouse for unsanctioned reasons and divorces shows him- or herself to be an unbeliever, in violation of God's Word (see Eph. 5:1–33). Also, "the refusal of sexual communion is disobedience to a divine mandate and therefore unbelief" (p. 304).

Insofar as there are no other grounds for divorce, the believer is absolutely not permitted to leave the unbelieving partner. The believing partner must persevere as long as possible. Only when the other categorically refuses intercourse and to show love and fidelity and there's no longer any hope for change, can the believing spouse divorce (p. 306).

Physical and Emotional Abuse:

In instances of physical abuse that is habitual and harsh, the spouse may divorce (these qualifiers of "habitual" and "harsh" will no doubt run against the grain of our modern sensibilities. We would say now—and rightly so—to take every legal measure possible to extricate yourself from an abusive relationship, before it gets physical). Wherein a spouse becomes a tyrant (emotional abuse), a dissolution of the marriage is permitted. The courts are bound to deliver the victim from unjust tyranny (pp. 308–309).

"God instituted marriage so that a [spouse] would receive love and faithfulness from the other and not ugly language, pain, and grief." The divorce is legit if a spouse receives nothing but "ranting, pounding, beating, pain, and agony" (p. 309).

Special Calling:

Divorce is permitted in response to a special call, that is, to a monastery or nunnery. Very few people are called in this manner, noted Bucer.

Criminality:

A legitimate divorce may be procured in response to a serious crime perpetrated by a spouse—murder, sedition, and abortion are noted as examples by Bucer.

* * *

In all of these instances, it is important to note Bucer's premise: an attempt must be made—at least initially—to bring about reconciliation. Yet the innocent party must not be forced so to do. If there are legitimate grounds for divorce, a Christian must forgive (without continuing to tolerate toxic behavior and habits), but that does not necessarily entail staying. If he or she finds that they are not able, on account of what has happened, to love the other with an open mind and heart and to maintain full communion of life with him or her, then no obligation to stay married remains.

Even the guilty can remarry before God, according to Bucer, provided they repent (pp. 317–18). Perhaps somewhat contradictorily, even if they don't repent, he thought it was probably better that they do remarry, despite his recognition of 1 Corinthians 7:10, which suggests that a spouse who leaves the other for an invalid reason must remain unmarried (p. 318). But Bucer thought that marriage as a divine mandate trumps all the other concerns put forth about remarriage (p. 321). Why? Because, as I wrote in the previous post, in the end he thought it better before God to sin less by remarrying than to "fornicate."

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Divorce—Cowardice or Courage?

It's important to state every so often along the way in the course of this divorce discussion that it wasn't completely one-sided. My ex, depending on your point of view, was either a coward or courageous. But our relationship had died years before, not least due to my own words and actions. 

I was holding on because I had a bottom-line commitment to the ideal of the lifelong marital bond (absent adultery and abuse—but even then I had thought in theory that reconciliation was best). We did not share that fundamental starting point, apparently. But this presses into all sorts of other questions, perhaps most importantly the questions revolving around—from a Christian perspective—what constitutes a viable divorce beyond adultery and abuse (emotional or physical). And this is, again, where Martin Bucer comes in.

The vertigo from being left is felt as a result of the shock of its coming, even if you had seen it coming for a while. Unrequited love may or may not be wrapped up in that shock, and of course that just sucks. There are no more words to add to that kind of pain. Suffice to say, you will read Le Morte d'Arthur, Remains of the Day and The Sun Also Rises in a new way.

Rejection, shame, wounded pride—all of these get mixed in there too. I was truly a mess for a time (fighting off apostasy as much as anything else), but I still don't think I can put a finger on the precise feelings that made up why I was reacting the way I did. I thought perhaps love for my ex had something to do with it, but even now I'm not so sure. Perhaps it was more a love of what was lost: the best that was yet to be, would never be. I do know this much: the event unfolding before me went against a core value—an identity marker—and that goes a long way to at least helping me understand the devastating affect it was having on me at the time.

We must not forget that the leaver has also experienced the pain the leavee is feeling. They've simply walked that path already, and probably more slowly. The one being left is playing catch-up in this instance, and that's also a part of what makes the upheaval so intense. The resolved (or seemingly cold) nature of the leaver jars the leavee, but, again, that's likely because the leaver turned the corner long ago. If grace is ever going to be a factor in your handling of divorce, continually humanizing the other is necessary (hypocrisy alert!), which, of course, doesn't entail winking at toxic behavior.

And speaking of human dignity, Bucer's views on divorce and remarriage were meant to uphold exactly that. If you're unfamiliar with the going narrative, the gist is that the majority of Reformers stuck to the Catholic line on divorce, even if they jettisoned the notion that marriage is itself a sacrament—preferring instead to locate it within the context of a creational ordinance and civil institution rather than within the church. If the late medieval Catholic teaching on divorce is flattened out to be that the church simply never recognized divorce a vinculo (a total divorce), even in response to adultery (where it would grant a divorce a mensa et a thora, i.e., a legal separation), then that doesn't hold up: affirming a complete divorce in response to adultery was widespread among the Reformers.

