"Alternative Protestantism"

Plenary Address by John Milbank

[[Joel Garver offers a more concise, articulate summary of this address at his blog, sacra doctrina.]]

Radical Orthodoxy has been taken to task for ruthlessness, but it is explicitly an ecumenical theology--not a theology of ecumenism, but of itself an ecumenical theology, with a particular ecumenical diagnosis. In this sense, it may be the first ecumenical theology there has been (!). But this doesn’t meant that Radical Orthodoxy has only academic origins. Its founders are grounded in catholic practice, broadly catholic in orientation, committed to ancient creeds, ecumenical councils, high sacramentality, and three-fold ministry (qualifications to come).

RadOx is not in itself some sort of rival church. To compare it with the Reformed tradition is not to compare like with like. Also, it is only a recent movement of reflection, while the Reformed tradition is a long and complex tradition of practice and theory.

There are not then 2 alternatives.

RadOx could be incarnated in Reformed contexts.

But it tends to offer critiques of all existing Christian denominations, in connection with a particular genealogy of Christian history.

It does reflect on the central Calvinist theme of majesty and glory of God.

Calvin and Calvinist tradition:
some general considerations about history of Protestant
finally, reflections on Christianity as a whole as a monotheism.

Anglicans appeal for authority to church fathers, also to earlier scholastics, esp. Aquinas (this began with Richard Hooker), and Anglicans also appealed early on to John Calvin. Even high church 17th c theologians were Calvinists, despite their developments of deification and high sacramentality and participation. Those weren’t necessarily movements away from Calvinism, we see the same developments among Puritans.

relevant question is: what did Calvin think and what did he leave unclear?

Genealogical perspective of RadOx: Our main historical target is not the Reformation, rather late scholasticism. Late medieval thought tended to back off from a metaphysics of participation; particularly, justification ceased to do with sharing in divine nature and became more a matter of a bare divine affirmation (ignoring some clear NT on this point). This could be combined with Palagian elements, now seen more as stemming from human autonomous resources. The concern with covenant as between two independent initiative (human and divine) starts here.

By contrast, the Reformation can be seen as a practical, though imperfect, critique of the later Middle Ages, with more attention to the humanist sense of language, human history, and arts--culture. Since Calvinism has its origins in humanism, it is open to this dimension. Later Protestants (Edward's) embody such an alternative Protestantism.

Luther and Calvin on justification: They revert to a patristic concern with participation in Christ. God’s love for us precedes our participation in Christ (Calvin) . God’s free gift brings the further gift of sanctification.

There is no scholastic habit of righteousness instilled within us (Ames).

Is Calvin further removed from participation than Luther? Luther had more of a metaphysics than Calvin, and it was a univocalist and nominalist metaphysics. So Luther had to concede the hypostatic union as one thing (monophysite). For the logos to be united to the human individual, God must enter into creation, like an alien place. If humanity is united to divinity (a la nominalism), it must fused with it. Likewise in Luther, our participation in Christ edges too close to pantheistic identity, with no sharing between identity and difference.

The danger of the early Lutheran view is its physicalist mode which downgrades sanctification. Calvin’s version stresses that this sharing is a sharing of finite in infinite nature, which demands a participatory metaphysic of creation. But, later Calvin has too much separation.

Justification opens upon sanctification.
By sharing in Christ we are sanctified.
Participation is present in Reformed, but in a christological context. This might extend to a more general metaphysical theory of participation, a parallel extrapolation from Calvin’s eucharistic theology. Later Calvinism did develop more Platonic readings of Calvin.

French Huguenots were more participatory (?)

Calvin’s ontology is vague. It’s not clear that the nominalist/voluntarist reading is the only or best. Most Anglican and Puritan readings thought otherwise.

Calvin explicitly rejected the late medieval distinction between God’s absolute and ordained will. He has a feeling for divine simplicity comparable with that of Aquinas. Creaturely freedom is fully and absolutely determined by God. The two do not compete together in a zero sum game.

Participation language alone conveys creation ex nihilo. Calvin’s idea seem to open up to that of the Czech Reformer [ ? ], where nature displays divine features.

If, inversely, participation were only an imitation, then it would be palagianism (not by grace). In consequence, there is no mileage in pitting covenant against participation (this is a conceptual error). If covenant is contrasted with participation, it necessarily implies creeping palagianism. (Zwingliansim) Justification is now obsessed with God’s decree and our mode of acceptance.
Faith is now our contribution, in a Scotus mode-- a la Suarez.

