From
Living Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Church In America
Volume 3, Number 2
Pentecost 1998
Confessional Renewal Movements
Are We So
Right We Can't Be Saved?
John R.
Seraphine
Several
years ago I received a brochure promoting a very conservative Lutheran
seminary. Among its boasts: "This seminary is founded on an inerrant
interpretation of the Bible."
Was that
simply a syntactical slip? Do these people rely on God's inerrancy or their
own? As long as the Christ has been around, he has been "a sign that will
be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed." It has
proven impossible to have faith in Jesus and in one's own religious accuracy at
the same time (Lk 2:34-35; Phil 3:4-9)
But in how many other ways does an
unintended message of institutional inerrancy creep into our witness to Christ?
Preparing for this article I used those ultimate tools of the modern religious
searcher: Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite and Ebig. I was looking for academic research
about the Athanasian Creed and it was instructive that most of the
"hits" were on those World-Wide-Web sites where congregations,
denominations, theological publications, and Christian movements provide
hyper-links to files of information intended to define themselves by telling of
their activities and their values. I wondered if we really want the world's
first impression of the ELCA or of our congregation to be these words:
Whoever
wishes to be saved should above all cling to the catholic faith. Whoever does
not guard it whole and inviolable will doubtless perish eternally.
Does this reveal the inner thoughts of
the ELCA? Of those who have the Athanasian Creed, or Quicunque Vult on page 54
in our Lutheran Book of Worship and in the front of our Book of Concord? Does
this creed convey what we believe to be the nature of saving faith when it
equates it with guarding inviolable an extremely complex set of Greco-Roman philosophical
propositions regarding the nature of the godhead?
This issue of Let's Talk focuses on
the "9.5 Theses Concerning the Confession of the Faith," a statement
by serious pastor-theologians that raises a most urgent question for the
continuing tradition of Christian orthodoxy: How do we remain "centered in
the revelation of God in Jesus Christ."
I wish to offer a critique of the
"9.5 Theses," but I want to make clear at the outset that I have no
argument with their basic concern for faithfulness, or with their contention
that to champion orthodoxy it is sometimes necessary to publicly condemn false
teaching. My observation is that a crystal clear understanding of sola gratia
must be the center-piece of all evangelical confessionalism, and that every
witness to faith that does not demonstrate intellectual humility is deeply
flawed and tends toward the abandonment of sola gratia
In this
article I attempt to critique the
"9.5 Theses" and demonstrate a fallible confessionalism with
reference to The Athanasian Creed.
In Favor of
Fallibilism
The framers
of the "9.5 Theses" are not alone. There are many voices today crying
out for more direction from our bishops and more respect for the authority of
pastors, the Church, the Creeds and Scripture. Authority is the watchword.
There are
some who fear the apostasy of absolute relativism. The relativist says,
"There is no absolute truth. If there are no claims to truth that can be
said to be more valid than any other, then there is no value in inquiry-no sense
in discourse." Thomas C. Oden,
professor of theology and ethics at Drew University and author of Requiem: A
Lament in Three Movements, wrote in the March, 1996 issue of Christianity
Today, "Today, the arch-heretic is the one who hints that some distinction
might be needed between truth and falsehood, right and wrong. This is often
treated incredulously by a relativist majority."
What we must
not forget in our reaction against relativism is the horrendous destructive
power of absolutism. The absolutist claims, "Ah yes, there is absolute
truth, and I know it." (And we can grin with recognition at that splendid
definition of a fanatic as the one who does what God would do if only God had
all the facts.) Absolutism naturally wants to usurp the authority of office,
law and force, because when one is fighting for ultimate causes, the end always
justifies the means. Yesterday defenders of the faith killed the Anabaptists of
Europe, today they kill babies in Algerian villages, and tomorrow they may come
for you or me.
There is an
alternative to both relativism and absolutism. It is fallibilist
confessionalism-the belief that there is-that there must be-absolute truth; but
I do not possess it. I can trust in it. I can search for it. I can put myself
at its service. I can commit my life to it and thereby bear witness (the Greek
marturia). I can thus have very strong feelings about it; but I can never
possess it (Walter Bruegemann's Texts Under Negotiation, Minneapolis:Fortress,
1993, calls for testimony or witness instead of claims of objective certainty
as the appropriate faith response in a post-modern world.).
As
evangelicals, we confess a Truth that is a Divine Person, and a faith that is
not assent to propositions, but trust in God who is ever calling us out of darkness
into light. Therefore we must be the preeminent fallibilists who confess that
the Truth possesses us.
