Dunscentrate just a little bit more . . .

Dunce Cap

"a traffic cone for that special student"

(Image from Wikipedia)

Yesterday, a student showed up in my Yonsei course on multiculturalism and European unification after missing 9 straight classes. She has missed 10 classes in all and hasn't read a single word of the assigned articles, nor has she participated in a single discussion in a course small enough for me to treat as a discussion seminar.

I informed her that she had missed 10 classes, and she merely smiled. I asked her how much one could miss and still pass the course, and she knew the immediate answer to that:

"One-third."

"One-third . . ." I mused. "We have 16 weeks, counting midterm and finals weeks, with two classes per week . . . which makes 32. You've missed nearly one-third already. And that's assuming that midterm and finals weeks count. I'll have to check with the office on this."

I looked at her for a moment, then said:

"Thesis statements are due this Friday. Do you know what you want to write your paper on?"

She shook her head. I pointed to the board, where I had provided a sample thesis statement:

Europe will successfully unify despite its problems because it is a continent of democratic states with wealthy, educated populations that recognize their economic, political, and military self-interest in uniting and developing into an effective superpower.

I then explained:

"Note that this sample has thesis-statement form. It has the A --> B b/c A --> C logic. This Friday, you should bring to class a thesis statement formulated in this way."

She smiled but said nothing. I'm curious to see what she brings on Friday. As for me, I might need to prepare by picking up a traffic cone on my way to that class.

Calvin's nonvoluntarist deity

John Calvin

Engraving

after

Original Oil Painting

in

University Library of Geneva

(Image from Wikipdia)

I've recently become aware of more and more Calvinists among Southern Baptists, the church in which I grew up, but when I was young, I never heard anybody in my church speak up in favor of predestination. That doctrine was for the Presbyterians. Most Baptists adhered to a sort of popular Arminianism, which emphasizes the free will of individuals to make their own choice in accepting or rejecting grace.

My grandmother had even heard of 'official' Arminian theology and mentioned it once in explaining to me her rejection of predestination. The term stuck in my head, but I hadn't seen it written down, so I later confused it with Armenian Christianity as my knowledge increased beyond my understanding, so I imagined in my sophomoric views that the early theologian Pelagius (born 354), who emphasized free will, was an Armenian and that his theology had so influenced the Armenian Church that Pelagianism came to be known as Armenianism.

Eventually, sometime after my sophomore year, I got that point straightened out.

Anyway, as I was saying, I've noticed more Calvinist among Southern Baptists these days, and my anecdotal impression has now been confirmed through an article in Christianity Today by Ken Walker, "TULIP Blooming" (1/17/2008), which reveals the following fact:

Although only 10 percent of SBC pastors identify themselves as Calvinists, nearly 30 percent of recent seminary graduates do.

The influence of these new graduates on the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is already being felt:

Long considered more Arminian in orientation -- emphasizing an individual's need to respond to the gospel rather than God's election in salvation -- the nation's largest Protestant denomination is grappling with doctrines of grace and election amid a seminary-led revival.

I suppose that I'll be hearing more about this issue in the years ahead, so I'd best start boning up on the predestinarian and free-will theologies of Calvin and Arminius, respectively. In fact, one of the leaders of the Bible study class that I attend at Seoul International Baptist Church (SIBC) is a Calvinist, and he's a very well-informed, interesting individual.

This man regularly refers to God's "sovereignty," a theological point that I've often heard Calvinists emphasize in such as way as to nearly suggest theological voluntarism, an extreme view emphasizing the power of God to do anything he damned well pleases. Obviously, this would make Calvinism similar to the Medieval Nominalism of Duns Scotus or to the mainstream theology of orthodox Islam (insofar as I understand these).

However, the Christian philosopher Michael Sudduth, writing in his unpublished paper "Calvin and the Medieval Dialectic of Divine Omnipotence" (1997), argues that Calvin was no voluntarist, and he cites this passage from Calvin:

That Sarbonic dogma, therefore, in the promulgation of which the Papal theologians so much pride themselves, "that the power of God is absolute and tyrannical," I utterly abhor. For it would be easier to force away the light of the sun from his heat, or his heat from his fire, than to separate the power of God from His justice. Away, then, with all such monstrous speculations from godly minds, as that God can possibly do more, or otherwise, than He has done, or that He can do anything without the highest order and reason. For I do not receive that other dogma, "that God, as being free from all law Himself, may do anything without being subject to any blame for doing so." For whosoever makes God without law, robs Him of the greatest part of His glory, because he spoils Him of His rectitude and justice. Not that God is, indeed, subject to any law, excepting in so far as He is a law unto Himself. But there is that inseparable connection and harmony between the power of God and His justice, that nothing can possibly be done by Him but what is moderate, legitimate, and according to the strictest rule of right. And most certainly, when the faithful speak of God as omnipotent, they acknowledge Him at the same time to be the Judge of the world, and always hold His power to be righteously tempered with equity and justice. (Calvin, A Doctrine of the Secret Providence of God (1558) in Calvin's Calvinism: Treatises on the Eternal Predestination of God and the Secret Providence of God, tr. Henry Cole (Grand Rapids: Reformed Free Publishing Association, 1987?), p. 248)