So, while it's not a total mistake to consider Bucer's views as more liberal than say, Calvin's or Luther's, it's very easy to overstate the case. Mere freedom wasn't his major concern; caring for abandoned women and children was. In short, most of the Reformers—Calvin and Luther included—argued that divorce is allowed in certain scriptural cases, in which the "innocent" party is permitted to remarry another person (and I can only think of a very few instances where one party is, indeed, "innocent"). Bucer said the same (and he did interpret those biblical reasons more liberally than others), and he added that remarriage is also allowed across the board, because in the end he thought it better before God to sin less by remarrying than to "fornicate."

It's worth noting that it was in response to the perceived reformational laxity with respect to divorce and remarriage that the Council of Trent upped its ante on the indissolubility of marriage. (The oddity that is seen among—in my experience—the patriarchal Reformed crowd nudges up against this view, which admittedly gets its impetus from WCF 24.) This brief article in the January/February 2017 issue of Christianity Today covers the ground fairly well, even if it necessarily lacks nuance at key points: "Divorce and Remarriage from Augustine to Zwingli." Here's a more in-depth historical overview from the old Winnipeg Theological Seminary's Trinity Journal: "Divorce and Remarriage from the Early Church To John Wesley." (Note the bit about John Milton, who was undoubtedly influenced by Bucer in this regard.)

I find that I've chased a few other rabbits in this post, so allow me to pick up with Bucer immediately in the next one.

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Ever-Day Has Begun

 
Not only does the church suffer from an open wound of schism, she is weak, and unsurprisingly so, in this time between the times. The former continues in disobedience; the latter is just the way it is, at least until that final day.

Has anything ever been decreed absolutely by God (when it comes to his contingent creation), without any expectation of meeting certain conditions on our part, without any response on his part to intervening historical contingencies? Taking our cue from the sacred Scriptures, we see that even those decrees (oracles, prophecies, apostolic utterances, etc.) that appear at first glance to be absolute (e.g., Jonah 3:4), are nevertheless laden with conditions (when dealing with humankind in particular).

I submit that the same holds true with respect to the people of God and their calling to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

Put another way, I'm talking about a God who called out of the massa perditionis a Christ (the eternal Son of God who took upon himself our nature), in whom people are united (through baptism and faith), which people are then called to be what they are. Being thus made posse non pecare they are given the tasks laid out in various places throughout the Scriptures of embodying what it means to be corpus Christi, and, by virtue of the indwelling Spirit of God, are thus able to do so. In doing so, they falter, they err, and all the while their loving and patient God struggles with them, responding to them, and continually goads them on toward the unity (of will and purpose and substantiality) that is shared among the Godhead, the great Three in One.

And the reality is, the church continues to fail in this particular calling toward unity set before it, a church of the open wound. So far as this world and our finite perspectives are concerned, Christianity, with all its divisions, worldly alliances, demagoguery, and heterodoxy, does indeed look false. But there's hope with each dawn, which will be fully realized on that final morn when there will be no more night, for the Lord God himself will shine (Rev 22:5); indeed, the city will have "no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb [will be] its light" (Rev 21:23).

No-nightness comes.

Ever-day has begun to encroach upon the lightless land,
and we, lamp-stands all, called to remove the basket covering.

But how is the church "rightly" weak today? Perhaps it's better stated this way: the church has always been weak, and we have the tools to recognize it as such, and therefore we have the tools to better "let our good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise our heavenly Father" (Matt 5:16).

Recently, an essay over at First Things by Matthew Rose on "Karl Barth's Failure" produced some critical responses by a few Protestant bloggers. One, in particular, stood out: David Congdon's "In Defense of Modernity." In brief, Congdon writes, "Put plainly: modernity is Protestant, so to reject modernity is to reject Protestantism. Perhaps that is the underlying message of Rose’s article. Barth finally fails, because he remains, at the end of the day, "a theologian of the Reformation."

And what are some of the contours of that modernity? You can read Congdon's post to see, but I'd like to highlight one—the rise of historical consciousness as a genuinely theological event. He quotes Gerhard Ebeling at length to unpack the point:

The sola fide of the Reformation is directed not only against justification by works and thereby against a legalistic exposition of scripture, not only against mysticism and against multiplication of the revealing reality in the form of saints and against materialization of the revealing reality in the form of sacred objects. But the sola fide has undoubtedly also an anti-sacramental and an anti-clerical point. To the sola fide there corresponds solus Christus. Revelation and the present are separated from each other in such a way that only one bridge remains: the Word alone—and indeed, lest any misunderstanding should arise, the Word interpreted as salvation sola gratia, sola fide. All other bridges have been broken up. The whole system of Catholicism has thereby collapsed. There is no such thing as a simple, matter-of-fact presence of revelation. (emphasis mine; Word and Faith, 35–36)

"There is no such thing as a simple, matter-of-fact presence of revelation." The sola fide of the Reformation implies a rejection of all absolute institutional claims, of all offers of restored taken-for-granted institutional certainty (to paraphrase Peter Berger). But does this mean that no institution is left standing? No. But what type of institution can we then speak of? Extraordinarily weak associations of individuals with no deep commitment. Can such institutions survive? They can and do. (I'm a member of a vibrant parish in a decidedly progressive mainline diocese, and it has much more in common with its traditionalist counterparts in Roman and Lutheran churches, and yet is not filled with parishioners who maintain a posture of alleged certainty. And this phenomena occurs regularly within the old mainline churches, often cast in less traditional forms, whether broad-church or evangelical.)

