The other reason that so many Jews are so hostile to the Gospel is that it poses a threat to their already insecurity sense of identity. Many Jews define their Judaism in anti-Christian terms. I realize this is a provocative proposal, but what are we to think when a secular Jew is still a Jew, but a Messianic Jew is a traitor to his people?
The Jewish identity crisis is as old as Judaism itself. For Judaism was born in exile. The legend of the wandering Jew has its exemplar in Abraham, whom God called out of Ur. Heavenly-minded Messianic Jews like Abraham, Simeon and Stephen (cf. Acts 7; Heb 11) have never suffered from an identity crisis. But it has been a pervasive problem for many of the Jewish people throughout their long history. When they had the land, they identified with the land. But when they lost the land through exile or deportation, they no longer had this point of reference. Even when they had the land, there was a temptation to assimilate with the cultural climate of the surrounding nations, and thus lose their distinct identity as a covenant community. When they had the Temple, they identified with the Temple, But when the lost the Temple, twice over, they no longer had this point of reference.
When the land was occupied by the Romans, the challenge was again to maintain their identity as a holy people, set apart by God, despite the constant and defiling contact with their heathen overlords. The Essenes, Pharisees and Zealots each represent different distancing strategies to retain identity under Roman rule. The Pharisees resorted to a multiplication of purificatory rites to insulate themselves from daily defilement with Greek slaves and Roman masters. The Essenes took this strategy a step further, and more literally. Instead of a ritual buffer zone, they put physical space between themselves and the heathen by living apart from the contaminating presence of the pagan. And the Zealots too this strategy a final step, and, in a sense, inverted the Essene policy by trying to externalize the heathen. When the Zealot party won the argument, but lost the war, Palestinian Jews joined the Diaspora, and exported the Pharisaic strategy.
During the Middle ages, the ghetto imposed Jewish identity by a physical barrier. But when the fence fell, the temptation to assimilate with the dominant culture reasserted itself. And, indeed, some Jews were better Germans than the Germans. But their very success was held against them. For the Holocaust deassimilated the Jews. The bitter irony of Nazism was to confer a Jewish identity on many Jews who had lost their own sense of Jewishness, or done their best to put it behind them.
After the mortifying shock of this final "outing," many Jews turned to Zionism to supply their identity. But decades of war with intractable Arabs and suicide bombers have soured this utopian vision.
Other Jews turned to Marxism, which is a secular Messianism. Marx was an apostate Jew who heralded from a long line of Rabbis. Trotsky (b. Lev Davidovitch Bronstein) was another renegade Jew. Yet Russian Jews suffered under the Stalinist pogrom. So a Jewish-inspired ideology became just one more Jew-killing machine. And this painful irony embittered yet another utopian vision.
Some Jews have tried dodging the issue by proposing a dual covenant. And this compromise has recently received the endorsement of the Vatican.
The problem, however, is that the NT was Jewish before it was Christian. And the New Covenant is a covenant for Jews as well as Christians. There is no other way of reading the mission to the Jews in the Gospels and Acts, much less the redemptive-historical plot-lines in Romans or 2 Corinthians or Ephesians or Hebrews.
The Jews have suffered from a lingering and malingering identity crisis because they go out of their way to avoid the one anchor of Jewish identity. In the past, Christian apologetics has suffered from invoking a few isolated messianic prooftexts. But messianic prophecy needs to be seen as a more organic and holistic whole. A Christian apologist should identify the key messianic motifs, and trace out their steady thematic progression (e.g., "Messiah," The Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 2:987-95.
VI. Door 4
Are the sacraments a means of grace?
I. Yes! Catholicism, Anglo-Catholicism, Lutheranism, Eastern Orthodoxy
II. No! Anabaptism
III. Yes and no! Covenant theology
A Confectionery Classification of the Eucharistic Schools
1. Oreonian:
An earthly sign of a heavenly filling (Impanation)
2. Animal-Crackeresque:
The doughy rhino represents the real pachyderm (Memorialism)
3. Chocolate-chippy:
The heavenly chips are mixed in, with and under the earthly ingredients (Consubstantiation).
4. Carobean:
Although the substance is really carob, the cookie retains its chocolatean accidents (Transubstantiation).
5. Oatmealy:
The heavenly nutrients are spiritually present in the earthly ingredients (Virtualism). More nutritious than the Anabaptist view (#2), but less ostentatious than the Catholic view (#4).
A. Mediate Systems of Grace
1. Catholicism
How do you decide? That, again, depends in part on the other doors you pass through. If you answer "no" to freewill, then you must answer no to sacramental realism, for there is a conflict between sovereign grace and sacramental grace. For if grace is channeled through the sacraments, which are mediated by men and administered to the heavenbound and hellbound alike, then grace is general and resistible rather than particular and irresistible. But if you answer "no," to freewill, then sovereign grace trumps sacramental grace.
If, in addition, you answer "yes" to sola Scriptura, then sacramental realism must pass Scriptural muster. And that brings us to the next point. It isn’t enough that a sacramentalist must be right in principle. His position entails that he must also be right in practice, for if there are any impediments to the right reception or administration of the means of grace, then the outward sign is conferred without the inner grace.
We must also ask what would count as a prooftext for sacramental realism. Putting this another way, we must ask, If and how would the NT witness differ were the opposing position true?
The basic case for sacramental realism is that certain verses attribute saving grace to the sacraments. And that, at first glance, looks like a pretty straightforward deduction.
But what is the opposing position? The opposing position holds the sacraments to be signs of grace rather than means of grace. Now, if the sacraments were emblematic rather than efficacious, would we expect the NT to express itself in different terms? I don’t see why, for the very nature of symbolic discourse involves the principle of substitution, in which A substitutes for B, so that whatever was said of B may be said of A. An example would be the way in which Paul talks about the Cross (e.g., Col 2:14). Because the Cross signifies the work of Christ, Paul can ascribe redemptive power to the Cross. But, of course, a piece of wood is singularly inefficacious—as Isaiah would be the first to say (Isa 44:19)!
So it would seem that sacramental realism has failed to take the measure of what the opposing position entails. Since, on the symbolic view, sign and significate are interchangeable, sacramental realism is underdetermined by the putative evidence—for the NT witness would be identical on either view.
Now, to deny that a given verse is a prooftext doesn’t convert it into a disproof. Sacramental realism could still be true. But if its traditional prooftexts are really neutral, then there is no prima facie presumption in its favor, so that some additional and independent argument is needed to tilt the balance.
But in that regard, it is also striking to see where the sacramentalist must go for some of his prooftexts. For example, he appeals to the Gospel of John, but instead of starting with narratives that directly address the practice of baptism (e.g., 1:19-34; 3:22-4:2) or communion (13:1-14), they turn to passages like 3:5 or the Bread of Life discourse (6:22-59) on the assumption that these rather picturesque speeches are concerned with the sacraments. Why begin there? Because a sacramentalist can’t get what he wants from the historical narratives.
It must be frustrating for the sacramentalist to find that John doesn’t seem to share his intense interest in the sacraments. For John passes up natural opportunities to enlarge on that theme, had he deemed it a priority. And this from the most reflective of the Gospel writers.
But the most basic failing, the principal weakness with the sacramental reading lies not in finding so much sacramental significance in the Johannine narratives, but so little. For the whole of the Fourth Gospel is a book of earthly signs of unseen truths. The miracles of feeding and healing, restoring life and sight, walking on water and turning water into fine wine, are no more or less sacramental than baptism and communion. And suffusing the whole is the miracle of the Incarnation. John has no account of the Transfiguration because the Incarnate life of Christ is a daily transfiguration and living tabernacle of God's glory in flesh and blood.
Another prooftext for the Real Presence is 1 Cor 11:27-29. But as Roger Beckwith remarks,
"To understand such feasts, it is necessary to remember the Biblical attitude to meals in general…Meals were…used to inaugurate covenants…the animals to be eaten were first offered in sacrifice to God, with the result that he became the Host, inviting men to his table, and that the sins of men were taken away by the shedding of blood before they approached (Heb 9:16-22)…Those who neglected the annual passover meal were rejected by God and became liable to the visitation of death (Exod 12:15,19; Num 9:13). Now, in 1 Cor 10:14-22, St. Paul compares such feasts with their pagan counterparts and with the Holy Communion, and he dwells upon the function of all of these in cementing koinonia (communion, fellowship, partnership) not just between worshiper and worshiper, but more especially between the worshippers and the deity (vv16f.,20)," Priesthood and Sacraments. Latimer Monographs 1 (Marchman Manor, 1964), 91.
"The sin of "not distinguishing the body," and the physical judgments which it is liable to bring (1 Cor 11:29-31), can be paralleled from the corresponding judgments incurred by profaning the sacred feasts of the OT, in which no one imagines there to be a bodily presence of the Lord in the elements (Lev 7:20f.; 22:3)," The Service of Holy Communion and its Revision. Latimer Monographs 3 (Marchman Manor, 1972), 33.
I would add that it is precisely because some believers affirm the Real Presence at the Last Supper that they deny it at the Lord’s Supper—owing to its commemorative and eschatological character (1 Cor 11:24-26). For the Last Supper foreshadows the Lamb's supper (Lk 22:18; 13:22-29; cf. Isa 25:6-9; Rev 19:6-10).
Indeed, what the vicarious relation (Mt 26:28; cf. 20:28) implies is not that Christ is now with us (Real Presence), but that Christ has acted for us (penal substitution). He has acted on our behalf and in our stead—taking our place rather than taking his place beside us.
I would further add that sacramental realism is a position with practical consequences. Simply put, if the sacraments are a means of grace, where’s the grace? When Judas was a communicant at the inaugural Eucharist, this augurs ill for the future of sacramental realism. How do we account for the widespread phenomenon of national apostasy in countries where almost everyone used to be baptized and most everyone received regular communion? If the divine design of the sacraments were to effect (in baptism) and sustain (in communion) a state of grace, how did we ever get from nearly unanimous participation to nearly unanimous defection? It rather looks like this is a paper theory which is falsified by a failure to make good on its promise.
As a rule, I don’t think it’s fair to judge a doctrine by experience. Yet some doctrines do, in the very nature of the case, come equipped with predictive values.
As with sola Scriptura, how you come down on the efficacy of the sacraments affects your polity and ecclesiology. If you believe the sacraments to be a means of grace, especially in the ex opere operato sense, then that generally commits you to a firm lay/clerical division and apostolic succession to help ensure the valid administration of the sacraments.
And that, in turn, weighs in the relative gravity of schism. If you believe that the sacraments are a means of grace, and the Church the appointed custodian and gatekeeper, then a break with the true church is a worst case scenario. Unity is put at a premium.
If, on the other hand, you deny these assumptions, then there are worse things than schism. In that event you travel light and keep your bags packed (Acts 7; Heb 11).
Although the scandal of schism is often treated as the scarlet letter of the Protestant movement, less is said about the opposing scandal of catholicity. For if you identify the true Church with one visible communion, then no matter how corrupt the institutional Church becomes, you are committed to that system. It is like the old Roman punishment in which a murderer was chained to the rotting corpse of his victim.
The Catholic sex scandal is a case in point. The problem was not only with sodomites in the priesthood and vile prelates who facilitated their crimes. The problem is that the good Catholic is just as complicit as the worst, for the good Catholic is more loyal to the lofty pretensions of his church than a cynical Magisterium, and his institutional allegiance to a rotten institution is just what enables a corrupt clergy and vicious hierarchy to stay in business. For the good Catholic, his church is the only church in town, and so his duty to defend Mother Church takes precedence over institutional reform inasmuch as the institution, if deemed to be divine, is irreformable.
The problem with pretensions to a divine teaching office is that it leaves you exposed to the same mistakes as any other uninspired organization, but you're even worse off; on the one hand, you disdain conventional standards of investigation and verification; on the other hand, you don't dare admit error for fear of losing face. This has a cumulative effect as special pleading advances a new lie to cover up an old blunder. Otherwise innocent errors or petty mistakes, which are harmless enough if caught and corrected early in the process, instead supply the premise for further falsehoods in a downward spiral of systematic deceit. The Roman Church has a long history of this, viz., the False Decretals, the Galileo affair, the Sistine Vulgate.
2. Lutheranism
Lutheran theology grounds the assurance of salvation in the objectivity of grace. Grace is objectified in the sacraments. Since the sacraments are visible and tangible means of grace, the recipient can know himself to be in a state of grace. Conversely, Lutheran theology faults Anabaptism and covenant theology for robbing the Christian of assurance by grounding assurance in subjective factors.
I must confess that I've never understood how so many intelligent Lutherans can find this line of argument the least bit compelling. To begin with, it hinges on the valid administration of the sacraments. But even if we waive that imponderable, it also turns on a one-to-one correspondence between the object of the sacrament and the object of salvation. If everyone was saved who was baptized, then the assurance would be well-warranted. But since Lutheran theology admits the possibility and reality of nominal believers and open apostates, the inference is flagrantly invalid.
In addition, Lutherans regard justification by faith as a fundamental doctrine. Yet faith is a subjective condition. To be sure, faith is the gift of God, but that only goes to show that God is the sovereign of our heart no less than of our outward circumstances, so that it is quite mistaken to equate subjectivity with uncertainty.
Now I realize Lutherans will say that the relation between various articles of faith is mysterious. But this plays into a dialectical double-standard in Lutheran theology, for it is rationalistic in its offensive mode, but fideistic in its defensive mode. It employs logic to attack opposing positions, but when opposing positions use logic to attack Lutheran theology, the Lutheran exchanges logic for paralogisms. I could have some respect for one or the other, but the pragmatic alternation strikes me as evasive, opportunistic, unprincipled and duplicitous. Although that is not the intent, that is the effect.
B. Immediate Systems of Grace
1. Anabaptism
Anabaptism represents the discontinuous end of the spectrum. That, at least, is how it looks from the viewpoint of covenant theology.
However, Anabaptism needn’t view its position as marking a substantive break with the Old Covenant. For Anabaptism would deny that presumptive election, justification or regeneration was ever the basis of infant circumcision. Hence, withholding baptism from infants does not signal an essential shift in God’s redemptive policy. Rather, both sign and subject were symbolic; for Jewish man-children were circumcised to prefigure the Messianic seed of promise, and once the antitype had come, the type was retired.
Anabaptism came by its name due to its belief in rebaptism. Most churches oppose this, although some Southern Presbyterians denied the validity of Roman Catholic baptism. Cf. J. Thornwell, "The Validity of the Baptism of the Church of Rome," Collected Writings (Banner of Truth, 1986), 3:283-412. And if Roman Catholic baptism is deemed to be invalid, then it would be easy to extend that logic to justify the rebaptism of converts from other apostate denominations.
Traditionally, opposition to rebaptism was due to the belief in baptismal regeneration, conveyed ex opere operato, which was held to confer an indelible mark on the soul. But if you don’t subscribe to baptismal regeneration or the automatic efficacy of the sacraments, then, of course, there is no principled objection to rebaptism if the circumstances so warrant.
We need to keep in mind that both sides in this debate don’t have the same investment in the outcome. If, on the one hand, a Baptist were right about the inefficacy of baptism, but wrong about its subjects, then a wrong turn would not be a fatal mistake. Indeed, he believes the opposing position to be more perilous because it offers the subject a false assurance of grace.
If, on the other hand, a sacramentalist were right about baptismal regeneration, then going through the wrong door could conduct the misguided soul straight down to the very pit of hell. So the sacramentalist has more at stake. The Baptist can afford to be wrong in some respects, for if the sacraments were never a means of grace, then their invalid administration doesn’t deprive the subject of any essential blessing.
C. Intermediate Systems of Grace
1. Covenant Theology
Covenant theology presents a position apparently intermediate between Anabaptism and sacramental realism. According to covenant theology, the sacraments are efficacious for the elect or believers and their seed, but not for the reprobate. This argument is based in part on the parallel between infant circumcision and infant baptism. As such, it assumes the basic continuity of the Old Covenant with the New.
Such a position has the tactical advantage of being unfalsifiable, for if, say, a communicant were to fall away, then that would be consistent with saying that as a reprobate, the sacrament was never a means a grace for him; but if he remains in the faith, then that too is consistent with saying that. as one of the chosen, he was sealed by the grace of the sacrament.
But the same circularity renders the position unverifiable, for it is consistent with opposing results. I don’t say this by way of criticism, for there is no particular reason why a given truth may not be circular. Truth is prior to proof. And a revealed truth needs no warrant beyond revelation itself.
But the incentive behind a mediating position lies in assuming that each of the opposing views offers some distinct advantage. Yet this compromise must draw on the same evidentiary base as sacramental realism; so that, if the case for sacramental realism is unsound, then neither is there any presumption in favor of splitting the difference. It is a solution in search of a problem.
Whether we deny the efficacy of the sacraments is in part dependent on how we construe any spiritual influence. If we regard a sacrament as an enacted allegory, then it would have the same edifying effect on the onlooker or adult subject as a fine sermon. As Charles Hodge has said,
"Anything is said to be present when it operates duly on our perceiving faculties. A sensible object is present (prae sensibus) when it affects the senses. A spiritual object is present when it is intellectually apprehended and when it acts upon the mind...God is present with his people when he controls their thoughts, operates on their hearts and fills them with the sense of his nearness and love. this presence is not imaginary, it is in the highest sense real and effective," Systematic Theology (Eerdmans, 1982), 3:637-38.
At this level, there's not much material difference between Anabaptism and covenant theology—especially for adults.
But there is yet another sense in which covenant theology presents an intermediate system of grace. With its principle of federal headship, the federal head acquires a sacramental significance inasmuch as grace is channeled through the head to the junior parties to the covenant. And this operates in larger or smaller social units. The blessing is upon Abraham and his seed, but the blessing is also upon believers and their seed. And the latter supplies the warrant for infant circumcision and baptism.
Yet the sacramental relation is not efficacious across the board. Christ is a means of grace for all the elect, but Abraham and David and believing mothers and fathers are not gracious channels for all their seed.
VII. Out of the Labyrinth
By way of general summary, the relative range of choices turns on how you answer four basic questions. For some answers severely limit subsequent options. The shortest route out of the labyrinth is to opt for closed systems of action and revelation, immediate systems of grace and radically continuous or discontinuous systems of federalsim.
If you deny open revelation, then you don't have to sift through multiple sources of dogma. If you deny freewill, then you don't have to decide how fine to slice the gradations of human merit. If you deny sacramental grace, then you don't have to winnow the valid from the invalid instances. If you affirm the radical continuity or discontinuity of the covenants, then you don't have to draw a lot of fine distinctions.
Of course, the shortest route is not necessarily the right route. It may be a dead-end. But for critics who see sola Scriptura as Pandora's box or a Penelopean web, and seek refuge in Mother Church, it is important for them to realize that questions of comparative simplicity cannot be answered in isolation, and that their favored escape route is at least as circuitous as the Protestant position, and may even be a cul-de-sac.
We also need to avoid the danger of imposing overly abstract categories of analysis and thereby fostering artificial difficulties or disjunctions. Going back to the question of the covenants, if the NT has already hashed out some basic distinctions, such as the discontinuance of the ceremonial law, then that simplifies the operation because we have a presorted category to work with. We will still need to labor over how that yardstick applies in borderline cases, but it isn't the same as taking the measure of a position with no benchmark whatsoever. Again, the distance between memorialism and virtualism is less, even vanishingly slight, compared with the distance between either baptismal regeneration or some robust form of the Real Presence.
Sunday, June 13, 2004
The 4-Door Labyrinth-4
So far I’ve been discussing the traditional difference between covenant theology and Anabaptist theology. But we now need to draw a further distinction between old school Anabaptism and new school Anabaptism, for modern authors like Sider, Yoder, Wink, Wallis, Hauerwas, Kaufman and McClendon have taken their tradition from a stance of radical social isolationism to radical social activism. So they too, believe that the land of milk and honey lies within reach.
But the modern-day denial of separatism also calls into question the remaining commitment to pacifism inasmuch as pacifism was embedded in separatism. The argument for pacifism was that the Christian didn’t have a vested interest in the world; as such, he didn’t fight for the state because the state represents an extension of the world. But if a modern Anabaptist now proclaims his stake in the world, then he has had gone over to the Constantinian side.
The remaining difference is then that the Pilgrim conquers Canaan with the Gospel of grace, whereas the new school Anabaptist conquers Canaan with the social gospel.
Besides the separatist accent, wherever that still stands, is the pacifist accent. And here the Anabaptist takes his cue from the Sermon on the Mount—the assumption being that the Sermon on the Mount represents a radical shift from OT to NT ethics.
But this is a problematic move. To begin with, the Anabaptist is very fond of the Sixth Commandment. But even if this justified his pacifist stance, it would do so on the warrant of OT ethics.
It should also be obvious that the Sixth Commandment does not underwrite nonviolence. In the cases law there were no fewer than 16 capital offenses. The law also acknowledges justifiable homicide in the case of the nighttime intruder (Exod 22:2). And, of course, there are the provisions for holy war (Deut 20).
But going back to the Sermon on the Mount, it is unclear just why, on the face of it, we should treat this sermon as the inaugural address of the New Covenant. For the subject-matter doesn’t invite that expectation. We would expect a transition from the Old to the New Covenant to discontinue the ceremonial law rather than the moral law. Of course, God is always free to confound our expectations, but where the Gospel of Matthew expressly signals a covenantal shift, the subject-matter confirms our prior expectations —for Christ is there fulfilling the ceremonial law (26:28) and inaugurating the New Covenant foreseen and forecast by Jeremiah.