Sacramental participation is now downplayed. For Calvin, the ceremony of baptism works a means of grace and thereby incorporates us into the community of the new covenant.

The later Kuyperian notion of church is as one sphere among other spheres. Similarly, the sense that the eucharist allows direct participation in Christ is lost in the 17th c, in favor of the view that it’s simply a sign of the new covenant. All these suggest that the old and new are basically the same. In the new dispensation, we utterly depend on God, but lost is the sense that we are to depend on God, as God’s children.

Later Puritan and Dutch Reformers moved away from Calvin. He was no strict sabbatharian, and he still regarded ordination as a sacrament and was open on bishops. The western tradition from Jerome to Aquinas tends to see the priest and not the bishop as the prime receiver of sacramental powers. Anglicans often follow the eastern view and Ignatius of Antioch (such that the bishop is the prime sacramental officer), but that really should require many more bishops than the Anglican church has. So this shouldn't be such a great stumbling block between traditions.

This is not to say that all of Calvin is adequate!
He has too much of a covenant theology in that he sees the older alliance as salvific in its own right, rather than, as for catholic theology, as foreshadowing and proleptically sharing in the new covenant. It’s as if God provides a way for gentiles to be Jews, rather than that the Jews participated in gentile salvation. It is not an accident that Calvinism as new Jews has sometimes led to racism in Calvinist thought, where the theological undergirding of racism was overwhelmingly Calvinist. This incidence of racism has a tragically ironic relationship to . . [[? ].

I prefer the catholic approach, because if God is one, than salvation has only been through God, always, who can remake us through one person in Christ and teach us again the law of love--not through any lesser dispensations. Calvin has too weak a doctrine of the fall (!). Earlier dispensations besides ancient Judaism only regarded it as educative. This runs counter to a deep-seated American tendency to see itself as the new Israel. That’s dangerous!

The idea of justification as imputation is still not acceptable; it paradoxically offends the idea of divine glory. If God is simple and omnipotent, than His decision to treat us as just makes us just. If creation is not univocally alongside God, then there is no ontological limbo in which a divine degree of justification can hover. When it reaches us it is already created grace. It must again make us just and with persistence. We must receive the infused habit of justice.

Faith in God must be already and more primordially the love of God.

The magisterial Reformation tends to displace the idea that Christianity is the religion of the centrality of love (in favor of trust and hope).

Calvin’s Christology is unsatisfactory; it fails to embrace participatory ontology. It’s as if there is a schizophrenic interplay of persons. Calvin, like Scotus, refuses the deification of Christ, [[quasi personality in humanity.]] For if Christ’s human nature is divinely personified, then it is a Godlike character, which can’t be separated . Calvin’s route leans toward purely human without divine. This indicates a failure to grasp the difference between nature and hypotasis. Calvin defines the hypostatical union as that which makes one person out of two natures. But he fails to see that the union happens from the divine side. Calvin sees that the predication of nature ensures that in the incarnate person the distinction of created and uncreated remains absolute. Because of the union via personality--style, autosubstantive--there can be communication of the seemingly alien idioms. This lies in the fact that the union is through personality (persona means personality!).

There is only one divine esse in Christ (not a human being as well as divine being) according to Aquinas, so he has a human nature but is not a human being. So, the divine attribute of omnipotence is exercised insofar as the nature is, divinely.

This is an extra of nature and a hypostasis of logos. This would indeed be like Calvin’s idea of the body of Christ being confined to heaven in eucharistic doctrine. There is a tendency to see the divine/created relationship too ontologically.

If one observes the ontological difference we see that the reserve is in the gift and not held back from it, since the gift is also the gift of the reserve. Because Christ is physically present in the eucharist, he is all the more accessible. Because Christ’s humanity has always ruled creation, it reserves in itself the mystery of the person of the Son. The extra idea misunderstands this.

Calvin’s sacramental theology is not really coherent. It has a good pneumatological emphasis--the real presence of Christ is there because the receiver lifts up the elements. But the idea of spiritual participation in the body of Christ in heaven makes little sense. Christ’s body is potentially present anywhere, and will be so eschatologically, but not as Luther’s sense of being contained, but only in the way that God is omnipresent--substantially. The bread and wine can become accidents of Christ’s body and blood without local presence. Transubstantiation suggests participation in the physical mysteriously. It stresses more the divine kenotic descent of grace to us.