By "Sarbonic dogma," I'm assuming that Calvin was referring to theologians associated with La Sorbonne (the University of Paris), that Medieval university founded in Paris by Robert de Sorbon in 1257, for one of its early theologians was the theological voluntarist Duns Scotus, who taught there from 1293 to 1297.

At any rate, Sudduth comments on the passage above from Calvin:

Perhaps more than any other single passage in Calvin this statement is crucial to understanding Calvin's position on both voluntarism and the Distinction [i.e., between "the potentia Dei absoluta (absolute power of God) and the potentia Dei ordinata (ordained power of God)"]. What is striking about this passage is that in it Calvin clearly denies that God can do just anything without being subject to blame for doing so. Similarly he denies that God is exlex or super legem (beyond law). Furthermore, Calvin is explicit that God has reasons for what He does, and they are just reasons, but they are simply hidden from us in this life. These points set definite moral constraints on what God can do. I take this to be evidence against the voluntarist reading of Calvin alluded to earlier (in section II). For the voluntarist, God cannot act inordinately because whatever God does is just by virtue of his doing it. The divine act makes the moral fact. Calvin, however, following theologians such as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, maintains that God cannot act inordinately because of the consistency of the divine nature. God's being righteous may be epistemically mysterious in many respects, but it is not ontologically vacuous.

This emphasis upon God's consistent nature thus precludes a radically voluntarist reading of Calvinism (though some hyper-Calvinists might even deny Calvin on this point and return to Duns Scotus). But Calvin is also worried about the Euthyphro dilemma, which he wants to circumvent through these words concerning God:

He is a law unto Himself. But there is that inseparable connection and harmony between the power of God and His justice.

Calvin wants to ensure that God is just, but Calvin's emphasis upon God being a law unto Himself leaves unclear what makes the 'justness' of God just. Calvin does not wish to leave God's justice arbitrary, as though God's absolute might makes what he does absolutely right even though he could have done utterly differently than he has done. But he also does not wish to impose justice upon God by referring to a standard external to God. But is God, then, divided within Himself into a capacity for willful absolute power and a standard of divine, infinitely wise justice? Would the latter act as God's conscience, as though an imperial God were to think, like Nixon, "Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong." Calvin probably wouldn't like to imagine God in this way either.

Be that as it may, Calvin's insistent Christian belief that God has a divine nature that in some nonarbitrary way grounds divine justice, and also divine love, places Calvin's thinking in the mainstream of Christian theology and, as it happens, distinguishes his position from that of mainstream Muslim theology, which holds that God does not have a nature and can do as he arbitrarily pleases.

Or such is my understanding of Islamic theology...

Yet More on Limits to the Divine Will

Islam

Bowing to Allah's Arbitrary Will?

(Image from Wikipedia)

By looking around more at the Chiesa website, I found a fuller version of Aref Ali Nayed's views. These occur in the same passage that I quoted from yesterday, but on a different Chiesa webpage, "Two Muslim Scholars Comment on the Papal Lecture in Regensburg" (Sandro Magister, Chiesa, October 4, 2006), where Nayed comments upon a passage from the Pope's Regensberg lecture:

Benedict XVI, being a scholar of medieval theology knows that he can not deny certain facts:

"In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions."

This passage, while serving its author's ultimate goal of undermining the theologies mentioned in it, does at least show that Benedict XVI is somewhat aware that other possible theologies do exist, and that Muslim theologians were not alone in caring about the affirmation of God’s sovereignty against human pretensions to govern Him with human criteria.

Here, Nayed appears to be affirming that the voluntarist views of such Nominalists as Duns Scotus are precisely the same as the Muslim view of Allah, and if that is so, then Islam does hold that Allah can willfully flout that principle of noncontradiction. Nayed then dryly observes of the Pope that, "Unfortunately, he goes on to totally undermine such theologies as not being the true 'faith of the Church'." I can see that this is unfortunate for Nayed's claim that the Christian and Muslim views of the deity are identical, but it's certainly not 'unfortunate' for the Pope's argument.

