Prejean posted a comment on my blog, then deleted it. The PP summarized the comment in the form of a questionnaire for Prejean to answer. I’ll reproduce the questionnaire and the response before offering my own reply:
***QUOTE***
Pedantic Protestant said...
John 1:14 [my quick translation]:
And the word became flesh and tented among us, and we beheld His glory --- glory as of the-only-begotten-of the Father, full of grace and truth.
(1) Are you saying that Hays doesn't believe that God the Son became flesh?
(2) Are you claiming that Hays denies that the Word-who-became-flesh did not come from the Father?
(3) Are you asserting that Hays denies that the Word-who-became-flesh is not full of grace and truth?
II Peter 1:3-4 [my quick translation]:
As all [things of] His divine power which issue unto life and godliness have been bestowed upon you through the knowledge of the one who called you by his own glory and goodness, through which things the valuable and greatest promises have been bestowed upon you, so that through these you might be partakers of the divine nature, fleeing the corrupted things of the world that are produced by evil desires.
(4) Are you claiming that Hays denies that God's agency has bestowed on Christians what is necessary for life and godliness?
(5) Are you claiming that Hays denies that Christians will be partakers of "the divine nature”?
Hopefully Hays can speak for himself here.
Friday, September 09, 2005 5:45:50 PM
Pedantic Protestant said...
Jonathan removed his comment, it seems [?].
Friday, September 09, 2005 5:46:50 PM
CrimsonCatholic said...
Hays and Svendsen are Nestorians, so they don't believe the premise in (1). Autotheos is an outright denial of the premise in (2), unless you accept Warfield's incoherent account of divine economy. Re: (3), I'm not sure how Hays could say anything meaningful about the Word-Who-became-flesh, because He doesn't believe the Word became flesh.
Re: (4), I don't know what "agency" means in this context; I do not believe that he thinks they were bestowed "by His glory and goodness." And yes, he denies (5).
So, yeah, pretty much, I think his Christology makes a mockery of Scripture. But I don't even see any benefit in wasting further time on it. That he's a sham artist who name-drops in lieu of argument has been exposed; that his Christology is anti-Nicene has been exposed; that Nicene Christology and the condemnation of Nestorianism is clearly taught in Scripture should be obvious to anyone who cares (and most Evangelicals who aren't in the nutbar anti-Catholic fringe agree).
Good victorious, evil punished, yada yada. No matter what they say at this point, their credibility is shot among anyone who accepts the Nicene creed as the standard of orthodoxy and who has the least bit of respect for historical theology. I was just going to say that y'all can have your "me and my Bible" fraternity, and good luck with all that.
Got nothing to do with intellectual superiority, BTW; it's got to do with basic scholastic honesty and me being able to read carefully enough to catch them when they're faking it. They are trying to appear as if they fit within "conservative Evangelicalism," as if they are somehow normal, and I'm just pointing out that they are an extreme fringe that is rejected by most of conservative Evangelicalism. Nestorianism and anti-Nicene Christology are not cool, even for Protestants. But hey, if you want to stick with it, fine by me. My work is done; the quacks are unveiled.
Friday, September 09, 2005 6:29:53 PM
***END-QUOTE***
i) Prejean’s allusion to Jn 1:14 is presumably to the clause, “and the word became flesh.” Sarx has a wide semantic domain in LXX and NT usage. In the context of Jn 1:14, it means, at a minimum, that the Logos became human—possibly with an added overtone of the infirmities of the flesh.
ii) However, Prejean’s contention is that unless you subscribe to his Cyrillene Christology, you deny Jn 1:14. But this isn’t exegesis. It is placing a far more specific construction on the text than the text itself will bear.
Even if his Christology were correct, it doesn’t follow that the Johannine clause means that the Logos became flesh in the Cyrillene sense.
The problem lies with Prejean’s childish insistence that if he can’t get everything he wants out of a verse of Scripture, then he will simply make it mean more than it actually says by extorting a surplus sense through semantic coercion.
Again, even if his Christology were correct, that doesn’t make his exegesis correct. His Cyrillene gloss goes well beyond what the verse either says or means or even implies.