In addition, Mt 5:17-19 reads like a formula of covenant renewal, sealed with the inscriptional curse (cf. Deut 4:2; 12:32). So this would lay heavy emphasis on covenantal continuity.
It is easy for the modern reader to forget that the Sermon on the Mount was addressed to Jews, not Christians—to Jews still living under the Old Covenant. So we need to distinguish between the historic viewpoint of Jesus and the narrative viewpoint of Matthew. The Gospel of Matthew is addressed to Christians (or Messianic Jews), but not the Sermon on the Mount.
Are there any reasons for treating the Sermon on the Mount as both an exposition of the New Covenant and abrogation of the Old? Two reasons are commonly adduced. First, we have the antitheses of 5:21-48. And the oft-made assumption is that this voids the Old Covenant.
But that inference, while possible, overdraws the evidence. Laws can be repealed without repealing the covenant. For example, Deut 12:5,14 repeals Exod 20:24-26, yet Deuteronomy is a document of covenant renewal. In transitioning from a nomadic existence in the wilderness to a settled existence in Canaan, there was a corresponding adjustment in particular provisions of the law. Likewise, the situation of Jews living under pagan occupation (the Roman Empire) was quite different from the situation of pagans living under Jewish occupation (the conquest of Canaan), so certain adaptations are called for, viz., the Roman custom of impressment (Mt 5:41).
Second, it is often said that Mt 5-7 presents Jesus as a second Moses. Moses delivered the Law from Mt. Sinai, and Jesus delivers the Sermon on the Mount. Now there is no doubt that Mosaic-typology is in play here.
However, the ministry of Moses is associated with more than one mountain, and is, in particular, book-ended by two mountains. So which figure is in view—the revelation of the covenant at the foothills of Horeb, or the renewal of the covenant at the foothills of Nebo? Given the parallel between the beatitudes of Jesus (Mt 5:2-12) and beatitudes of Moses (Deut 33:1-19), the Deuteronomic setting makes for a closer fit.
Or take Mt 5:9, which is a summa of the Anabaptist position. There are two problems with this appeal:
i) There is a difference between a peacemaker and a peacetalker or pacifist. Nonresistance, flower-power, pretty speeches, love beads and peace signs do not effect peace on earth. They don't prevent war and they don't end war. In fact, makarioß was "usually applied to emperors," not to men who merely "live in peace, practicing nonresistance, but those who actually bring about peace," D. Hill, The Gospel of Matthew (Eerdmans, 1996), 113.
ii) Jesus' injunction is grounded, not in a distinctive NT ethic, but OT ethics (cf. Ps 34:14; Isa 52:7; Prov 10:10, LXX).
iii) The Anabaptist fails to harmonize 5:9 with 10:34. Perhaps they would spiritualize 10:34. But why spiritualize 10:34 while taking 5:9 literally? Moreover, the opposition in view in 10:34 certain envisions actual violence in the persecution and martyrdom of Christian believers.
Another problem with playing off one Testament against the other is that the divine warrior-motif is common to both, and Christ is heir to both. Assuming Josh 5:13-15 to be a Christophany, the Captain of the Host is a warlord, and not merely in metaphor. And this has its counterpart in the knight on the white horse who leads the saints into battle (Rev 19:11-16). It is also striking that the author of Hebrews, although distinguished by his heavenly-mindedness, commends the martial exploits of the Judges (11:32).
In addition, the way we come out of Door #3 depends on how we came out of Door #2. There is a natural relation between Anabaptist ethics and Anabaptist soteriology. If you deny an Augustinian view of sin and grace, then that entails a more hopeful view of human nature. Pacifism is prized on optimism. But if you believe that every impulse of the graceless heart is bent on evil all the time (Gen 6:5), then that fails to lay a very firm foundation for a policy of passive resistance. Indeed, Anabaptism is almost Manichean in its radical dualism between the church and the world. But if the world is irredeemably evil, then how is a policy of peaceful coexistence even possible?
Now the Anabaptist might reply that he preaches nonviolence, not because it is a winning strategy, but because it is the price of discipleship. And we must admit that martyrdom is often the cost of following Christ.
But there are situations in which the very survival of the Church is at stake. An entire book of the Bible is devoted to such a threat, and the covenant community was only able to save itself by launching a massive preemptive strike (Est 9:16). And it should be unnecessary to note that the enemies of the NT church are just as ruthless as the enemies of the OT church. Sin is the same under every dispensation. For example, John Wenger complains about how difficult it is to retain Anabaptist identity under regimes that fail to respect conscientious objection (The Doctrines of the Mennonites [Scottdale, 1952], 35-37). Well, what did he expect! In a fallen world, if you never fight back you get slaughtered!
And unless an Anabaptist subscribes to the OT view of covenant children, then doesn’t this dualism run right through the community of faith? Unless the seed of believers are believers, the Church becomes a Trojan horse for the world. One also wonders how the identity of the world as the Civitas Diaboli is consistent with the Anabaptist belief in unlimited atonement.
Anabaptism theology places great stock in the passive example of Christ (e.g., 1 Pet 2:20-24). And there is no doubt that many Christians are called upon to follow their Lord into martyrdom. But this appeal is lopsided:
i) Anabaptist theology reduces the Atonement to the exemplary aspect. But that is very one-sided. Even Peter, to which the Anabaptist repairs, has a doctrine of penal substitution (1 Pet 2:24; 3:18).
ii) Even on exemplary grounds, Christ is heir to the role of the divine warrior (Rev 19:11-15; cf. Josh 5:13-16). Why doesn't the imitatio Christi extend to the office of Christ as a warrior and judge?
Anabaptist writers accuse the Magisterial Reformers of simply yielding to the force of circumstance and trumping up an ex post facto justification for succumbing to the pressure of practical necessities. Cf. The Mennonite Encyclopedia, H. Bender et al., eds., (Scottdale, 1955-59), 4:614a. There may be some truth to this charge. On the face of it, it seems as if they take their initial cue from the world, and then look to Scripture for warrant.
But whatever the motive, this charge is somewhat question-begging, for Scripture is situated in a real world setting, in the world of Egypt and Assyria, Babylon and Rome. So the world you see out the window looks very much like the world you see in Scripture, save for an invisible dimension directing outward events. Modern threats to the people of God from Islam, the papacy, Marxism, Baathism, National Socialism and so on, are not a world apart from the threats facing OT Israel or the NT church, but true to type.
A final failing of Anabaptist ethics is its one-sidedness. It prioritizes and absolutizes the irenic ideal if that were the only value or supreme value in dominical and NT ethics. But what happens, as often happens, when the irenic ideal comes into conflict with the moral imperative of social justice (e.g., Mt 23:23; Lk 1:52-53; Rom 13:3-4; Jas 1:27-2:7; Rev 18)? What if gross injustice cannot be remedied by peaceful means? Doesn't Anabaptism come perilously close to the unctuous preacher who says to starving, shivering masses, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled" (Jas 2:16)? Consider what cold comfort Stanley Hauerwas has to offer the oppressed:
"For Christians, the proper home for the language of evil is the liturgy: it is God who deals with evil, and it's presumptuous for humans to assume that our task is to do what only God can do…Does that mean there is nothing we can do? No, I think that a lot can be done…Christians might consider, for example, asking the many Christians in Iraq what we can do to make their lives more bearable. A small step, to be sure, but peace is made from small steps," "No," This War Would Not Be Moral," Time (March 3, 2003), 45).
Aside from the fact that citizens of a police state are not free to speak their minds, there are other ways of overhearing their cries, if—that is—you have ears to hear. But within the soundproof sanctuary of his pacifist liturgy, Hauerwas is serenely tone-deaf to the screaming victims of the gas chambers and torture chambers, rape rooms and killing-fields—for all unpleasantness lies in a neutral zone, beyond good and evil. A small step, to be sure, but genocide is made from small steps. For sublime sophisticates like Hauerwas, moral outrage is a redneck vulgarism which civilized men must learn to rise above. At most, any breath of indignation is refinedly reserved for those that speak of evil out of turn.
4. Lutheranism
The law/gospel antithesis is fundamental to Lutheran hermeneutics. And Lutheran theology accuses Reformed theology of legalism because it characterizes that the offer of the Gospel is a conditional offer. Cf. F. Pieper, Christian Dogmatics (Concordia, 1970), 3:247-48.
I confess to finding this charge rather baffling, for it seems to me to ignore the obvious. On the one hand, the Gospel offer is conditioned on repentance and faith. On the other hand, Scripture also distinguishes between genuine and nominal conversion. I do not see, therefore, how the Reformed alternative can be gainsaid.
The Lutheran charge is careless in other key respects as well. There is a difference between conditions and meritorious conditions. Reformed theology denies that the subject, either before or after conversion, can do anything to merit his justification before God. Furthermore, Reformed theology would insist that if a given subject does exercise saving faith, that is entirely owning to the irresistible grace of God. God is ultimately responsible for both the stipulation and satisfaction of the conditions.
In addition, the law/gospel antithesis, such as it is, fails to either relate or distinguish the Testaments, for both bilateral and unilateral elements are discernible in the Old and New Covenants alike. Cf. B. Waltke, "The Phenomenon of Conditionality within Unconditional Covenants," A. Geliadi, ed., Israel's Apostasy and Restoration (Baker, 1988), 123-39. My best guess is that Lutheran theology was already locked into this position before much scholarly study had been conducted on the character of covenants in Scripture and cognate literature.
5. Judaism
The relationship between Christianity and Judaism is, of course, key to their mutual identity and integrity. For a Messianic Jew, the Old Covenant is essentially continuous with the New insofar as it is fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus. Excepting Luke, who may well have been a God-fearer, all of the NT authors are Messianic Jews.
For a rabbinical Jew, the OT is essentially discontinuous with the New Covenant inasmuch as he regards Jesus as a messianic pretender and the Christian faith to be a Jewish heresy.
Historically, Judeo-Christian dialogue has suffered from stereotyping on both sides. On the Christian side, it is common to hear it said that the Jews rejected Jesus because he didn't fit their preconception of a political Messiah. This is a half-truth. But if fails to distinguish between the religious establishment and the rank-and-file. The "laity" did have their sights set on a political Messiah who would oust the Romans and restore Jewish sovereignty (e.g., Jn 6:15; Acts 1:6). And when their expectations were disappointed, they turned against Jesus.
However, the concern of the religious establishment was just the opposite. They felt threatened by Jesus because they did view him as a political Messiah, and they were rather attached to the status quo because it kept them in power.
A lot of Christians also equate modern Jews with OT Jews. But many modern Jews do not identity with the OT. And even observant Jews tend to filter the OT through the Talmud.
Moreover, God cut a covenant with Abraham and his seed. But God never made a covenant with the Ashkenazi, for the Ashkenazi are of European descent. They are not ethnic Jews, and many are not even religious Jews. Under the Mosaic covenant, Gentiles could convert to the faith of Israel, but they had to be covenant-keeping converts. And if, moreover, the Mosaic covenant was nullified by the work of Christ, then conversion to Judaism after the New Covenant are null and void.
Furthermore, this comparison is deeply misleading, for it fosters the image that Judaism is a continuum whereas Christianity is an offshoot. But it is crucial to realize that both rabbinic Judaism and Messianic Judaism (=Christianity) lay claim to be the legitimate heirs of OT faith and expectation. The relation of Christianity to Judaism is not of branch to trunk, but of branch to branch in relation to a common trunk. And the question is which is truly continuous with the OT.
For their part, many Jews entertain influential stereotypes of Christianity. One source of misunderstanding is the difference between rabbinical righteousness and Evangelical holiness. In rabbinical ethics, it is possible for a man to be a righteous man by keeping the law. In this definition, a righteous man is a good man, a man of high virtue. And this, in turn, creates an expectation of what it means or ought to mean for a Christian to be a good or bad Christian. Unless a Christian attains a certain standard of personal virtue, he is a hypocrite. And if enough Christians fall short, then the Christian faith must be deeply hypocritical.
Incidentally, Rabbinical righteousness has its counterpart in Catholic piety, with its penance and purgatory, congruent merit, Mariololatry and cult of the saints—in contradistinction to Evangelical holiness (i.e., the Lutheran/ Reformed tradition).
But from the standpoint of Christian ethics, a Christian is not a good man, but a holy man. Holiness is both better and worse than mere goodness. A saint is not a man of outstanding morals. He is, first and foremost, a man who has been called and consecrated, set apart and sanctified by God's grace and God's righteousness. It isn't inborn or acquired. No one is born a Christian the way one is born a Jew or Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist. No one converts to Christianity the way one converts to Islam or Judaism. It isn't a personal attainment. It isn't the cause or consequence of a high moral character. Rather, it comes, if it comes at all, from without rather than within. It is a true vocation or calling.
This is by no means to deny that a Christian is set apart, in part, to be a man of godly character. But godliness and holy living are like the anchor beyond the veil (Heb 6:19). We are drawn to God because we are drawn by God. It is a deeper and stronger thing then mere goodness because we are drawn Godward by the bands of an everlasting and almighty love (Isa 54:7-8; Jer 31:3; Hos 11:4). A Christian has a heart for God because God has given him a heart a to love and serve him. But he still suffers from heart disease, from a divided heart. It falls so short because it aims so high—higher than the heavens. And only in heaven will the distance be bridged.
Another major impediment is the notion of a Divine Messiah. This they regard as a blasphemous violation of OT monotheism (e.g. Exod 20:3; Deut 6:4; Isa 44:6). (Strictly speaking, these prooftexts are neutral on the Trinity, for their purpose is not to define the divine nature in and of itself. For that, you have to turn to a passage such as Exod 34:6-7, with its enumeration of divine attributes. Rather, they are concerned to delimit the relation between the true God and idolatry.) And they attribute the Deity of Christ to the tincture of Hellenistic philosophy.
That, however, doesn't fully explain their demurral. To begin with, this is an artificial reading of the NT. John's Logos-theology has its background in OT logos-theology, mediated by the Septuagint. And if you read the debates between Jesus and the Jewish leaders, not only in John, but also the Synoptics, on the nature of his divine Sonship, this is a controversy over the nature of the OT Messianic expectation and the terms of its fulfillment.
But even on its own grounds, the charge is not self-explanatory. Philo was far more Hellenistic than anything you find in the NT, yet Jews don't regard Philo as an infidel. Cabalism is a form of Neoplatonic theosophy, dressed up in Hebrew word-play, yet Cabalism isn't dismissed as an apostate philosophy. It is, in fact, striking how many of Paul's opponent's were not Palestinian Jews, but Hellenistic Jews (Acts 13:45,50; 14:2,19; 17:5,13; 18:12; 20:3). Paul himself was trained in Palestinian Judaism of the purest water.
Even on the question of Jesus' Messianic claims, the Jews didn't excommunicate the disciples of Bar Kochba just because they backed the wrong horse. For example, Bar Kochba was anointed by Rabbi Akiba, the leading rabbi of the age, yet Jews don't dismiss Rabbi Akiba as a renegade Jew. The Talmud accuses Jesus of witchcraft (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 43a), yet the practice of exorcism holds an honored place in Jewish tradition (cf. Josephus, Ant. 8:42-49).
Another charge is that Jesus tempted Jews to defy the Mosaic law. But even if that were true, it doesn't entirely account for the reaction. To begin with, many Jews disregard the kosher laws and other suchlike. In addition, the notion of a New Covenant is famously on display in OT Messianic expectation (Jer 31:31-34), so there is no a priori reason why Jews would necessarily take offense at a Messianic claimant just because he presented himself as inaugurating this promise. The true Messiah would have to assume that role. For that matter, Jews don't question the Jewish credentials of the Essenes, even though this sect severed its ties with the religious establishment and formal cultus. Josephus was a collaborator, yet he is freely cited as an authentic spokesman for 1C Judaism.
So the reaction must cut deeper than the standard objections. I would suggest that it has two elements: anti-Semitism and the Jewish identity crisis. Regarding the first, many Jews blame the Church for the brunt of anti-Semitism, starting with the NT, and running through the Inquisitions, Crusades, pogroms and Holocaust.
Now, this is a complicated allegation. To begin with, the NT was written by Jews, so the charge of anti-Semitism seems oxymoronic. This is an intramural debate between fellow Jews.
Now, some Jews would counter that the NT reflects the phenomenon of the self-hating Jew. One problem with this charge is that it is usually applied to Jews who are torn between their heritage and the forces of assimilation. But the NT writers are not mainstreaming with Greco-Roman culture for purposes of social advancement. Indeed, they retain the OT denunciations of idolatry. Another problem is that the supposedly anti-Semitic verses in the NT are tame compared with the denunciations of stiff-necked Israel in the OT. So if the NT is anti-Semitic, so is the OT.
A further problem with this accusation is that it commits a cultural anachronism. Freedom of dissent is a modern notion. The reason that the Roman Catholic Church is an authoritarian institution is that it came of age during the era of autocratic government, and Roman Catholic polity is a mirror-image of Roman polity. Instead of the Roman Emperor and aristocracy, you have the Roman Pontiff and episcopate. The Roman Church made a fatal move when it turned a culture-bound polity into a divine and irreformable institution. But the immediate point is that the Roman Church was an equal-opportunity avenger. For she persecuted all forms of dissent, whether heretics, humanists, schismatics, infidels, Muslims, Jews, Protestants, lapsed Catholics, &c.
As I say, the modern idea of civil tolerance for religious dissent is just that, a modern idea. You don't find it in Luther, bur, for that matter, you don't find it in Machiavelli or Suleyman. I'm not a Lutheran, and I don't condone Luther's invective, but Luther was just as nasty things about the papists, Anabaptists, &c. Indeed, he said very nasty things about himself! This was a polemical age in which many writers on every side descended to vitriolic attack and counterattack. I would just add that, within my own theological tradition, the Calvinists have been distinguished by their general geniality towards the Jews.
And remember that religious offenses were capital offenses under the Mosaic Covenant as well. The Jews stoned Sabbath-breakers and blasphemers, and waged holy war against the heathen. And it was, indeed, the Jews who originally persecuted Christ and the Christians. And Messianic Jews are persecuted in modern Israel.
It should also go without saying that anti-Semitism antedates the rift between the church and the synogogue. The anti-Semitism of Pharaoh (Exod 6) and Haman (Esther) were hardly inflamed by the charge of Deicide. I would add that much of the persecution of the Jews owes as much or more to nationalism and national character than religion. For example, German Nazis were far harsher than Italian Fascists, and the Fascist measures were largely owing to Nazi pressure. "The Fascist alliance with Nazism delays the 'final solution' for Italian Jews until September of 1943, when the Germans took total command of northern Italy. Exceptional efforts of other Italians to protect their Jewish compatriots in occupied zones allow many of the latter to stay alive…In Eastern Europe, of course, the situation was much worse," M. Schneider, Vengeance of the Victim: History and Symbolism in Giorgio Bassani's Fiction (U of Minnesota, 1986), 57.
My immediate aim is not to sort out the right from the wrong in all of this, but just to remind the reader that he is guilty of selective morality if he singles out the Church for special blame in the history of religious persecution. This is not distinctive to the Church.
But the modern-day denial of separatism also calls into question the remaining commitment to pacifism inasmuch as pacifism was embedded in separatism. The argument for pacifism was that the Christian didn’t have a vested interest in the world; as such, he didn’t fight for the state because the state represents an extension of the world. But if a modern Anabaptist now proclaims his stake in the world, then he has had gone over to the Constantinian side.
The remaining difference is then that the Pilgrim conquers Canaan with the Gospel of grace, whereas the new school Anabaptist conquers Canaan with the social gospel.
Besides the separatist accent, wherever that still stands, is the pacifist accent. And here the Anabaptist takes his cue from the Sermon on the Mount—the assumption being that the Sermon on the Mount represents a radical shift from OT to NT ethics.
But this is a problematic move. To begin with, the Anabaptist is very fond of the Sixth Commandment. But even if this justified his pacifist stance, it would do so on the warrant of OT ethics.
It should also be obvious that the Sixth Commandment does not underwrite nonviolence. In the cases law there were no fewer than 16 capital offenses. The law also acknowledges justifiable homicide in the case of the nighttime intruder (Exod 22:2). And, of course, there are the provisions for holy war (Deut 20).
But going back to the Sermon on the Mount, it is unclear just why, on the face of it, we should treat this sermon as the inaugural address of the New Covenant. For the subject-matter doesn’t invite that expectation. We would expect a transition from the Old to the New Covenant to discontinue the ceremonial law rather than the moral law. Of course, God is always free to confound our expectations, but where the Gospel of Matthew expressly signals a covenantal shift, the subject-matter confirms our prior expectations —for Christ is there fulfilling the ceremonial law (26:28) and inaugurating the New Covenant foreseen and forecast by Jeremiah.
In addition, Mt 5:17-19 reads like a formula of covenant renewal, sealed with the inscriptional curse (cf. Deut 4:2; 12:32). So this would lay heavy emphasis on covenantal continuity.
It is easy for the modern reader to forget that the Sermon on the Mount was addressed to Jews, not Christians—to Jews still living under the Old Covenant. So we need to distinguish between the historic viewpoint of Jesus and the narrative viewpoint of Matthew. The Gospel of Matthew is addressed to Christians (or Messianic Jews), but not the Sermon on the Mount.
Are there any reasons for treating the Sermon on the Mount as both an exposition of the New Covenant and abrogation of the Old? Two reasons are commonly adduced. First, we have the antitheses of 5:21-48. And the oft-made assumption is that this voids the Old Covenant.