No doubt the certainty of Rome’s institution has been considerably weakened by historical scholarship and the social sciences. The same holds true, of course, for Protestant institutions as well. Every time the structures of Protestant orthodoxy sought to recapitulate Rome's absolute claim—in order to maintain a "strong" institution, one that has a "foundation of taken-for-granted verities, requiring representatives who exude an air of self-assured certainty," so Berger—those structures have also come tumbling down. It's one of the unintended consequences of the Reformation—the divine and human protest again any absolute claim made for a relative (i.e., socially constructed) reality, which immediately turns directly back on to itself.

What this means is simply this: "For the sake of Christ, take pleasure in your weakness . . . . For when you are weak, then you are strong" (2 Cor 12:10). Knowing you're weak, recognizing the gaping wound in the side of our Lord's bride, reshapes the mission each of us have been called to in this American life.

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On Certainty Mixed with Doubt

A recent rabbit led me to a trail upon which an old, forgotten (by me) book had been assigned by its author for a systematic theology class back in 2002. A portion of it had to do with "cognitive rest," or the coming to a certain position “because of the presence of something very much like a feeling . . . . It is the sense that now one can commit himself to the belief, that he can 'live' with it” (John Frame, Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 152–53). Regarding Christian belief, coming to a cognitive rest “is achieving a ‘godly sense of satisfaction’ with the message of Scripture” (153). Cognitive rest means no more struggling against the truth but rather embracing it.

In the end, cognitive rest, wrought by the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, is not new revelation but rather “the Spirit’s work [that] illumines and confirms the revelation already given” (156).¹ Professor Frame concludes this brief discussion with the recognition that it does concede “some truth to the subjectivist position: I cannot regard any belief as justified unless it accords with my subjective inclinations . . . . Thus the godly sense of satisfaction may be defined in terms of Scripture. What satisfies me is what I believe Scripture warrants. Or it may be defined situationally as a feeling that I have understood the facts. The three perspectives are one!” (161–62).

This last sentence is of course an example of the main reason why many disagree with tri-perspectivalism: all the perspectives are said to collapse into the existential.

But maybe the good professor feels the weight of the inevitable relativity inherent in any human society, and thus tri-perspectivalism is an attempt to (re)construct an institution worth handing down, namely, a foundation for thinking and acting in this modern world? I'd suggest tentatively that those who kick hard against these goads are those who see the radical contingency of this present world and yet refuse to think that they are affected by it, that their deductive dogma renders them untouchable. Maybe the tri-perspectivalist has gone through an epistemological crisis—which crisis actually enabled tri-perspectivalism to begin with? What crisis would that be?

In a word, it is pluralism. Pluralism brings along with it the imperative of many choices, and along with that comes—necessarily—uncertainty. How do we face the notion that everything we do and believe is historically located, that the institution of religion itself is socially constructed and therefore unable to be known with any epistemological certitude? While this modern world seems to actually create the necessity of a presuppositionalism or fideism, I have yet to see the correlation between tri-perspectivalism and a presuppositionalism of the more dogmatic sort. In other words, tri-perspectivalism does not allow for the mere dogmatic (and axiomatic) assertion (of Christianity) for which many presuppositionalists are known.

Still, the question remains: with respect to the Christian faith, can anything be known without even a hint of doubt? Most Christians would say yes. Some might say the Word of God is certain (a certainty wrought by the internal testimony of the Spirit, no doubt). When it tells us something clearly, that something we are to hold with certainty. Also, it does appear that doubt is castigated at some points in Scripture—for example, those instances in Scripture where “unbelief” is found wanting as an excuse on Judgment Day.

Peter Berger (I know, I know) writes in “Protestantism and the Quest for Certainty” that pluralism affects us deeply in relation to how we believe (not what).² “Pluralism ensures that socialization processes are not uniform and, consequently, that the view of reality is much less firmly held. Put differently, certainty is now much harder to come by." At any rate, Berger argues that the Reformation inadvertently created this situation. How? Because of its principle of individual conscience ("Here I stand . . ."), which carried with it the potential for an ever-expanding variety of Christian groupings. “History is always the arena of unintended consequences." Eventually, every religious tradition had to come to terms with the simple fact that it no longer controlled a captive population of adherents. The modern is faced with a plethora of choices, one of which is leaving a particular tradition only to try on another. Thus, nothing can be taken for granted any longer, which essentially means that all claims to truth are relativized. However, we are not left with a crass open-ended and unchecked relativism, nor are we forced into some variant of “absolutist retrenchment.” There is a middle way, and it expresses itself in “prototypically Protestant . . . language: . . . sola fide.” Berger argues further that once we recognize this situation, attempting to construct taken-for-granted institutions in this modern world would, over time, be difficult to fake. To him, the Protestant principle of sola fide implies a rejection of all absolute claims, “ipso facto of all offers of restored taken-for-granted certainty. It insists that the believer should live by faith alone—and that, by God’s grace, this is actually possible." The reader may see how this substantiates, for example, Esther Meeks’ view of certainty (that it cannot be without doubt), as opposed to Frame's tri-perspectival answer to the certainty question: Some things are to be known without doubt, because the Bible tells us that in some cases doubt is wrong. But consider the following from Berger, which I should “know” to be misguided, yet feel otherwise (I quote him at length):

Conventional Christian language maintains that there is a contradiction between faith and lack of faith, belief and unbelief. The implication is that unbelief is sinful. This has never been very persuasive to me. God has not exactly made it easy for us to believe in him, and, it seems to me, a just God will not hold it against us if we don’t manage the exercise. Be that as it may, it seems more plausible to me to propose a contradiction not between belief and unbelief but between belief and knowledge. If we know something, there is no reason to believe; conversely, if we say that we believe something, we are implying that we don’t know. A world that is taken for granted is one in which people know (more accurately, think they know) what is true; they don’t have to believe. Putting the contradiction in this way, one must then ask: Just what do we know when it comes to religion?