The
"9.5 Theses": Not Absolutist,
but Not
Fallibilist Either
I hope that all the people of God in
the Metro Chicago Synod will affirm the call of the "9.5 Theses" for
a serious re-commitment to the creeds and confessions of our Church. A
compelling statement comes in the second paragraph of the statement which
speaks of a struggle between right-wing enthusiasm, fundamentalism, nationalism
and pietism" vs. left-wing "activism, feminism, [and] advocacy."
The paragraph concludes:
The real
struggle is for faithful adherence to the Scriptures, creeds and confessions
over against their subordination to these social or religious ideologies.
The "9.5 Theses" claim that
we are caught in a crisis of faith, and I agree. You can tell you are in such a
crisis when the key figures of a religious community begin, in subtle but
significant ways, to structure their existence around values and images which are
irrelevant or even quite alien to those that gave their religion its birth.
It is now all too difficult to find
conversation with colleagues in the faith that is focused on theology-rarer
still to find a group of pastors who dedicate themselves to that "mutual
conversation and consolation" that comes only from honest, passionate, and
prayerful study of Scripture and doctrine. Instead we find colleagues animated
by discussions of the merits of the latest marketing strategies and
pseudo-social science promoted by the hoard of church growth gurus.
But it is
important to note that ideas become ideologies-become bona fide competitors for
religion-when they mature into systems of life-shaping thought. They can do
this only with myths and images. Theologian Sallie McFague has pointed out that
all our god-talk must be analogical or metaphorical and that these multi-valent
images precede and "fund" all more conceptual or propositional
language.
Bad ideas are dangerous; but it is bad
images that float a myriad of bad ideas. Don Browning has pointed out in works
such as Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1987), and A Fundamental Practical Theology (Fortress, 1991), that at
the base of our moral thinking is a "horizon of meaning." That is,
fundamental to our thinking about rules and roles, the needs and obligations of
the human animal, there must be a fundamental picture of the way the world
works. Browning examines how modern psychological systems are quasi religious
because their creation flows out of a metaphorical horizon of meaning or
picture of the world, and adoption of their methods inevitably presents
challenges to the world-view of Christianity or of any religion.
There are, of course, many competing
horizons of meaning other than those of the psychologies. We find it hard to
accept that it takes a village to raise a child because we have so much
mythical investment in the cowboy who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps in
a capitalistic jungle where only the fit survive. And the variety of new age
spiritualisms appeal to our ancient gnostic/dualistic desire for the secret
knowledge that will enable us effortlessly to fly off from our carnal
limitations on the wings of a snow-white dove.
Bad ideas are
dangerous, but bad images are worse. And it is only through confident and
robust dialog that we can work through ideas and discern their worth or their
danger. The "9.5 Theses" fail us when they do not help us
differentiate between helpful critiques and the dangerous forms these critiques
take when they harden into ideologies that compete with the Christian
world-view.
Instructive
is the passage in thesis number one:
We reject
the false teaching that the naming of God as Father is a human construct to be
understood on the analogy of human fatherhood; that it designates Israel's God
as male; that the trinitarian Name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is inherently
oppressive to human beings in general or women in particular; or that
substituting triadic terms is adequate.
First of all, as a fallibilist, I am
constrained to confess that all naming of God is a human construct, and is done
by analogy. It may be inspired and revealed, and still be a human construct.
Like Christ-both human and divine. It may be true, but always in a way that
must be limited by being in the form of human language which has meaning that
is always contingent and depends on the vagaries of convention.
econd, I
believe that most feminist theologians are not saying that male language about
the godhead is "inherently oppressive." Words are never oppressive by
themselves. It is the ways humans use them that is subject to misuse and
oppression. And indeed there continues to be much oppressive misinterpretation
and misuse of god-talk at the service of privileging certain groups of people
over others. The entire history of the Church is marked by a tension between
priestly/ecclesiastical authority and charismatic/prophetic power (see Max
Weber's The Sociology of Religion, [Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, first published
in German in 1922]; Hans Freiherr von Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority
and Spiritual Power in the Church of the First Three Centuries [London: Adam
& Charles Black, 1969], and Walter Bruegemann's The Creative Word, [Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1982). It is the proper function of the prophetic to disturb our
theology-to force the Church to listen to the voices of the disenfranchised and
consider the ways that our interpretation of revelation is becoming captive to
the privileged perspectives of our culture and our institutions.