But that inference, while possible, overdraws the evidence. Laws can be repealed without repealing the covenant. For example, Deut 12:5,14 repeals Exod 20:24-26, yet Deuteronomy is a document of covenant renewal. In transitioning from a nomadic existence in the wilderness to a settled existence in Canaan, there was a corresponding adjustment in particular provisions of the law. Likewise, the situation of Jews living under pagan occupation (the Roman Empire) was quite different from the situation of pagans living under Jewish occupation (the conquest of Canaan), so certain adaptations are called for, viz., the Roman custom of impressment (Mt 5:41).
Second, it is often said that Mt 5-7 presents Jesus as a second Moses. Moses delivered the Law from Mt. Sinai, and Jesus delivers the Sermon on the Mount. Now there is no doubt that Mosaic-typology is in play here.
However, the ministry of Moses is associated with more than one mountain, and is, in particular, book-ended by two mountains. So which figure is in view—the revelation of the covenant at the foothills of Horeb, or the renewal of the covenant at the foothills of Nebo? Given the parallel between the beatitudes of Jesus (Mt 5:2-12) and beatitudes of Moses (Deut 33:1-19), the Deuteronomic setting makes for a closer fit.
Or take Mt 5:9, which is a summa of the Anabaptist position. There are two problems with this appeal:
i) There is a difference between a peacemaker and a peacetalker or pacifist. Nonresistance, flower-power, pretty speeches, love beads and peace signs do not effect peace on earth. They don't prevent war and they don't end war. In fact, makarioß was "usually applied to emperors," not to men who merely "live in peace, practicing nonresistance, but those who actually bring about peace," D. Hill, The Gospel of Matthew (Eerdmans, 1996), 113.
ii) Jesus' injunction is grounded, not in a distinctive NT ethic, but OT ethics (cf. Ps 34:14; Isa 52:7; Prov 10:10, LXX).
iii) The Anabaptist fails to harmonize 5:9 with 10:34. Perhaps they would spiritualize 10:34. But why spiritualize 10:34 while taking 5:9 literally? Moreover, the opposition in view in 10:34 certain envisions actual violence in the persecution and martyrdom of Christian believers.
Another problem with playing off one Testament against the other is that the divine warrior-motif is common to both, and Christ is heir to both. Assuming Josh 5:13-15 to be a Christophany, the Captain of the Host is a warlord, and not merely in metaphor. And this has its counterpart in the knight on the white horse who leads the saints into battle (Rev 19:11-16). It is also striking that the author of Hebrews, although distinguished by his heavenly-mindedness, commends the martial exploits of the Judges (11:32).
In addition, the way we come out of Door #3 depends on how we came out of Door #2. There is a natural relation between Anabaptist ethics and Anabaptist soteriology. If you deny an Augustinian view of sin and grace, then that entails a more hopeful view of human nature. Pacifism is prized on optimism. But if you believe that every impulse of the graceless heart is bent on evil all the time (Gen 6:5), then that fails to lay a very firm foundation for a policy of passive resistance. Indeed, Anabaptism is almost Manichean in its radical dualism between the church and the world. But if the world is irredeemably evil, then how is a policy of peaceful coexistence even possible?
Now the Anabaptist might reply that he preaches nonviolence, not because it is a winning strategy, but because it is the price of discipleship. And we must admit that martyrdom is often the cost of following Christ.
But there are situations in which the very survival of the Church is at stake. An entire book of the Bible is devoted to such a threat, and the covenant community was only able to save itself by launching a massive preemptive strike (Est 9:16). And it should be unnecessary to note that the enemies of the NT church are just as ruthless as the enemies of the OT church. Sin is the same under every dispensation. For example, John Wenger complains about how difficult it is to retain Anabaptist identity under regimes that fail to respect conscientious objection (The Doctrines of the Mennonites [Scottdale, 1952], 35-37). Well, what did he expect! In a fallen world, if you never fight back you get slaughtered!
And unless an Anabaptist subscribes to the OT view of covenant children, then doesn’t this dualism run right through the community of faith? Unless the seed of believers are believers, the Church becomes a Trojan horse for the world. One also wonders how the identity of the world as the Civitas Diaboli is consistent with the Anabaptist belief in unlimited atonement.
Anabaptism theology places great stock in the passive example of Christ (e.g., 1 Pet 2:20-24). And there is no doubt that many Christians are called upon to follow their Lord into martyrdom. But this appeal is lopsided:
i) Anabaptist theology reduces the Atonement to the exemplary aspect. But that is very one-sided. Even Peter, to which the Anabaptist repairs, has a doctrine of penal substitution (1 Pet 2:24; 3:18).
ii) Even on exemplary grounds, Christ is heir to the role of the divine warrior (Rev 19:11-15; cf. Josh 5:13-16). Why doesn't the imitatio Christi extend to the office of Christ as a warrior and judge?
Anabaptist writers accuse the Magisterial Reformers of simply yielding to the force of circumstance and trumping up an ex post facto justification for succumbing to the pressure of practical necessities. Cf. The Mennonite Encyclopedia, H. Bender et al., eds., (Scottdale, 1955-59), 4:614a. There may be some truth to this charge. On the face of it, it seems as if they take their initial cue from the world, and then look to Scripture for warrant.
But whatever the motive, this charge is somewhat question-begging, for Scripture is situated in a real world setting, in the world of Egypt and Assyria, Babylon and Rome. So the world you see out the window looks very much like the world you see in Scripture, save for an invisible dimension directing outward events. Modern threats to the people of God from Islam, the papacy, Marxism, Baathism, National Socialism and so on, are not a world apart from the threats facing OT Israel or the NT church, but true to type.
A final failing of Anabaptist ethics is its one-sidedness. It prioritizes and absolutizes the irenic ideal if that were the only value or supreme value in dominical and NT ethics. But what happens, as often happens, when the irenic ideal comes into conflict with the moral imperative of social justice (e.g., Mt 23:23; Lk 1:52-53; Rom 13:3-4; Jas 1:27-2:7; Rev 18)? What if gross injustice cannot be remedied by peaceful means? Doesn't Anabaptism come perilously close to the unctuous preacher who says to starving, shivering masses, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled" (Jas 2:16)? Consider what cold comfort Stanley Hauerwas has to offer the oppressed:
"For Christians, the proper home for the language of evil is the liturgy: it is God who deals with evil, and it's presumptuous for humans to assume that our task is to do what only God can do…Does that mean there is nothing we can do? No, I think that a lot can be done…Christians might consider, for example, asking the many Christians in Iraq what we can do to make their lives more bearable. A small step, to be sure, but peace is made from small steps," "No," This War Would Not Be Moral," Time (March 3, 2003), 45).
Aside from the fact that citizens of a police state are not free to speak their minds, there are other ways of overhearing their cries, if—that is—you have ears to hear. But within the soundproof sanctuary of his pacifist liturgy, Hauerwas is serenely tone-deaf to the screaming victims of the gas chambers and torture chambers, rape rooms and killing-fields—for all unpleasantness lies in a neutral zone, beyond good and evil. A small step, to be sure, but genocide is made from small steps. For sublime sophisticates like Hauerwas, moral outrage is a redneck vulgarism which civilized men must learn to rise above. At most, any breath of indignation is refinedly reserved for those that speak of evil out of turn.
4. Lutheranism
The law/gospel antithesis is fundamental to Lutheran hermeneutics. And Lutheran theology accuses Reformed theology of legalism because it characterizes that the offer of the Gospel is a conditional offer. Cf. F. Pieper, Christian Dogmatics (Concordia, 1970), 3:247-48.
I confess to finding this charge rather baffling, for it seems to me to ignore the obvious. On the one hand, the Gospel offer is conditioned on repentance and faith. On the other hand, Scripture also distinguishes between genuine and nominal conversion. I do not see, therefore, how the Reformed alternative can be gainsaid.
The Lutheran charge is careless in other key respects as well. There is a difference between conditions and meritorious conditions. Reformed theology denies that the subject, either before or after conversion, can do anything to merit his justification before God. Furthermore, Reformed theology would insist that if a given subject does exercise saving faith, that is entirely owning to the irresistible grace of God. God is ultimately responsible for both the stipulation and satisfaction of the conditions.
In addition, the law/gospel antithesis, such as it is, fails to either relate or distinguish the Testaments, for both bilateral and unilateral elements are discernible in the Old and New Covenants alike. Cf. B. Waltke, "The Phenomenon of Conditionality within Unconditional Covenants," A. Geliadi, ed., Israel's Apostasy and Restoration (Baker, 1988), 123-39. My best guess is that Lutheran theology was already locked into this position before much scholarly study had been conducted on the character of covenants in Scripture and cognate literature.
5. Judaism
The relationship between Christianity and Judaism is, of course, key to their mutual identity and integrity. For a Messianic Jew, the Old Covenant is essentially continuous with the New insofar as it is fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus. Excepting Luke, who may well have been a God-fearer, all of the NT authors are Messianic Jews.
For a rabbinical Jew, the OT is essentially discontinuous with the New Covenant inasmuch as he regards Jesus as a messianic pretender and the Christian faith to be a Jewish heresy.
Historically, Judeo-Christian dialogue has suffered from stereotyping on both sides. On the Christian side, it is common to hear it said that the Jews rejected Jesus because he didn't fit their preconception of a political Messiah. This is a half-truth. But if fails to distinguish between the religious establishment and the rank-and-file. The "laity" did have their sights set on a political Messiah who would oust the Romans and restore Jewish sovereignty (e.g., Jn 6:15; Acts 1:6). And when their expectations were disappointed, they turned against Jesus.
However, the concern of the religious establishment was just the opposite. They felt threatened by Jesus because they did view him as a political Messiah, and they were rather attached to the status quo because it kept them in power.
A lot of Christians also equate modern Jews with OT Jews. But many modern Jews do not identity with the OT. And even observant Jews tend to filter the OT through the Talmud.
Moreover, God cut a covenant with Abraham and his seed. But God never made a covenant with the Ashkenazi, for the Ashkenazi are of European descent. They are not ethnic Jews, and many are not even religious Jews. Under the Mosaic covenant, Gentiles could convert to the faith of Israel, but they had to be covenant-keeping converts. And if, moreover, the Mosaic covenant was nullified by the work of Christ, then conversion to Judaism after the New Covenant are null and void.
Furthermore, this comparison is deeply misleading, for it fosters the image that Judaism is a continuum whereas Christianity is an offshoot. But it is crucial to realize that both rabbinic Judaism and Messianic Judaism (=Christianity) lay claim to be the legitimate heirs of OT faith and expectation. The relation of Christianity to Judaism is not of branch to trunk, but of branch to branch in relation to a common trunk. And the question is which is truly continuous with the OT.
For their part, many Jews entertain influential stereotypes of Christianity. One source of misunderstanding is the difference between rabbinical righteousness and Evangelical holiness. In rabbinical ethics, it is possible for a man to be a righteous man by keeping the law. In this definition, a righteous man is a good man, a man of high virtue. And this, in turn, creates an expectation of what it means or ought to mean for a Christian to be a good or bad Christian. Unless a Christian attains a certain standard of personal virtue, he is a hypocrite. And if enough Christians fall short, then the Christian faith must be deeply hypocritical.
Incidentally, Rabbinical righteousness has its counterpart in Catholic piety, with its penance and purgatory, congruent merit, Mariololatry and cult of the saints—in contradistinction to Evangelical holiness (i.e., the Lutheran/ Reformed tradition).
But from the standpoint of Christian ethics, a Christian is not a good man, but a holy man. Holiness is both better and worse than mere goodness. A saint is not a man of outstanding morals. He is, first and foremost, a man who has been called and consecrated, set apart and sanctified by God's grace and God's righteousness. It isn't inborn or acquired. No one is born a Christian the way one is born a Jew or Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist. No one converts to Christianity the way one converts to Islam or Judaism. It isn't a personal attainment. It isn't the cause or consequence of a high moral character. Rather, it comes, if it comes at all, from without rather than within. It is a true vocation or calling.
This is by no means to deny that a Christian is set apart, in part, to be a man of godly character. But godliness and holy living are like the anchor beyond the veil (Heb 6:19). We are drawn to God because we are drawn by God. It is a deeper and stronger thing then mere goodness because we are drawn Godward by the bands of an everlasting and almighty love (Isa 54:7-8; Jer 31:3; Hos 11:4). A Christian has a heart for God because God has given him a heart a to love and serve him. But he still suffers from heart disease, from a divided heart. It falls so short because it aims so high—higher than the heavens. And only in heaven will the distance be bridged.
Another major impediment is the notion of a Divine Messiah. This they regard as a blasphemous violation of OT monotheism (e.g. Exod 20:3; Deut 6:4; Isa 44:6). (Strictly speaking, these prooftexts are neutral on the Trinity, for their purpose is not to define the divine nature in and of itself. For that, you have to turn to a passage such as Exod 34:6-7, with its enumeration of divine attributes. Rather, they are concerned to delimit the relation between the true God and idolatry.) And they attribute the Deity of Christ to the tincture of Hellenistic philosophy.
That, however, doesn't fully explain their demurral. To begin with, this is an artificial reading of the NT. John's Logos-theology has its background in OT logos-theology, mediated by the Septuagint. And if you read the debates between Jesus and the Jewish leaders, not only in John, but also the Synoptics, on the nature of his divine Sonship, this is a controversy over the nature of the OT Messianic expectation and the terms of its fulfillment.
But even on its own grounds, the charge is not self-explanatory. Philo was far more Hellenistic than anything you find in the NT, yet Jews don't regard Philo as an infidel. Cabalism is a form of Neoplatonic theosophy, dressed up in Hebrew word-play, yet Cabalism isn't dismissed as an apostate philosophy. It is, in fact, striking how many of Paul's opponent's were not Palestinian Jews, but Hellenistic Jews (Acts 13:45,50; 14:2,19; 17:5,13; 18:12; 20:3). Paul himself was trained in Palestinian Judaism of the purest water.
Even on the question of Jesus' Messianic claims, the Jews didn't excommunicate the disciples of Bar Kochba just because they backed the wrong horse. For example, Bar Kochba was anointed by Rabbi Akiba, the leading rabbi of the age, yet Jews don't dismiss Rabbi Akiba as a renegade Jew. The Talmud accuses Jesus of witchcraft (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 43a), yet the practice of exorcism holds an honored place in Jewish tradition (cf. Josephus, Ant. 8:42-49).
Another charge is that Jesus tempted Jews to defy the Mosaic law. But even if that were true, it doesn't entirely account for the reaction. To begin with, many Jews disregard the kosher laws and other suchlike. In addition, the notion of a New Covenant is famously on display in OT Messianic expectation (Jer 31:31-34), so there is no a priori reason why Jews would necessarily take offense at a Messianic claimant just because he presented himself as inaugurating this promise. The true Messiah would have to assume that role. For that matter, Jews don't question the Jewish credentials of the Essenes, even though this sect severed its ties with the religious establishment and formal cultus. Josephus was a collaborator, yet he is freely cited as an authentic spokesman for 1C Judaism.
So the reaction must cut deeper than the standard objections. I would suggest that it has two elements: anti-Semitism and the Jewish identity crisis. Regarding the first, many Jews blame the Church for the brunt of anti-Semitism, starting with the NT, and running through the Inquisitions, Crusades, pogroms and Holocaust.
Now, this is a complicated allegation. To begin with, the NT was written by Jews, so the charge of anti-Semitism seems oxymoronic. This is an intramural debate between fellow Jews.
Now, some Jews would counter that the NT reflects the phenomenon of the self-hating Jew. One problem with this charge is that it is usually applied to Jews who are torn between their heritage and the forces of assimilation. But the NT writers are not mainstreaming with Greco-Roman culture for purposes of social advancement. Indeed, they retain the OT denunciations of idolatry. Another problem is that the supposedly anti-Semitic verses in the NT are tame compared with the denunciations of stiff-necked Israel in the OT. So if the NT is anti-Semitic, so is the OT.
A further problem with this accusation is that it commits a cultural anachronism. Freedom of dissent is a modern notion. The reason that the Roman Catholic Church is an authoritarian institution is that it came of age during the era of autocratic government, and Roman Catholic polity is a mirror-image of Roman polity. Instead of the Roman Emperor and aristocracy, you have the Roman Pontiff and episcopate. The Roman Church made a fatal move when it turned a culture-bound polity into a divine and irreformable institution. But the immediate point is that the Roman Church was an equal-opportunity avenger. For she persecuted all forms of dissent, whether heretics, humanists, schismatics, infidels, Muslims, Jews, Protestants, lapsed Catholics, &c.
As I say, the modern idea of civil tolerance for religious dissent is just that, a modern idea. You don't find it in Luther, bur, for that matter, you don't find it in Machiavelli or Suleyman. I'm not a Lutheran, and I don't condone Luther's invective, but Luther was just as nasty things about the papists, Anabaptists, &c. Indeed, he said very nasty things about himself! This was a polemical age in which many writers on every side descended to vitriolic attack and counterattack. I would just add that, within my own theological tradition, the Calvinists have been distinguished by their general geniality towards the Jews.
And remember that religious offenses were capital offenses under the Mosaic Covenant as well. The Jews stoned Sabbath-breakers and blasphemers, and waged holy war against the heathen. And it was, indeed, the Jews who originally persecuted Christ and the Christians. And Messianic Jews are persecuted in modern Israel.
It should also go without saying that anti-Semitism antedates the rift between the church and the synogogue. The anti-Semitism of Pharaoh (Exod 6) and Haman (Esther) were hardly inflamed by the charge of Deicide. I would add that much of the persecution of the Jews owes as much or more to nationalism and national character than religion. For example, German Nazis were far harsher than Italian Fascists, and the Fascist measures were largely owing to Nazi pressure. "The Fascist alliance with Nazism delays the 'final solution' for Italian Jews until September of 1943, when the Germans took total command of northern Italy. Exceptional efforts of other Italians to protect their Jewish compatriots in occupied zones allow many of the latter to stay alive…In Eastern Europe, of course, the situation was much worse," M. Schneider, Vengeance of the Victim: History and Symbolism in Giorgio Bassani's Fiction (U of Minnesota, 1986), 57.
My immediate aim is not to sort out the right from the wrong in all of this, but just to remind the reader that he is guilty of selective morality if he singles out the Church for special blame in the history of religious persecution. This is not distinctive to the Church.
The 4-Door Labyrinth-3
3. Reincarnation
But once you cut free of sola Scriptura, you don’t have to stop with half-measures like conditional immortality. At this point, pagan options are now in play, like transmigration. Again, if you deny freewill, then this door is bolted shut—for its autosoteric morality spins on the wheel of a fateful freewill.
Of course, reincarnation is vulnerable to various other objections. For if the purpose of reincarnation is to work off bad Karma, it does seem a little odd that the metempsychotic machinery would reincarnate a guilty soul as a Chinese soldier under orders to gun down Tibetan monks. And if guilt-free souls have been trickling into Nirvana for unnumbered centuries, how do we account for the population explosion—especially in Asian nations where the Oriental pieties and austerities are so assiduously observed? One must also wonder who is manning the vast metempsychotic machinery, especially as Hinduism and Buddhist are either atheistic or pantheistic. A further problem distinctive to Buddhist ontology is how to square reincarnation with its no-soul doctrine.
For a standard critique of reincarnation, cf. P. Edwards, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (Prometheus 2001).
B. Closed systems of action
1. Calvinism
But if you answer in the negative, then this greatly simplifies the matter, for it leaves you with very few options. You can choose between the "infra" door or the "supra" door, but that’s about it. (The supra view maintains that God foreordained the fall as a means of manifesting his mercy and justice to the elect by visiting his grace upon the elect and judgment on the reprobate. The infra view admits that God foreordained the Fall, but is wary of deriving a theodicy from this arrangement.)
For if man does not have freewill, then the salvation (or damnation) of man depends entirely on God. And that being the so, a "no" answer commits you in advance to a lengthy and logical set of doctrines, viz., divine omnipotence and omniscience, predestination, unconditional election/reprobation; general/special providence, federal theology, the bondage of the will, special redemption, penal substitution, irresistible grace, sola fide; the assurance of salvation, and perseverance.
How it all hangs together goes something like this. If fallen man lacks freewill, then he is entirely at the mercy of God for his redemption. And only a God with sovereign attributes, such as omniscience and omnipotence, can act in a sovereign fashion.
If fallen man lacks freewill, then salvation doesn’t depend on individual action, but on one party acting on behalf of and in the place of another or many others.
If fallen man lacks freewill, then whoever is saved is saved on account of God’s sole and sufficient grace. God predestines, elects, creates, redeems, renews, justifies, preserves, and glorifies. By the same token, whoever is lost is not lost on account of God’s efficient and final agency. God predestines, reprobates, creates, judges, hardens, and damns.
If fallen man lacks freewill, then whoever is saved is saved from eternity and saved for time and eternity—for his salvation was rendered certain by the sovereign grace of God. And thus he may be assured of the gracious state wherein he finds himself.
None of this should be taken to mean that the object of grace is passive from start to finish. For God revives our heart and restores our sight. He works in us to will and to do his good will (Phil 1:6).
Reformed theology is popularly defined in terms of the five-points of Calvinist (TULIP). This is a rather negative definition inasmuch as it merely serves to distinguish Calvinism from the alternatives, but there is more to Calvinism than what makes it to differ from something else. And Calvinism can be viewed from varied perspectives:
i) Trinitarian: Those the Father chose, the Son redeemed and the Spirit renews
ii) Redemptive-Historical: Throughout history, God is adopting, redeeming, calling, justifying and gathering a chosen people to be his people and be their God
iii) Supralapsarian: God foreordained the Fall to manifest his mercy in election and his justice in reprobation.