The real presence a late phrase, and has much more quasi-Lutheran connotations of liberal local presence. Transubstantiation is more apophatic. We’re rare in this eclecticism.

Calvin’s humanist and practical theology is in search of a metaphysics. There should be a realist participatory metaphysics to convey Calvin’s themes of grace and glory. It is an accident of history that only the Spanish Jesuit’s works were at hand (Suarez).

Calvin’s practical orientation is one ingredient in American pragmatism legacy, one clue to the American intellectual legacy. The title of Ames’ treatise was “Technometria”--this is one reason American thought is so pious and full of technological wizardry. . .

If one only stresses the usefulness of thought that tries to transform the world, it’s all the same, with pointless differences. This trajectory leads to a dangerous corruption of foodstuffs, and the feeling that science ought to be doing something! Yet this is not to say that one can’t produce new things. Developing things has to be guided by a feeling for essence--not fully disclosed but dimly affirmed in openness.

We do need laws which constrain our making and our use.

An aspect of these emerging natures is the question of our appropriateness and finality in relation to the ends of humanity and the cosmos. We have to judge--it’s an aesthetic issue. The American tradition has sometimes been fully aware of this. Without this sense of aesthetic, pragmatism can be demonic. It’s not that ethical law supervenes on our animal nature--our human nature is already a certain beautified convenience. The way we are supposed to be is part of this aesthetic pattern, such that we can discern--if bestiality were ordained to us this would destroy our nature.. .

To speak of aesthetic discernment is to appeal to divine reason as much as to divine will and command. If if were not for such discernment, then we would say this is one way to glorify God, and one only grasps formal effectiveness. It reduces conventia to technology. Such reduction disallows that the system discloses God’s nature, by participation, and we can’t know that God is good in any analogical sense, including new good things. Hence we can’t love God, but only trust in him blindly.

I am convinced that the Bible insists primarily on the love of God and the disclosure of God in the cosmos.

We need reformed catholicism and alternative protestantism.
In Christ is where we see that God is love.
In Christ we see how the cosmos begins to be harmonized beyond violence.
The project of love is only possible if we have faith and hope that being is receptive of love. Christ opens up the universe again to the miracle of love and the God of glory.

In a counter reaction to Darwinism, 19th c protestantism abandoned Newman and the Oxford movement and the view that miracles came to end. There is a more catholic direction of accepting the unlimited continuing power of the spirit in the world. Christianity needs to link this ecstatic relation with the theological sense that Christ is the gift of the Spirit to the church, to begin to realize the kingdom of love upon earth. All Protestantism and all Christianity has to take more seriously the main movement of Christianity of the last 200 years, in the direction of ecstatic Christianity (even though I feel uncomfortable with it). It must mean something.

As Christians in the 19th c. discerned, this requires a more social understanding of the church and a greater understanding of the ecclesia as a project of love in society. We need to renew the socialist project by proclaiming that the faith opened up is possible because of its analogical structure.

Still more radically, we need to reinvent Christianity to render it more orthodox. If miracles didn’t end with apostolic times, then surely neither did revelation, even if it only shows us once again Christ. But Christ, even as absolute truth in time, was still in humanity bound by his time, else he couldn’t have been incarnate. The eternal response of the spirit to the logos--this response is Christ’s gift to us, but he only gives it insofar as he already receives the church’s response, if he is to be incarnate on earth and to exist. Thus Mary’s fiat is required for incarnation, and all Jesus’s social incarnations on earth. The reception of Christ as incarnation of God is constitutive of his being the incarnation of being God. Otherwise we have a fantasy of a nonhistorical Jesus.

The full truth of Christ has to be unfolded in later events. Christ is only incarnate as truth if he is invoked also as the absolutely true response commensurate with his Godhead.

We now have to talk about something like a double incarnation if we are to be radically orthodox beyond orthodoxy so far.

We have been given the possibility of love, but groaning cosmos awaits our interpretation and embodiment of this love and we don’t know or see what love is. How is agape related to eros?How can love we don’t choose be commanded? What is the place of sexual love? Is love univocal, equivocal, or analogical? How are we to love non humans creatures and inanimate things? How are we to relate the love of human beings to other manifestations to a love of Christ who shows the finality of God himself.?

