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Protestant subtraction
A historical, ecclesial, and theological exercise.
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues against what he calls “subtraction theories” of secularism. A subtraction account describes secularism as simply removing, say, belief in God from the equation; hence, a secular age is the same world minus outmoded ideas about an all-powerful man in the sky. Against this, Taylor argues that secularism is in fact the proposal of something positive, something new and substantive that was not there before—regardless of its truth.
Now apply the concept of subtraction to the story of Christian division over the centuries. I first thought of the following exercise as “playing the Protestant game.” Most of my life I have been surrounded by people who believe, usually explicitly, that most of what the church did and taught from the apostolic fathers through the eighteenth or nineteenth century was erroneous. Here in west Texas, that’s still true. Sometimes this view is made out to be allied to the reformations of the sixteenth century, though typically in ignorance of the fact that, for example, the magisterial reformers did not abolish creeds or infant baptism or ordination or Christian government or other phenomena low-church American evangelicals take for granted as capital-C “Catholic” (and therefore bad).
At the same time, there seems to be a creeping openness among these very people to more and more of “the tradition”: to the church calendar, to saints and monks, to sacramental practice, to creeds and councils, to patristic and even medieval wisdom. This is part of the “loosening” I’ve identified before, which is non-ideological and thus works in every which direction—sometimes toward reclaiming sacred tradition, sometimes toward pursuing charismatic gifts, sometimes toward relaxing social conventions (regarding alcohol or gambling, for example), sometimes toward liberalizing long-standing teachings (regarding sex or male ordination, for example). There’s no one way this loosening is happening. Much is being shaken at the moment; how things will settle won’t be clear for decades, or so it seems to me.
But return to the notion of subtraction. Below I have formulated a list of fifty doctrines or practices that were more or less universally accepted and established by the time of the late middle ages. Many of them underwent serious development in the medieval period; most of them have roots in the church fathers; some of them are basically present in toto before Nicaea. So it wouldn’t be fair to say that the list is just “whatever the church believed from 100 to 1500”—though parts of the list do fit that bill. It would be fair to say that all, or nearly all, of these things described the church just before the Great Schism, and that all, or nearly all, of them continue to describe the faith and piety of two-thirds of the global church today.
So here is the exercise. Ask yourself: When do you hop off the train? When do you say, Yes, I reject items x through y, but no more from here on out? And what is the logic that informs your decision? Is that logic disciplined? arbitrary? a matter of preference? a matter of upbringing? of local social convention? Are there concrete, nonnegotiable biblical or theological reasons to hold back your Christian neighbor from striking through the next item on the list—or the next ten?
Let’s say that the Orthodox have questions about the first three items and that the Anglicans, at least the higher-church among them, have modest questions about a handful (but no more) in the first twenty. Say that, depending on whom you ask, Lutherans and Calvinists want to reject the first twenty to thirty (maybe thirty-five) items on the list. Say that American evangelicals are uncomfortable with every item through forty-five. Say that primitivists and restorationists have more than occasionally set a question mark next to forty-six and forty-seven, and that Protestant liberals have done the same for the final three items.
Where do you stand? Where does your church? Where does your tradition? Why? And, perhaps most important, what is the doctrine of divine providence, wedded to what doctrine of the church, that makes sense of God’s people having gotten so much so wrong for so long? What else have Christians gotten wrong over the millennia? How can we know? Is there a limit?
And if, as I’m less than subtly wanting to suggest, this sort of indefinite unrolling logic of subtraction is neither wise nor defensible; and if, as I mentioned earlier, there is a spiritual hunger behind the “loosening” we are witnessing, a hunger for unwinding these subtractions in favor of reclaiming what was lost—then what should be reclaimed, and on what basis? Call this last query an exercise in addition, even in restoration.
But I digress. Here’s the list. See what you make of it.