The first perspective accentuates the economic Trinity, the second—covenant theology, and the third—theodicy and historiography. These three perspectives are supplementary and complementary.
2. Universalism
In principle, the denial of freewill is also consistent with universalism; for universalism, with its uniform outcome, is also deterministic.
The decision depends in part on how you answer all four questions. For the way you answer one of the four questions turns the key one way or another on the other questions as well. If you answer "no," to freewill, but answer "yes," to sola Scriptura, and if Scripture closes the door on universalism, then that door will remain shut even if you try the knob.
The strong point of universalism is also its weak point. For the strong point lies in its three-hanky storyline. But by that same token, it makes no effort to resist the temptation of wishful thinking. Marilyn Adams and Thomas Talbott are the two leading "Evangelical" exponents of universalism. But both writers pen polemical tearjerkers in which serious exegesis takes a backseat to the sob story.
Reading universalist literature is like going to the movies to see Shirley Temple in The Little Princess. To be a little princess is the secret wish of every curly-haired girl. And universalism spins the ultimate rags-to-riches tale. But the willing suspension of belief does not survive the exit sign, for as soon as I leave the hearts-and-flowers decor of the movie theater for the means streets outside, the real world looks ever so much more like the work of a Calvinist than a universalist—a world in which every poor orphan girl is not rescued by a rich uncle.
In this same connection, have you ever noticed the coincidental relation between reincarnation and universalism? Subjects of past-life regression therapy always remember being an Egyptian princess rather than an Egyptian slave, and having an affair with a dashing Egyptian prince rather than a sorry Egyptian beggar. More seriously, Origen's doctrine of the Apocatastasis owes as much to reincarnation as it does to universalism.
I would add that the lump-throated appeal of universalism is far from universal. It is attractive to pampered liberals, but not to poor orphan girls who would wreak vengeance on those responsible for their miserable plight. Mercy for all is most unmerciful towards the victims of injustice.
It is also hard to see how a universalist can condemn hell without invoking the principle of retributive justice. For hell would only be wrong if it were unjust to the damned. But aside from the fact that I’ve never shared his confidence in quantifying the guilt of a child rapist, the universalist is poorly poised to invoke the principle of retributive justice, for universalism occasions a universal miscarriage of justice.
Jerry Walls has made the provocative claim that Calvinism implies universalism, on the ground that if God can save anyone, he should save everyone, and that it is only owing internal tensions within Reformed theology that it resists this inference. Cf. Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, 1992).
In particular, Walls alleges that the distinction between the general call and special call is "hypocritical," and at variance with "the ordinary sense of the term" (ibid., 60). God seems to be "toying with the lost" (ibid., 62) Likewise, reprobation is deemed to be unfair because it does not apply a "common standard of judgment" and because the reprobate are unable to avoid their fate, contrary to "normal assumptions" of fair play (ibid., 69).
What all this comes down to, however, is not that Calvinism suffers from internal tensions, but rather that Calvinism is in tension with Arminian ethics. So his critique systematically begs the question.
Along the same lines, Wallis plugs his Wesleyan definitions into Calvinist usage, and then expresses puzzlement at the incoherence thus generated. He claims that the distinction between a general and special call has reference to different degrees of divine influence (ibid. 59), falsely assimilating the Reformed category of the general call to the Wesleyan category of sufficient grace
When the Westminster Confession submits two grounds for reprobation, he plays these off against each other, as if they were mutually exclusive (68). Yet this is merely the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Mainstream Calvinism has never subscribed to Medieval voluntarism, and there is no reason why it should. God’s sovereign will is not a sheer will, but a will characterized by all his other attributes. His power is a just power; and his justice is a powerful justice.
V. Door 3
Is the New Covenant continuous with the Old?
I. Yes! —
i) Covenant theology
ii) Roman Catholicism
II. No! —
i) Marcionism
ii) Fundamentalism
iii) Anabaptism
iv) Lutheranism
v) Judaism
A. Continuous Systems of Federalism
1. Covenant Theology
For Covenant theology, covenantal continuity isn’t absolute, but presumptive. It assumes the Old Covenant to continuous with the New assuming that the New Covenant does not assert otherwise a point of discontinuity, by express or implicit teaching. So, for example, a covenant theologians would say that the moral law is still binding because you can see it carry over into the NT, (E.g., note how the Holiness Code (Lev 19:11-18) quietly underwrites the moral theology of James (2:1,9; 4:11; 5:4,9,12,20).) whereas the ceremonial law is subsumed and sublimated in the person and work of Christ because the NT says so (e.g., Heb 4-10). So the alternation between points of continuity and discontinuity is not drawn arbitrarily, but on a principled basis; for covenant theology takes its cue from progressive revelation, and not some abstract principle of formal consistency. The creation mandates (Gen 1:28; 2:3) can be used as compass points to map the moral law in the Mosaic code.
For a covenant theologian, the church is comprised of the elect, be they Jews or Gentiles. For a fundamentalist, Israel antedates the Church, but for a covenant theologian, the church antedates Israel. For a covenant theologian, the distinction between promise and fulfillment applies, not so much to Israel and the Church, as it does to BC and AD, to the OT church and the NT church, to the Church before the advent of Christ and the Church after the advent of Christ.
For a covenant theologian, Israel was a part of the church, a medium of the Messiah, a custodian of the covenants, and a type of Christ. It would be good to think of the relation between promise and fulfillment along the lines of testament and inheritance. A covenant is like a last will and testament. Christ is the heir, and the church his inheritance.
Approaching this from another angle, God cut a covenant with Abraham and his seed. Who is the seed of promise? Who is party to this covenant? Is it the Jew? Is it ethnic Israel?
But the seminal theme doesn’t begin with the Abrahamic covenant. It goes back to the Protevangelium (Gen 3:15), of which the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants are historical and instrumental exempla. The seed of promise is the seed of the woman, and the seed of the woman consists of the elect in union with Christ (e.g., Gal 3:16,29). So the dividing line is not between Jew and Gentile, Israel and the Church, but between elect and reprobate, the woman’s seed and the serpent’s seed.
Incidentally, debates over the regulative principle of worship also turn on questions of comparative continuity. Are the aesthetic elements of the Temple service part of the ceremonial law? What about holidays? The primary prooftext for the RPW is the Second Commandment (Exod 20:4), but this is proscriptive rather than prescriptive, and does not, as such, offer any positive guidance on the form and content of true worship. In the OT, the concrete details were supplied by the case law, and not the Decalogue.
2. Catholicism
Roman Catholicism, with its sacerdotal system, presents a superficial point of continuity with the OT. Is the Catholic theologian more consistent than the covenant theologian?
Now, at one level, how we come out of Door #1 may already foreclose the Catholic option. For if sola Scriptura is the only rule of faith, then that thereby invalidates various dogmas distinctive to the Magisterium.
At more than one level, how we judge Catholicism depends, not only on how we come out of this door, but all four doors. If you affirm sola Scriptura and/or deny freewill and or deny sacramental grace, then Catholicism is bolted shut before you ever get to Door #3.
As this applies to Catholicism, covenant theology would say that even if the Roman priesthood were properly parallel to the Levitical priesthood, the discontinuance of the ceremonial law voids all comparison. The Levitical priesthood was at once foreshadowed and fulfilled in the priesthood of Christ. In addition, covenant theology would further deny that the sacrifice of the Mass is in any sense continuous with the ceremonial law. Cf. F. Turretin, Institutes (P&R, 1997), 3:519-48
So both in principle and practice, the comparison is equivocal and fallacious.
II. Discontinuous Systems of Federalism
1. Marcionism
On the discontinuous end of the spectrum, the Marcionite heresy is self-refuting inasmuch as Marcion had to retrofit the canon of Scripture to accommodate his doctrine rather than draw his doctrine from the canon of Scripture. As such, it not only lacks the support of Scripture, but openly opposes Scripture.
But this brings us to another question, What is the cost of being wrong? And the penalty varies with where you range along the spectrum. If the amil is right, and the postmil is wrong, or vice versa, that is not all-important, for it comes down to a choice of center-left or center-right. But the price is much higher at the extremes of continuity (e.g. Catholicism) and discontinuity (Marcionism), for there the difference is not off by a few degrees either way, but radically opposed. At the far end you have no buffer zone, no middle ground, no margin of error. If you fall off the edge, you have no where to go but down, straight down.
In saying this, my motive is not to foster a latitudinarian disposition. I do believe there are damnable errors and nonnegotiable doctrines, and I also believe that the truth sometimes lines at the margins, and not somewhere in the middle. But for seekers and believers who find the sheer variety of choices to be very daunting, and whose anxiety tempts them to take spiritual short-cuts, to prematurely foreclose investigation, and instead to cultivate a false sense of security by contracting out their spiritual fortunes to a middle man with a winning sales-pitch; for people like these—and they are many—it is helpful and needful to slow both the heart-rate and pace of progress so that they don’t mistake a sinking ship for a lifeboat.
2. Fundamentalism
The dispensational aspect of Fundamentalism involves a distinctive ecclesiology and eschatology as it bears on the relation of Israel to the Church in space and time. The analysis is tricky, in part because it presents something of a moving target these days. But a basic issue is the role of Israel in the redemption of the world. To put it one way, is the adoption of Israel merely a means to an end, or an end in itself? Do the covenants with Abraham, Moses and David apply in some distinctive way to the identity and destiny of Israel, or is Israel a type and courier of the Church? Do the covenants in some way terminate on Israel, or is Israel a conduit of the covenants? Do the covenants signify Israel, or is Israel a sign of the Church and the messianic hope?
It is important to keep in mind that dispensational and covenant theologians don’t necessarily mean the same thing by "Israel" and the "Church." For a fundamentalist, Israel and the Church coincide with ethnic Jews and believing Gentiles respectively, whereas, for a covenant theologian, Israel and the Church intersect like the shaded area of overlapping circles.
When a fundamentalist looks at covenant theology, it appears to him that the covenants are fulfilled when the Church supercedes Israel. But that is because a fundamentalist sees Israel as prior to the Church, so that if the covenants apply to the church, then they can only apply by sidelining Israel.
But that is judging covenant theology in reference to a premise supplied by dispensationalism. For a covenant theologian, the covenants are fulfilled in the collective and singular seed of promise. They receive a singular and primary fulfillment in Christ, as well as a secondary and collective fulfillment in the Church inasmuch as the Church is in union with her head.
And all this has a further bearing on the millennial debate—with which fundamentalism is so associated. Many Christians suppose that the millennial debate begins with Rev 20. But it really begins with the OT expectation of the messianic age.
In order to appreciate that facet we must appreciate the nature of visionary revelation, for the apocalyptic and prophetic passages belong to the visionary genre of revelation. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, Micah, Habakkuk, and Zechariah were seers.
Now, many readers treat the apocalyptic and prophetic passages as if these were an exercise in inspired crystal-ball gazing. The prophet peers into the crystal ball and sees future events as they unfold in real space and time.
But this commits a category mistake. What a seer sees is not a chronicle of the future, but a symbolic vision of the future. His prophecy is not a record of the future, but a record of what he saw in his mind’s eye. It is important that we not confound a visionary sequence with a historical sequence. Even though a vision may often be about things to come, we should not necessarily equate events that are imminent in the vision with events that are imminent in real time. That confuses the visionary process with the historical process.
It’s like the difference between dreamtime and real time, dream space and real space. A dreamer experiences a series of images. The psychological process of dreaming involves a temporal succession of subjective impressions. In addition, the images flow in a certain order.
But visionary relations of simultaneity and succession are not isospatial or isochronal with the topology of real spatiotemporal relations. For the psychological mode of visionary processing and symbolic medium of visionary images are ideographic rather than identical with world geography or chronology.
And it is in this general connection that we should note how certain verses concerned with the "imminent" return of Christ (e.g., Mt 10:23; 16:28; 24:34; Rev 1:1,7) have their background in the visions of Daniel (cf. 2:28-30,44-45; 7:13-14). In addition, at least three of the Apostles were seers—Peter (Acts 10:9-16), Paul (2 Cor 12:1-4) and John (Rev 1:1,10f.; 4:1ff). Not only does this involve a visionary process, but a revisionary process inasmuch as a seer such as John processes revelation as an imaginary montage of earlier visions. He sees events through the eyes of Ezekiel and Daniel, Isaiah and Zechariah, like photographic lenses that color and filter his own visionary experience.
Now, there are cases in which the Bible does offer a direct description of the future. For example, Acts 1:11 predicts the return of Christ in observational language. But we must be on guard against assuming that apocalyptic predictions (e.g., Mt 16:28) have direct reference to a public experience or event. For this could have immediate reference to a visionary experience. Such a vision will also have an extra-visionary point of reference. But we can’t peg a one-to-one correspondence.
This is both because a vision is not reality in the raw, and because symbolism is inherently open-textured inasmuch as the fit between sign and significate is conventional. For example, clouds can stand for storm clouds, and thereby illustrate divine judgment (e.g., the Flood/Parousia); but clouds can also stand for the Shekinah, and thereby illustrate God’s gracious presence (e.g., the tabernacle/Transfiguration.
So there’s a sense which every date-setting school, be it preterist, historicist or futurist shares a common confusion. The most we can say, although this is saying quite a lot, is that we can use our own historical position as a relative, but not an absolute, point of reference. Many of the endtime events in Scripture are still future to us for the simple reason that they don’t lie in the past; if they lay in the past, then we would lie in the past inasmuch as they forecast the terminus of church history. Yet church history has yet to end.
3. Anabaptism
I have lined up the alternatives according to their degree of discontinuity or continuity. That, however, represents a provisional and conventional classification, and we may find that the real and deeper contrast lies elsewhere. On the face of it, Anabaptism accentuates covenantal discontinuity. It takes its pacifism from the Sermon on the Mount, and its separatism from 2 Cor 6 & Rev 18. At this level, Anabaptist theology would seem to present the antipode of covenant theology.
But appearances are somewhat deceptive. For Anabaptist theology is deeply indebted to Exodus-typology, and this is something it shares in common with covenant theology. Both the Pilgrim and Anabaptist viewed themselves as strangers in a strange land, a walled garden within the wide wilderness of sin. The Church is not merely the Civitas Dei, but the Civitas peregrina, set over against the Civitas Diaboli.
So OT narrative casts a long shadow over the Anabaptist vision of the walk of faith. Both the Pilgrim and Anabaptist identify with the OT saint, and situate themselves in the typical landscape of redemption. As Bradford and Cotton Mather each put it:
"So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits," W. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (Knopf, 1994), 47.
"I write of the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the deprivations of Europe to the American strand; and, assisted by the holy Author of that religion, I do with all conscience of truth, required therein by him who is the truth itself, report the wonderful displays of his infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and faithfulness, wherewith his divine providence hath irradiated an Indian wilderness," C. Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (Banner of Truth, 1979), 1:25.
The difference is that, for the Anabaptist, every generation recapitulates the Exodus-generation, redeemed from bondage, but ever wandering in the wilderness; whereas the Pilgrim views himself as Caleb or Joshua, taking possession of the Promised Land.
The Anabaptist is a perpetual pilgrim, and his nomadic existence keeps him unspotted from the carnal entanglements of the world. I made mention of 2 Cor 6 and Rev 18, but these do not represent a dispensational disjunction, for each is grounded in Isa 52:11 (cf. 2 Cor 6:17; Rev 18:9). So both OT and NT saint must flee from Babylon.
But once you cut free of sola Scriptura, you don’t have to stop with half-measures like conditional immortality. At this point, pagan options are now in play, like transmigration. Again, if you deny freewill, then this door is bolted shut—for its autosoteric morality spins on the wheel of a fateful freewill.
Of course, reincarnation is vulnerable to various other objections. For if the purpose of reincarnation is to work off bad Karma, it does seem a little odd that the metempsychotic machinery would reincarnate a guilty soul as a Chinese soldier under orders to gun down Tibetan monks. And if guilt-free souls have been trickling into Nirvana for unnumbered centuries, how do we account for the population explosion—especially in Asian nations where the Oriental pieties and austerities are so assiduously observed? One must also wonder who is manning the vast metempsychotic machinery, especially as Hinduism and Buddhist are either atheistic or pantheistic. A further problem distinctive to Buddhist ontology is how to square reincarnation with its no-soul doctrine.
For a standard critique of reincarnation, cf. P. Edwards, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (Prometheus 2001).
B. Closed systems of action
1. Calvinism
But if you answer in the negative, then this greatly simplifies the matter, for it leaves you with very few options. You can choose between the "infra" door or the "supra" door, but that’s about it. (The supra view maintains that God foreordained the fall as a means of manifesting his mercy and justice to the elect by visiting his grace upon the elect and judgment on the reprobate. The infra view admits that God foreordained the Fall, but is wary of deriving a theodicy from this arrangement.)
For if man does not have freewill, then the salvation (or damnation) of man depends entirely on God. And that being the so, a "no" answer commits you in advance to a lengthy and logical set of doctrines, viz., divine omnipotence and omniscience, predestination, unconditional election/reprobation; general/special providence, federal theology, the bondage of the will, special redemption, penal substitution, irresistible grace, sola fide; the assurance of salvation, and perseverance.
How it all hangs together goes something like this. If fallen man lacks freewill, then he is entirely at the mercy of God for his redemption. And only a God with sovereign attributes, such as omniscience and omnipotence, can act in a sovereign fashion.
If fallen man lacks freewill, then salvation doesn’t depend on individual action, but on one party acting on behalf of and in the place of another or many others.
If fallen man lacks freewill, then whoever is saved is saved on account of God’s sole and sufficient grace. God predestines, elects, creates, redeems, renews, justifies, preserves, and glorifies. By the same token, whoever is lost is not lost on account of God’s efficient and final agency. God predestines, reprobates, creates, judges, hardens, and damns.
If fallen man lacks freewill, then whoever is saved is saved from eternity and saved for time and eternity—for his salvation was rendered certain by the sovereign grace of God. And thus he may be assured of the gracious state wherein he finds himself.
None of this should be taken to mean that the object of grace is passive from start to finish. For God revives our heart and restores our sight. He works in us to will and to do his good will (Phil 1:6).
Reformed theology is popularly defined in terms of the five-points of Calvinist (TULIP). This is a rather negative definition inasmuch as it merely serves to distinguish Calvinism from the alternatives, but there is more to Calvinism than what makes it to differ from something else. And Calvinism can be viewed from varied perspectives:
i) Trinitarian: Those the Father chose, the Son redeemed and the Spirit renews
ii) Redemptive-Historical: Throughout history, God is adopting, redeeming, calling, justifying and gathering a chosen people to be his people and be their God
iii) Supralapsarian: God foreordained the Fall to manifest his mercy in election and his justice in reprobation.
The first perspective accentuates the economic Trinity, the second—covenant theology, and the third—theodicy and historiography. These three perspectives are supplementary and complementary.
2. Universalism
In principle, the denial of freewill is also consistent with universalism; for universalism, with its uniform outcome, is also deterministic.
The decision depends in part on how you answer all four questions. For the way you answer one of the four questions turns the key one way or another on the other questions as well. If you answer "no," to freewill, but answer "yes," to sola Scriptura, and if Scripture closes the door on universalism, then that door will remain shut even if you try the knob.
The strong point of universalism is also its weak point. For the strong point lies in its three-hanky storyline. But by that same token, it makes no effort to resist the temptation of wishful thinking. Marilyn Adams and Thomas Talbott are the two leading "Evangelical" exponents of universalism. But both writers pen polemical tearjerkers in which serious exegesis takes a backseat to the sob story.
Reading universalist literature is like going to the movies to see Shirley Temple in The Little Princess. To be a little princess is the secret wish of every curly-haired girl. And universalism spins the ultimate rags-to-riches tale. But the willing suspension of belief does not survive the exit sign, for as soon as I leave the hearts-and-flowers decor of the movie theater for the means streets outside, the real world looks ever so much more like the work of a Calvinist than a universalist—a world in which every poor orphan girl is not rescued by a rich uncle.
In this same connection, have you ever noticed the coincidental relation between reincarnation and universalism? Subjects of past-life regression therapy always remember being an Egyptian princess rather than an Egyptian slave, and having an affair with a dashing Egyptian prince rather than a sorry Egyptian beggar. More seriously, Origen's doctrine of the Apocatastasis owes as much to reincarnation as it does to universalism.
I would add that the lump-throated appeal of universalism is far from universal. It is attractive to pampered liberals, but not to poor orphan girls who would wreak vengeance on those responsible for their miserable plight. Mercy for all is most unmerciful towards the victims of injustice.
It is also hard to see how a universalist can condemn hell without invoking the principle of retributive justice. For hell would only be wrong if it were unjust to the damned. But aside from the fact that I’ve never shared his confidence in quantifying the guilt of a child rapist, the universalist is poorly poised to invoke the principle of retributive justice, for universalism occasions a universal miscarriage of justice.
Jerry Walls has made the provocative claim that Calvinism implies universalism, on the ground that if God can save anyone, he should save everyone, and that it is only owing internal tensions within Reformed theology that it resists this inference. Cf. Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, 1992).
In particular, Walls alleges that the distinction between the general call and special call is "hypocritical," and at variance with "the ordinary sense of the term" (ibid., 60). God seems to be "toying with the lost" (ibid., 62) Likewise, reprobation is deemed to be unfair because it does not apply a "common standard of judgment" and because the reprobate are unable to avoid their fate, contrary to "normal assumptions" of fair play (ibid., 69).