A certain austere monotheism, refusing participation, has been very demythologizing, and secularizing. (the reverse of Bultman) Doesn’t the lack of the mediation of the divine word lead inevitably to manic claims of direct access to an arbitrary divine voice and terrorism? Is all this biblical, or does the NT require an enlarged biblical vision beyond the literal word of the Bible?!!!!

If God is transcendently and imminently one, then God is not an individual--a big one--rather it means that God is simple and plenitudinous. God is not in competition with other gods but is absolute deity beyond the godhead. To oppose monotheism to polytheism is to have an idolatrous monotheism which lapses back to polytheism.

Doesn’t then the entire glory of God require a stress on participation and the re-enchantment of the cosmos which can acknowledge its God-given mysteries, and then we can help save the cosmos for the future.

This is not only reflected in human spiritual subjects. We can honor God in other ways as well. We tend to project reduced subjectivity on God. Isn’t this supposed non-paganism a serious kind of idolatry. Recently, we were shown by John Cary how orthodox Irish theologians reconstructed the celtic gods as semi-fallen angels, or unfallen human beings, as well as evil demons. Few people were so naive as to suppose that the goddess Venus didn’t exist but the resurrected Jesus does. In the Middle Ages, folks assigned different levels of reality to surviving pagan gods, etc. More recently Marion theology sees that apophaticism regarding One must also entail recognition of lesser spiritual powers.

These are hints for a generous accommodation of the various spiritualities of this world, both in the past and today.

George Carey was once asked, “Do you believe in angels?” He reported replied, “I don’t know but my wife is one.”

I would hope that to be RadOx means that one realizes that this sentiment reflects not only sexism, but also atheism. Let us rather, in this new millennium, in the name of Christ, try to recover the full plenitude of the western metapoetic metaphysical vision. This alone will save us now.

+++++
James K. A. Smith’s Response:

I hear you saying, “become what you are.” The Reformed tradition is a catholic tradition. We don’t always make it back as far as Calvin--thanks for helping us get back there.

I’m struck by one charge you make, that Calvin’s is a theology in search of a metaphysics. I’m moved to respond that RadOx is a metaphysics in search of the Bible!!!

I take your point. Calvin didn’t do a metaphysics. The tradition has started to work on it, and Calvinist/Reformed metaphysics so wants to honor the integrity of creation as a created good that it can sound non-participatory and non-deistic, since it wants to emphasize that all that creation needs is enfolded into it from the beginning. I think this is one place where maybe the 20th c Reformed tradition has tried to develop a metaphysic.

On participation and Reformed metaphysic--I think that here RadOx slides toward occasionalism.

Please, we don’t want to be the theologians of the fall. You said that Calvin has too weak a doctrine of the Fall. Can you unpack that for us?

Milbank: If it’s strong enough, only incarnation can save us, but the Reformed emphasis on salvation downplays it.

Questions from the floor:

Milbank: Transubstantiation is based on Aquinas’ esse, it doesn’t downgrade the bread and wine, but they directly inhere in the divine body/identical with esse. It’s bound up with a level of of esse more fundamental than a level of essence/accidents. It’s all about a theory of the presence of God.

??Is it that the recognition of Jesus as God by humans is the ground for the hypostatic union coming about?

Milbank: Already Christ is being received into the world through Mary, and how is this possible?(it’s more an effect of the arrival of perfection of her action as a proleptics of participation in Christ). The point is that the significance is a figura of church, the church is already present in Mary, in the spirit in her response. What does it mean in terms of human existence that it requires the response of other people? Jesus’ enhypostatics and divinized humanity is not separable from actions. Without something like a proper response to him, the coming about of this hypostatic union is not possible. This is the translation at the human level of fact that the logos is not without the Holy Sprit. Trinitarian theology gives justice to the constitutionality of Jesus’s existence. If there is no recognition of Jesus (he is not immune to normal laws); if, for example, he had been brutalized as a child.. . . .we’ve just not thought about what incarnation means.

This is an attempt to do justice of all the data of the NT.

And, it allows for metaphoricity. God does not become anything (wouldn’t be God if God did become things). We’re not talking about the transformation of God, but of humanity.

Posted by Margaret at September 15, 2003 08:31 PM