Papal supremacy
Roman primacy
Purgatory
Intercession of saints
Canonization of saints
Intercession of Mary
Veneration of Mary
Mary as Theotokos
Icons
Relics
Holy sites
Monasticism
Vowed celibacy
Vowed poverty
Masses for the dead
Private masses
The Mass
Eucharistic transubstantiation
Eucharistic adoration
Eucharistic change
Eucharistic real presence
“Deutero-canonical” books
Priestly absolution
Priests
Bishops
The sacrament of holy orders
The sacrament of marriage
The magisterium
Dogma
Signs and wonders
Miraculous healings
Exorcisms
Baptismal regeneration
Confirmation/chrismation
Infant baptism
Sacred tradition
Liturgical calendar
Creeds
Extra-congregational polity
Ordination
Liturgical order
Baptismal efficacy
Eucharistic presence
Regular observance of the Eucharist
The necessity of baptism
The doctrine of the Trinity
The divinity of Jesus
The inerrancy of Scripture
The infallibility of Scripture
The indissolubility of marriage
Twenty texts for twenty centuries
Choosing twenty Christian texts from twenty Christian centuries, one text per century. I offer my list. What would yours be?
Suppose you knew someone who wanted to read broadly in the Christian tradition. Specifically, this someone requested twenty Christian texts—no more, no less—one from each century of the church’s existence (present century excluded).
What would you assign? Who would be on your list?
For the purposes of this hypothetical, the texts are not supposed to be “the best” or the most influential or the most significant or what have you. Nor need they represent the full gamut or spectrum of Christian faith, doctrine, practice, and liturgy—as if that were possible.
At the same time, while the someone in question is a sharp reader, they are an Anglophone normie, not a polyglot scholar. You’re not, for example, going to assign the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas. You’re aiming for reasonably accessible texts by great Christian writers that, together, offer a snapshot of what it means to be Christian; what it means to live as a Christian; what it means to believe as a Christian; and so on.
You could tweak the rules as you please. These are my rules. Here are my answers.
*
First century: The Gospel According to Saint John.
Second century: Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Letters.
Third century: Origen, An Exhortation to Martyrdom.
Fourth century: Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation.
Fifth century: Saint Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ.
Sixth century: Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels.
Seventh century: Saint Maximus Confessor, The Lord’s Prayer.
Eighth century: Saint John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith.
Ninth century: St. Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons.
Tenth century: Saint Gregory of Narek, Festal Works.
Eleventh century: Saint Anselm, Cur Deus Homo?
Twelfth century: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God.
Thirteenth century: Saint Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind Into God.
Fourteenth century: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love.
Fifteenth century: Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ.
Sixteenth century: John Calvin, Book II of Institution of Christian Religion.
Seventeenth century: Saint Francis de Sales, An Introduction to the Devout Life.
Eighteenth century: Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits.
Nineteenth century: Saint Thérèse of Liseux, Story of a Soul.
Twentieth century: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship.
*
I will confess, I almost trolled the Prots by leaving out Calvin, Edwards, and Bonhoeffer for Saint Teresa, Saint Alphonsus Liguori, and Simone Weil. That would still be a good list! But I had to be honest. I also somewhat cheated with Julian, whose visions and writing spanned the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Were she to be moved ahead, I would remove Kempis and add Dante or Saint Catherine.
It goes without saying that, for most centuries—though curiously not for all, at least from my vantage point—you could choose a dozen or more texts. It hurts not to include Saint Augustine; but then, neither are there any Cappadocians. The fourth and fifth centuries are rich beyond compare.
It’s clear what I’m prioritizing here: brevity, clarity, piety, devotion, faith, love, prayer, discipleship. With, granted, an emphasis on the person and work of Christ. I also wanted a relative balance between East and West, Greek and Latin. It seems to me that an open-hearted reader of these twenty texts would walk away with a beautiful picture of the meaning of lived Christian faith, told from the inside. I almost envy such a person the experience.
“The slow death of the Protestant churches”
Fifteen years ago, in a journal article on Karl Barth’s christology and Chalcedonian doctrine (among other things), Bruce McCormack concluded his article with the following paragraph (my emphasis): It remains only to say a word about the situation—and the motives which have led me to elaborate precisely this form of Christology in the present moment. The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches.
Fifteen years ago, in a journal article on Karl Barth’s christology and Chalcedonian doctrine (among other things), Bruce McCormack concluded his article with the following paragraph (my emphasis):
It remains only to say a word about the situation—and the motives which have led me to elaborate precisely this form of Christology in the present moment. The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches. I have heard it said—and I have no reason to question it—that if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches (the last named of which will include those denominations, like the Southern Baptists, which are non-confessional in doctrinal matters and congregationalist in their polity). The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation. What all of this means in practice is that it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox. And that means, too, coming to agreements with churches supportive of the classical two-natures scheme in Christology. The question is not, it seems to me, whether the two-natures doctrine has a future. That much seems to have already been decided. The only real question is what form(s) it can take. So it is for the sake of an improved understanding of the potential contained in the two-natures doctrine that I offer my ‘Reformed’ version of kenoticism.