What all this comes down to, however, is not that Calvinism suffers from internal tensions, but rather that Calvinism is in tension with Arminian ethics. So his critique systematically begs the question.
Along the same lines, Wallis plugs his Wesleyan definitions into Calvinist usage, and then expresses puzzlement at the incoherence thus generated. He claims that the distinction between a general and special call has reference to different degrees of divine influence (ibid. 59), falsely assimilating the Reformed category of the general call to the Wesleyan category of sufficient grace
When the Westminster Confession submits two grounds for reprobation, he plays these off against each other, as if they were mutually exclusive (68). Yet this is merely the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Mainstream Calvinism has never subscribed to Medieval voluntarism, and there is no reason why it should. God’s sovereign will is not a sheer will, but a will characterized by all his other attributes. His power is a just power; and his justice is a powerful justice.
V. Door 3
Is the New Covenant continuous with the Old?
I. Yes! —
i) Covenant theology
ii) Roman Catholicism
II. No! —
i) Marcionism
ii) Fundamentalism
iii) Anabaptism
iv) Lutheranism
v) Judaism
A. Continuous Systems of Federalism
1. Covenant Theology
For Covenant theology, covenantal continuity isn’t absolute, but presumptive. It assumes the Old Covenant to continuous with the New assuming that the New Covenant does not assert otherwise a point of discontinuity, by express or implicit teaching. So, for example, a covenant theologians would say that the moral law is still binding because you can see it carry over into the NT, (E.g., note how the Holiness Code (Lev 19:11-18) quietly underwrites the moral theology of James (2:1,9; 4:11; 5:4,9,12,20).) whereas the ceremonial law is subsumed and sublimated in the person and work of Christ because the NT says so (e.g., Heb 4-10). So the alternation between points of continuity and discontinuity is not drawn arbitrarily, but on a principled basis; for covenant theology takes its cue from progressive revelation, and not some abstract principle of formal consistency. The creation mandates (Gen 1:28; 2:3) can be used as compass points to map the moral law in the Mosaic code.
For a covenant theologian, the church is comprised of the elect, be they Jews or Gentiles. For a fundamentalist, Israel antedates the Church, but for a covenant theologian, the church antedates Israel. For a covenant theologian, the distinction between promise and fulfillment applies, not so much to Israel and the Church, as it does to BC and AD, to the OT church and the NT church, to the Church before the advent of Christ and the Church after the advent of Christ.
For a covenant theologian, Israel was a part of the church, a medium of the Messiah, a custodian of the covenants, and a type of Christ. It would be good to think of the relation between promise and fulfillment along the lines of testament and inheritance. A covenant is like a last will and testament. Christ is the heir, and the church his inheritance.
Approaching this from another angle, God cut a covenant with Abraham and his seed. Who is the seed of promise? Who is party to this covenant? Is it the Jew? Is it ethnic Israel?
But the seminal theme doesn’t begin with the Abrahamic covenant. It goes back to the Protevangelium (Gen 3:15), of which the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants are historical and instrumental exempla. The seed of promise is the seed of the woman, and the seed of the woman consists of the elect in union with Christ (e.g., Gal 3:16,29). So the dividing line is not between Jew and Gentile, Israel and the Church, but between elect and reprobate, the woman’s seed and the serpent’s seed.
Incidentally, debates over the regulative principle of worship also turn on questions of comparative continuity. Are the aesthetic elements of the Temple service part of the ceremonial law? What about holidays? The primary prooftext for the RPW is the Second Commandment (Exod 20:4), but this is proscriptive rather than prescriptive, and does not, as such, offer any positive guidance on the form and content of true worship. In the OT, the concrete details were supplied by the case law, and not the Decalogue.
2. Catholicism
Roman Catholicism, with its sacerdotal system, presents a superficial point of continuity with the OT. Is the Catholic theologian more consistent than the covenant theologian?
Now, at one level, how we come out of Door #1 may already foreclose the Catholic option. For if sola Scriptura is the only rule of faith, then that thereby invalidates various dogmas distinctive to the Magisterium.
At more than one level, how we judge Catholicism depends, not only on how we come out of this door, but all four doors. If you affirm sola Scriptura and/or deny freewill and or deny sacramental grace, then Catholicism is bolted shut before you ever get to Door #3.
As this applies to Catholicism, covenant theology would say that even if the Roman priesthood were properly parallel to the Levitical priesthood, the discontinuance of the ceremonial law voids all comparison. The Levitical priesthood was at once foreshadowed and fulfilled in the priesthood of Christ. In addition, covenant theology would further deny that the sacrifice of the Mass is in any sense continuous with the ceremonial law. Cf. F. Turretin, Institutes (P&R, 1997), 3:519-48
So both in principle and practice, the comparison is equivocal and fallacious.
II. Discontinuous Systems of Federalism
1. Marcionism
On the discontinuous end of the spectrum, the Marcionite heresy is self-refuting inasmuch as Marcion had to retrofit the canon of Scripture to accommodate his doctrine rather than draw his doctrine from the canon of Scripture. As such, it not only lacks the support of Scripture, but openly opposes Scripture.
But this brings us to another question, What is the cost of being wrong? And the penalty varies with where you range along the spectrum. If the amil is right, and the postmil is wrong, or vice versa, that is not all-important, for it comes down to a choice of center-left or center-right. But the price is much higher at the extremes of continuity (e.g. Catholicism) and discontinuity (Marcionism), for there the difference is not off by a few degrees either way, but radically opposed. At the far end you have no buffer zone, no middle ground, no margin of error. If you fall off the edge, you have no where to go but down, straight down.
In saying this, my motive is not to foster a latitudinarian disposition. I do believe there are damnable errors and nonnegotiable doctrines, and I also believe that the truth sometimes lines at the margins, and not somewhere in the middle. But for seekers and believers who find the sheer variety of choices to be very daunting, and whose anxiety tempts them to take spiritual short-cuts, to prematurely foreclose investigation, and instead to cultivate a false sense of security by contracting out their spiritual fortunes to a middle man with a winning sales-pitch; for people like these—and they are many—it is helpful and needful to slow both the heart-rate and pace of progress so that they don’t mistake a sinking ship for a lifeboat.
2. Fundamentalism
The dispensational aspect of Fundamentalism involves a distinctive ecclesiology and eschatology as it bears on the relation of Israel to the Church in space and time. The analysis is tricky, in part because it presents something of a moving target these days. But a basic issue is the role of Israel in the redemption of the world. To put it one way, is the adoption of Israel merely a means to an end, or an end in itself? Do the covenants with Abraham, Moses and David apply in some distinctive way to the identity and destiny of Israel, or is Israel a type and courier of the Church? Do the covenants in some way terminate on Israel, or is Israel a conduit of the covenants? Do the covenants signify Israel, or is Israel a sign of the Church and the messianic hope?
It is important to keep in mind that dispensational and covenant theologians don’t necessarily mean the same thing by "Israel" and the "Church." For a fundamentalist, Israel and the Church coincide with ethnic Jews and believing Gentiles respectively, whereas, for a covenant theologian, Israel and the Church intersect like the shaded area of overlapping circles.
When a fundamentalist looks at covenant theology, it appears to him that the covenants are fulfilled when the Church supercedes Israel. But that is because a fundamentalist sees Israel as prior to the Church, so that if the covenants apply to the church, then they can only apply by sidelining Israel.
But that is judging covenant theology in reference to a premise supplied by dispensationalism. For a covenant theologian, the covenants are fulfilled in the collective and singular seed of promise. They receive a singular and primary fulfillment in Christ, as well as a secondary and collective fulfillment in the Church inasmuch as the Church is in union with her head.
And all this has a further bearing on the millennial debate—with which fundamentalism is so associated. Many Christians suppose that the millennial debate begins with Rev 20. But it really begins with the OT expectation of the messianic age.
In order to appreciate that facet we must appreciate the nature of visionary revelation, for the apocalyptic and prophetic passages belong to the visionary genre of revelation. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, Micah, Habakkuk, and Zechariah were seers.
Now, many readers treat the apocalyptic and prophetic passages as if these were an exercise in inspired crystal-ball gazing. The prophet peers into the crystal ball and sees future events as they unfold in real space and time.
But this commits a category mistake. What a seer sees is not a chronicle of the future, but a symbolic vision of the future. His prophecy is not a record of the future, but a record of what he saw in his mind’s eye. It is important that we not confound a visionary sequence with a historical sequence. Even though a vision may often be about things to come, we should not necessarily equate events that are imminent in the vision with events that are imminent in real time. That confuses the visionary process with the historical process.
It’s like the difference between dreamtime and real time, dream space and real space. A dreamer experiences a series of images. The psychological process of dreaming involves a temporal succession of subjective impressions. In addition, the images flow in a certain order.
But visionary relations of simultaneity and succession are not isospatial or isochronal with the topology of real spatiotemporal relations. For the psychological mode of visionary processing and symbolic medium of visionary images are ideographic rather than identical with world geography or chronology.
And it is in this general connection that we should note how certain verses concerned with the "imminent" return of Christ (e.g., Mt 10:23; 16:28; 24:34; Rev 1:1,7) have their background in the visions of Daniel (cf. 2:28-30,44-45; 7:13-14). In addition, at least three of the Apostles were seers—Peter (Acts 10:9-16), Paul (2 Cor 12:1-4) and John (Rev 1:1,10f.; 4:1ff). Not only does this involve a visionary process, but a revisionary process inasmuch as a seer such as John processes revelation as an imaginary montage of earlier visions. He sees events through the eyes of Ezekiel and Daniel, Isaiah and Zechariah, like photographic lenses that color and filter his own visionary experience.
Now, there are cases in which the Bible does offer a direct description of the future. For example, Acts 1:11 predicts the return of Christ in observational language. But we must be on guard against assuming that apocalyptic predictions (e.g., Mt 16:28) have direct reference to a public experience or event. For this could have immediate reference to a visionary experience. Such a vision will also have an extra-visionary point of reference. But we can’t peg a one-to-one correspondence.
This is both because a vision is not reality in the raw, and because symbolism is inherently open-textured inasmuch as the fit between sign and significate is conventional. For example, clouds can stand for storm clouds, and thereby illustrate divine judgment (e.g., the Flood/Parousia); but clouds can also stand for the Shekinah, and thereby illustrate God’s gracious presence (e.g., the tabernacle/Transfiguration.
So there’s a sense which every date-setting school, be it preterist, historicist or futurist shares a common confusion. The most we can say, although this is saying quite a lot, is that we can use our own historical position as a relative, but not an absolute, point of reference. Many of the endtime events in Scripture are still future to us for the simple reason that they don’t lie in the past; if they lay in the past, then we would lie in the past inasmuch as they forecast the terminus of church history. Yet church history has yet to end.
3. Anabaptism
I have lined up the alternatives according to their degree of discontinuity or continuity. That, however, represents a provisional and conventional classification, and we may find that the real and deeper contrast lies elsewhere. On the face of it, Anabaptism accentuates covenantal discontinuity. It takes its pacifism from the Sermon on the Mount, and its separatism from 2 Cor 6 & Rev 18. At this level, Anabaptist theology would seem to present the antipode of covenant theology.
But appearances are somewhat deceptive. For Anabaptist theology is deeply indebted to Exodus-typology, and this is something it shares in common with covenant theology. Both the Pilgrim and Anabaptist viewed themselves as strangers in a strange land, a walled garden within the wide wilderness of sin. The Church is not merely the Civitas Dei, but the Civitas peregrina, set over against the Civitas Diaboli.
So OT narrative casts a long shadow over the Anabaptist vision of the walk of faith. Both the Pilgrim and Anabaptist identify with the OT saint, and situate themselves in the typical landscape of redemption. As Bradford and Cotton Mather each put it:
"So they left that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits," W. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (Knopf, 1994), 47.
"I write of the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the deprivations of Europe to the American strand; and, assisted by the holy Author of that religion, I do with all conscience of truth, required therein by him who is the truth itself, report the wonderful displays of his infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and faithfulness, wherewith his divine providence hath irradiated an Indian wilderness," C. Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (Banner of Truth, 1979), 1:25.
The difference is that, for the Anabaptist, every generation recapitulates the Exodus-generation, redeemed from bondage, but ever wandering in the wilderness; whereas the Pilgrim views himself as Caleb or Joshua, taking possession of the Promised Land.
The Anabaptist is a perpetual pilgrim, and his nomadic existence keeps him unspotted from the carnal entanglements of the world. I made mention of 2 Cor 6 and Rev 18, but these do not represent a dispensational disjunction, for each is grounded in Isa 52:11 (cf. 2 Cor 6:17; Rev 18:9). So both OT and NT saint must flee from Babylon.
The 4-Door Labyrinth-2
4. Charism & Charismata
Another comparative newcomer to the debate is Pentecostalism. But the case for charismatic theology moves within the same old framework as apostolic succession. Prophecy is traditionally classified in official terms. A prophet holds the prophetic office, just as an Apostle holds the apostolic office. An office is more or less permanent insofar as it admits a succession of incumbents. When a Pentecostal reads 1 Cor 12:28 or Eph 4:11 with this official framework in mind, he can only regard the spiritual gifts as a natural extension of regular church office (e.g. the pastorate).
The problem with this analysis is that suffers from the alien imposition of a Roman bureaucratic overlay. The category of "office" derives from Roman government, not NT church government. This is not to deny that we have some positions or functions in the Bible that could be classified in official terms (e.g. kingship, priesthood, eldership). But we should not take this conceptual scheme as our point of reference.
It is traditional to characterize the prophetic "office" as an "extraordinary" office, as over against ordinary church office. However, the conflation of an extraordinary office commits a category mistake. It would be more accurate, both exegetically and conceptually, to distinguish between office and gift or calling.
Even this distinction can be misleading if we abstract the idea of a gift or calling from its concrete setting in Scripture. A "gift" easily connotes a natural talent—something that’s always on tap. Again, a "vocation" suggests a fulltime occupation.
But even in the Bible, prophetic insight was an occasional phenomenon dependent on divine initiative. It is not something that a prophet could dial up at will. This is not how he made his living.
Charismatic theology standardizes the spiritual gifts. They become as ordinary as the sacraments or church office (e.g. elders, deacons). But this process of normalization violates the special character of an oracle or miracle. So charismatic theology builds on a false foundation.
Many Christian theologians deny outright any brand of subapostolic revelation. For them, this is a matter of redemptive-historical theology. They contend that revelation is epochal in character. More precisely, word-media and event media are correlative. The role of revelation is to expound and explain the significance of God’s redemptive deeds. But there are no further redemptive deeds during the inter-adventual age.
There is, moreover, a basic distinction between saying—on the one hand—that God may, on special occasion, directly address a Christian, heal a believer or perform a miracle in answer to prayer, and saying—on the other hand—that God has endowed some Christians with the gift of healing, prophecy or wonder-working power. A cessationist could be quite open to the possibility or reality of extraordinary and direct divine intervention without admitting a third-party that mediates this action on a regular or official basis.
A subpoint is the debate over glossolalia, both because interpreted tongues are the equivalent of prophecy, and because they're both charismatic phenomena, so that the case of charismatic theology rises or falls as a unit.
And one of the issues is the identity of modern glossolalia in relation to Acts 2 and 1 Cor 12-14. If modern glossolalia are not the same as NT glossolalia, then that would support the cessationist case. And if glossolalia in 1 Cor 12-14 are the same as glossolalia in Acts 2, then that would equate NT glossolalia with foreign languages. As one scholar has noted,
"the reference here (1 Cor 14:2 ) is to uninterpreted tongues. If no interpreter is present, then no one can undertand what the one speaking in gonues says…Such a statement about tongues does not contradict Acts 2. The tongues are comprehensible in Acts 2 only because those who understood the languages spoken happen to be present," T. Schreiner, Paul (IVP 2001), 367.
Some commentators classify this as an auditory rather than vocal miracle. But that’s a false dichotomy. The listener hears a foreign tongue because the speaker is using a foreign tongue. Paul also describes the auditory aspect of the phenomenon (1 Cor 14:28), but no one takes this as exclusive of the vocal relatum. The xenological understanding would also explain the functional equivalence between prophecy and interpreted tongues (1 Cor 14:5). And if modern glossolalia are not foreign languages, then that would support the cessationist case.
Gordon Fee contends that "the question seems irrelevant, [for] Paul's whole argument is predicated on the phenomenon's unintelligibility to both speaker and hearer. Cf. God's Empowering Presence (Hendrickson, 1994), 173. But it appears to me that the question is highly relevant, and Fee's counter-argument is highly irrelevant. For the assumption seems to be that if glossolalia were foreign languages, then they would be intelligible to both speaker and hearer. But how does that follow? Isn't it obvious that a foreign speaker can speak in a tongue unfamiliar to the listener (cf. Acts 14:11)? Doesn't Paul, in fact, make that very point (1 Cor 14:10,21; cf. Acts 2:4)?
What may seem less obvious is that a foreign speaker might not know what he himself is saying. And under normal circumstances, that is true enough. If I learn a language, I know it. But Paul is dealing with a paranormal phenomenon involving possession. In that case, it is not the human host, but the indwelling spirit, be it divine or demonic (cf. 1 Cor 2:12; 12:3,10; Acts 16:16; Isa 29:4; 1 Sam 28:11), which is the source of the utterance, of which the human host is the medium or ventriloquist. And in that event, the language could well be unintelligible to the speaker; indeed, that would only serve to heighten the numinous aura. Cf. "Xenoglossis," Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology, L. Shepard, ed. (Gale, 1985), 3:1463b-69a; F. Goodman, How About Demons? (Indiana U Press 1988); Speaking in Tongues (U of Chicago, 1972); K. Koch, The Strife of Tongues (Kregel, 1975), 31-34.
B. Closed Systems of Revelation
1. Biblicism
This little tour goes to show that everyone must go through the first (and following) doors. No one is exempt from taking this trip. And everyone does indeed go through the same four doors. Some go on their own, others hire a guide (e.g., tradition, the Magisterium).
Thus the Protestant position doesn’t detour you into any more twists and turns than the Catholic or Orthodox. To be sure, choices generate other choices, but if a traveler chooses not to go down the Protestant trail, he has—in a sense—already made that journey if only to deem it a dead end. Why would you turn left rather than right unless you knew which was a wrong turn? And how would you know that unless you’d taken each fork in the road in turn?
As a practical matter, no one has explored every nook and cranny. Rather, everyone hires a guide to scout out the territory and show him the shortcuts. For the Protestant, Biblical tradition composes the advance party, for the Catholic—Magisterial tradition, for the Orthodox—conciliar tradition. In that event, you check out the guide rather than the trail to make sure he's not going to lead you astray. There is a sense in which I don't choose the Bible—the Bible chooses me. For God has a chosen people and a chosen book. He has chosen the people for the book and the book for the people. He puts his people in touch with his book, and touches their hearts to believe and live by his book.
Keep in mind that Orthodoxy and Catholicism are just a couple of the more conservative and pious alternatives to sola Scriptura. But once you open the door a crack to multiple-sources of dogma, the door can swing wide open! Consider reason and experience. It is amusing to hear those disdainful of revelation exhort you and me to judge all things by reason, as if that were such a straight and narrow path. But if you go through the door marked "reason," that opens into another hallway with other doors marked history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, biology, anthropology, cosmology, and so on. And if you go through the door marked philosophy, that will, in turn, come out into another hallway with other doors marked Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Husserl, Heidegger, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Chisholm, Quine, Derrida, and so on. If you go through the door marked Wittgenstein, you’ll enter a room with two sidedoors, one marked "early Wittgenstein," and the other marked "later Wittgenstein." And through each door you can overhear heated arguments over the true meaning of the Master. And if you retrace your steps and repeat the exercise with the door marked "psychology," that will take you down another corridor, and another, and another.
Adhering to sola Scriptura doesn’t imply that you despise reason and experience. Indeed, a Protestant regards revelation as the very highest form of reason inasmuch as it amounts to nothing short of divine reason. And one value of revelation is to broker the completing claims of uninspired reason and experience.
Now let’s go back to sola Scriptura and see if it’s really such a problem. And let’s begin with the canon. Many people seem to find this deeply problematic. And I think the major reason for this misconception is that they approach the issue from the avenue of church history. Maybe they’ve read something about the Council of Jamnia, or Marcion or Luther. And this fosters the impression that the Church started with a random pile of books, tossed a few of them and canonized the rest.
Now there’s a value in viewing the canon from a church historical standpoint. There are several fine treatments from this vantagepoint. (Cf. R. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church [Eerdmans, 1986]; F.F. Bruce, the Canon of Scripture [IVP, 1988]; B. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament [Oxford, 1987]; J. Roberts & A. Du Toit, Guide to the New Testament, vol. 1 [Pretoria, 1989]; B.B. Warfield, Syllabus of the Canon of the New Testament in the Second Century [Pittsburgh, 1881].)
But this presents a rather skewed perspective. For it takes us out of the Bible and into a retrospective phase. It creates the impression that the formation of the canon was an afterthought, something improvised in a pinch, long after the composition of the books.
How often have we heard it said that the Church is prior to the Bible because the Church antedated the Bible and gave us the canon? Well, which Church and which canon? Did the NT church antedate the OT? Did the Jews have no canon of Scripture before Trent?
If we take a step back and look at the way the Bible is put together, we will see that historical theology can present a very artificial and anachronistic conception of the process. In some cases, for example, there would have been no hard and fast line between composition and canonicity. The Pentateuch supplied the charter documents of the old theocracy. The theocracy didn’t codify the Pentateuch; rather, the Pentateuch codified the theocracy.