His answer is simply that what we affirm, we must affirm modestly and with no pretense of certitude. We ought to be a people “unsure of [our]selves, groping for a few glimpses of truth to hold onto, even where it seems that the roof is about to fall in.” The reason behind this posture is the paradox between Christ and culture. While Christians believe in the resurrection of Jesus and in his glorious return, that glory is obviously not yet. “The triumphant Christ is still coming; we are still in the aeon of the kenotic Jesus." The church therefore pronounces this coming triumph, yet it still bears the marks of Jesus’ kenosis.

I find this hard to deny. We gaze upon the conquered Promised Land, yet we wander in the wilderness, exiled, and in great need of repentance. Nonetheless, contra Berger, is there not even one object in which we can place our confidence that nudges up against something like certitude? Is it not this message of coming triumph? Whatever one’s views about inerrancy, are not the promises of God through Jesus the singular item that mysteriously comes to be believed with little doubt precisely because of God’s gracious call? Maybe everything else contained in the annals of historic, Christian orthodoxy should be under “permanent reflection,” but the coming triumph? So what if, for example, the kingdom of Solomon was greatly exaggerated, that doesn’t mark the difference between sheep and goats. What makes one a Christian, apparently, is personal trust, flowing from Word and sacrament, in he who is “able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted” (2 Tim. 1:12). In short, it is he who trusts and obeys God's Christ by the power of his Spirit. Anything resembling certainty with little or no doubt must be found there—yes, through (not in) the institution of the church, the religious experiences she gives, and the authority of the sacred text she proclaims.

To be sure, we still must exercise faith through such institutions (for such is the means by which beliefs and values are transmitted from generation to generation³), but taking them for granted is untenable is this modern world. All of them have been weakened: the certainty of church institutions by historical scholarship and the social sciences; the certainty of inner experience by psychology and the sociology of knowledge; the certainty of the biblical text by the findings of biblical criticism. Tri-perspectivalism perhaps attempts to prepare us for this very feeling of vertigo that comes when we are faced with the weakening of our beloved taken-for-granted institutions. Berger’s theory of the social construction of reality does much the same thing, though perhaps more consistently. Could the two be close cousins? Both, after all, are able to relativize the relativizers. Both undermine dogmatic assertions by recognizing the role of self and situation in the gaining of “knowledge.” Both affirm the existence of an absolute (i.e., the truth) that is knowable only through (to use a once-familiar phrase in Frame's classes) the participation of the other perspectives. Both force us to take a stand in the face of pluralism and place our trust in Providence, even while we approach most things as milquetoast “uncertainty-wallahs.”⁴

Our faith, then, is that God is really and truly present in the world, whether we receive him or not (much like the the proclamation of his Word and the administration of the sacraments). The same can be said for the other institutions mentioned above (the church, the experience, the text). The hope is held but cautiously. As a community of imperfectly glorified people, can we do much better? Maybe in the end sola fide does stand as the only non-Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox answer to this peculiarly modern situation. But while Saint Paul had much to distrust, underlying this contingency was a trustworthy God: “I know in whom I have believed.” I think we can say this too, while at the same time recognizing that our tradition is not immune to criticism, or put another way, to the relativity intrinsic to any social construction. To pretend that it can be immune, is nothing more than entering the world of self-delusion. This is not the Emersonian disdain for any and all institutions; rather, this is a simple affirmation that God, and God alone, is sure. All else is subject to change.

What other option is there in this time between the times?

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1 Similarly, Kierkegaard wrote that there is “only one proof for the truth of Christianity—the inward proof, argumentum spiritus sancti.” He then cited 1 John 5:9–10 to substantiate this. ^↩

2 From The Christian Century, 115.23 (Aug 26, 1998). ^↩

3 In case the reader is wondering, so Berger: “Yes, such institutions . . . can survive—and sometimes they show a surprising vitality." All this means is that our choices must be deliberate. No longer can we unthinkingly ‘go with the flow.’ ^↩

4 This idiosyncratic phrase is Berger’s way to describe himself and others who by free choice belong to “weak” religious institutions, that is, those institutions that are not founded upon taken-for-granted verities, and which are entered and left voluntarily. See also my description above about Christ being in paradox with culture. ^↩

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When Teleology Trumps Soteriology

I delivered this rant a few weeks ago in a doctoral seminar I'm taking from Tom McCall (co-author of Jacob Arminius: Theologian of Grace). It's basically a riff on Newbigin's doctrine of election and how it completely subverts the ordo decretorum (logical order of God's decrees) debates of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries between supras, infras, conditional infras, etc., etc. Due to the required length of the paper, I had to leave a whole lot of thoughts on the floor, so it definitely runs the risk of presenting a lopsided view of the matter. I also focus criticisms on Arminian arguments because, well, it's a seminar on that very subject.