This is a distinction which a Catholic commentator on John, such as Brown or Schnackenburg, would have no difficulty observing. It betrays the intellectual insecurity of his faith that Prejean cannot allow the text of Scripture speak for itself.
If I deny that Winnie the Pooh teaches quantum mechanics, I am not rendering a value-judgment on quantum mechanics.
iii) The image of the Son coming from the Father is a complex image in Johannine usage. It signifies his divinity, divine mission and commission, as well as his Incarnation.
Prejean fails to explain what is incoherent in Warfield’s analysis. As applied to the Godhead, “sonship” is a metaphor. After all, no one is contending that Christ is the physical progeny of God. So the question is what the metaphor signifies.
In Johannine usage, and NT usage generally, it is a divine title. Hence, it implies the divinity of Christ. As such, it further entails an eternal relationship, grounded in the intramundane Trinity.
Likewise, divine paternity is also a metaphor, and one correlative with the sonship of Christ. Fatherhood and sonship answer to each other.
But to turn these figures of speech into a causal model whereby the action of the Father is constitutive of the Son is crudely anthropomorphic and gets wholly carried away with the incidental connotations a mere metaphor.
And to take the further step of exchanging this image for the role of the Father as the fons deitatis or fons trinitatis is yet another wrong turn; metaphors are not interchangeable, and it is illicit to swap one theological metaphor for another.
iv) As to 2 Peter, I assume his allusion is to 1:4 (“partakers of the divine nature”), which is the classic prooftext for theosis.
It should be needless to point out that theosis is a classically Greek orthodox soteric category, not a Roman Catholic soteric category. So if Prejean’s position is that anyone who does not subscribe to the Greek Orthodox gloss on 2 Pet 1:4 is a heretic, then his fellow Roman Catholics are equally heretical.
I’d add that theosis makes use of Neoplatonic ontology to flesh out its soteriology. But Neoplatonism postdates 2 Peter. So even if it were a valid framework in its own right, it would still be anachronistic to reinterpret 2 Pet 1:4 in light of Neoplatonism—much less the late Medieval development of hesychasm.
For a philological analysis of 1 Pet 1:4, cf. J. Starr, Sharers in Divine Nature: 2 Peter 1:4 in Its Hellenistic Context (Stockholm 2000).
Starr arrives at the conclusion that what the verse in fact denotes is not deification, but participation in the moral character of Christ.
What Prejean subscribes to is not, in fact, a hypostatic union, but rather, an anhypostatic union. He charges anyone who disagrees with him with being a Nestorian, but by depersonalizing the human nature of Christ, one could, with equal logic, classify Mr. Prejean as a Monophysite.
As David Wells has put it, “it is not entirely clear how a human nature devoid of its ego is still human nature; without its prosopon, Jesus’ ousia would be merely homoiousion with ours and not homoousion,” The Person of Christ (Crossway Books 1984), 109.
In the same series is Gerald Bray’s book on The Doctrine of God, in which he raises the same sorts of objections to Nicene subordinationism that I do.
BTW, the series editor for this book was Peter Toon, an Evangelical Anglican and high churchman, as well as a diligent and devout student of historical theology. And Roger Nicole was one of the peer reviewers. So this is scarcely the “nutbar anti-Catholic fringe.”
Prejean has yet to explain how a “rational soul” can be impersonal. How does he square his own position with the Athanasian creed? What’s an anhypostatic union if not Docetism by another name?
The point here is not to either accept a Nestorian Christology or reject a Cyrillene Christology. The point, rather, is to resist the temptation to be more specific than Scripture and dogmatize beyond the bounds of revelation.
