Charles Taylor on Locating the Truth

Reading Charles Taylor

A few months ago, I finally made it through Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's landmark book, A Secular Age. I won't even try to respond to the book in general, which was the densest, richest, and most thorough analysis of the spirit of our time I've ever read; I can't claim to have internalized much of what Taylor put into it on first first. (I do highly recommend it, or James K.A. Smith's more readable guide to it) But I came across a passage toward the end of the book that perfectly articulated something I'd been trying to think about in Taylor's typical, fuzzily precise way, and I want to expand on and respond to it here. (If you happen to have the book, it is section 4 of chapter 20)

The context of this passage is Taylor (a practicing Roman Catholic) reflecting on Vatican II and the tensions between its theology and the "established Catholic tradition", exemplified by the decrees of the Council of Trent. In other words, "what should we make of the reform of Vatican II?" Taylor begins by saying:

Now there are two clear perspectives in which this can be seen. On one hand, we can postulate that what is at stake here is the ultimately and totally right understanding of Catholic Christianity. Then this issue is, who got it right, Vatican II or Trent, and/or in which respect? (p. 752)

Regarding Charles Péguy, a twentieth-century Catholic theologian whose thought was influential for Vatican II, Taylor says that in this perspective (emphasis added),

We would be dealing with his background in the way that is familiar from many debates in secular history. For instance, the way in which believers in Progress argue that earlier ages couldn't have been expected to see certain truths which are obvious to us, because they lacked certain knowledge, or a freedom from prejudices, and the like; or from the other side, the way supporters of traditional ways may argue that in the contemporary condition of moral decay, when the most basic decencies are under attack, we cannot expect that young people will be able to see the value of what has been lost. We describe backgrounds and perspectives, in other words, as epistemically privileged or deprived, as good or bad vantage points to discern some single truth. (p. 752)

To greatly simplify, this perspective involves the kind of thinking that says, "I'm right, you're wrong; here's why." There is a "single truth", and some parties are more "epistemically privileged", able to discern that truth, than others. Taylor goes on to describe the second perspective in which Péguy and Vatican II can be viewed:

The second framework in which we can understand this kind of study postulates that what is at stake is complementary insights. Neither is simply right or wrong about a single issue, but each bring a fresh perspective which augments and enriches our understanding. The issue is to see how these different insights fit together, and for this purpose filling out the background, the social/intellectual/spiritual context from which an insight comes can be very illuminating. (p. 752)

Taylor favors this second perspective, but in keeping with it, he argues that the first perspective is also necessary and can be the truer at times. There are some points at which "Péguy's views just contradict earlier established beliefs, and Vatican II changes the reigning ideas surrounding Vatican I; like the importance of freedom, the value of democracy, the centrality of human rights, the judgments made on other faith traditions, and so on." (p. 753) Pius IX's staunch opposition to democracy and human rights as incompatible with Christianity was "just wrong", yet nineteenth-century Catholics like Pius IX might have seen the dangers and weaknesses of democracy more clearly than we do today; we still have something to learn from them. Their insights and ours, in other words, are complementary. He gives a few other examples of how the views of nineteenth-century Catholics can complement those of twenty-first century Catholics, like the old principle that "error has no rights" and fasting guidelines. Of these he says,

We have to grasp these historical differences bi-focally; in one way, we are dealing with right/wrong issues, in which each change is a gain or loss of truth; in another with different avenues of approach to the faith from out of very different ways of life. A total focus on the first can blind us to the second. And this would be a great loss. This is partly because understanding another approach can free us from the blindness that attends a total embedding in our own. (p. 753) 

What Taylor is recommending is a way of conversing (or disagreeing) with historical or contemporary figures that attempts to view one's one perspective as complementary to the other's. In other words, you don't necessarily adopt another's view and may even say you disagree with it, but you seek to understand that view beneath the surface, discern the values and insights underlying it (which will often be more agreeable than their conclusion), and learn from them as far as is possible. Taylor further expands on this thought with another example, one likely more familiar to Protestants:

Christians today, for example, have to climb out of an age in which Hell and the wrath of God are often very faintly felt, if they are understood at all. But they live in a world where objectification and excarnation [a term Taylor defines as "the transfer of our religious life out of bodily forms of ritual, worship, practice, so that it comes more and more to reside 'in the head'."] reign, where death undermines meaning, and so on. We have to struggle to recover a sense of what the Incarnation can mean. But Jonathan Edwards, for instance, three centuries ago, lived in a world where the wrath of God was a powerful presence, and where thee difficulty was to come to an adequate sense of God's universal love. One can respond to this difference polemically, and judge that one or the other was bang-on right, and the other quite wrong. We condemn Edwards as caught in an old mode, or ourselves as having watered down the faith.

But we can also see it in another light. Neither of us grasps the whole picture. None of us could ever grasp alone everything that is involved in our alienation from God and his action to bring us back. But there are a great many of us, scattered through history, who have had some powerful sense of some facet of this drama. Together we can live it more fully than any one of us could alone. Instead of reaching immediately for the weapons of polemic, we might better listen for a voice which we could never have assumed ourselves, whose tone might have been forever unknown to us if we hadn't strained to understand it. We will find that we have to extend this courtesy even to people who would never have extended it to us (like Jonathan Edwards)—in that respect, perhaps we have made some modest headway towards truth in the last couple of centuries, although we can certainly find precedents in the whole history of Christianity. Our faith is not the acme of Christianity, but nor is it a degenerate version; it should rather be open to a conversation that ranges over the whole of the last 20 centuries (and even in some ways before). (pp. 753-754)

It is hard for me to admit that I could have anything to learn about the Christian faith from one such as Jonathan Edwards, but Taylor makes a compelling case. That refusal to learn, to seek truth everywhere and from everyone, is just the flip side of my assurance that thanks to sound Orthodox teaching, I have finally "gotten it right" and can slip into something like Taylor's first perspective. It is sin. Taylor starts to put this composite perspective together:

This, of course, leaves us with an immense set of messy, hermeneutical issues: how the different approaches relate to each other; how they relate together to questions of over-arching truth. We will never be without these issues; the belief that they can finally be set aside by some secure instance of authority, whether the Bible or the Pope, is a damaging and dangerous illusion.