Nayed's larger article is worth reading (despite its strongly ironic but misplaced jabs at Catholicism for its violent history and its deplorable Eurocentrism) but still doesn't seem to me to directly engage with the Pope's point about reason and the nature of God . . . or Allah.

The Pope's Critique of Protestantism

John Duns Scotus

Proto-Protestant Dunce

(Image from Wikipedia)

The Pope's Regensburg lecture has received a great deal of attention for the Byzantine quote about Muhammad bringing nothing new except for things "evil and inhuman" (or: "bad and inhumane"), but less noted has been the Pope's criticisms of Protestantism -- namely, that it sunders the Christian synthesis of faith and reason -- which took up far more of his talk.

Let's take a look at this critique, which begins with an admission about some Medieval Catholic theology:

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm [i.e., "that God is not bound even by his own word, ... that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us," and that "we would even have to practise idolatry" if God so willed] and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which -- as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated -- unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul -- "λογικηλατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

Note that the Pope asserts the crucial significance of the "real analogy" between God and us, which is ultimately based (though unmentioned here) upon the scriptural statement that human beings are made in God's image (Genesis 1:26-27) and which is interpreted (and explicitly thematized here) in Greek terms as a shared rationality between God and individuals.

The Pope, then, would affirm the analogia entis (analogy of being) over such concepts as the analogia fidei (analogy of faith) emphasized by the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth -- and would perhaps accuse Barth of holding to a variant of fideism, i.e., faith unsupported by, and even against, reason.

The Pope would see Barth's position as a consequence stemming from the dehellenization of Christianity that began with the Protestant Reformation, a point that the Pope begins to make here:

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity -- a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.

The Pope then expounds at some length on these three stages, but I will excise portions to summarize in his own words:

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

The Pope's concern here touches on an unmentioned point, namely, that the principle of sola scriptura entails a rejection of the Catholic Church's authority to speak as the true Church in interpreting scripture. His rehabilitation of reason -- of Greek thought -- for modern Christianity would entail a reassertion of Catholic authority over Protestants. Why so? Because the Greek-Christian synthesis was achieved by the early Church Fathers, and to accept the Church Fathers is already to reject the Protestant principle of sola scriptura. If the Pope can persuade Protestants that they tend in their theology toward the dangerous concept of a capricious God, then he might be able to draw them back to the mother church.

That's the subtext, anyway, that I'm reading here.

Be that as it may, the Pope doesn't stop at this point. There are yet stages two and three to treat. Here's stage two:

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative .... Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university.

This was the liberal theology most characteristic of 19th-century Christianity, which tended to subordinate Christianity to culture, understood as Western culture but not so much in terms of tradition as in terms of moral progress. This grounding of Christianity in culture left it without an independent position from which to critique that culture. Recovering that independence, the Pope implies, would require returning to the concept of a rational God who made human beings in his own image and rejecting the liberal Christian view that made Christianity -- and therefore the Christian God -- in the image of culture.

Interestingly, one of the most powerful Protestant rejections of liberal theology comes to us in the work of the already-mentioned Karl Barth, whose reaction to the horrors of the First World War led him to articulate a system of neo-orthodoxy through his powerful commentary on Paul's letter to the Romans. From the Pope's perspective, Barth's reaction to WWI -- which led him to reject the validity of all human perspectives in the presence of the unfathomable otherness of God -- would be simply to reoccupy the position articulated by the early Protestant Reformers and thus would not solve the problem engendered by the dehellenization of Christianity.

The Pope doesn't mention all this, but it's on his mind.

But let's turn from our reading of the Pope's mind to a reading of his words concerning the third stage:

I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

This -- the Pope implies -- would compound the errors of the first two stages by appropriating a sort of sola scriptura even while subordinating Christianity to culture ... or, rather, cultures.

The Pope is especially concerned about this third stage, for it threatens even the Catholic synthesis because as Church growth occurs outside of the West, such that non-Western Catholics begin to outnumber Western ones, even Catholic voices have been raised in favor of the indigenization of theology -- effectively a dehellenization of the sort feared by the Pope.

Some of the Pope's criticism thus takes aim at Catholic developments, but he uses much more of his ammunition on Protestantism ... if my reading is correct.

Therefore, against these insults to our divinely inspired reformed church, I call upon all of my Protestant brothers and sisters to rise up in violent protests (we are "Protestants," after all!) and breathe out threatenings and slaughter (cf. prooftext Acts 9:1: "empneo apeile kai phonos") against Catholics, the Catholic Church, and Pope Benedict XVI.

Nah ... just kidding. I call for further reasonable dialogue on these fascinating issues and hope that I am contributing something.