Indeed, Starr is exactly Nestorian on that point (moral union of the wills by grace -> personal union). If he believes that the verse is Nestorian, that would hardly vindicate Nestorianism. And the fact that you think Scripture teaches Nestorianism does not make the view less Nestorian. I'm not arguing that Scripture is Cyrillene; I'm arguing that Chalcedon is Cyrillene and that anyone who takes a Cyrillene view of Scripture cannot abide yours.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Bray being on the "nutbar" fringe, whatever claim of consistency he makes with Chalcedon is based on viewing the council as a "vindication" of Antiochene exegesis (as his work Biblical Interpretation Past and Present makes clear). He cites David Dockery's work in favor of this proposition, who cites Brown, who cites Harnack. In other words, it's a big circle of argumentation based on Harnack's discredited scholarship. The fact is that none of these people are Cyrillene scholars, and none of them has vetted their conclusions against the Cyrillene scholarship, which means that none of them is reliable based on the so-called coherence of their position. And theologically, it IS the nutbar anti-Catholic fringe as far as I am concerned to follow Warfield and Hodge on the denial of Nicene Christology. I have zero respect for anti-Nicene so-called "Christian" scholarship, and if that puts a whole lot of Evangelical "scholars" in the dump, so be it. By my lights, they have allowed some pretty sorry theological methodology to creep in, and I have no qualms dismissing Warfield, Hodge, Wells, Toon, Bray, Nicole, Helm, Frame, Murray, and anybody else who wants to put themselves in that position. Most conservative evangelical scholarship is trash with respect to patristics and history, and I have few qualms about saying so.
To begin with, it was the Church of England which gave us the word “latitudinarian.” Anglicans mix and match their theological traditions all the time.
ReplyDeleteIf I’d said that he was both an Evangelical and an Anglo-Catholic, there might be something to your point. But, on the one hand, he’s clearly quite at home with the Evangelical wing given his sympathetic studies of Evangelicals and/or Puritans like Ryle and Owen.
On the other hand, his work with the prayer book society and criticism of American Evangelicalism points him in a high church direction. He himself has described the Anglican way as both Evangelical and Catholic.
As to theosis, you’re repeating your penchant for taking my comments out of context. According to Prejean, to deny the Greek Orthodox interpretation of 2 Pet 1:4 is to deny 2 Pet 2:4, period. But although you can find theosis in some Western writers, especially in the Augustinian tradition, it hardly enjoys the kind of official and distinct standing whose denial would represent a repudiation of either Catholic dogma generally or 2 Pet 1:4 in particular.
As to Starr’s analysis, it doesn’t imply that the divine nature is thus limited, but only that what is imitable within the scope of v4 is limited the moral attributes.
In addition, you seem to be defining “divine nature” in a comprehensive sense, and then inferring, on this interpretation, that the divine nature would be merely moral in character. But that begs the very question of how the phrase is being used in Peter.
As to the relation between person and nature, you are at least offering an argument for your position, which is a cut above Prejean.
As to the argument itself, we don’t find a divine nature apart from persons. Person and nature are inseparable in the Godhead. In the case of the Godhead, moreover, the relation is internal. There could no be fewer than three or more than three (persons). Furthermore, we don’t find human nature apart from persons.
Now, there are a couple of directions in which one might possibly qualify that equation. The exemplary idea of human nature can exist in the mind of God, as an unexemplified universal.
But the immediate point at issue is the hypostatic union, where we’re dealing with concrete particulars.
In addition, depending on your anthropology, you might say that a newly conceived baby is not yet a person—even if he has a soul. Depends on whether you calibrate personhood according to a certain level of consciousness or cognitive development.
Be that as it may, where the hypostatic union is concerned, we’re going to be crossing that threshold as the Christchild matures.
As to the relation between nous and nature, the question for an Evangelical is how we integrate the testimony of Scripture and what categories we employ.
There are now a number of terms in play: person, soul, intellect, and nous. Are these being used as synonyms?
Taking a step back, in terms of theological method, we have various acts and attributes described and ascribed to God. We also have various acts and attributes described and ascribed to Christ.
Scripture ordinarily leaves the operative concepts undefined because it leaves it to the reader to analogize from human experience and make the necessary allowances for the difference between God and man.
In addition to his divinity, we are both shown and told that Christ is human in every respect except for sin.
To deny to Christ a personal human nature would involve a radical discontinuity with human experience, which forms the common ground for how we construe these predications in the first place.
So we would need some compelling exegetical reason to override this considerable presumption. Is there something either in the Scriptural description of the two natures or else the phenomenology of Christ to override that presumption?
Berkhof uses the phrase “complex person,” while Warfield uses the phrase “dual consciousness.”
As regards the Trinity, we use the term “person” and much of what we associate with that term to capture a recognizable concept on display in Scripture.
On human analogy, this would suggest a collective consciousness along with a threefold self-consciousness.