What this fragmentary and difficult conversation points towards is the Communion of Saints. I'm understanding this not just as a communion of perfected persons, who have left their imperfections behind them; but rather as a communion of whole lives, of whole itineraries towards God. ... Itineraries consist not only of sins. My itinerary crucially includes my existence embedded in a historic order, with its good and bad, in and out of which I must move toward God's order. The eschaton must bring together all these itineraries, with their very different landscapes and perils. (p. 754)

I agree with Taylor's identification of this conversation with the communion of saints; or perhaps equivalently, with Holy Tradition. Contrary to my first impressions of it, Tradition is not simply the collection of all the answers to theological questions that the Church has authoritatively settled upon over the millennia. Looking back at the definitions quoted in my post on Holy Tradition, several of them define Tradition not merely as a body of doctrines or teachings, but as "the life of the Church in the Holy Spirit", or "the living memory of the Church", as an ongoing "activity or dynamism". Put another way, the fullness of the truth of the Christian faith is found in Holy Tradition, but it comes to us not in the form of a formula or formal body of teachings, but in the form of a conversation spanning time and space, across the communion of saints. The Orthodox Church, with its absence of a secure, singular, "final" authority apart from Christ himself, seems like a uniquely conducive place for this conversation, this light-giving meeting of persons. In other words, I think Taylor is really onto something here.

And this gives us a second reason not to let the issue of final truth occlude the difference of itineraries. It is that the Church, as a communion of different peoples and ages, in mutual understanding and enrichment, is damaged, limited, and divided by an unfounded total belief in one's own truth, which really better deserves the name of heresy. (pp. 754-755)

Belief in the infallibility of the Church must not become this. I am not the Church. (The same is arguably true for the infallibility of the Scriptures) Taylor concludes:

I have described two different meanings we can give to the sense the contemporary convert has that she must move outside the established order. One sets us to look for the perfectly adequate historic order; the other invites us to a conversation which can reach beyond any one such order. The goal in this case is not to return to an earlier formula, inspiring as many of these will undoubtedly be; there will always be an element of imitation of earlier models, but inevitably and rightly Christian life today will look for and discover new ways of moving beyond the present orders to God. One could say that we look for new and unprecedented itineraries. Understanding out time in Christian terms is partly to discern these new paths, opened by pioneers who have discovered a way through the particular labyrinthine landscape we live in, its thickets and trackless wastes, to God. (p. 755) 

The Christian faith, I have heard it taught, is not a system of rules or teaching; it is in something like this sense that it is often said not to be merely a "religion". It is a journey towards and into the One who is Truth, and yet who transcends all that our minds can grasp. Charles Taylor grasps this reality and invites us to live accordingly.

(Dis)agreeing Constructively

The idea that Taylor's way of putting things helped me to articulate is that, as you might guess, theological discussion usually doesn't live up to the vision he lays out. Specifically, people tend to think from his first perspective—I'm right, you're wrong, here's why—and neglect the second—here is how our understandings complement and inform each other. The first perspective deals with rightness as a zero-sum game, like a military battle or, well, a game; the second handles it more like a cooperative venture, a group project. The danger of overapplying the second perspective is syncretism and naive gullibility. The danger of overapplying the first is more common and evident all around us; polarization, polemic, endless bickering, intractable controversies and debates. Instead of thinking cooperatively and coming to a fuller understanding of the reality than they could arrive at separately, each party assumes their "side" has to be correct at the expense of another.

A simple example of this is an interaction my wife and I share almost daily: when she tells me she loves me, I jokingly respond, "No, I love you," as if correcting her. The idea of marital love being a zero-sum game so that one spouse's love comes at the expensive of the other's is silly, but this pattern occurs more seriously elsewhere. For example, a phrase often used to respond to calls for gun control measures is "guns don't kill people; people do." This slogan sets two (I would argue complementary) families of responses to gun violence, gun control and improved prevention/mental health care, against each other. A simple religious example which I have commented on before is the controversy dating back to the nineteenth century over whether the Bible is "merely human" writing to be treated "like any other book", or if it is something more. In the course of opposing this conception as a denial of the Christian faith, theological conservatives came to adopt theories of Scripture that instead overemphasized its divine nature, such as biblical inerrancy.

I also saw this pattern of escalating reaction repeatedly while studying the history of modern theology. Deists and Enlightenment thinkers reacted to the ugly clashes of Orthodoxy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and proposed a religion based on pure, natural reason. Schleiermacher, responding to the growing conflict between religion and reason, proposed a way of doing theology centering around human religious feeling and experience rather than dogma, which would become the school of liberal theology. Theological conservatives and fundamentalists, reacting in turn to theological liberalism, doubled down on the divine authority and traditional interpretation of Scripture. Modern theologians, dismayed at what they saw as conservatives' silo mentality, proposed to demythologize Christianity, or tried to fuse Christianity and existentialism, or something else. Liberal, fundamentalist, process, neo-orthodox, liberation, and existential all developed in reaction to real abuses of teaching, and may even have formed around a kernel of truth, but they remain only fragmentary, incomplete perspectives, in part because of their need to distinguish themselves from what they react against.

This outward spiral of reaction and counter-reaction, also described by Taylor in A Secular Age, is responsible for a good deal of the theological diversity of modern Protestantism and Catholicism. It demonstrates how both of his perspectives are necessary. Rare is the case when a teaching is completely false and is rightly met only with denial. Sin is not creative; it corrupts that which already is, and so most beliefs will have an underlying kernel of truth to them. Critiquing a reasoned approach to just about anything will usually involve a mix of affirmations and denials: some tenets may be correct, others wanting; and even then, they may involve correct premises worthy of affirmation while proceeding from them wrongly.

The conversation Taylor points towards involves both of his perspectives; looking for truth in the wisdom and witness of others as well as identifying where they genuinely (and not just seemingly) conflict; discerning where someone's view is wrong and how it is merely incomplete. Ecumenical dialogue between different religious traditions will not get far without such a spirit of humility. And within a religious tradition, this attitude helps prevent divisions from forming in the first place, reminding individuals that they can never contain the fullness of the truth with which the Church has been entrusted; we must constantly be open to receiving it from others. The Church is the fullness of the truth, Orthodox believe, but I am not the Church and am not fit to speak for her. At least on an individual level, orthodoxy is always freedom from error, never having nothing left to learn. As in Taylor's example of Trent and Vatican II, we can and should seek out and learn from diverse voices and sources within the breadth of Holy Tradition as complementary sources capable of shedding light on parts of the truth we may be inclined to neglect.

It is a common Christian truism that we are not saved merely by having doctrinally correct theology. In the extreme case, reactionary, polemical thinking can lose sight of this reality as we become more concerned with refuting error than with loving the truth—when we make what we deny central to what we believe. Denial, in itself, is not redemptive, no matter how awful is the thing you are rejecting. Such adversarial thinking reinforces disagreement, even revels in it, rather than seeking to heal it. It is a form of the divisiveness I described last time. Nurturing "seeds of the Word" is more important than rooting out every last "seed of the adversary". One will hopefully get you a blooming garden, the other a barren plot of dirt.