This dual difficulty is characteristic
of the entire contents of the "9.5 Theses." On the one hand, they
fail to demonstrate the spirit of intellectual humility-the recognition that
all language about God (including the language of Scripture and creed) is
vulnerable to cultural bias and must be critiqued. On the other, they fail to
distinguish between healthy critiques of dogma, some of which may be the
prophetic Spirit at work, and critique which has hardened into a world view
alien to orthodoxy's-a true heresy.
The
Athanasian Creed-Its History
and Use in
the Church
The Athanasian Creed, also known as
the Quicunque Vult (for the first two words in its original language of Latin,
meaning "Whoever wishes [to be saved]") most probably originated in
southern France sometime between the Council of Constantinople in 381 and the
Council of Chalcedon in 451 (for most of my historical information I rely on
the premier study, The Athanasian Creed by J.N.D. Kelly (New York: Harper &
Row, 1964). The traditional attribution to Athanasius cannot be correct because
it was originally written in Latin and all early references and its theology
are Western. Whoever did compose the creed it seems to be related to the works
of Vincent of Lérins (d. ca. 450), a monk, priest and scholar who wrote, under
the pseudonym of Peregrinus, tractates against the Nestorians. It also reflects
the thought of Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), an archbishop whose early draft of
a sermon contains the earliest known text of the Quicunque. It is interesting
to note that Vincent was a proponent of the Semi-Pelagianism that Caesarius
later condemned. Adolph Harnack wondered whether the creed itself seems to lean
toward a Semi-Pelagian way of thinking with its emphasis on human volition as
determinative of salvation. But while Vincent and Caesarius may have had
different approaches to Augustine's teachings on grace and freedom of the will,
they both admired Augustinian Trinitarian and Christological doctrine.
The
Quicunque does not conform to the baptism-based creedal type of the Apostle's
and Nicene Creed, nor is it called a symbolum as they were (Thomas Aquinas
called it "a doctrinal exposition"). It is likely that it was used
primarily for the instruction of clergy. In Germany it was recited in the
liturgy after the sermon and by the ninth century was being chanted throughout
the Western Church. It was in the 13th century that it was elevated to the same
stature as the Apostle's and Nicene Creeds and was traditionally used in the
liturgy of the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity.
The
Quiqunque was recognized in the Eastern Church by the 12th century, but not
translated into Greek or used extensively until the 14th. Since ca. 1780 it has been included in the Greek
Horologium, a liturgical book; though without the Filioque clause.
Still
accepting the notion of its composition by Athanasius, and wanting to
demonstrate their continuity with the One Holy Catholic Church, several major
Protestant movements of the Reformation received the Athanasian Creed with
respect. Lutherans included it as a Catholic and ecumenical symbol in their
Book of Concord of 1580. Zwingli and Calvin and their followers accepted its
theology. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer ordered its recitation at matins
on 13 holy days dispersed throughout the church year calendar. A notable
exception is that the Scottish Presbyterians and the churches of the
Westminster Confession do not formally recognize it.
While the Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and
Lutherans have used the Quicunque in their liturgy, in all communions there has
been a significant reduction in its use in recent years. Roman Catholics now
use it only on Trinity Sunday if at all. The Church of England permits, but
has, in practice, abandoned its use. And the Protestant Episcopal Church of
America, despite a protest to the contrary by founding bishop Samuel Seabury,
has abandoned its use in worship.
The Missouri Synod's The Lutheran
Hymnal permitted the use of the Athanasian Creed instead of the Psalmody at
Matins on Trinity Sunday. The Lutheran Book of Worship includes the text of the
Quicunque, but includes no instruction for its use, even in the pages of the
LBW companion book, the Manual on the
Liturgy.
A Valuable
Doctrinal Exposition
-A Dangerous
Statement of Faith
As was noted above, Thomas Aquinas
(Summa II, ii, I, 10, 3) referred to the Quicunque as a "doctrinal
exposition." As such it is of great value to the Church in this age. It
serves as a clear and careful summation of centuries of development of orthodox
doctrine on the Trinity and Christology.
Such a
summation can be of immense value as the Church addresses modern heresies. The
people of God do need to be alerted to the dangers of dualistic cosmologies,
a-historical soteriologies and a host of various theologies of glory. None of
these ideologies can abide the ancient, radical insistence that the God
incarnate in Jesus Christ indeed suffered as he met and disarmed the powers and
principalities of evil and injustice that work on this world's stage. Nor can
these ideologies grasp just how utterly humans are enmeshed in systems that are
alienated from this God of grace, and therefore that the death of God's Messiah
should be necessary for salvation.