Again, we can debate the best way to model the Trinity and the hypostatic union, but any model must be under the thumb of divine revelation.
Starr isn't attempting to gloss the verse in light of Patristic categories. Rather, he's conducting a comparative linguistic analysis of the terminology based on analogous usage or analogous concepts in the OT, Philo, Josephus, Plutarch, Stoicism, Pauline and non-Pauline theology.
ReplyDeletePrejean, by contrast, is trying to change a flat-tire with a corkscrew, or uncork a wine-bottle with a tire iron.
"Prejean, by contrast, is trying to change a flat-tire with a corkscrew, or uncork a wine-bottle with a tire iron."
ReplyDeleteNope. You separate hermeneutics and Church in ascertaining divine meaning, but that's simply your own opinion. For someone who supposedly presents arguments, you have surely failed to offer one for separating hermeneutics from the interpretive community.
CrimsonCatholic said:
ReplyDelete"You separate hermeneutics and Church in ascertaining divine meaning, but that's simply your own opinion. For someone who supposedly presents arguments, you have surely failed to offer one for separating hermeneutics from the interpretive community."
Once again, Prejean makes assertions without evidence and demands that anybody who disagrees with him prove that he's wrong. Prejean makes references to the text of scripture, but when we see that his interpretations can't be supported if we interpret those documents as we would any other historical document, Prejean tells us that we need to let "the church" tell us what the texts mean. Does Prejean give us any argument that leads to his conclusions? No.
Is the church relevant to scripture interpretation in some ways? Yes, the first century Corinthians, Galatians, etc. are part of the context in which we interpret the Biblical documents. But is Prejean defining "the church" correctly? No. And is the church relevant to scripture interpretation in all of the ways Prejean would suggest? No.
When Papias and other early patristic sources advocate premillennialism, does Prejean let those church leaders interpret scripture for him? No. When one church father after another, century after century, denies that Mary was sinless throughout her life, does Prejean let them interpret scripture for him? No. When ecumenical councils contradict the doctrine of the papacy, does Prejean let them interpret scripture for him? No. What Prejean has in mind is a modern Roman Catholic concept of "the church" interpreting scripture for us. That view of church interpretation was unknown to the earliest Christians. There's no reason to think that Jesus and the apostles would want us to interpret scripture the way Prejean does.
Maybe Prejean will tell us, again, that he isn't going to justify his Roman Catholic belief system for us, since such a justification would require book-length treatment. Yet, he's said elsewhere that men like Karl Keating and Phil Porvaznik have already sufficiently answered his Evangelical critics. But I've never seen a Catholic Answers tract that argues that we should interpret scripture allegorically because Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria did. Why wait for Prejean's book-length treatment when men like Keating and Porvaznik supposedly have given us the answers already?
Jason Engwer
http://members.aol.com/jasonte
New Testament Research Ministries
http://www.ntrmin.org
Mr. Robinson said: "I have known Toon, and he is not a high churchman. One doesn't describe oneself in Anglican circles as 'evangelical' and then claim to be a high churchman since those are opposing categories."
ReplyDeletePerhaps you should inform Mr. Toon, for he wrote, "The term 'Evangelical High Churchmen' was coined to distinguish traditional High Churchmen from Tractarians and to emphasize their commitment to the Reformation principles of the sole authority of Holy Scripture and justification by grace through faith. To distinguish an Evangelical High Churchman from an Evangelical with a high doctrine of the visible, episcopally governed, national Church is not easy and between about 1838 and 1848 perhaps impossible in some cases. At the other end of the Evangelical spectrum were those who shared with Non-conformists and Scottish Presbyterians an admiration for the Puritans of the seventeenth century as well as fairly low views of the value of the historical episcopate. It was to this grouping that the term 'Low Churchmen' was attached in the 1830s and the term 'Recordite' later. So to include at one end the Evangelical with a high view of episcopacy at the other the Evangelical with a low view, the following definition of an Evangelical is proposed as a basis for including or excluding men and women from this study:" See pp. 4-5 from Peter Toon's Evangelical Theology 1833-1856, A Response to Tractarianism (Atlanta: John Knox press, 1979).
In your usual "rush to crush" Mr. Robinson, the rock of correction has found you as its target again.