About all those denominations...

A Bible study I participated in recently began with 1 Corinthians 1:10: "Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment." (NKJV) Responding to this, a friend remarked on the stark contrast between the vision of unity in this passage and the highly fragmented state of modern Christianity. Paul's words feel like a painful indictment of our disunity; how could we so completely fail to live up to them?

Pervasive interpretive pluralism

This question was very familiar to me, as I had just been rereading The Bible Made Impossible by sociologist Christian Smith, a book that was greatly influential on my journey through religious doubt (so much so that I bought a case of copies to give away, wanting others to read it). Its first half is a vigorous critique of an approach to the Bible which Smith calls "biblicism", which he characterizes as "a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability". (p. viii) In making his case, Smith draws attention to the widespread doctrinal diversity among Christians (particularly evangelical Protestants), a phenomenon he calls "pervasive interpretive pluralism", and which he argues renders biblicism impossible in practice if not in theory:

The very same Bible—which biblicists insist is perspicuous and harmonious—gives rise to divergent understandings among intelligent, sincere, committed readers about what it says about most topics of interest. Knowledge of “biblical” teachings, in short, is characterized by pervasive interpretive pluralism. What that means in consequence is this: in a crucial sense it simply does not matter whether the Bible is everything that biblicists claim theoretically concerning its authority, infallibility, inner consistency, perspicuity, and so on, since in actual functioning the Bible produces a pluralism of interpretations. (17)

The import of pervasive interpretive pluralism is that for virtually any Christian doctrine, from the major to the minor, there exists a range of teachings on it held by various churches and denominations, all claimed to be based on the Bible. Zondervan's Counterpoints series of books walk the reader through the variance on many such doctrines. From Smith and other sources, I've compiled a fairly complete list of teachings for which there exists such pluralism:

Theology proper:

• Christology (classical, kenotic, adoptionist...)
• The Trinity (though modern Unitarians arguably base their theology more on "rational" thought than the Bible, other groups like Christadelphians, Jehovah's Witnesses, The Way International, and Oneness Pentecostals reject the trinity on biblical grounds, as did the early unitarians)

The Church:

• Nature of the Church (not as much variance as between Protestantism and Catholicism/Orthodoxy, but there is still different weight placed on the institutional nature of the Church between, say, an Anglican and a Baptist)
• Church polity (episcopal, presbyterian, congregational)
• Legitimacy of ordained ministry (i.e. how the "priesthood of all believers" is understood)
• Methods of church discipline

Worship:

• Legitimacy and value of creeds and confessions
• Styles of worship (traditional, contemporary, blended, choral or congregational singing, Psalms-only, use of instruments, regulative principle...)
• Use of images or sensory aids in worship
• Christian relation to the Sabbath

Sacraments and spiritual gifts:

• Baptism (infant/adult, significance)
• Real Presence in the Eucharist (the subject of the first division among the Protestant reformers)
• Continuation of spiritual gifts in the present
• Importance of the gift of tongues

Gender, marriage, and family:

• Women's roles in the church and the home (patriarchalism, evangelical feminism, complementarianism, egalitarianism...)
• Divorce and remarriage
• Birth control
• Corporal punishment of children

Societal issues:

• Capital punishment
• Slavery (there may be agreement today, but there was fierce disagreement between competing "biblical" views less than 200 years ago)
• Homosexuality
• Church-state relations
• War
• Ethics and use of wealth (private property, meaning of material success, tithing...)
• Celebration of [religious] holidays
• Christians' relation to culture

 Soteriology:

• The nature of salvation
• Nature/reality of total depravity and original sin
• Significance of a "conversion experience"
• Atonement theology (PSA, governmental, moral example, Christus victor...)
• Justification
• Role of good works in the last judgment (and the nature and number of the last judgment(s))
• Sanctification and its relation to salvation
• Eternal destiny of the unevangelized (exclusivism, inclusivism, universalism), and infants

Personal morality

• Wearing of jewelry/makeup
• Drinking
• Gambling
• Dancing
• Swearing oaths
• Asceticism and celibacy 

Eschatology:

• Imminence of the Second Coming (putting a definite date to it, expecting and planning on it in the next few years/decades, or simply living in readiness)
• Rapture and the Millennium (pre/post-tribulationist, premillennialist, postmillenialist, amillenialist)
• Understanding of the "antichrist" (the papacy, a figure in current events, or yet to come?)
• Role of the Jews in salvation history (a major distinctive of dispensationalism)
• Understandings of apocalyptic prophecy (preterist, futurist, historical, idealist)
• Nature of hell (eternal conscious torment, annihilationism, purgatorial universalism, C.S. Lewis' view...)

God's providence:

• Free will/determinism and predestination (Calvinism vs. Arminianism)
• Eternal security
• Nature of God's foreknowledge (unconditional or based on foreseen faith?)

The Bible:

• Bibliology; nature of the Bible itself
• Perspectives on Paul
• Relation between the Testaments
• Biblical inerrancy/infallibility
• Creation/Evolution
• Nature of the divine image in humanity (and to what extent or in what way has it been lost?)
• Historicity of Adam
• Biblical literalism
• Value of reason/rationality in faith

Pervasive interpretive pluralism is far from a recent problem. In a survey of other authors' takes on it, Smith quotes American theologian John Nevin, who lamented a similar situation in 1849:

It sounds well, to lay so much stress on the authority of the Bible, as the only text-book and guide of Christianity. But what are we to think of it, when we find such a motley mass of protesting systems, all laying claim so vigorously here to one and the same watchword? If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way . . . they are flung asunder so perpetually in their religious faith, instead of being brought together? (19)

However they may differ among themselves as regard to what it teaches, sects all agree on proclaiming the Bible the only guide of their faith; and the more sectarian they are . . . the more loud and strong do they show themselves in reiteration of this profession . . . It will not do to reply . . . that the differences which divide the parties are small, while the things in which they are agreed are great, and such as to show a general unity after all in the main substance of the Christian life. Differences that lead to the breaking of church communion, and that bind man's consciences to go into sects, can never be small for the actual life of Christianity, however insignificant they may be to their own nature. . . . However plausible it may be in theory, to magnify in such style the unbound use solely of the Bible for the adjustment of Christian faith and practice, the simple truth is that the operation of it in fact is, not to unite the church into one, but to divide it always more and more into sects. (19-20)

Smith does not argue that biblicism creates pervasive interpretive pluralism, but rather that it is unable to account for it, tends to exacerbate it, and is ultimately rendered superfluous by it. How, then, are we to explain it?