The
theology, philosophy, cosmology, and metaphorical world of meaning of the
Athanasian Creed are all therefore valuable as doctrinal exposition. They can
and should be used by theologians in their instruction concerning the ancient
ecumenical community of faith with which we must be in trustworthy
conversation.
But should
we include this creed in our hymnals? Should we honor it with hyperlinks on our
web pages so that people see it as our test of orthodoxy today? Should we
consider the Quicunque a statement of the living faith of the Church or as a
viable creed?
J.N.D. Kelly
makes a valiant defense of the Quicunque as a creed. He acknowledges that the
creed seems to assert that "our eternal destiny is poised on adhesion or
non-adhesion to the detail of a highly technical, man-made formulary."
Kelly knows that Mark 16.16 declares
that he who does not believe shall be damned. But Mark there speaks of
believing the gospel while the Athanasian Creed substitutes for gospel 'the
Catholic faith, and "identifies this with the formulated doctrines of the
Trinity and the Incarnation (The Athanasian Creed, p. 72). He points out that
saving faith, to the Quicunque, is not mere intellectual assent but worship of
the divine Trinity. Further, he asserts,
the damnatory clauses serve as a crucial reminder "of the awful
responsibility of making the right decision in matters of fundamental belief
(pp. 125-126)."
In the same book Kelly notes that in
our modern age we have sharp compunction about "the prevailing tendency in
the west, and in the east too after the 3rd century, was to distinguish sharply
between orthodox and heretic, and to consign the latter mercilessly to eternal
flames (p. 72)." In short, Kelly believes that the benefit of the
doctrinal sharpness of the Athanasian Creed far outweigh the negatives. We
might worry about denigrating the faith of those whose doctrine deviates from
ours, but Kelly thinks we can look past that excess and appreciate the
seriousness of theology and the "confident dogmatism" of this creed.
My contention is that, while it is
indeed valuable for pastors and other theologians of the Church to study this
document, it does tremendous damage to present it to the public as a creed of
the Church because of its drastic misrepresentation of faith itself.
The argument
from Scripture is overwhelming. In the Bible faith is first and foremost not an
act of human will or a product of human deduction, but a reflection of God's
faithfulness, or constant grace. Many passages describe an element of intellectual assent, but trust and
confidence in a loving God is always at the heart of the matter.
The Hebrew
Bible really has no word for faith, but the root 'mn, used in the Hiphil forms,
points to a firmness and confidence that we interpret as faith. Significant
is Gen 15:6, "And [Abraham]
believed in Yahweh and He counted it as righteousness in him." In Isa 7.9
the ideas of "belief in" and firmness of a life commitment or trust
is clear in the oracle of Isaiah to Ahaz: "If you do not believe you will
not endure." Yet intellect and faith do belong together as expressed in
Isa 43.10-12: "You are my witness, says the Lord, and my servant whom I
have chosen, that you may know and believe in me and understand who I am."
That is the
faith that Jesus calls "great" in Matt 15:21-28? The evangelist
probably uses the ancient designation "Canaanite" instead of
Syro-Phonecian to underscore the fact that she was a pagan. We have no hint
that she understands Jesus as a Messiah or Son of God, but only that she
desperately wants healing for her child. Jesus on several occasions is reported
to have said that such a faith saves. These are cases not of doctrinal
correctness but of existential urgency. Just as one man cries out "I
believe; help my unbelief (Mk 9:24)," so the disciples do not understand
or believe even after the resurrection appearances, and yet they are admitted
to the sacred meal, given the Spirit, and changed into bold witnesses to the
Truth.
The uniquely Western attempt by the
Church to substitute for the full Christian experience of faith a philosophical
codification is summarized by the definition of Thomas Aquinas: "Faith is the act of the intellect when it
assents to divine truth under the influence of the will moved by God through
grace" (Summa Theologica II.II.q2.a.9). Despite the single reference to
worshipping the single God in trinity the Athanasian Creed repeatedly refers to
faith as clinging, guarding, not confusing, acknowledging, thinking thusly and
confessing a formula about God. Thus the Athanasian Creed speaks as Aquinas and
purports to be able to reduce (at least for the sake of discerning in one's
self and in others) this inexpressible and holistic experience of biblical
faith to a philosophical formula.