The Logical Order of Things About Which We Know Next to Nothing

Mercutio: I am hurt.

A plague a’ both your houses! I am sped.

—Romeo and Juliet, 3.1.86–87¹

The church has been hurt, indeed, “sped” throughout the years whenever she finds herself caught in the crossfire of battles over the logical order of things about which we know next to nothing. This is not to suggest that one view with respect to the ordo decretorum is as good as any other; some truly do, however inadvertently, commit blasphemy: some “logical” orders make God the author of sin, while others make man the author of himself.

Nevertheless, the church suffers every time its leaders and laypersons obsess over the reasons for an individual’s election by probing backwards toward the secret counsel of God instead of pressing forward from one’s election (in both individual and corporate terms) to the purpose of that election.² This obsession most notably plagued the Reformed churches in the late sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth century. The Arminian and Remonstrant response, unfortunately, faired little better, precisely because they too shared in their compatriot’s assumptions regarding the final destiny of individuals flowing from decrees made in eternity “past.” Despite the appropriate Arminian allergic reaction to certain Reformed articulations of election that lead to churches thinking of themselves as exclusive beneficiaries of God’s saving love, the biblical fact and fundamental truth of election is that it is made according to God’s sovereign and unconditional choice. Keeping the center of the doctrine of election away from any consigning of individuals to either eternal life or death ought to remove the edges with which it is unnecessarily laden. In so doing, we can see the highly speculative and unedifying nature of the ordo decretorum for what it is, a less-than-robust expression of the purpose of election itself—expressions that Arminians and Remonstrants only recapitulated in their protests.

Taking my cue from St. Thomas, as many others often have, election appears to be primarily teleological—it is all about where we are sent, rather than from where we have come. And by invoking destiny, I do not mean so much individual or corporate salvation as individual and corporate purpose, not so much related to the salvific outcome of absolute decrees among the Godhead as to the purpose for which those decrees were made: Like an arrow directed by the archer towards its mark, the movement of predestination “gets its specific character from what it is a motion to, not a motion from.”³ And it is with that motion to in mind that the mission of God in the election of his people becomes most robustly realized. When members of Christ’s church consider their election as a calling to die to self for the salvation of the world, not as God’s way simply to secure for himself an elite group of chosen individuals, or as a pronouncement upon people he foresees who employ grace just enough to work out their salvation to the end of their lives, the pastoral objections (that the Reformed ordo causes despair or presumption) to God’s sovereign choice in election fall away. In other words, properly emphasizing the individual and corporate teleology, rather than the individual soteriology, of election renders both the Reformed and Remonstrant ordo constructions moot.

When looked at in this way, arguments over whether God elects unbelievers and predestines them to become believers or whether he elects foreseen believers and predestines them to become his children are out of place. This is not to deny a cause or basis of God’s election, because, as stated above, it is biblically obvious that election stems from the elector’s good pleasure. Yet this need not make the Arminian interlocutor anxious, as if her argument that the cause of God’s election instead centers on the free will act of an individual fulfilling the conditions of salvation suffers from incoherence. If the purpose of election was primarily the salvific destiny of individuals, then the Arminian rebuttal to the majority of Reformed expressions merits serious attention. That is to say, in the context of early seventeenth-century debates revolving around the ordo decretorum, Arminius’ opposition to deterministic supra- and infralapsarianism was raised for all the right reasons.

Still, relegating predestination merely to a function of divine foreknowledge is less than satisfactory. Whatever else can be said of the differences between Arminius and subsequent generations of seventeenth-century Remonstrants on redemption, there’s no difference among them on the subordination of God’s decree to predestinate and reprobate certain individuals to his foreseeing their completion or rejection of salvation’s conditions. If, again, the ordo decretorum primarily has to do with how an individual comes to be elected rather than the missiological why that individual was elected, then the Arminian construction finds itself rightly critiqued for reviving something akin to late medieval works-righteousness—perhaps worse, depending on how anemic its ecclesiology is.⁴

Thus, the Remonstrant critique could be seen as a recapitulation of the covenantal nomism that Saint Paul challenged so long ago. Arminius’ confession that he “ascribes to God’s grace the origin, the continuance, and the fulfillment of all good”⁵ may excuse him from the sharpest points of this criticism, but it may also be that his remonstration lead to the unintended consequence of making too much of human performance as a condition of God’s mercy. E. P. Sanders’ summary of second-temple Judaism as “getting in by grace, staying in by obedience”⁶ parallels in significant ways the Remonstrant view that any move toward God is by (prevenient) grace alone while increase in grace and final justification depends ultimately on human cooperation. Not even the most strident Remonstrant has argued that one can be saved by works alone, as human works are not seen to be meritorious in and of themselves (and thus always insufficient to gain God's forgiveness). Yet according to the Remonstrants in particular, in God’s new covenant in Christ Jesus, he promises to accept as righteousness the believer’s obedience of faith. The implication is that the law we humans have always transgressed has been softened to the point that people who make good use of grace can now do it and live, provided they continue to perform.⁷ What is this if not the principle of “getting in by grace, and staying in by obedience”? But this is the very principle that the apostle opposed when he wrote, “You began by God’s Spirit; do you now want to finish by your own power?” (Gal 3:3). If indeed the gospel is a new law, then Augustine’s prayer to a sovereignly electing God to “grant what you command, and command what you will” becomes ever the more necessary.⁸