The problem of authority

Here is where I must play my Orthodox card. Non-Protestant Christians, myself included, generally attribute the diversity of teaching Smith describes to the principle of sola scriptura, and the problem of authority inherent to it. I'll try to describe this problem differently and more clearly than I did in my critique of sola scriptura in the Journey to Orthodoxy series, focusing not so much on the teaching per se as on how it is applied in practice.

A common definition of sola scriptura goes something like this: the Bible alone is the highest and final authority in matters of Christian faith, teaching, and practice. More thoughtful definitions will be careful to note that it is not the only authority, ascribing some legitimacy, usefulness, and derived authority to traditional Christian teachings, hymns, or creeds—insofar as they are based on the Bible. Under sola scriptura, all such formulations are seen as fallible human creations with no authority of their own, no claim on my conscience, except what they gain by speaking truly with the backing of the authoritative teaching of Scripture.

It seems like a modest and cogent enough proposal: try to peer behind, or beneath, all the layers of extra stuff that has been added onto the teaching of the Church over the centuries to glimpse the pure, undistorted Gospel in the pages of Scripture. But hidden inside it is a radically new stance toward human authority, which is placed decisively lower than the "authority of Scripture". No mere man has authority over my conscience; no earthly power can take the place of God's word and tell me what to believe. Human teachers and traditions may be helpful resources and aids, but the Bible always gets the final say. This rhetoric sounds well and good, seemingly recognizing our human fallibility, and I don't doubt that it is meant that way, but what gets forgotten is the need to interpret Scripture, and the inescapable subjectivity of this task.

This became an especially serious issue as sola scriptura came to be applied less on the level of large, often national churches (as it was in the early days of the magisterial Reformation) and more on the individual level, spurred by developments like the Radical Reformation, Pietism, and the Great Awakenings. Seen in this light, what sola scriptura entails in practice is that the individual Christian's personal interpretation of Scripture becomes authoritative for that individual; no one else can tell him or her how to read or what to believe. "The teaching of Scripture" comes to be identified in practice with "my interpretation of Scripture". Obviously, this becomes a problem when two parties hold conflicting "biblical" views. As pervasive interpretive pluralism shows, the "plain meaning" of Scripture on a given matter is rarely plain to everyone. How to determine who (if anyone) is more correct?

This new stance towards human tradition and authority makes resolving disagreements of interpretation nearly impossible. As interpretive authority is shifted from a common body or tradition to Scripture itself and (in turn) the individual reader of Scripture, there is no longer any way to hold together individuals or factions who are inclined to see things differently and cannot come to agreement between themselves, or to determine who among them (if anyone) is in the right. There is then little recourse except schism. This is the problem of authority. In traditional Christianity such disputes are resolved by calling a council, as in Acts 15 or the succeeding centuries of Church history, but when Scripture alone is finally authoritative, councils are merely exercises of limited human authority and can again be rejected if they are thought contrary to Scripture. Each party may well start his own tradition, believing himself to be upholding the true teaching of Scripture and the other to be unwilling or unable to discern it. The classic example of this is Luther and Zwingli at the Marburg Colloquy, and such divisions have been continuing ever since.

A disclaimer: obviously, not every Protestant embodies this kind of divisiveness and insistence on the authoritativeness of one's own interpretation. Thankfully, most do not—and, not coincidentally, most Protestants don't form their own churches or denominations. So please don't read the above as an attack on or attempt to describe everyone who affirms the principle of sola scriptura. To whatever degree you participate in and uphold your church's body of tradition and doctrine, however much you seek to live in harmony and unity with other Christians who may or may not agree with what you believe (and you may be better at this than I am!), that is a very good thing; it is commanded by the Scriptures and expected of the Church. But I argue that it does not come from the principle of authority implied by sola scriptura, which, at its worst, has legitimated doctrinal divisiveness like that of early Christian heretics.

Orthodox Christianity holds a different attitude to authority and tradition, as I have written in my Journey to Orthodoxy series. The word "tradition" and its Greek equivalent, paradosis, both connote receiving something passed on or handed off. Doctrine is received from one's spiritual parents or teachers (as in 1 Cor 11:2 or Gal 1:8-9), rather than derived for oneself by an independent reading of the Scriptures (though we are of course encouraged to read the Scriptures and glimpse the faith through and in them). Holy Tradition, the life of the Church in the Holy Spirit originating with the apostles' teaching (cf. Acts 2:42), is said to be authoritative (in response to which claim sola scriptura asserts that final authority belongs to Scripture alone), the continuation of the authority vested in the apostles by Christ. The teaching of an individual, even a bishop, no matter how "biblical" it seems, cannot overrule the consensus of the Church originally received from the apostles and kept by their successors. The communal, shared nature of traditioned truth mirrors the communal nature of salvation as spiritual, transformative union with Christ (and, transitively, with each other). The human mediation involved is no cause for concern, and does not mean that Tradition is necessarily as fallible as you or I. God came to earth as a man, sent his Spirit onto men, and is saving and redeeming men. By his grace, we can become conduits of his truth, not obstacles to it that need to be cleared away.

The Church

The problem of authority is closely tied in with a distinctive ecclesiology—one of the areas in which, as noted above, there is substantial pluralism among evangelicals. But generally in Protestantism, an ecclesiology prevails in which the church is visibly divided but invisibly one, consisting of those God alone truly knows as his, in a way that is not essentially inhibited by the visible schisms among churches. Which institutional church you belong to is unimportant, it is thought, as long as you truly follow Jesus. The original, visible Church fell away in a "great apostasy", but in its invisible essence the Church continued through the centuries. Thus the phenomenon of pervasive interpretive pluralism, while unfortunate and confusing, does not mean the Church is divided into countless pieces; Christianity is just expressed in many different forms instead of one, and members of the true Church can be found in virtually any of them, believing and worshipping the same God earnestly and authentically according to their conscience, just as the more visibly united early Christians did.

But this redefinition of "unity" in light of such glaring division tremendously cheapens the unity of the Church confessed in the Nicene Creed. This "Church" does not enjoy anything like the unity Paul described in 1 Cor 1:10, and that the Orthodox Church has enjoyed (though never perfectly or free from the troubles of sin) since then. Even calling this state of disconnection and pluralism "the one Church" does violence to the term. It is unprecedented in Christian history to suppose that after a schism, both parties can still somehow belong to the "body of Christ", or to suppose that members of churches holding distinctly different faiths can both be part of the one Church. Paul and the other epistle authors have no such flattering or reassuring words for schismatics. Such sentiments are more Gnostic than Christian; when applied to the Church as body of Christ, they resemble the heresy of Docetism. As Smith quoted John Nevin earlier, "Differences that lead to the breaking of church communion, and that bind man's consciences to go into sects, can never be small for the actual life of Christianity, however insignificant they may be to their own nature."