The Reformation
strongly critiqued this scholastic over-intellectualization of faith as is
evidenced by the Lutheran Confessions. We confess that we cannot by our own
understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ or come to him, but the Holy
Spirit calls us through the gospel, etc. The central article on justification
states that we are not put right with God by works, but:
We receive
forgiveness of sin and become righteous before God by grace, for Christ's sake,
through faith, when we believe that Christ suffered for us and that for his
sake our sin is forgiven and righteousness and eternal life are given to
us. For God will regard and reckon this
faith as righteousness, as Paul says in Romans 3:21-26 and 4:5. (Augsburg
Confession IV).
Also, in the article on repentance,
the Augsburg Confession speaks of saving, justifying faith as the trust in the
Gospel's promise of forgiveness through Christ:
Properly
speaking, true repentance is nothing else than to have contrition and sorrow,
or terror, on account of sin, and yet
at the same time to believe the Gospel and absolution (namely, that sin has
been forgiven and grace has been obtained through Christ), and this faith will
comfort the heart and again set it at rest (AC XII).
One other
interesting citation among hundreds in the Confessions:
Actually,
true perfection consists alone of proper fear of God and real faith in God, for
the Gospel does not teach an outward and temporal but an inward and eternal
mode of existence and righteousness of the heart (Augsburg Confession XVI).
We can argue
too from the perspective of brain research. The right hemisphere of the brain
generally deals with the sensed world tacitly as a whole. It sees patterns. It
recognizes what it cannot put into words. The left hemisphere for the most part
is linear, sequential and verbal. In fact the brain's working is complex, with
segments of both hemispheres (as well as the inner brain core, associated with
primal emotions, and the outer neo-cortex, associated with the intellect)
cooperating in most of our functioning, such as language.
What can
this teach us about faith and the Quicunque? The age-old question of what is
saving faith is one that is wired into our circuits. At its core our faith is
emotional and experiential. We experience it as a whole, tacitly. It is like
knowing and recognizing a familiar face, but being unable to describe it to
others. Yet to be whole-brained and completely human, we must try to describe
it. In fact, to be completely open with God and to love the Lord our God with
heart, soul and mind (Matt 22:37), we must strive to put our experience into
words. This is the way we think and the way we can be in community with others.
This brings us back to the call for a
fallibilist confessionalism-it is the only way to be whole-brained Christians.
We must strive to express in words that which we know tacitly. We know that
there is a truth "out there." We know we have experienced something
in the love of God that has the force of Absolute Truth. To fully respond to it
as humans we must worship both with our private emotional honesty, but also in
words. We must praise it in the presence of the whole congregation. We must
bear our testimony. Of course the Reformers knew this and therefore they wrote
and penned their names to the Book of Concord to prove to the world that the
faith that had captured their spirits was not an ephemeral thing but had
meaning in the realm of human discourse.
To this
struggle for words the Athanasian Creed's trinitarian and christological
formulas bring a great blessing.
But the
Quicunque is not a living creed because it leads to the conclusion that faith
can be distilled into words. It fails to point beyond the words to holistic
experience of God's grace. It does not humbly acknowledge that believers must
continually return to the core images of faith for refreshment, and continually
reexamine our language in the light of the experiences of the people of God.
hat makes
statements like the Athanasian Creed and the "9.5 Theses" so
attractive is the emptiness of absolute relativism. We know that when people
stop believing in something they don't then believe in nothing, but in
anything. They become ever more vulnerable to "the devil's empty
promises."
Confronted with this prospect many
among us long for a rigorous faith. Something strict. Something with teeth and
bite. Something that will strengthen our sense of identity.
But sola gratia is the right place for
Christians to dig in their heels and be rigorous. For the sake of this
foundation of our faith we can and should confess our faith as fallible, humble
Christians. We should always acknowledge that we might be wrong and that we
certainly need to listen to the witnesses of others, especially to the voices
of the disenfranchised.
Especially in its anathemas the
Athanasian Creed breathes an institutional arrogance that is exactly the
attitude Jesus warned us against when he said "If you were blind, you
would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see,' your sin remains (John
9:41).
A beloved
professor of mine, Fred Danker, once quipped, "Sometimes you can be so
right you can't be saved." Another apt observation: "Damnation is not
a means of grace."
Especially in our liturgy, our creedal
statements, and in web sites that introduce our beliefs to the world, we should
remember that the grace of God will forever outstrip our conceptions of it.
John R.
Seraphine
Pastor, St.
Luke, Glen Ellyn