To magisterial Protestant ears, that prediction must sound dire indeed. Dire or no, it seems on the nose to me. In my next book I lay out a threefold typology of the church for heuristic purposes: catholic (=Eastern, Roman, Anglican), reformed (=magisterial Protestant), and baptist (=low-church, congregationalist, non-confessional, believers baptism, etc.). What’s astonishing is simultaneously how much “the reformed” dominate Anglophone theology across the last 200 years and yet how institutionally and demographically invisible actual reformed churches are today, certainly on the North American scene. To the extent that that already-invisible presence is continuing to shrink, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it will continue to dwindle to statistical insignificance. That doesn’t mean there won’t be Lutherans or Calvinists in America four decades from now. But it may mean that they have little to no institutional form or heft—at least one that anybody is aware of who doesn’t already live inside one of their few remaining micro-bubbles.
To be clear, I don’t mean these words as a happy prophecy, dancing on the grave before the body’s interred. Some of my best friends are magisterial Protestants. (Hey oh.) And I wish those friends every success in their ongoing efforts to revivify the American Protestant community. History isn’t written until after the fact; perhaps McCormack and the rest of us naysayers will be proven wrong.
The lines aren’t trending in the direction of renewal, though. So it’s worth reflecting on what the future of American Christianity looks like: either catholic or baptist, which is to say, either “high” (liturgical, sacramental, episcopal, conciliar, creedal, etc.) or “low” (non-creedal, non-confessional, non-sacramental, non-denominational, non-doctrinal, in short, biblicist evangelicalism). To my inexpert eyes, that also seems to be the global choice, not least if you include charismatic traditions under the “low” or “free” category.
The question then is: Do the latter communities have what it takes to weather the storm? Do they, that is, have the resources, the roots, the wherewithal to sojourn, unbending and unbent, in the wilderness that awaits? As Stanley Hauerwas once remarked, the evangelicals have two things in spades: Jesus and energy. What more do they have?
Fred Sanders, in a blog post commenting on McCormack’s programmatic prediction at the time of its publication, thinks evangelicals are possessed of that “more,” or at least are possessed of the relevant potential for the right kind of “more.” He runs a thought experiment, thinking “back” from the perch of 2047 when the dire prophecies of the death of American Protestantism have come to fruition. He writes:
It’s 2047: Bruce McCormack is just over 100 years old and is trying to figure out where to go to church. He’s not picky, he just wants a place that teaches justification by faith and sola scriptura. There are no mainline Protestant churches to choose from, no “obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation.” Everywhere he goes, there are non-denominational evangelicals, and Roman Catholics, and the Orthodox. Who’s got the Reformation theology, where can I go to get it?
Jumping back to 2006, and back to my own evangelical (just barely denominational) context, I can see the advantages of doing what McCormack ’06 recommends: “for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox.” But as an evangelical theologian committed to the theology of the Reformation, I think my more pressing task is to work for a clearer theological witness in evangelical congregations and institutions. I think it’s possible for evangelicalism to function as a much more “obvious institutional bearer of the message of the Reformation.” Indeed, with the mainline keeling over and dropping the Protestant baton, the people most likely to pick it up are people like my people, or maybe Pentecostals in the developing world. Everything hinges on greater theological sophistication and stronger commitment to doctrines like sola scriptura and justification. I actually wonder why McCormack pointed instead to Roman Catholic and Orthodox dialogue partners. Probably it’s because his speech was about reinvigorating traditional Chalcedonian christology, and he (rightly) thinks he’s more likely to find conversation partners about that among Catholics than among evangelicals.
To evangelical theologians (Baptists, non-denominationals, etc.) I would take a hint from McCormack and say: The baton is being dropped, the mainline churches are going down. Study harder, learn the great tradition of Christian doctrine (from the Catholics and Orthodox perhaps), and keep your hands ready to take up the baton of Protestant teaching. Plan for mid-century, when there will be a crying need for an “obvious institutional bearer of the theology of the Reformation.”