In the case of the Psalter, likewise, many of the Psalms were official productions. They were composed for the national worship of Israel. So, in such cases, we should see canonization as a more organic process. Inasmuch as many of the authors of Scripture held institutional positions within the Temple or theocracy, inasmuch as inspiration had official organs (e.g. the sons of Korah, the court historian), canonization was not a separate and subsequent step. Likewise, when Peter, Paul or John addressed letter to one of their churches, it would ordinarily enjoy immediate reception. So the formal origin and formation of the canon were often coincident events.
In addition, if we make some allowance for overlapping authors, the historical books of the OT present pretty much a continuous narrative history in serial installments, viz.,
Pentateuch>Joshua>Judges>Ruth>Samuel>Kings>Esther>Ezra>Nehemiah>Chronicles.
Seen this way, the historical books are like a train of passenger cars, with connecting doors, all moving in the same direction. And these, in turn, supply the historical backdrop for the Psalmists (e.g., David [1 Sam 16-2 Kg 2; 1 Ch]; Asah & Jeduth [2 Ch 5:12], and the sons of Korah [Num 26:11; 1 Ch 6]) and the Prophets (e.g., Isaiah [2 Kg 19-20], Jeremiah [2 Ch 35:25; 36:12,21-22], and Zechariah [Ezra 5:1; 6:14]), as well as for various events and individuals which figure in their writings (e.g. Pss 78; 105-106; 135-136). So there are assorted connecting rooms between one book and another. As Nahum Sarna remarks,
"The messianic theme of the return to Zion as an appropriate conclusion to the Scriptures was probably the paramount consideration in the positioning of Chronicles. Further evidence that the arrangement of the Scriptures was intended to express certain leading ideas of Judaism may be sought in the extraordinary fact that the initial chapter of the Former Prophets (Josh 1:8), and of the Latter Prophets (Isa 1:10) and the closing chapter of the Ketuvim (Ps 1:2) all contain a reference to Torah," "Bible," Encyclopaedia Judaica (Keter, 1971), 3:382.
The same holds true when you come to the NT. Say you go through the front door marked Luke. When you enter the Lucan room, you find a backdoor to the OT (24:44) a sidedoor to Acts (1:1), and another sidedoor to Mark (Acts 12:12). If you go into through the sidedoor to Acts, it has sidedoors to Timothy (Acts 16:1), Peter (Acts 1:13), James (Acts 12:17), John (Acts 1:13), John-Mark (Acts 12:12), Matthew (Acts 1:13) and Paul (Acts 7:58). And if you go through the sidedoor to Mark, you find another side door to Matthew (Mk 3:18), Peter (Mk 3:16), John (Mk 3:17) and Jude (Mk 6:3). If you go through the sidedoor to Matthew, it has a sidedoor to James (Mk 13:55). If you go through the sidedoor to Jude, it has a sidedoor to Peter—because 2 Peter and Jude are synoptic—and if you go through that sidedoor, it has a sidedoor to Paul (2 Pet 3:15), and another sidedoor to Mark (1 Pet 5:13). If you go through the side door to Timothy, you’ll find another sidedoor to Hebrews (Heb 13:23). If you take the sidedoor to Paul, it has a sidedoor to James and John (Gal 2:9), and another sidedoor to Mark and Luke (Col 4:14; 2 Tim 4:11; Phm 24), which brings you full circle.
We could explore a great many more connecting rooms. The larger point is that in reading the NT we find the same cast of characters circulates from book to book, either as actors, authors, or both. So it resembles a series of interconnected tunnels.
Another way of looking at this is to see that canon and covenant are correlative inasmuch as the Bible is a history of federalism. Genesis gives the federal history of the Adamic, Noahic, and Abrahamic covenants; Exodus-Judges the federal history of Mosaic covenant; and Ruth-Chronicles, as well as the wisdom literature (the wisdom literature could also be called the royal corpus because it is the expression of the Davidic dynasty), and the federal history of the Davidic covenant; whereas the NT gives the federal history of the New Covenant in the person of Christ as the later and greater Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, in whom their respective covenants receive final fulfillment.
Yet, for some critics, this is not enough. They deem a rule of faith to be a failure unless it constrains consent. Now this is a rather odd assumption. It’s like saying that the multiplication tables are defective unless you never make a mistake once you commit them to memory. But that is not the proper role for a rule of faith. A rule sets a standard, a benchmark. But we wouldn’t blame a yardstick because you're sloppy with your measurements. If you're off by half an inch, that’s your fault for not accurately aligning the yardstick or carefully counting off the units.
Yet another unspoken assumption that underlies so much criticism of sola Scriptura is the attitude that if you like one set of consequences, but dislike another, that gives you the right to choose your rule of faith accordingly. But suppose that God has authorized only one rule of faith? Suppose the rule of faith is God speaking in his word? Your only responsibility is to obey God. Leave the results to God.
IV. Door 2
Does man have freewill?
I. Yes! Pelagianism, &c.
II. No! Calvinism.
Some definitions are in order. Arminian theology defines and affirms freewill as an inalienable power to do otherwise, whereas Reformed theology defines and affirms freewill as a voluntary or uncoerced decision. On the latter definition, freedom and determinism are consistent (compatibilism). Reformed theology denies freewill in the Arminian sense. There are several specific respects in which Reformed theology denies freewill. It denies that (i) an agent is free to thwart the divine decree; that (ii) the unregenerate are free to believe the Gospel; that (iii) the regenerate are free to commit apostasy, or that (iv) the glorified are free to sin. The Arminian version attacks the Reformed version on ethical grounds whereas the Reformed version attacks the Arminian version on exegetical and philosophical grounds.
A. Open systems of action
1. Libertarianism
Where you emerge from Door #1 affects where you end up here, or vice versa. If you answer "yes" to freewill, then you must answer "no" to sola Scriptura; for if everyone has a chance to be saved, then common grace and general revelation must supply the sufficient conditions, in which event, man is justified by the law, not the Gospel.
You see, there is an internal relation between sola Scriptura, sola fide and solus Christus. For if faith alone in Christ alone is a necessary and sufficient condition of our justification before God, then that, in turn, assumes sola Scriptura inasmuch as the Bible supplies us with the object of faith through the saving revelation of Christ in the scriptures.
Conversely, if everyone has a chance at salvation, then that must be apart from the Gospels inasmuch as everyone has not heard the Gospel. So even before you come to the freewill/determinism debate, your prior position on sola Scriptura may have already coopted your position on the freewill/determinism debate.
However, it is also worthwhile to weigh the alternatives on their own respective merits or demerits. Let us work through some of the consequences of freewill before returning to the subject of determinism. For freewill, although it negates determinism, does not thereby choose for or else eliminate any particular alternative to determinism. So it doesn't simplify the selection process. Quite the contrary, if you answer in the affirmative to freewill, then that, in principle, opens the door very widely indeed, for the degree to which, on that assumption, a man may contribute to his own salvation (or damnation) ranges along an infinitely divisible continuum of possible options.
To name just a few of the signs you see strolling down the ever-receding corridor, there’s Deism, Sufism, Socinianism, asceticism, Arminianism, Amyraldinism, Baalism, Bogomilism, Cabalism, cannibalism, Catharism, Confucianism, Gnosticism, Taoism, Molinism, Mormonism, Manichaeism, phallicism, Pharisaism, Neoplatonism, Zoroastrianism, Swedenborgianism, Yoga, open theism, Ophism, Orphism, condign merit (Pelagianism), congruent merit (Roman Catholicism), alchemy, necromancy, naval-gazing, Islam, idolatry, ufology, Mariolatry, Free Masonry, ancestor worship, emperor worship, ufology, process theology, Totemism, Tai Chi, witchcraft, priestcraft, child sacrifice, headhunting, intoning "OM," smoking dope (peyote, Soma), breathing exercises, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Mary, apocatastasis, theosis (Greek Orthodoxy), metempsychosis, &c.
2. Conditional Immortality
If you answer "yes," then that affects your eschatology. If even common grace and general revelation are not enough to level the playing field, then conditional immortality and postmortem evangelism take up the rear. For the notion of a second chance is predicated on freewill (although postmortem evangelism could be made accessory to universalism). But if you answer "no," then than slams the door shut on such rearguard actions.
Of course, conditional immortality is open to other objections. It repristinates a Sadducean eschatology (cf. Josephus, BJ 2:165; Ant. 18:16), in open defiance of Scripture (Mt 22:23; Acts 23:8). Sure, you can draw some hairsplitting distinctions between the Sadducees and their modern counterparts, but the respective views have the same cash value.
As with most compromise positions, it is heir to the same basic criticisms leveled against the opposing extremes without being able to capitalize on the distinctive appeal of either. It isn't strictly retributive (hell) or remedial (universalism). Conditional immortality is the Goldilocks lai of the afterlife—not too hot and not to cool! It really represents a transitional phase on the downward slide into secular materialism, which ends in universal annihilationism—what with its denial of the soul and survival beyond the grave.
Another comparative newcomer to the debate is Pentecostalism. But the case for charismatic theology moves within the same old framework as apostolic succession. Prophecy is traditionally classified in official terms. A prophet holds the prophetic office, just as an Apostle holds the apostolic office. An office is more or less permanent insofar as it admits a succession of incumbents. When a Pentecostal reads 1 Cor 12:28 or Eph 4:11 with this official framework in mind, he can only regard the spiritual gifts as a natural extension of regular church office (e.g. the pastorate).
The problem with this analysis is that suffers from the alien imposition of a Roman bureaucratic overlay. The category of "office" derives from Roman government, not NT church government. This is not to deny that we have some positions or functions in the Bible that could be classified in official terms (e.g. kingship, priesthood, eldership). But we should not take this conceptual scheme as our point of reference.
It is traditional to characterize the prophetic "office" as an "extraordinary" office, as over against ordinary church office. However, the conflation of an extraordinary office commits a category mistake. It would be more accurate, both exegetically and conceptually, to distinguish between office and gift or calling.
Even this distinction can be misleading if we abstract the idea of a gift or calling from its concrete setting in Scripture. A "gift" easily connotes a natural talent—something that’s always on tap. Again, a "vocation" suggests a fulltime occupation.
But even in the Bible, prophetic insight was an occasional phenomenon dependent on divine initiative. It is not something that a prophet could dial up at will. This is not how he made his living.
Charismatic theology standardizes the spiritual gifts. They become as ordinary as the sacraments or church office (e.g. elders, deacons). But this process of normalization violates the special character of an oracle or miracle. So charismatic theology builds on a false foundation.
Many Christian theologians deny outright any brand of subapostolic revelation. For them, this is a matter of redemptive-historical theology. They contend that revelation is epochal in character. More precisely, word-media and event media are correlative. The role of revelation is to expound and explain the significance of God’s redemptive deeds. But there are no further redemptive deeds during the inter-adventual age.
There is, moreover, a basic distinction between saying—on the one hand—that God may, on special occasion, directly address a Christian, heal a believer or perform a miracle in answer to prayer, and saying—on the other hand—that God has endowed some Christians with the gift of healing, prophecy or wonder-working power. A cessationist could be quite open to the possibility or reality of extraordinary and direct divine intervention without admitting a third-party that mediates this action on a regular or official basis.
A subpoint is the debate over glossolalia, both because interpreted tongues are the equivalent of prophecy, and because they're both charismatic phenomena, so that the case of charismatic theology rises or falls as a unit.
And one of the issues is the identity of modern glossolalia in relation to Acts 2 and 1 Cor 12-14. If modern glossolalia are not the same as NT glossolalia, then that would support the cessationist case. And if glossolalia in 1 Cor 12-14 are the same as glossolalia in Acts 2, then that would equate NT glossolalia with foreign languages. As one scholar has noted,
"the reference here (1 Cor 14:2 ) is to uninterpreted tongues. If no interpreter is present, then no one can undertand what the one speaking in gonues says…Such a statement about tongues does not contradict Acts 2. The tongues are comprehensible in Acts 2 only because those who understood the languages spoken happen to be present," T. Schreiner, Paul (IVP 2001), 367.
Some commentators classify this as an auditory rather than vocal miracle. But that’s a false dichotomy. The listener hears a foreign tongue because the speaker is using a foreign tongue. Paul also describes the auditory aspect of the phenomenon (1 Cor 14:28), but no one takes this as exclusive of the vocal relatum. The xenological understanding would also explain the functional equivalence between prophecy and interpreted tongues (1 Cor 14:5). And if modern glossolalia are not foreign languages, then that would support the cessationist case.
Gordon Fee contends that "the question seems irrelevant, [for] Paul's whole argument is predicated on the phenomenon's unintelligibility to both speaker and hearer. Cf. God's Empowering Presence (Hendrickson, 1994), 173. But it appears to me that the question is highly relevant, and Fee's counter-argument is highly irrelevant. For the assumption seems to be that if glossolalia were foreign languages, then they would be intelligible to both speaker and hearer. But how does that follow? Isn't it obvious that a foreign speaker can speak in a tongue unfamiliar to the listener (cf. Acts 14:11)? Doesn't Paul, in fact, make that very point (1 Cor 14:10,21; cf. Acts 2:4)?
What may seem less obvious is that a foreign speaker might not know what he himself is saying. And under normal circumstances, that is true enough. If I learn a language, I know it. But Paul is dealing with a paranormal phenomenon involving possession. In that case, it is not the human host, but the indwelling spirit, be it divine or demonic (cf. 1 Cor 2:12; 12:3,10; Acts 16:16; Isa 29:4; 1 Sam 28:11), which is the source of the utterance, of which the human host is the medium or ventriloquist. And in that event, the language could well be unintelligible to the speaker; indeed, that would only serve to heighten the numinous aura. Cf. "Xenoglossis," Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology, L. Shepard, ed. (Gale, 1985), 3:1463b-69a; F. Goodman, How About Demons? (Indiana U Press 1988); Speaking in Tongues (U of Chicago, 1972); K. Koch, The Strife of Tongues (Kregel, 1975), 31-34.
B. Closed Systems of Revelation
1. Biblicism
This little tour goes to show that everyone must go through the first (and following) doors. No one is exempt from taking this trip. And everyone does indeed go through the same four doors. Some go on their own, others hire a guide (e.g., tradition, the Magisterium).
Thus the Protestant position doesn’t detour you into any more twists and turns than the Catholic or Orthodox. To be sure, choices generate other choices, but if a traveler chooses not to go down the Protestant trail, he has—in a sense—already made that journey if only to deem it a dead end. Why would you turn left rather than right unless you knew which was a wrong turn? And how would you know that unless you’d taken each fork in the road in turn?
As a practical matter, no one has explored every nook and cranny. Rather, everyone hires a guide to scout out the territory and show him the shortcuts. For the Protestant, Biblical tradition composes the advance party, for the Catholic—Magisterial tradition, for the Orthodox—conciliar tradition. In that event, you check out the guide rather than the trail to make sure he's not going to lead you astray. There is a sense in which I don't choose the Bible—the Bible chooses me. For God has a chosen people and a chosen book. He has chosen the people for the book and the book for the people. He puts his people in touch with his book, and touches their hearts to believe and live by his book.
Keep in mind that Orthodoxy and Catholicism are just a couple of the more conservative and pious alternatives to sola Scriptura. But once you open the door a crack to multiple-sources of dogma, the door can swing wide open! Consider reason and experience. It is amusing to hear those disdainful of revelation exhort you and me to judge all things by reason, as if that were such a straight and narrow path. But if you go through the door marked "reason," that opens into another hallway with other doors marked history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, biology, anthropology, cosmology, and so on. And if you go through the door marked philosophy, that will, in turn, come out into another hallway with other doors marked Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Husserl, Heidegger, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Chisholm, Quine, Derrida, and so on. If you go through the door marked Wittgenstein, you’ll enter a room with two sidedoors, one marked "early Wittgenstein," and the other marked "later Wittgenstein." And through each door you can overhear heated arguments over the true meaning of the Master. And if you retrace your steps and repeat the exercise with the door marked "psychology," that will take you down another corridor, and another, and another.
Adhering to sola Scriptura doesn’t imply that you despise reason and experience. Indeed, a Protestant regards revelation as the very highest form of reason inasmuch as it amounts to nothing short of divine reason. And one value of revelation is to broker the completing claims of uninspired reason and experience.
Now let’s go back to sola Scriptura and see if it’s really such a problem. And let’s begin with the canon. Many people seem to find this deeply problematic. And I think the major reason for this misconception is that they approach the issue from the avenue of church history. Maybe they’ve read something about the Council of Jamnia, or Marcion or Luther. And this fosters the impression that the Church started with a random pile of books, tossed a few of them and canonized the rest.
Now there’s a value in viewing the canon from a church historical standpoint. There are several fine treatments from this vantagepoint. (Cf. R. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church [Eerdmans, 1986]; F.F. Bruce, the Canon of Scripture [IVP, 1988]; B. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament [Oxford, 1987]; J. Roberts & A. Du Toit, Guide to the New Testament, vol. 1 [Pretoria, 1989]; B.B. Warfield, Syllabus of the Canon of the New Testament in the Second Century [Pittsburgh, 1881].)
But this presents a rather skewed perspective. For it takes us out of the Bible and into a retrospective phase. It creates the impression that the formation of the canon was an afterthought, something improvised in a pinch, long after the composition of the books.
How often have we heard it said that the Church is prior to the Bible because the Church antedated the Bible and gave us the canon? Well, which Church and which canon? Did the NT church antedate the OT? Did the Jews have no canon of Scripture before Trent?
If we take a step back and look at the way the Bible is put together, we will see that historical theology can present a very artificial and anachronistic conception of the process. In some cases, for example, there would have been no hard and fast line between composition and canonicity. The Pentateuch supplied the charter documents of the old theocracy. The theocracy didn’t codify the Pentateuch; rather, the Pentateuch codified the theocracy.
In the case of the Psalter, likewise, many of the Psalms were official productions. They were composed for the national worship of Israel. So, in such cases, we should see canonization as a more organic process. Inasmuch as many of the authors of Scripture held institutional positions within the Temple or theocracy, inasmuch as inspiration had official organs (e.g. the sons of Korah, the court historian), canonization was not a separate and subsequent step. Likewise, when Peter, Paul or John addressed letter to one of their churches, it would ordinarily enjoy immediate reception. So the formal origin and formation of the canon were often coincident events.
In addition, if we make some allowance for overlapping authors, the historical books of the OT present pretty much a continuous narrative history in serial installments, viz.,
Pentateuch>Joshua>Judges>Ruth>Samuel>Kings>Esther>Ezra>Nehemiah>Chronicles.
Seen this way, the historical books are like a train of passenger cars, with connecting doors, all moving in the same direction. And these, in turn, supply the historical backdrop for the Psalmists (e.g., David [1 Sam 16-2 Kg 2; 1 Ch]; Asah & Jeduth [2 Ch 5:12], and the sons of Korah [Num 26:11; 1 Ch 6]) and the Prophets (e.g., Isaiah [2 Kg 19-20], Jeremiah [2 Ch 35:25; 36:12,21-22], and Zechariah [Ezra 5:1; 6:14]), as well as for various events and individuals which figure in their writings (e.g. Pss 78; 105-106; 135-136). So there are assorted connecting rooms between one book and another. As Nahum Sarna remarks,
"The messianic theme of the return to Zion as an appropriate conclusion to the Scriptures was probably the paramount consideration in the positioning of Chronicles. Further evidence that the arrangement of the Scriptures was intended to express certain leading ideas of Judaism may be sought in the extraordinary fact that the initial chapter of the Former Prophets (Josh 1:8), and of the Latter Prophets (Isa 1:10) and the closing chapter of the Ketuvim (Ps 1:2) all contain a reference to Torah," "Bible," Encyclopaedia Judaica (Keter, 1971), 3:382.
The same holds true when you come to the NT. Say you go through the front door marked Luke. When you enter the Lucan room, you find a backdoor to the OT (24:44) a sidedoor to Acts (1:1), and another sidedoor to Mark (Acts 12:12). If you go into through the sidedoor to Acts, it has sidedoors to Timothy (Acts 16:1), Peter (Acts 1:13), James (Acts 12:17), John (Acts 1:13), John-Mark (Acts 12:12), Matthew (Acts 1:13) and Paul (Acts 7:58). And if you go through the sidedoor to Mark, you find another side door to Matthew (Mk 3:18), Peter (Mk 3:16), John (Mk 3:17) and Jude (Mk 6:3). If you go through the sidedoor to Matthew, it has a sidedoor to James (Mk 13:55). If you go through the sidedoor to Jude, it has a sidedoor to Peter—because 2 Peter and Jude are synoptic—and if you go through that sidedoor, it has a sidedoor to Paul (2 Pet 3:15), and another sidedoor to Mark (1 Pet 5:13). If you go through the side door to Timothy, you’ll find another sidedoor to Hebrews (Heb 13:23). If you take the sidedoor to Paul, it has a sidedoor to James and John (Gal 2:9), and another sidedoor to Mark and Luke (Col 4:14; 2 Tim 4:11; Phm 24), which brings you full circle.
We could explore a great many more connecting rooms. The larger point is that in reading the NT we find the same cast of characters circulates from book to book, either as actors, authors, or both. So it resembles a series of interconnected tunnels.