The enabling effect of such an ecclesiology on schisms is this: if you or your church rejects/divides from someone you consider a false teacher, this individual is not obliged to repent and seek to be reunited to his old church, but can instead join (or start) a different church. His membership in the true Church, fully independent of his membership in a local church body, is never endangered by such interpersonal conflicts. In traditional Christianity, such a person would be told in no uncertain terms that he was no longer part of the body of Christ until he repented and returned to it. This, then, is why sola scriptura inevitably produces divisions among Protestants: because it legitimates schism, makes it a justifiable response in order to liberate oneself and one's conscience from what one views as false teaching, and, after doing away with any higher authority than individuals' interpretations of Scripture, leaves no other way to resolve doctrinal conflicts.

Traditional Christians have always applied the biblical teachings of the Church as the "pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim 3:15), temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 3:16), the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27), against whom the gates of Hades will not prevail (Mat 16:18), to the visible Church, the one founded by Christ. The Church is identified with a particular body, a particular tradition, a particular faith; it is not an intangible abstraction that assumes a multitude of forms. The Lord did not come to Earth as a phantasm, but as a man. This Church could no more cease to exist than Jesus could return to earth as a mortal man to recreate it, contrary to his promises to return in glory (Mat 16:27). No one has the authority or the ability to divide the body of Christ and start another church than the one the Lord established. It would be unthinkable enough for the Church to vanish and then be recreated by mere men, even if they demonstrated the same unity of faith that the apostles did. But as seen above, modern claimants to represent "biblical Christianity" manifestly do not and have not. The blanket skepticism with which theories of the "great apostasy" treats all other prior and competing forms of Christianity makes it very hard to believe that your church has finally "gotten it right."

Tu quoque?

A possible objection to what I have been saying is that traditional Christianity is also divided. There are four main Christian communions all claiming apostolic succession and that they are the "one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church": the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Chuch, and the Church of the East, as well as numerous smaller churches that have separated from them (such as the Old Believers or Old Calendarists). Traditional Christianity, it seems, fails to practice what it preaches. Doesn't this then show that the true origin of schism and division among Christians is simply sin, and is thus ever-present and not new to sola scriptura?

This is a good question, and an important one to ask since Orthodox critiques of sola scriptura (mine included) can give the impression that rejecting it will result in perfect unity, which is of course not true. I would respond with two points. First, though traditional Christianity is not fully united, the difference in the number and depth of divisions between it and Protestantism is so great as to be qualitative. There is vastly more consensus and less disagreement; for instance, Oriental and Eastern Orthodoxy are still strikingly similar in belief and worship despite having been in schism for almost sixteen centuries. The last major schism between churches claiming apostolic succession was the Great Schism in 1054. There is also nothing like Smith's pervasive interpretive pluralism; most of the issues listed above on which Protestants differ have never been controversial, because there has either always been general agreement on them, they are acknowledged to be of secondary importance, or multiple perspectives are recognized as being jointly valid. As I explored Orthodoxy, I found that it actually realizes the Protestant ideal of "in essentials unity; in non-essentials liberty; in all things charity".

And second, I would say that while sin is indeed the "cause" of schisms on a very high level, Tradition arguably helps to restrain and dampen the effects of sin on the unity of the Church, while sola scriptura fans the flames. Yes, the Orthodox Church has undergone schisms and some Protestants enjoy a great deal of unity and consensus within their church or denomination, but I don't think there is any systemic problem contributing to schisms in the Orthodox Church like the problem of authority I described above. Instead, I see Holy Tradition making it much harder to divide the Church, such that the three aforementioned major schisms were not instigated by individuals or congregations, but occurred between entire national churches with conceptions of the faith that had come to be irreconcilable, in part due to linguistic, cultural, political, and geographic disparities (rather than merely reading the same Bible in different ways). Even if one of the parties to these schisms continues to be the "one true Church" afterwards (as all agree to be the case), the sin that contributed to them is shared by all and mourned by all.

In the case of schisms among Protestant denominations, if there is "sin" involved in such schisms, it tends to be the other party's sin of denying the truth of God's Word and being led astray into error; thus, one feels right to reject and separate from them as false teachers worthy of condemnation, such as the Bible warns about (cf. Gal 1:6-9, Col 2:18-19, Jude 1:3-4)—in other words, to actually initiate the schism. The large number of Christian churches and denominations, it is thought, is due to existing churches falling into error, and authentic believers coming out from them and becoming separate. This inverts the old pattern: the schismatic party, rather than being the one condemned as in traditional Christianity, is instead said to be justified and a force for doctrinal restoration. Schism ceases to be violence against the body of Christ and becomes a mechanism for maintaining true doctrine, which is in turn an unrealized ideal the Church must journey towards rather than a treasure she was entrusted with by Christ and has held since the beginning. Sola scriptura, especially as it has been applied in the wake of the Radical Reformation, extends to all Christians the responsibility and authority to "rightly divide the word of truth" traditionally held by the bishops, the successors of the apostles. With such a multitude of little bishops, is it any wonder that there exists such a plurality of Protestant teachings?

The sea of relativism

In my own experience, Orthodox (or Catholic) claims to be the "one true Church" tend to be viewed by Protestants as deeply, problematically arrogant. But such a skeptical attitude toward any church claiming authenticity merely leaves one with the pervasive interpretive pluralism Smith describes, with multiple competing "biblical" truth claims on virtually any teaching or practice and no authoritative answers as to who may be right. The baseline of skepticism enabled by sola scriptura towards claims of absolute doctrinal truth actually bears much resemblance to the attitude of secular skeptics towards absolute truth claims in general. Absolute truth exists, evangelicals like to argue in a number of ways, yet while living with an unprecedented state of doctrinal pluralism and rejecting truth claims more absolute than their own.

There are several ways that Protestants manage this, and I don't claim to list them all here. For those who are content to accept and uphold the teachings of their particular church tradition, the reality of pervasive interpretive pluralism feels remote, and may not be noticed at all. The existence of other Christians who hold an irreconcilably different faith based on the same scriptural foundation need not bother someone who is able to receive and live in his or her own church's teaching with simple faith.