That is laudable and wise advice. I do wonder: After what has happened in and to American evangelicalism in the last 15 years, what, if anything, would Sanders (or his Protestant comrades in arms) say about the prospects of such a vision? Can evangelicalism as it stands be reformed—that is, converted to the confessions and doctrines of the magisterial Reformation—from within? Is the rot not yet too deep? Is the form of evangelicalism—that is, its bone-deep opposition to extra-biblical doctrinal formulations and practices, to formal institutional organization and authorities, to anything that might mitigate the frontier revivalist spirit—open to the sheer degree of ecclesial, liturgical, and theological change that would be required to conform to actual magisterial teaching and practice?
My questions are leading, and in the extreme. Granted. I’m open to being wrong. Ratzinger’s oft-quoted words from half a century ago, about the church shrinking in size and prestige but becoming purer and more faithful as a result, may well apply to the churches of the Reformation as much as to Rome. Nor do the trend lines mean anything, literally anything, with respect to whether or not Christians who find themselves in true-blue Protestant churches ought to seek to be faithful as best they can in the time and place in which God has placed them. Obviously they should.
But at the macro level, looking at the big picture, I can’t escape the sense that McCormack is right, and hence that in the coming decades the ecclesiological choice we face, and our children face, will be between two options, not three. If true, that makes a big difference—for church conversations, for theological arguments, for political debates. We ought therefore to face it head on, with courage, clarity, and honesty, and most of all without pretense. Collective denial is not going to make the present crisis disappear. Let’s be thinking and talking now about what it is the times, which is to say the Holy Spirit, requires of us. Let’s not wake up in 2047 and realize we missed our only opportunity to avert disaster.
Diarmaid MacCulloch on the Psalter as the secret weapon of the Reformation
"The explanation for this mass lay activism may lie in the one text which the Reformed found perfectly conveyed their message across all barriers of social status and literacy. This was the Psalter, the book of the 150 Psalms, translated into French verse, set to music and published in unobtrusive pocket-size editions which invariably included the musical notation for the tunes. In the old Latin liturgy the psalms were largely used in monastic services and in private devotional recitation. Now they were redeployed in Reformed Protestantism in this metrical form to articulate the hope, fear, joy and fury of the new movement. They became the secret weapon of the Reformation not merely in France but wherever the Reformed brought new vitality to the Protestant cause. Like so many important components of John Calvin's message, he borrowed the idea from the practice of Strassburg in the 1530s. When he arrived to minister to the French congregation there after his expulsion from Geneva in 1538, he found the French singing these metrical psalms, which has been pioneered by a cheerfully unruly convert to evangelical belief, the poet Clément Marot. Calvin took the practice back to Geneva when he returned there to reconstitute its Reformation. Theodore Beza finally produced a complete French metrical psalter in 1562, and during the crisis of 1562–3, he set up a publishing syndicate of thirty printers through France and Geneva to capitalize on the psalm-singing phenomenon: the resulting mass-production and distribution was a remarkable feat of technology and organization.
"The metrical psalm was the perfect vehicle for turning the Protestant message into a mass movement capable of embracing the illiterate alongside the literate. What better than the very words of the Bible as sung by the hero-King David? The psalms were easily memorized, so that an incriminating printed text could rapidly be dispensed with. They were customarily sung in unison to a large range of dedicated tunes (newly composed, to emphasize the break with the religious past, in contrast to Martin Luther's practice of reusing old church melodies which he loved). The words of a particular psalm could be associated with a particular melody; even to hum the tune spoke of the words of the psalm behind it, and was an act of Protestant subversion. A mood could be summoned up in an instant: Psalm 68 led a crowd into battle, Psalm 124 led to victory, Psalm 115 scorned dumb and blind idols and made the perfect accompaniment for smashing up church interiors. The psalms could be sung in worship or in the market-place; instantly they marked out the singer as a Protestant, and equally instantly united a Protestant crowd in ecstatic companionship just as the football chant does today on the stadium terraces. They were the common property of all, both men and women: women could not preach or rarely even lead prayer, but they could sing alongside their menfolk. To sing a psalm was a liberation—to break away from the mediation of priest or minister and to become a king alongside King David, talking directly to his God. It was perhaps significant that one of the distinctive features of French Catholic persecution in the 1540s had been that those who were about to be burned had their tongues cut out first."
—Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Penguin Books: 2003), 307–308