Another way of looking at this is to see that canon and covenant are correlative inasmuch as the Bible is a history of federalism. Genesis gives the federal history of the Adamic, Noahic, and Abrahamic covenants; Exodus-Judges the federal history of Mosaic covenant; and Ruth-Chronicles, as well as the wisdom literature (the wisdom literature could also be called the royal corpus because it is the expression of the Davidic dynasty), and the federal history of the Davidic covenant; whereas the NT gives the federal history of the New Covenant in the person of Christ as the later and greater Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, in whom their respective covenants receive final fulfillment.
Yet, for some critics, this is not enough. They deem a rule of faith to be a failure unless it constrains consent. Now this is a rather odd assumption. It’s like saying that the multiplication tables are defective unless you never make a mistake once you commit them to memory. But that is not the proper role for a rule of faith. A rule sets a standard, a benchmark. But we wouldn’t blame a yardstick because you're sloppy with your measurements. If you're off by half an inch, that’s your fault for not accurately aligning the yardstick or carefully counting off the units.
Yet another unspoken assumption that underlies so much criticism of sola Scriptura is the attitude that if you like one set of consequences, but dislike another, that gives you the right to choose your rule of faith accordingly. But suppose that God has authorized only one rule of faith? Suppose the rule of faith is God speaking in his word? Your only responsibility is to obey God. Leave the results to God.
IV. Door 2
Does man have freewill?
I. Yes! Pelagianism, &c.
II. No! Calvinism.
Some definitions are in order. Arminian theology defines and affirms freewill as an inalienable power to do otherwise, whereas Reformed theology defines and affirms freewill as a voluntary or uncoerced decision. On the latter definition, freedom and determinism are consistent (compatibilism). Reformed theology denies freewill in the Arminian sense. There are several specific respects in which Reformed theology denies freewill. It denies that (i) an agent is free to thwart the divine decree; that (ii) the unregenerate are free to believe the Gospel; that (iii) the regenerate are free to commit apostasy, or that (iv) the glorified are free to sin. The Arminian version attacks the Reformed version on ethical grounds whereas the Reformed version attacks the Arminian version on exegetical and philosophical grounds.
A. Open systems of action
1. Libertarianism
Where you emerge from Door #1 affects where you end up here, or vice versa. If you answer "yes" to freewill, then you must answer "no" to sola Scriptura; for if everyone has a chance to be saved, then common grace and general revelation must supply the sufficient conditions, in which event, man is justified by the law, not the Gospel.
You see, there is an internal relation between sola Scriptura, sola fide and solus Christus. For if faith alone in Christ alone is a necessary and sufficient condition of our justification before God, then that, in turn, assumes sola Scriptura inasmuch as the Bible supplies us with the object of faith through the saving revelation of Christ in the scriptures.
Conversely, if everyone has a chance at salvation, then that must be apart from the Gospels inasmuch as everyone has not heard the Gospel. So even before you come to the freewill/determinism debate, your prior position on sola Scriptura may have already coopted your position on the freewill/determinism debate.
However, it is also worthwhile to weigh the alternatives on their own respective merits or demerits. Let us work through some of the consequences of freewill before returning to the subject of determinism. For freewill, although it negates determinism, does not thereby choose for or else eliminate any particular alternative to determinism. So it doesn't simplify the selection process. Quite the contrary, if you answer in the affirmative to freewill, then that, in principle, opens the door very widely indeed, for the degree to which, on that assumption, a man may contribute to his own salvation (or damnation) ranges along an infinitely divisible continuum of possible options.
To name just a few of the signs you see strolling down the ever-receding corridor, there’s Deism, Sufism, Socinianism, asceticism, Arminianism, Amyraldinism, Baalism, Bogomilism, Cabalism, cannibalism, Catharism, Confucianism, Gnosticism, Taoism, Molinism, Mormonism, Manichaeism, phallicism, Pharisaism, Neoplatonism, Zoroastrianism, Swedenborgianism, Yoga, open theism, Ophism, Orphism, condign merit (Pelagianism), congruent merit (Roman Catholicism), alchemy, necromancy, naval-gazing, Islam, idolatry, ufology, Mariolatry, Free Masonry, ancestor worship, emperor worship, ufology, process theology, Totemism, Tai Chi, witchcraft, priestcraft, child sacrifice, headhunting, intoning "OM," smoking dope (peyote, Soma), breathing exercises, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Mary, apocatastasis, theosis (Greek Orthodoxy), metempsychosis, &c.
2. Conditional Immortality
If you answer "yes," then that affects your eschatology. If even common grace and general revelation are not enough to level the playing field, then conditional immortality and postmortem evangelism take up the rear. For the notion of a second chance is predicated on freewill (although postmortem evangelism could be made accessory to universalism). But if you answer "no," then than slams the door shut on such rearguard actions.
Of course, conditional immortality is open to other objections. It repristinates a Sadducean eschatology (cf. Josephus, BJ 2:165; Ant. 18:16), in open defiance of Scripture (Mt 22:23; Acts 23:8). Sure, you can draw some hairsplitting distinctions between the Sadducees and their modern counterparts, but the respective views have the same cash value.
As with most compromise positions, it is heir to the same basic criticisms leveled against the opposing extremes without being able to capitalize on the distinctive appeal of either. It isn't strictly retributive (hell) or remedial (universalism). Conditional immortality is the Goldilocks lai of the afterlife—not too hot and not to cool! It really represents a transitional phase on the downward slide into secular materialism, which ends in universal annihilationism—what with its denial of the soul and survival beyond the grave.
The 4-Door Labyrinth-1
I. Into the Labyrinth
For many observers, both inside and outside the church, Christendom presents a bewildering array of squabbling schools and sects. Not only is Christendom divided into many denominations, but the denominations are further subdivided in a wide variety of spin-offs. Consider the number of Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian denominations? And that is not counting all the cults. How is the average man supposed to thread his way through this vast labyrinth?
II. One Room, Four Doors
I would submit that almost all of the vast variety within Christendom can be reduced to how you answer four basic questions. It is like a room with four doors. Each door represents a question with a yes or no answer. When you go through one of the four doors, it leads into a hallway with other doors on either side. For if you answer "yes," that opens other doors, and if you answer "no," that opens other doors. And those doors lead into other rooms with backdoors and side-doors.
On the face of it, this seems to veer off into a never-ending maze of doors and corridors. But that depends on which door you open. And even if you become lost in the maze, you can always retrace your steps to the central room, for all passageways thread back through one of the four doors. However much they may diverge after exiting the central room, they all converge at that common point of origin.
So what are the four questions? (1) Is sola Scriptura the only rule of faith? (2) Does man have freewill? (3) Is the New Covenant continuous with the Old? (4) Are the sacraments a means of grace?
Each door represents one of these four questions. And when you open each door, a leads you into a hallway, with a row of "yes" answers on one side and "no" answers on the other.
III. Door 1
Is sola Scriptura the only rule of faith?
I. Yes! Protestantism.
II. No! Catholicism, Anglo-Catholicism, Orthodoxy, rationalism, Mormonism, Pentecostalism, &c.
A. Open Systems of Revelation
Some schools of thought would deny that their position amounts to new or continuous revelation. But whatever the foreign currency or exchange rate, their position has the same cash value.
1. Catholicism
For many people, sola Scriptura is not the solution, but the problem. Because Scripture is not self-organizing or self-interpreting, sola Scriptura generates chaos. That is why, so the argument goes, it is necessary to have a Church that can speak with one authoritative voice.
This is the classic Catholic objection to the Protestant rule of faith. And many people find the objection quite compelling. For the sake of argument, suppose that we agree with this objection. Does that simply the choice?
Often, critics of a given view assume that rebutting the opposing position automatically validates their own. But that doesn’t always follow. For example, the Roman Church did not have an official canon for over 1500 years. And it was only under the pressure of the Protestant Reformation that it finally decreed a canon of its own.
As at other points, which door you come out of elsewhere has consequences for where you wind up here. If you say "yes" to freewill and sola Scriptura alike, then sola Scriptura is more vulnerable to the Catholic objection inasmuch as freewill is an inherently unstable and destabilizing dynamic, and when you plug it into sola Scriptura, chaos may well ensue. If, on the other hand, you say "yes" to sola Scriptura, but "no" to freewill, then sola Scriptura is not just another free radical, but functions within the providence of God.
It may be said that even if you take the canon for granted, it fails to alleviate the irony of those who come to the same Bible, but go away with opposing views. The same people who insist on sola Scriptura are the very ones who cannot agree on what it means. So sola Scriptura is obviously an impractical rule of faith. It leads into a trackless maze.
For many, this is a persuasive charge. Is there an answer? There are several. But let us begin with just one. The unspoken assumption is that some other rule of faith is available which will save us from these dire consequences. But that is illusory, for every rule of faith assumes the right of private judgment. Consider the Catholic alternative. The Catholic must exercise his private judgment in deeming the Roman Church to be the one true church and heir to the promises of Christ and his Apostles. He must exercise his private judgment in deeming that the promise of Mt 16:16-18 was official rather than personal, that Peter ordained a seamless line of successors, and so on. He must exercise his private judgment in winnowing the ordinary from the extraordinary Magisterium. Now, these involve him in a host of intricate exegetical and historical judgments.
Consider some exegetical questions. Does the promise of Christ (Mt 16:16-18) refer to Peter? A fair case can be made out for this identification. Yet the parallel with Mt 7:24 invites a Christological referent. And if 16:18 is equating the papacy with the Vicar of Christ, does v23 equate the papacy with the Antichrist? Does the promise refer to Peter alone? No. The promise was extended to the Apostolate in general (18:17-18; Jn 20:23). Does the promise have reference to a Petrine office? No. Indeed, the argument for Petrine primacy is in tension with the argument for apostolic succession. How can Peter’s authority be intransmissible in relation to the Apostolate, but transmissible in relation to the episcopate? Was Peter the first bishop of Rome? No, because such a question confounds the Apostolate with the episcopate. Moreover, it is anachronistic to read the monarchal episcopate back into the 1C Church of Rome— A point conceded in contemporary Catholic scholarship. Cf. R. Brown, Priest and Bishop (Paulist Press, 1970).
Furthermore, the Church of Rome wasn’t founded by Peter. It was most likely an extension of Messianic synagogues (cf. Acts 18:2; Rom 16:3). For that matter, the Diocese of Pontus-Bithynia has a weightier claim to be a Petrine See than the Roman See (1 Pet 1:1).
Consider some historical questions. Can we document an unbroken apostolic succession? What about the Great Schism? "For nearly half a century the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another, so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another, and, in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side," J. Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (Ignatius, 1987), 196. "It must be frankly admitted that bias or deficiencies in the sources makes it impossible to determine in certain cases whether the claimants were popes or anti-popes," New Catholic Encyclopedia (CUA, 1967) 1:632.
What about rigged elections? (Cf. NCE 11:572b.) What about nullified elections? In "his constitution 'De fratrum nostrorum' (1503)," Julius II "declared null and void every pontifical election brought about by simony," Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford, 1977), 768a.
What about the various impediments to valid ordination, such as the absence of "perfect chastity"? "The lawful reception of Orders demands outstanding and habitual goodness of life, especially perfect chastity," NCE 7:89a. "Mere conscious rejection or unconscious repression of sexuality is not chastity," NCE 3:516. One wonders in passing how representatives of the Renaissance papacy measured up to these saintly conditions!
How do we sift the extraordinary from the ordinary Magisterium? Isn’t this a fallible and retrospective judgment? In "Unum Sanctam," Boniface VIII denied that salvation was obtainable outside the Roman Church. His position was codified by the councils of Florence and Lateran IV. But Rahner (in is famous or infamous category of "anonymous Christians"), Ratzinger, Urs von Balthasar (Dare We Hope? [Ignatius, 1988].) and John-Paul II (Cf. Crossing the Threshold of Hope [Knopf, 1994]; G. Warner, "Is the Pope Catholic," The Spectator [2001].) offer up salvation on far more favorable terms.
Trent repeatedly anathematizes Protestant believers, but Vatican II kindly dubs them the "separated brethren," and even spares some generous words for the followers of Muhammad.
Pius IX roundly condemned higher criticism, but Vatican II lifted the ban. Cf. H. Vorgrimler, ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II (Herder & Herder, 1969), 3:205-06. And it is freely received by the likes of Rahner (E.g., Inspiration in the Bible [Herder & Herder, 1961].), Ratzinger (E.g., In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall [Eerdmans, 1995]. where he adopts the Documentary Hypothesis and demotes Gen 1 to the level of an expurgated version of a heathen creation myth [10-13].), Fitzmyer (E.g., A Christological Catechism: New Testament Answers [Paulist, 1991]. To take just one example, notice how Fitzmyer accuses our Lord of "protological thinking…being a child of his time," [59]), and John-Paul II (Cf. K. Rahner, I Remember [Crossroad, 1985], 95.) It seems as though the dividing line between the ordinary and extraordinary Magisterium can only be drawn with the benefit of postmortem hindsight. Poor Galileo!
Catholicism can always salvage the infallible reputation of the Magisterium by declaring after the fact that embarrassing positions reflect the ordinary Magisterium. But there is a toll for crossing this bridge. You make magisterial teaching unfalsifiable by rendering it unverifiable.
So, to say nothing more, this means that every Roman Catholic must begin life as a de facto Protestant, must begin where every Protestant must begin. But if you must lay your foundation on Protestant ground, then sola Scriptura should quarry every brick of the rising edifice.
2. Orthodoxy
Then there are many in agreement with the Catholic objection, but in disagreement with the Catholic answer. Take the Orthodox alternative, which canonizes conciliar tradition. But the problem with this alternative is that every belief has a toehold in tradition, for tradition is just another name for the history of belief. Heresy has a past. Heresy is just as old as orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy codifies a sliver of tradition —the tradition canonized in ecumenical councils is the norm. Ah, but who decides when a council local or ecumenical? Heretical or orthodox? The Greek Orthodox Church has never had a really official canon of Scripture inasmuch as none of the councils it deems to be ecumenical decreed a canon.
Setting tradition in opposition to private judgment commits a regressive fallacy, for tradition has to start somewhere, and where it begins is with the work of pioneering individuals. Today's tradition was yesterday's innovation. All that Orthodoxy does is to codify the private judgment of trendsetters like Basil and Athanasius. If the right of private judgment were all that problematic, then resorting to tradition would only push the problem back a step. The right of private judgment has been camouflaged, but not uprooted.
How you come down on sola Scriptura affects your polity and ecclesiology. For if you believe that the alternative to sola Scriptura is some form of sacred tradition, then that generally commits you to a high ecclesiology, with a firm lay/clerical division and authoritarian teaching office. But if, on the other hand, you subscribe to sola Scriptura, then you can afford a more pragmatic policy on church government.
Like Catholicism, Orthodoxy hitches its star to apostolic and sacramental succession. (Cf. G. Florovsy, Bible, Church, Tradition [Norland, 1972], 17-18; J. Meyendorff, Living Tradition [St. Vladimir's Press, 1978], 50-51.) But trying to establish a historical case for apostolic and sacramental succession would appear to be even more vexed for Orthodoxy than Romanism inasmuch as the Orthodox church is much more decentralized than the Roman See, consisting of numerous national bodies (e.g., Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Georgian), each with its own checkered history of internal intrigue and backstabbing.
In the nature of the case, divine revelation presumes that God is an object of knowledge. So sola Scriptura, if true, would undercut the apophatic tradition in Byzantine theology.
3. Mormonism
Unlike the conflict with Rome, which has generated a huge polemical legacy, Mormonism is a rapidly growing and relative newcomer to the theological scene, and for that reason, has not received the critical attention it deserves. It should be said at the outset that even if the Mormon apologist could establish an open canon, that would not move an inch towards establishing the prophetic pretensions of Joseph Smith or other Mormon sages.
Hugh Nibley, that most versatile of Mormon scholars, has made a detailed case for an open canon. Cf. Since Cumorah (Deseret Book Company, 1988).
Let’s outline his argument:
i) Initial opposition to the claims of Joseph Smith was prized on the assumption of a closed canon and plenary verbal inspiration.
ii) Textual criticism has overthrown the traditional theory of plenary verbal inspiration.
iii) Source criticism and form criticism have demonstrated that the Gospels are secondary rather than primary sources of the Christian kergyma. Moreover, they suppress the original message.
iv) The very existence of the Synoptics represents a tampered version of the original text.
v) The coexistence of the Apocrypha, Agrapha and Pseudepigrapha with the NT documents goes to show that the NT canon does not enjoy a privileged standing.
vi) Alongside the NT there existed an esoteric tradition.
vii) The NT only bears witness to the pre-Easter teaching of Christ.
What are we to make of these charges?
i) Nibley consistently confounds higher and lower criticism. It is a non-sequitur to infer the errancy of the autographa from textual variants.
ii) Nibley exploits the concessions of liberal Catholic and Protestant Bible scholarship as a launching pad. Of course, conservative Christians would reject the operating assumption. Hence, Nibley’s whole chain-of-reasoning is hung on thin air.
iii) Orality and literality coexisted in NT times. For example, the NT preserves the letters of Paul (Romans—Philemon) as well as the speeches of Paul (in Acts). Hence, there is no reason to insist on a primary and preliminary oral stage as over against a secondary literary stage, or assign these to different hands.
iv) The Synoptics vary according to the target-audience. Matthew adds some background details for his Jewish audience, and Luke for his Gentile audience, but there is nothing nefarious about audience-adaptation. Moreover, both Matthew and Luke are extremely conservative in their editing of Marcan materials.
v) Controversies over the extent of the canon prove that the ancient Church did not operate with an open canon.
vi) The fabrication of rival literature takes the preexisting canon as the frame of reference.
vii) It is not the Church that was guilty of suppressing evidence. Rather, it is well known that Marcion was the one who produced an expurgated version of the canon
viii) Mormonism has to resort to a conspiracy theory to justify the canonicity of its own literacy. But this poses a familiar dilemma. How do you document a conspiracy? If it’s a conspiracy, there shouldn’t be a public record, right? The very fact that Nibley turns to the publications of the Church Fathers undermines his central thesis. This isn’t classified, top-secret material. Long before Nag Hammadi we knew what we knew about Marcion and the Gnostics because the Church Fathers published point-by-point expositions and refutations of the opposing position. So this is completely above-board.
ix) Nibley is deceptive about relative chronology and literary dependence. None of his counterexamples coincide with the date of the NT. He builds his case on such miscellaneous and late-dated source material as the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas (3C), the Gospel of Thomas (4-5C)—ragments of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas can be traced back to the 2C via the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, but even these fragments are derivative of the canonical Gospels—the Clementine Recognitions (3-4C), The Pistis Sophia (4C), 2 Enoch (Nibley assigns this a pre-70 AD date. Yet some scholars have dated it no earlier than the 7C and as late as the 15C!), and even Innocent the III (12-13C)!
x) Examples like the so-called "Messianic Secret" do not afford evidence of a disciplina arcana. Indeed, Nibley’s examples are taken from the publicized teaching of Christ in the Gospels. And Nibley’s major source of a disciplina arcana comes from Basil (4C)—which is a very selective use of late evidence.
xi) Even if the Gospels were limited to the pre-Easter teaching of Christ—which represents a serious overstatement—the NT is not limited to the Gospels. The NT covers the work of Christ from the Incarnation to the Ascension and Session— with a preview of the Parousia. So it is not as if there were a great gap in the record. Nibley is piggybacking on the Gnostic and Catholic appeal to Acts 1:2-3 to smuggle in Mormon esoterica. But in terms of their function in the narrative strategy of Acts, vv2-3 do not issue an invitation to interpolate oral tradition. Rather, vv2-3 serve as a set-up for the apostolic kergyma. The preaching and prooftexting in Acts take their cue from dominical techniques (cf. Lk 24:25-27,45-48). The "kingdom of God" (1:3) has come in the coming of Christ (Lk 11:20; Acts 8:12; 19:8; 20:25; 28:23,31).
From a later generation of scholarship, Stephen Robinson has argued that the exclusion of other inspired writings from the canon (cf. Lk 1:1; 2 Cor 5:9; Col 4:16; Jude 14-15) opens the door to a reintroduction of revelation. Cf. How Wide the Divide, C. Blomberg & S. Robinson (IVP, 1997), 63,206-7 (nn.20-22).
But there are a number of weaknesses with this argument:
a)Why certain letters of Paul, didn’t make it into the canon is highly speculative. To build a positive case on such conjectural grounds is like flying in a vacuum tube.
b) However, the fact that 13 of his letters made it into the canon renders it quite unlikely that his other letters were actively excluded. What would be the motive?
c) The ancient church didn’t have the kind of centralized command-and-control that would even make it possible to not only exclude but eliminate all trace of rival literature. Indeed, the survival of so much of the Agrapha, Apographa and pseudepigrapha bears witness to that fact. The fact is that although the ancient church arrived at an informal consensus on the canon, there was no official canon until the Reformation forced the issue (E.g. WCF 1:2-3; Trent ("Decree on the Canonical Scriptures"). So the popular image of an Index Liborum Prohibitorum in the ancient church is a blatant anachronism.
d) Again, the ancient church didn’t have a publishing house. So it seems likely that these other letters didn’t survive, not because their was an organized effort to suppress them, but because there were not enough copies in circulation to be recopied and escape the ravages of time.
e) From a Reformed standpoint, we must add that the "loss" of an inspired writing is not a historical accident, but due to God’s providential design.
f) There is no evidence that the pre-Marcan gospels were inspired.
g) Even Robinson admits that we cannot confidently identify Jude 14-15 with the extant Enochian literature (Ibid., 206 [n.20].). So we cannot appeal to the Enochian Pseudepigrapha as inspired literature that was excluded from the canon, for Jude’s allusion may not have reference to any of this material—which is, in any case, a revamping of earlier source material.
h) There is also a difference between quoting a narrative work as prophetic and quoting a prophetic character within the narrative. The inspired status of the speaker is not interchangeable with the inspired status of the narrative in general, or vice versa. This commits a level-confusion.
i) Since the Mormon "scriptures" don’t resemble the Pauline letters or Enochian literature or Ur-Markus, Robinson’s counterexamples are subversive to his thesis. If this supplies the standard of comparison, then the Mormon "scriptures" are bogus, for they didn’t restore Paul’s "lost" letter to the Laodiceans and the like.
j) Since the Mormon "scriptures" contradict the canon of Scripture, and in fact present a completely different and divergent belief-system (on God, man, sin, salvation, christology, eschatology, creation, predestination, providence, the church, &c.), they can hardly represent a complement to the canon.