Many evangelicals take something of an a la carte approach to doctrine, not feeling strongly bound to any particular tradition, selecting beliefs from various traditions on the basis of their interpretation of Scripture and the Christian faith. The way I used to do this, at least, resembled deciding your positions on the "issues" at stake in a presidential election: this is what I believe on predestination, this is what I believe on women's ordination, this is what I believe about the nature of the Bible, and so on. This approach goes hand-in-hand with an ecclesiology that locates the one, invisible Church among true "followers of Jesus" across hundreds of different traditions. The subtext of such a theory is that maintaining an authentic, life-giving relationship with God through Jesus is of primary importance and what makes you part of "the Church", while what you believe is secondary and may well conflict with what others in "the Church" believe; what matters is how it bears on the relationship. Believers following the a la carte approach are well aware of the conflicting voices on a wide array of topics, but rather than a confused cacophony they merely see a variety of paths and options for arriving at a faith in accord with one's conscience.

At one time this individualistic approach, exemplifying the freedom to believe according to one's conscience guided by Scripture and unfettered by any human power, felt liberating to me, but in my doubt I realized this liberty was actually confining and profoundly relativistic. If my beliefs simply arose from my own scripturally-informed convictions, I had no confidence that they were true, especially if the scripturally-informed convictions of others led them to different conclusions. Even if I instead aligned myself to a church and accepted its faith tradition as my own, this merely pushed the problem of pluralism up to a higher level; did I prefer this church because it had most faithfully preserved the truth out of the wide plurality of denominations, or simply because it teaching was agreeable to me?

Despite its original intention of rescuing the truth of the Christian faith from its captivity under tradition, the attitude toward authority of sola scriptura ultimately made this truth even more unreachable and intangible. And for me, this was not a merely intellectual search; I found that I couldn't force myself to keep living a faith that seemed riddled with contradictions however I looked at it. This seemingly inescapable confusion about what is true, combined with an inability to trust any of the answers I found as anything more than my own preferences, is what I came to think of as the "sea of relativism".

In the midst of this confusion, Holy Tradition came not as an oppressive "teaching of man", or even primarily as a body of doctrinal truths more coherent and plausible than the one I had been attempting to construct, but as the soothing presence of Christ in the storm of my confusion. The Church established by Christ had not become diffused into this dreadful, unknowable pluralism, like a gas or an abstraction, revealed truth intermingled with human error. The gates of Hades will not prevail over this Church; how much less the arguments of men! Through the prayers and worship of the Church, through the sacraments, through the writings of the Fathers, and (of course) through the inspired words of Scripture, I can have an encounter with the living Christ not mediated by my own subjective interpretation of things (or by cumbersome human institutions and traditions). The only obstacle left after my confusion and doubt dissipated is my own stubborn, apathetic heart, in need of the Healer.

In conclusion

Even after months(!) of polishing, this post still ended up more polemical than I had hoped. Following the example of countless Orthodox teachers I've read, I am trying to rid myself of that habit; I don't need any other Christian tradition to be wrong to accept Orthodoxy as the truth. In this spirit, I'll try to bring this post full circle, back to the question my friend raised (or at least how I've kept it in mind): how do evangelical Christians concerned about the current state of Christianity as divided among hundreds or thousands of traditions (as I once was) respond to Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 1:10? The answer I've been pushing for through most of this post is simply "become Orthodox." But I don't presume to have convinced everyone or anyone, so in order not to leave you empty-handed, I will offer a few other thoughts.

The most basic thing, applicable to Protestants and Orthodox alike, is to avoid adding to the division and instead seek to embody the unity and agreeability Paul prescribes for the church in Corinth. Pray that God by his Spirit would fulfill these words of Paul in you: "I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." (Eph 4:1-3) Seek out and affirm points of truth (what St. Justin Martyr would call "seeds of the Word") in others' Christian traditions; this is the basic method of Orthodox ecumenical dialogue. When you do come to disagree on something, try to do so constructively, and to understand the reasons others believe as they do.

But this still does little to address the fragmented state in which evangelicals find their churches—the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism again. Perhaps the first step to applying Paul's words to this divided state is simply to recognize it. Even though you (hopefully) aren't personally responsible for it, you have inherited a form of Christianity that, more than any other, has failed to abide by Paul's words in 1 Cor 1:10, to preserve the unity of the early Church. So please, acknowledge this, and stop pretending it doesn't really matter in the name of humility or ecumenical goodwill. I have come to prefer the Roman Catholic Church's claims to be the original Church, even if I disagree with them, than the prevailing evangelical attitude that such claims are not necessary, or even possible. As I explained above, this attitude reeks of a relativism which evangelicals are right to reject in other contexts.

And finally, whether or not it leads you across the Bosphorus like it did me, I cannot recommend familiarizing yourself with Christian history highly enough. Some starter ideas from my own shelf: Justo Gonzalez has written an excellent, accessible, and fairly comprehensive history of Christianity from an evangelical perspective, as has Roger Olson. The late Jaroslav Pelikan's five-part series on the history of doctrine is a longer, denser read, but is magisterial in its treatment of the development of all three major streams of Christianity; in particular, I thank Pelikan for deepening my understanding of early Christian heresies and the legitimate theological concerns behind them, especially mono/miaphysitism and Nestorianism. And, if you're curious about my chosen church tradition, unfamiliar to western Christians as it so often is, you could always check out the book that led to my conversion. I have also written about paleo-orthodoxy, a movement within Protestant led by Thomas Oden (author of Classic Christianity) that seeks to rediscover the classical, ecumenical Christian faith through patristic study, to which I am grateful both for the translations of classic texts it has produced and for sparking interest in patristics among people whose familiarity with the subject often doesn't extend past St. Augustine.

Even if you don't think the early Church has continued to today or that Holy Tradition is anything more than the fallible attempts of of godly men and women to understand the Unknowable, studying church history can still give you a more historically founded perspective on your beliefs and show just what it meant for the Nicene Creed to affirm "one holy catholic and apostolic Church". You can study for yourself how we got from the church of the apostles to the vast multitude of churches we have today, and perhaps come to a diagnosis of your own as I did in this post. Connecting with the historical Christian tradition(s) is an important part of the spirit of unity I described above; it is unity across time rather than space. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, "Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead."

Though I have not done a good job of representing it here, the unity the Church ideally enjoys is far more than doctrinal. The Christian faith has always, asymptotically, extended beyond human understanding, to the heights of heaven. The Church is the "passage" to heaven, as Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote, and the "vehicle" that takes us there is communion—the creed's "communion of saints", which is understood as a life-giving unity with and under Christ the head, transcending time and space as he does. This is the unity that St. Paul calls us to. Don't settle for less.