In short, the debates revolving around the ordo decretorum simply miss the point. What God commands, and what he grants to that end, is encapsulated most succinctly in the motion to of the Great Commission. Herein lies the purpose of election, the telos of which the church forgets at her peril. Lesslie Newbigin summed it up best:

And we can also see that wherever the missionary character of the doctrine of election is forgotten; wherever it is forgotten that we are chosen in order to be sent; . . . wherever men think that the purpose of election is their own salvation rather than the salvation of the world; then God’s people have betrayed their trust.⁹

The salvation of the world with which the elect of God have been entrusted, the called-out ones commissioned to enact God’s kingdom will on earth as it is in heaven, must leave this old debate in the old books where it belongs if it will ever get down to doing its “best to make [the day of God] come soon . . . where righteousness will be at home” (2 Peter 3:12–13).

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1 From The Yale Shakespeare (Barnes & Noble Books, 1993), 918.^↩

2 St. Augustine’s warning comes to mind: “Wherefore he draws this one and not that one, seek not to decide if you wish not to err.” From Tractates on the Gospel of John, 26.2 (NPNF¹ 7).^↩

3 Thomas Aquinas, ST, I, Q. 23, Art. 1, Reply Obj. 3. Quoted from Summa Theologica, “God’s Will and Providence” (1a. 19–26), eds. Thomas Gilby and T. C. O’Brien, Blackfriars, vol. 5 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 111. See also Thomas’ ordo in Art. 4: particular love→election→predestination. “Therefore all the predestined are picked loved ones” (121). God creates the lovely through his electing love; it’s in no way based on the created’s loveliness (cf. Art. 5).^↩

4 It's beyond the scope of this post to defend this here, but suffice to say that where baptism and the Eucharist are largely removed from the equation of election, the theologian is left to over-emphasize—and thus truncate—the means ordained in Scripture by God to actualize his elect.^↩

5 W. Stephen Gunter, Arminius and His Declaration of Sentiments: An Annotated Translation with Introduction and Theological Commentary (Baylor University Press, 2012), 141.^↩

6 E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 93, 178, 371.^↩

7 See, e.g., John Mark Hicks, “The Theology of Grace in the Thought of Jacobus Arminius and Philip van Limborch: A Study in the Development of Seventeenth Century Dutch Arminianism” (PhD diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 1985), 103–11, esp. at 110. See also Keith D. Stanglin and Thomas H. McCall, Jacob Arminius: Theologian of Grace (OUP, 2013), 167–68.^↩

8 Saint Augustine, Confessions, X.xxix (40), trans. Henry Chadwick (OUP, 1998), 202. It may be that the historic triplex model of natural law→old law→new law best encapsulates the covenantal framework of God’s redemptive plan, but I do not concede that the necessary grace required to fulfill that new law has been imparted indiscriminately. Even the Remonstrant Limborch confessed as much when he wrote that while God’s general decree of salvation and damnation is not unclear, the other special decree regarding the means thereunto is mysterious, “upon the account of that disproportion wherein God is pleas’d to communicate the means of salvation to men. For he does not bestow an equal share of grace every where at all times and upon all men.” This depends “on the mere good pleasure of God,” and is unsearchable. Quoted from A Compleat System, or, Body of Divinity, both Speculative and Practical, Founded on Scripture and Reason (London: William Jones, 1702), 347.^↩

9 Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God (Wipf & Stock, 2008), 55.^↩

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Pope Francis, Carl Trueman & Protestant Reflection

Carl Trueman wrote recently, in the midst of a brief look at George Weigel's Evangelical Catholicism (see his distilled version in this month's First Things), on "what the point of reflecting on Rome is for a Protestant" at such a time as this. He offered three reasons, which you can read at the link provided above.

They're decent reasons, but they're also largely skin-deep. There's a more fundamental reason that Protestants ought to reflect on Rome when a pope is chosen, and it's teleological and twofold in nature. (Note my assumption: Catholic, Orthodox, and creedal Protestant communions are Christian communions. Each have their tares, their wolves, their covenanters who don't persevere.)

The first teleological fold is one major goal in which our hope as Christians is placed, a fixed post that our triune Lord promises throughout the various texts of sacred Scripture:

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a commanding shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God. First, the Christians who have died will rise from their graves. Then, together with them, we who are still alive and remain on the earth will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Then we will be with the Lord forever.
(1 Thess. 4:16–17)

In short, we Christians are in this together, forever—whether Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, the resurrection to life on a new earth is our great hope. The election of a new overseer of the largest Christian communion in the world ought to promote Protestant reflection, precisely because we share the same destiny with the Christians in that communion.

The second teleological fold may be particularly distasteful to Protestant ears that don't share my ecclesiastical sentiments. It has to do with a more finite goal, one that is hardly fixed: the reconciliation and reunification of Protestants and Catholics in this time between the times. This is by no means a given, but it is a hope, and one I believe all Protestants should share. Caring about and reflecting upon Rome at such a time as this comes naturally if you think and hope that one day the pope himself will one day be a pastor under whom your pastor (and their pastors) ministers, at least in a collegiate sense (as primus inter pares).