However, Robinson combines this with the old assertion of textual tampering—dating "whatever changes were made in the present text to between AD 55 and 200" [Ibid., 206 (n.1].) He also chides Blomberg for insisting that there is no textual evidence of deletion as question-begging because "it is the LDS contention that the evidence was deleted" (Ibid, 206 [n17].) But this position is faulty on several grounds:
i) The burden of proof is on the Mormon to document textual tampering. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the presumption is quite properly in favor of the textual integrity of the NT.
ii) Patristic and MS authorities not only attest the state of the NT text at the time of the Church Father or MS, but also attest a tradition of transmission. As such, the presumption of textual integrity and continuity extends well below the cut-off date of the earliest extant witness.
iii) Any effort to systematically tamper with the NT text would have ignited a firestorm of controversy, resulting in schism and generating a sizable polemical literature. This could not be covered up.
Incidentally, the same expedient figures in Muslim apologetics. Because Muhammad set up the Bible as the standard of comparison (e.g., 5:46-47; 10:94), any discrepancy between his message and Scripture falsifies his prophetic pretensions. Muslims can only evade this by claiming that the text of Scripture was tampered with. But even if the Church were willing and able to pull of this silent revolution, the most ancient versional and MS evidence extant still antedates Muhammad by centuries. So the charge falls of its own dead weight.
As a more general issue, the category of the divine in Mormon theology is inadequate to support a doctrine of inspiration and revelation. Mormonism subscribes to finite theism. The gods of Mormon theology are scaled up versions of men (Cf. D&C 130:22; Moses 6:9). As such, they would be subject to the same limitations of any other spatiotemporal being.
Incidentally, this is also a crippling impediment to the inspired status of Hindu and Buddhist "scriptures." A doctrine of divine revelation is only as good as a doctrine of the divine nature. And that is to say nothing of the further fact that the Vedic sages were acidheads.
For many observers, both inside and outside the church, Christendom presents a bewildering array of squabbling schools and sects. Not only is Christendom divided into many denominations, but the denominations are further subdivided in a wide variety of spin-offs. Consider the number of Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian denominations? And that is not counting all the cults. How is the average man supposed to thread his way through this vast labyrinth?
II. One Room, Four Doors
I would submit that almost all of the vast variety within Christendom can be reduced to how you answer four basic questions. It is like a room with four doors. Each door represents a question with a yes or no answer. When you go through one of the four doors, it leads into a hallway with other doors on either side. For if you answer "yes," that opens other doors, and if you answer "no," that opens other doors. And those doors lead into other rooms with backdoors and side-doors.
On the face of it, this seems to veer off into a never-ending maze of doors and corridors. But that depends on which door you open. And even if you become lost in the maze, you can always retrace your steps to the central room, for all passageways thread back through one of the four doors. However much they may diverge after exiting the central room, they all converge at that common point of origin.
So what are the four questions? (1) Is sola Scriptura the only rule of faith? (2) Does man have freewill? (3) Is the New Covenant continuous with the Old? (4) Are the sacraments a means of grace?
Each door represents one of these four questions. And when you open each door, a leads you into a hallway, with a row of "yes" answers on one side and "no" answers on the other.
III. Door 1
Is sola Scriptura the only rule of faith?
I. Yes! Protestantism.
II. No! Catholicism, Anglo-Catholicism, Orthodoxy, rationalism, Mormonism, Pentecostalism, &c.
A. Open Systems of Revelation
Some schools of thought would deny that their position amounts to new or continuous revelation. But whatever the foreign currency or exchange rate, their position has the same cash value.
1. Catholicism
For many people, sola Scriptura is not the solution, but the problem. Because Scripture is not self-organizing or self-interpreting, sola Scriptura generates chaos. That is why, so the argument goes, it is necessary to have a Church that can speak with one authoritative voice.
This is the classic Catholic objection to the Protestant rule of faith. And many people find the objection quite compelling. For the sake of argument, suppose that we agree with this objection. Does that simply the choice?
Often, critics of a given view assume that rebutting the opposing position automatically validates their own. But that doesn’t always follow. For example, the Roman Church did not have an official canon for over 1500 years. And it was only under the pressure of the Protestant Reformation that it finally decreed a canon of its own.
As at other points, which door you come out of elsewhere has consequences for where you wind up here. If you say "yes" to freewill and sola Scriptura alike, then sola Scriptura is more vulnerable to the Catholic objection inasmuch as freewill is an inherently unstable and destabilizing dynamic, and when you plug it into sola Scriptura, chaos may well ensue. If, on the other hand, you say "yes" to sola Scriptura, but "no" to freewill, then sola Scriptura is not just another free radical, but functions within the providence of God.
It may be said that even if you take the canon for granted, it fails to alleviate the irony of those who come to the same Bible, but go away with opposing views. The same people who insist on sola Scriptura are the very ones who cannot agree on what it means. So sola Scriptura is obviously an impractical rule of faith. It leads into a trackless maze.
For many, this is a persuasive charge. Is there an answer? There are several. But let us begin with just one. The unspoken assumption is that some other rule of faith is available which will save us from these dire consequences. But that is illusory, for every rule of faith assumes the right of private judgment. Consider the Catholic alternative. The Catholic must exercise his private judgment in deeming the Roman Church to be the one true church and heir to the promises of Christ and his Apostles. He must exercise his private judgment in deeming that the promise of Mt 16:16-18 was official rather than personal, that Peter ordained a seamless line of successors, and so on. He must exercise his private judgment in winnowing the ordinary from the extraordinary Magisterium. Now, these involve him in a host of intricate exegetical and historical judgments.
Consider some exegetical questions. Does the promise of Christ (Mt 16:16-18) refer to Peter? A fair case can be made out for this identification. Yet the parallel with Mt 7:24 invites a Christological referent. And if 16:18 is equating the papacy with the Vicar of Christ, does v23 equate the papacy with the Antichrist? Does the promise refer to Peter alone? No. The promise was extended to the Apostolate in general (18:17-18; Jn 20:23). Does the promise have reference to a Petrine office? No. Indeed, the argument for Petrine primacy is in tension with the argument for apostolic succession. How can Peter’s authority be intransmissible in relation to the Apostolate, but transmissible in relation to the episcopate? Was Peter the first bishop of Rome? No, because such a question confounds the Apostolate with the episcopate. Moreover, it is anachronistic to read the monarchal episcopate back into the 1C Church of Rome— A point conceded in contemporary Catholic scholarship. Cf. R. Brown, Priest and Bishop (Paulist Press, 1970).
Furthermore, the Church of Rome wasn’t founded by Peter. It was most likely an extension of Messianic synagogues (cf. Acts 18:2; Rom 16:3). For that matter, the Diocese of Pontus-Bithynia has a weightier claim to be a Petrine See than the Roman See (1 Pet 1:1).
Consider some historical questions. Can we document an unbroken apostolic succession? What about the Great Schism? "For nearly half a century the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another, so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another, and, in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side," J. Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (Ignatius, 1987), 196. "It must be frankly admitted that bias or deficiencies in the sources makes it impossible to determine in certain cases whether the claimants were popes or anti-popes," New Catholic Encyclopedia (CUA, 1967) 1:632.
What about rigged elections? (Cf. NCE 11:572b.) What about nullified elections? In "his constitution 'De fratrum nostrorum' (1503)," Julius II "declared null and void every pontifical election brought about by simony," Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford, 1977), 768a.
What about the various impediments to valid ordination, such as the absence of "perfect chastity"? "The lawful reception of Orders demands outstanding and habitual goodness of life, especially perfect chastity," NCE 7:89a. "Mere conscious rejection or unconscious repression of sexuality is not chastity," NCE 3:516. One wonders in passing how representatives of the Renaissance papacy measured up to these saintly conditions!
How do we sift the extraordinary from the ordinary Magisterium? Isn’t this a fallible and retrospective judgment? In "Unum Sanctam," Boniface VIII denied that salvation was obtainable outside the Roman Church. His position was codified by the councils of Florence and Lateran IV. But Rahner (in is famous or infamous category of "anonymous Christians"), Ratzinger, Urs von Balthasar (Dare We Hope? [Ignatius, 1988].) and John-Paul II (Cf. Crossing the Threshold of Hope [Knopf, 1994]; G. Warner, "Is the Pope Catholic," The Spectator [2001].) offer up salvation on far more favorable terms.
Trent repeatedly anathematizes Protestant believers, but Vatican II kindly dubs them the "separated brethren," and even spares some generous words for the followers of Muhammad.
Pius IX roundly condemned higher criticism, but Vatican II lifted the ban. Cf. H. Vorgrimler, ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II (Herder & Herder, 1969), 3:205-06. And it is freely received by the likes of Rahner (E.g., Inspiration in the Bible [Herder & Herder, 1961].), Ratzinger (E.g., In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall [Eerdmans, 1995]. where he adopts the Documentary Hypothesis and demotes Gen 1 to the level of an expurgated version of a heathen creation myth [10-13].), Fitzmyer (E.g., A Christological Catechism: New Testament Answers [Paulist, 1991]. To take just one example, notice how Fitzmyer accuses our Lord of "protological thinking…being a child of his time," [59]), and John-Paul II (Cf. K. Rahner, I Remember [Crossroad, 1985], 95.) It seems as though the dividing line between the ordinary and extraordinary Magisterium can only be drawn with the benefit of postmortem hindsight. Poor Galileo!
Catholicism can always salvage the infallible reputation of the Magisterium by declaring after the fact that embarrassing positions reflect the ordinary Magisterium. But there is a toll for crossing this bridge. You make magisterial teaching unfalsifiable by rendering it unverifiable.
So, to say nothing more, this means that every Roman Catholic must begin life as a de facto Protestant, must begin where every Protestant must begin. But if you must lay your foundation on Protestant ground, then sola Scriptura should quarry every brick of the rising edifice.
2. Orthodoxy
Then there are many in agreement with the Catholic objection, but in disagreement with the Catholic answer. Take the Orthodox alternative, which canonizes conciliar tradition. But the problem with this alternative is that every belief has a toehold in tradition, for tradition is just another name for the history of belief. Heresy has a past. Heresy is just as old as orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy codifies a sliver of tradition —the tradition canonized in ecumenical councils is the norm. Ah, but who decides when a council local or ecumenical? Heretical or orthodox? The Greek Orthodox Church has never had a really official canon of Scripture inasmuch as none of the councils it deems to be ecumenical decreed a canon.
Setting tradition in opposition to private judgment commits a regressive fallacy, for tradition has to start somewhere, and where it begins is with the work of pioneering individuals. Today's tradition was yesterday's innovation. All that Orthodoxy does is to codify the private judgment of trendsetters like Basil and Athanasius. If the right of private judgment were all that problematic, then resorting to tradition would only push the problem back a step. The right of private judgment has been camouflaged, but not uprooted.
How you come down on sola Scriptura affects your polity and ecclesiology. For if you believe that the alternative to sola Scriptura is some form of sacred tradition, then that generally commits you to a high ecclesiology, with a firm lay/clerical division and authoritarian teaching office. But if, on the other hand, you subscribe to sola Scriptura, then you can afford a more pragmatic policy on church government.
Like Catholicism, Orthodoxy hitches its star to apostolic and sacramental succession. (Cf. G. Florovsy, Bible, Church, Tradition [Norland, 1972], 17-18; J. Meyendorff, Living Tradition [St. Vladimir's Press, 1978], 50-51.) But trying to establish a historical case for apostolic and sacramental succession would appear to be even more vexed for Orthodoxy than Romanism inasmuch as the Orthodox church is much more decentralized than the Roman See, consisting of numerous national bodies (e.g., Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Georgian), each with its own checkered history of internal intrigue and backstabbing.
In the nature of the case, divine revelation presumes that God is an object of knowledge. So sola Scriptura, if true, would undercut the apophatic tradition in Byzantine theology.
3. Mormonism
Unlike the conflict with Rome, which has generated a huge polemical legacy, Mormonism is a rapidly growing and relative newcomer to the theological scene, and for that reason, has not received the critical attention it deserves. It should be said at the outset that even if the Mormon apologist could establish an open canon, that would not move an inch towards establishing the prophetic pretensions of Joseph Smith or other Mormon sages.
Hugh Nibley, that most versatile of Mormon scholars, has made a detailed case for an open canon. Cf. Since Cumorah (Deseret Book Company, 1988).
Let’s outline his argument:
i) Initial opposition to the claims of Joseph Smith was prized on the assumption of a closed canon and plenary verbal inspiration.
ii) Textual criticism has overthrown the traditional theory of plenary verbal inspiration.
iii) Source criticism and form criticism have demonstrated that the Gospels are secondary rather than primary sources of the Christian kergyma. Moreover, they suppress the original message.
iv) The very existence of the Synoptics represents a tampered version of the original text.
v) The coexistence of the Apocrypha, Agrapha and Pseudepigrapha with the NT documents goes to show that the NT canon does not enjoy a privileged standing.
vi) Alongside the NT there existed an esoteric tradition.
vii) The NT only bears witness to the pre-Easter teaching of Christ.
What are we to make of these charges?
i) Nibley consistently confounds higher and lower criticism. It is a non-sequitur to infer the errancy of the autographa from textual variants.
ii) Nibley exploits the concessions of liberal Catholic and Protestant Bible scholarship as a launching pad. Of course, conservative Christians would reject the operating assumption. Hence, Nibley’s whole chain-of-reasoning is hung on thin air.
iii) Orality and literality coexisted in NT times. For example, the NT preserves the letters of Paul (Romans—Philemon) as well as the speeches of Paul (in Acts). Hence, there is no reason to insist on a primary and preliminary oral stage as over against a secondary literary stage, or assign these to different hands.
iv) The Synoptics vary according to the target-audience. Matthew adds some background details for his Jewish audience, and Luke for his Gentile audience, but there is nothing nefarious about audience-adaptation. Moreover, both Matthew and Luke are extremely conservative in their editing of Marcan materials.
v) Controversies over the extent of the canon prove that the ancient Church did not operate with an open canon.
vi) The fabrication of rival literature takes the preexisting canon as the frame of reference.
vii) It is not the Church that was guilty of suppressing evidence. Rather, it is well known that Marcion was the one who produced an expurgated version of the canon
viii) Mormonism has to resort to a conspiracy theory to justify the canonicity of its own literacy. But this poses a familiar dilemma. How do you document a conspiracy? If it’s a conspiracy, there shouldn’t be a public record, right? The very fact that Nibley turns to the publications of the Church Fathers undermines his central thesis. This isn’t classified, top-secret material. Long before Nag Hammadi we knew what we knew about Marcion and the Gnostics because the Church Fathers published point-by-point expositions and refutations of the opposing position. So this is completely above-board.
ix) Nibley is deceptive about relative chronology and literary dependence. None of his counterexamples coincide with the date of the NT. He builds his case on such miscellaneous and late-dated source material as the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas (3C), the Gospel of Thomas (4-5C)—ragments of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas can be traced back to the 2C via the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, but even these fragments are derivative of the canonical Gospels—the Clementine Recognitions (3-4C), The Pistis Sophia (4C), 2 Enoch (Nibley assigns this a pre-70 AD date. Yet some scholars have dated it no earlier than the 7C and as late as the 15C!), and even Innocent the III (12-13C)!
x) Examples like the so-called "Messianic Secret" do not afford evidence of a disciplina arcana. Indeed, Nibley’s examples are taken from the publicized teaching of Christ in the Gospels. And Nibley’s major source of a disciplina arcana comes from Basil (4C)—which is a very selective use of late evidence.
xi) Even if the Gospels were limited to the pre-Easter teaching of Christ—which represents a serious overstatement—the NT is not limited to the Gospels. The NT covers the work of Christ from the Incarnation to the Ascension and Session— with a preview of the Parousia. So it is not as if there were a great gap in the record. Nibley is piggybacking on the Gnostic and Catholic appeal to Acts 1:2-3 to smuggle in Mormon esoterica. But in terms of their function in the narrative strategy of Acts, vv2-3 do not issue an invitation to interpolate oral tradition. Rather, vv2-3 serve as a set-up for the apostolic kergyma. The preaching and prooftexting in Acts take their cue from dominical techniques (cf. Lk 24:25-27,45-48). The "kingdom of God" (1:3) has come in the coming of Christ (Lk 11:20; Acts 8:12; 19:8; 20:25; 28:23,31).
From a later generation of scholarship, Stephen Robinson has argued that the exclusion of other inspired writings from the canon (cf. Lk 1:1; 2 Cor 5:9; Col 4:16; Jude 14-15) opens the door to a reintroduction of revelation. Cf. How Wide the Divide, C. Blomberg & S. Robinson (IVP, 1997), 63,206-7 (nn.20-22).
But there are a number of weaknesses with this argument:
a)Why certain letters of Paul, didn’t make it into the canon is highly speculative. To build a positive case on such conjectural grounds is like flying in a vacuum tube.
b) However, the fact that 13 of his letters made it into the canon renders it quite unlikely that his other letters were actively excluded. What would be the motive?
c) The ancient church didn’t have the kind of centralized command-and-control that would even make it possible to not only exclude but eliminate all trace of rival literature. Indeed, the survival of so much of the Agrapha, Apographa and pseudepigrapha bears witness to that fact. The fact is that although the ancient church arrived at an informal consensus on the canon, there was no official canon until the Reformation forced the issue (E.g. WCF 1:2-3; Trent ("Decree on the Canonical Scriptures"). So the popular image of an Index Liborum Prohibitorum in the ancient church is a blatant anachronism.
d) Again, the ancient church didn’t have a publishing house. So it seems likely that these other letters didn’t survive, not because their was an organized effort to suppress them, but because there were not enough copies in circulation to be recopied and escape the ravages of time.
e) From a Reformed standpoint, we must add that the "loss" of an inspired writing is not a historical accident, but due to God’s providential design.
f) There is no evidence that the pre-Marcan gospels were inspired.
g) Even Robinson admits that we cannot confidently identify Jude 14-15 with the extant Enochian literature (Ibid., 206 [n.20].). So we cannot appeal to the Enochian Pseudepigrapha as inspired literature that was excluded from the canon, for Jude’s allusion may not have reference to any of this material—which is, in any case, a revamping of earlier source material.
h) There is also a difference between quoting a narrative work as prophetic and quoting a prophetic character within the narrative. The inspired status of the speaker is not interchangeable with the inspired status of the narrative in general, or vice versa. This commits a level-confusion.
i) Since the Mormon "scriptures" don’t resemble the Pauline letters or Enochian literature or Ur-Markus, Robinson’s counterexamples are subversive to his thesis. If this supplies the standard of comparison, then the Mormon "scriptures" are bogus, for they didn’t restore Paul’s "lost" letter to the Laodiceans and the like.
j) Since the Mormon "scriptures" contradict the canon of Scripture, and in fact present a completely different and divergent belief-system (on God, man, sin, salvation, christology, eschatology, creation, predestination, providence, the church, &c.), they can hardly represent a complement to the canon.
However, Robinson combines this with the old assertion of textual tampering—dating "whatever changes were made in the present text to between AD 55 and 200" [Ibid., 206 (n.1].) He also chides Blomberg for insisting that there is no textual evidence of deletion as question-begging because "it is the LDS contention that the evidence was deleted" (Ibid, 206 [n17].) But this position is faulty on several grounds:
i) The burden of proof is on the Mormon to document textual tampering. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the presumption is quite properly in favor of the textual integrity of the NT.
ii) Patristic and MS authorities not only attest the state of the NT text at the time of the Church Father or MS, but also attest a tradition of transmission. As such, the presumption of textual integrity and continuity extends well below the cut-off date of the earliest extant witness.
iii) Any effort to systematically tamper with the NT text would have ignited a firestorm of controversy, resulting in schism and generating a sizable polemical literature. This could not be covered up.
Incidentally, the same expedient figures in Muslim apologetics. Because Muhammad set up the Bible as the standard of comparison (e.g., 5:46-47; 10:94), any discrepancy between his message and Scripture falsifies his prophetic pretensions. Muslims can only evade this by claiming that the text of Scripture was tampered with. But even if the Church were willing and able to pull of this silent revolution, the most ancient versional and MS evidence extant still antedates Muhammad by centuries. So the charge falls of its own dead weight.
As a more general issue, the category of the divine in Mormon theology is inadequate to support a doctrine of inspiration and revelation. Mormonism subscribes to finite theism. The gods of Mormon theology are scaled up versions of men (Cf. D&C 130:22; Moses 6:9). As such, they would be subject to the same limitations of any other spatiotemporal being.
Incidentally, this is also a crippling impediment to the inspired status of Hindu and Buddhist "scriptures." A doctrine of divine revelation is only as good as a doctrine of the divine nature. And that is to say nothing of the further fact that the Vedic sages were acidheads.
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