Living the Mystery

This is my final post on the book Discerning the Mystery, by Andrew Louth. The first post can be found here.

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In the previous five chapters Louth has attempted to trace the division between "head" and "heart", or between two different kinds of knowing truth, that characterizes much of our contemporary awareness. Now, in closing, he turns to look for a way to transcend this division and find unity.

The first possible solution he brings up is that of Baron von Hügel von Hügel traces this divide as being between reason, which is universal and sharable but merely explains and does not "move" us, and intuition, instinct, or feeling, which does "move" us but seems to be individual, evanescent, and not transferable. His answer to this dilemma is not a theory, but a life, "a life sufficiently large and alive to take up and retain, within its own experimental range, at least some of the poignant question and conflict, as well as of the peace-bringing solution and calm" (134)—or as Louth puts it, "the life of saint". As von Hügel says, not simply believing in God but feeling bound to believe as from God himself is what is important: "Not simply that I think it, but that I feel bound to think it, transforms thought about God into a religious act." (135) The saint is one for whom this religious act has become constant and basic to one's being, something made one's own, not merely thought about. Interpretation, understanding, and application are inseparable.

J.H. Newman wrote of a similar union between understanding and action. He seeks to free the concept or mind or intellect from its modern reduction to "mere ratiocination" (138) and to remind us of the classical concept of "mind", nous, as the faculty which enables us to know and commune with God and which is intuitive, moral, and active as well as analytical and contemplative. Faith understood in this light, Newman says, is a deeply intellectual act, but this does not manifest in a concern for proofs, arguments, and evidence. This is partly because our real reasons for believing things lie deeper and are more implicit; "The desire to make all reasoning explicit manifests 'a dislike of an evidence, varied, minute, complicated, and a desire or something producible, striking, and decisive.: such a desire is really irrational, as it fails to understand the realities of human behavior and action." (139) Faith is not merely passive engagement with the truth of the kind we see in the sciences, but active, whole-hearted engagement with it, a "reaching forward of the mind". It is more a skill than a method, a skill acquired by practice—the practice of love, humility, and trust in God. What is most important in knowing the Truth is not evidence but one's moral state.

Newman's striking doctrine of faith comes as a response to the objections raised by the Enlightenment against tradition. Against the scientific attempt to reject traditional ways of knowing, start from scratch, and build up a body of knowledge for oneself from the evidence, Newman defends tradition, the idea of the past as a bearer of the presumptions that allow us to attain to understanding. It is not a matter of applying the right method or technique, but something harder to define, a skill or insight developed by example, "something whose archetype is not the clever arguing of a debater, but the humble understanding of the saint, whose faith is tested and proven in a life." (141)

Louth next turns to a few briefer examples of attempts to transcend the Enlightenment divide. The atheist philosopher Iris Murdoch argues for something resembling traditional virtue ethics over against Kant's strong focus on ethics as a series of conscious moral choices. It is not a matter of consciously applying a rational moral law to choose the right action from a number of possibilities; rather, she says, a man acts because of the kind of person he is, and a truly good person will only see one possibility, the right one. Thus her holding-together of will and reason somewhat echoes von Hügel. Josef Pieper calls attention to the importance of wonder, "that purely receptive attitude to reality, undisturbed and unsullied by the interjection of the will" (142-143), to the contemplation of God. This wonder can be dulled, requiring the sensational rather than "everyday being" to be awakened, or reduced to doubt, a problem to overcome in the quest for knowledge. Yet wonder is not supposed to be temporary, but the lasting origin of philosophy.

The permanence of wonder, Louth says, corresponds closely to the irreducible nature of mystery. And it is a mystery that lies at the center of the Christian faith—and not just a philosophical mystery, but a mystery has been disclosed in the life of a historical person. The ultimate mystery of God is met in the particular, not merely for us to seek out but as the One who came to seek and save the lost. Here we see clearly how mystery is not just the focus of our questioning, but as that which questions us, calls us to account.

It is the centrality of mystery to human knowledge that is questioned by claims of the scientific way of knowing to be the only way to truth. For this way of knowing is blind to mysteries; it knows only solved problems and unsolved problems. But mystery is irreducible to the humanities, including theology, because they are concerned with what man has done as a free, personal being, not as constrained by rational natural laws.

In conclusion, Louth offers his thoughts on the value of theology for human understanding: "theology holds before us, and holds us before, the ultimate mystery of God, and suggests that it is because man is made by God in his image and likeness that he is ultimately mysterious and can never be understood as he really is in terms that prescind from the mystery of his personhood." (145-146) Its fundamental contribution to the pursuit of knowledge is, as Pieper puts it, "that it should hinder and resist the natural craving of the human spirit for a clear, transparent, and definite system", by keeping open access to the tradition in which we can behold the mystery of God in Christ. Theology is not only a matter of learning, though this remains important to its vitality, but is in Newman's terms "the apprehension of the believing mind combined with a right state of the heart" (147). Its fullest expression is a life, a life which testifies to the mystery of Christ and makes his light, his awe-fullness, his love manifest to others.

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One more implication of Louth's description of the kind of truth present in the Christian tradition: not being able to justify or "prove" our beliefs of practices in a way that is convincing to an arbitrary, "reasonable" person (assumed not to share our convictions) need not cast doubt on them. It's a consequence of truth in theology not being purely "objective" (that is, dependent on the knower), and the role of tradition in helping us to rightly perceive truth. I was reminded of it again by Newman's point in this chapter that the real reasons (as opposed to the justifications) for what we believe and do tend to be deep and implicit, and "must be attenuated or mutilated" (139) to be turned into a logical argument. This helps explain why in discussing theology I focus not on whether a teaching is derivable from Scripture using sound hermeneutics and rational arguments, but more on its implications (does it contradict or sit in tension with what I know of the "mind of the Church", or fit with it?), or on its origin: is it received as part of the apostolic tradition, or was it added later?

Louth and the authors he draws from (Newman in particular) lay out clearly ideas I was reaching towards as I was rethinking my faith in 2013, ideas which show the radical break I was going through from the quasi-scientific way I approached the Bible and Christian truth previously. I brought up the fact that Truth is something personal, namely Christ himself, in my search for a better way of reading Scripture, but I didn't have the skill to explore the implications nearly as fully as this book does. (Itself an illustration of our interdependence in the search for truth) My dissatisfaction with the scientific definition of truth in theology and idea of a more personal, experiential dimension of truth as something you participate in rather than just perceived are echoed and greatly developed on in Discerning the Mystery. In the next post I hinted at something like Hort's idea of truth as multifaceted and beyond-"rational", Marcel's concept of mystery, and Louth's recurring statement that truth and Christian faith are not merely a matter of ideas, but of reality and our active engagement with it. Of course I saw none of these things clearly at the time, but I anticipated them in some way—much like how Newman describes faith as concerned with anticipations and presumptions, an active "reaching forward of the mind." This pattern of movement from dim apprehension (as faith is tested and built up) to clear fulfillment (as faith is rewarded) is important in the Christian tradition, and I can see something like it at work even in my journey to Orthodoxy, which is a major reason why I find it so convincing.