Yet most Protestants don't even consider that their respective communions are not to be ends in themselves. They've forgotten that they're branches shooting off the one, mother trunk, and instead believe the lie that they are trees themselves, every bit as robust and as life-giving as the tree from which they sprang. It's not true. Much of Protestantism is wilted, particularly in those places where God's Word and Sacraments are neglected.

I hope this doesn't come across as a romanticized version of reality or flat-out naïve (or "young and cool," even though I am young-ish and definitely cool). It's just that I don't care about the things you do, or at least I don't think they're as important as you think they are. Put another way, I think it's far more important to reflect on Rome and her pope and our shared destiny than it is to continue, unfazed, in the work of building up your own little fiefdom.

Update: It has come to my attention that the "you" in the above paragraph may be misconstrued to refer to Carl Trueman. That is emphatically not the case. Carl is one of the last persons I'd suspect to be guilty of creating his own little fiefdom. Generally speaking, my antagonist around here is the autonomous, demagogic, second-degree separationist Christian leader. That's who I'm carrying on my make-believe conversation with in the concluding paragraph—whether or not he/she actually exists.

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Open Wound Now Sacred?

NOT THAT I EVER stop thinking about this particular subject, but perhaps a recent revelation precipitated my hitting "publish" on this post. Perhaps.

A couple of months ago I laid out a way of making sense of the church as it is in actuality (as opposed to its ideal), labeling it “Open Wound Ecclesiology.” Bryan Cross responded to it in his way, which is to say, both unsurprisingly and formidably. I regret not to have responded in kind, though I was going back-and-forth on this matter over at Called to Communion at the time (and much of what appears below appeared in some form over there).

What follows is an attempt to further clarify this “Open Wound Ecclesiology,” while answering some of the challenges Mr. Cross put forth in my combox.

Let me first say that I acknowledge the depressing nature of this ecclesiology (a friend responded to me about it in precisely those words). If you’re looking for something a tad more certain, then this is not for you. Perhaps you prefer redefining unity in response to our fragmented reality along with the high-church confessionalists in Geneva (unity=spiritual unity), or maybe you prefer the safety of the Vatican’s walls (unity=visible unity with the Roman Catholic Church alone). I know the openness I’m suggesting is unnerving.

Regarding the ancient creed's confession that “we believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” and its relationship to what I perceive to be a tautology—that the church is disunited—Mr. Cross wrote that “to interpret this line of the Creed as an affirmation of a future hope, and not as referring to a present reality, is to deny this line of the Creed, because it has never meant that, nor does it mean that.” It’s a matter of historical honesty to acknowledge this in the case of the early church, even, of course, in the midst of her struggles with schism. No doubt it’s no different than today, to Mr. Cross’ mind.

My only recourse is to suggest a development in doctrine on this score for Catholics to consider (with Vatican II nudging us along): that the church herself is in process, and thus her Lord along with her engages, and responds to, this process. Only God is sure; all else is subject to change. The body politic is a fragmented mess, and is failing her charge to be one, just as the Father and the Son are one. But this is what God himself chose to get into. We are thus left with the question and its implied challenge: What will the church evolve to be?

I hope not what it looks like—from the vantage point of the weeds. So far as this world and our finite perspectives are concerned, Christianity, with all its divisions, worldly alliances, demagoguery, and heterodoxy, does indeed look false.

I of course don’t think it is, but therein lies my hope, which brings us back around to the creed. There is, after all, a unity among all professing Christians, entailed in the creed’s language, that is yet retained (in the language of Lumen gentium: “though they [non-Catholics] do not profess the faith in its entirety or do not preserve unity of communion with the successor of Peter,” are “in some real way…joined with [Catholics] in the Holy Spirit, for to them too He gives His gifts and graces whereby He is operative among them with His sanctifying power”). No need to emphasize any of the words there; and they cannot be undone no matter how hard some of the Good Pope’s bishops and successors try.

Apparently, according to Lumen gentium, we who are not of the Roman Catholic Church are “joined” in some “real way” to that communion. And the locus of that union? The Holy Spirit himself. Nevertheless, it is not God’s ideal for his body, the church, for it’s currently suffering from an open wound.

This decidedly does not suffer from Mr. Cross’ charge that we’re outdoing Christ. There are indeed communions that more robustly embody the faith, and thus represent the visible church with a unified ecclesial structure: these are they who are in succession (through the laying on of hands as well as doctrinally); who rightly administer the sacraments; and who faithfully preach God’s Holy Word; in short, “one, holy, catholic and apostolic.” It is these who are burdened with the charge to actively reconcile (re-attach) the fragmented body of Christ, precisely because it is they who retain the most robust embodiment of the faith once delivered. They are not (emphatically!) the faith’s sole proprietors; they are its mothers, called to gracefully repent and heal and nurture the body to full communion.

This means that, yes, I’m suggesting that what God wants from us (ecclesiastically) isn't what he has received from us. But this does not provide an example of “ecclesial deism,” as if I’m saying that while God wants visible unity from us, he then simply stands back to see what he’ll get from us. If striving toward unity is "outdoing Christ" (in that "it seeks to go beyond the unity that Christ Himself saw fit to establish in His Church by imposing on what He founded as a merely invisible entity a visible unity He Himself did not see fit to establish"), then so too is living the Christian life, that is, keeping the faith—or else apostasy is only ever merely hypothetical.

Has anything ever been decreed absolutely by God (when it comes to his contingent creation), without any expectation of meeting certain conditions on our part, without any response on his part to intervening historical contingencies? Taking our cue from the Sacred Scriptures, we see that even those decrees (oracles, prophecies, apostolic utterances, etc.) that appear at first glance to be absolute, are nevertheless laden with conditions (when dealing with humankind in particular).

I submit that the same holds true with respect to the people of God and their calling to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

What I'm describing is quite down toward the opposite end of the spectrum from deism, and, if anything, can be taxed with placing too much emphasis on the immanence of God in relationship to his creation. I'm talking about a God who called out of the massa perditionis a Christ (the eternal Son of God who took upon himself our nature), in whom people are united (through baptism and faith), which people are then called to be what they are. Being thus made posse non pecare they are given the tasks laid out in various places throughout the Scriptures of embodying what it means to be corpus Christi, and, by virtue of the indwelling Spirit of God, are thus able to do so. In doing so, they falter, they err, and all the while their loving and patient God struggles with them, responding to them, and continually goads them on toward the unity (of will and purpose and substantiality) that is shared among the Godhead, the great Three in One.

I've already mentioned how Vatican II and its doctrinal development revolving around ecclesiology pushes us on toward this unity. This is also where I’d like to bring in Henri de Lubac to further help suggest the way forward: the Eucharist, he wrote, makes the church. The idea is not new (Augustine saw it when he wrote that “we become what we have received”). The so-called “communion ecclesiology” ensconced in Vatican II has paved our way (in the West; Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology already gets it, in my opinion, even if it too needs to be goaded here). The sacramental purpose of the Eucharistic body has seemingly been forgotten: it is to create the ecclesia (not merely pontificate about how Christ is present). Put another way, the real presence of Christ in the bread and the wine is inextricably tied to its purpose—the creation of his one body.

Why not, then, break bread together? This open wound will not be healed without shared participation in the meal Jesus gave us. Indeed, what anticipates that future marriage feast more clearly than open communion?

Catch up with your most recent ecumenical council, Catholics, for the love of God (or is "for Pete's sake" more apropos?).

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Epistemological Modesty

 

In response to this great article on Keith Mathison’s Shape of Sola Scriptura over at Called to Communion, an interesting discussion has emerged revolving around the tu quoque—certain folks are arguing back that Catholics are in no way on better ground epistemologically. That is to say, the Catholic position and subsequent argument against the non-Catholic positions can be applied equally to the Catholic making the argument. Slightly related to this issue, in my opinion, is the question of epistemological certitude, which I perceive has deep roots within the Called to Communion crowd. After all, once having swum the Tiber (or any conversion, for that matter), who wouldn’t want to consider those newly held beliefs with 100 percent certainty?

In this modern age, we all face the so-called “heretical imperative.” As Peter Berger put it in his book with the same title (and I paraphrase): Plurality of alternatives is the core of the modern experience. If there are no options, then what is can be interpreted as what must be; in the modern condition, there’s less and less of what must be. Fate becomes choice. Destiny becomes decision. In short, we are all forced to choose.

And this is why, in nuce, the argument proffered in the review of Mathison’s book suffers from the tu quoque fallacy. But it suffers from something else too. A pinch of hubris, or, rather, an overextension of what can be known with certainty, for the sake of cognitive rest. It seems to me all too convenient for the Catholic to suggest that his own private judgment led him to accept the authority of the Magisterium, which authority then grants him the knowledge that “there are no options" (or, in the words of Bryan Cross [comment #46]: "he discovers a living divinely-appointed authority, and that discovery then shapes his theology"). But once that leap has been made “what is can be interpreted as what must be.”

This is tantamount to sticking one’s head in the sand, so far as I can tell.

Now, this line of reasoning might not be useful at all, but for the sake of argument, let’s say I become Catholic in the next five years or so. In no way could I in good faith speak of my journey to Rome in the same manner that those folks (or at least a few of them) over at Called to Communion do (for the very reasons proffered above). It presumes a kind of epistemic certainty that to my mind is impossible to achieve before the return of the King.

Berger sums up nicely what I'm getting at here:

As Christians we believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and in his glorious return. But that glory is not yet. The triumphant Christ is still coming; we are still in the aeon of the kenotic Jesus—the self-emptying Jesus, who humbles himself by taking human form. The church, while it announces the coming triumph (indeed, that is the core of its message), still bears the marks of Jesus’ kenosis.

Epistemological modesty, he suggests, is part and parcel of bearing the marks of Christ's kenosis. I'll conclude with a final thought from Berger in an interview published in The Christian Century (29 October 1997, pp. 972–78):

The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude. There is a middle ground between fanaticism and relativism. I can convey values to my children without pretending a fanatical certitude about them. And you can build a community with people who are neither fanatics nor relativists.

My colleague Adam Seligman uses the term "epistemological modesty." Epistemological modesty means that you believe certain things, but you're modest about these claims. You can be a believer and yet say, I'm not really sure. I think that is a fundamental fault line.

So, here we are: a mellow synthesis of skepticism and faith. I realize the epistemic can of worms this may open for some—Catholics and non-Catholics alike. But this defines the religious affirmations of my journey for most of my life, and yet I believe—more strongly and exclusively Christain than Berger allows for himself. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night otherwise, flailing between the fact of modern pluralism, hyper-rationalistic solipsism and epistemological immodesty.

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