I decided to blog through Discerning the Mystery because I could tell the truths it witnesses to, things I had already sensed elsewhere in Orthodox teaching but nowhere as clearly, bear huge implications my faith, in particular for overcoming the head-heart divide, the "dissociation of sensibility" that I have long been aware of in myself. Yet this divide is so entrenched that even trying to get rid of it can end up perpetuating it, if I simply try to think myself out of it as I tend to do. The full answer, as Louth says, is not a theory or truth I need to understand analytically, but something I do and live. This is part of the broad and deep understanding of tradition he has been explaining throughout the book, and it is the beating heart of the Orthodox Church, inviting me to take part. Yesterday I began the 40-day fast leading up to the Nativity of Christ—which, as I have already reminded myself, is not simply the Christian version of kosher, but is meant to help us participate in the mysteries of God, to engage with the Truth of our faith, to grow in Christ-likeness. Practices like this, part of a tradition that is not just doctrines but a common life rooted in the everlasting life of Christ, offer someone like me real hope for uniting thought and feeling, belief and experience.

Rehabilitating Allegory

This is my fifth post on the book Discerning the Mystery, by Andrew Louth. The first post can be found here.

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Allegorical interpretation has a poor (to say the least) reputation in modern theology. And not just a specific, distinctly modern theology, but very nearly all kinds of theology done in the present time. Louth thinks this is primarily because allegory is seen as fundamentally dishonest, or arbitrary—it seems to interpret a text to make it say something it manifestly does not say, something that you instead want it to say. It seems to not only flirt with, but embrace subjectivity in terrible excess, taking the interpreter away from the actual meaning of the text into the realm of arbitrary fancy. The author's intent in writing a text may not be easy to discern, but we are charged to seek after it, not abandon it as allegory seems to do.

Louth has already explained the reasons he finds this kind of reaction to allegory less than convincing. It assumes that the meaning of a text is objective or "unproblematic": whatever the author meant to say when writing it. Within Protestantism, this assumption is strongly correlated with the principle of sola scriptura, which tends to see Scripture as the objective truth of God's revelation to man, who is charged with discerning this truth from it by right interpretation. From this point of view allegory seems to be a way of avoiding this revelation and replacing it with human opinions. More recently added to this is historical criticism in some form as an apparently promising method for the extraction of this objective truth of revelation from the pages of Scripture, a way of "right interpretation" allowing us to carry out the task laid before us by sola scriptura.

Louth considers this approach to Scripture to be contrary to the one found in the Fathers and not "traditional" in any sense. The truth of Christianity is not basically biblical; "the heart of Christianity is the mystery of Christ, and the Scriptures are important as they unfold to us that mystery, not in and for themselves." (102) Likewise historical criticism's quest for the objective "original meaning" in the biblical text is based on false assumptions about what is involved in interpretation and the role of tradition in general, as well as the significance of the divine inspiration of Scripture in particular. It is a transfer into the humanities of a methodology appropriate to the sciences, which Louth considers to be invalid since "the natural order of physical objects and the moral order of intelligent beings are not at all the same. ... The moral order is transparent to us in a way that the natural order is not ... and the medium of that transparency is tradition, tradition formed by language and custom." (105-106)

With all that said, we are ready to understand how the Fathers handled Scripture. The primary modern complaint with allegory, that the text has a single "original meaning" which allegory deftly sidesteps, is undermined; they saw not one by multiple senses of Scripture, a rich depth of meaning, which is explored through the use of allegory. Interpreting is not a matter of reconstructing the original context of the author and placing ourselves in it, but of listening across a historical gulf that is not empty and in need of a bridge, but filled with the tradition which brings the text to me along with the prejudices that help me understand it. "What unites us with the writers of the Scriptures is the life of the Church from their day to ours." (107) The relationship between Church and Scripture is reciprocal; the Bible emerged from the life of the Church, was recognized as Scripture within it, and is read as life-giving Scripture within it.

As an example of how tradition "echoes" Scripture, Louth gives the example of attending a high mass in a medieval French cathedral. (A divine liturgy in an old Orthodox cathedral would arguably work as well) A lot is going on; gestures and movements of the celebrants, chanting and singing of the liturgy, the so-called "smells and bells". There is detail in our surroundings: the architecture, the art (statues in Catholic churches, icons in Orthodox churches, stained glass in both). These different ways of conveying meaning to us can interact in almost an infinity of ways, calling each other to our attention, inviting analogies between each other, interpreting each other. All of this is drawn from the mystery of the Eucharist, and draws us back to it. This, Louth believes, is a sort of image of the way Scripture is revealed to possess a bottomless depth, a miras profunditas, of richness in the Church's tradition. This richness is the unfolding of or introduction to the great mysteries at its heart. It is this richness, this depth, which makes allegory with its recognition of inexhaustibly multiple senses and meanings of Scripture appropriate.

Louth pauses to ask: does not this focus on depth or complexity make the Scripture and its message too difficult, like a puzzle, into something like the hidden knowledge of the gnostics? Drawing from George Steiner, he considers how there are different kinds of difficulty. The two most relevant ones are "contingent" difficulty arising from lack of knowledge, and "ontological" difficulty, which is not easily resolved (if at all) demands the questioning and reorientation of our priorities and assumptions. This corresponds closely with Marcel's distinction between problem and mystery.

Seen this way, allegory is not a method for obfuscation since it is not meant to solve contingent difficulties (historical criticism has plenty to offer here); rather, it is a way of holding before us the mystery which constitutes the ontological difficulty of the Scriptures—"a difficulty, a mystery, which challenges us to revise our understanding of what might be meant by meaning ... which calls on us for a response of metanoia, change of mental perspective, repentance." (111) The difficulty in Scripture arises from its depth, not from any mistake or lack of clarity, from "not being sufficiently at home in the tradition, not having an unerring instinct as to what resonates and what merely makes a noise." (112) Thus the traditional recognition of the multiple senses of scripture and the use of allegory is a response to the miras profunditas of Scripture seen as witness of the mystery of Christ. Louth denies, as others have claimed, that allegory is a way of solving contingent interpretive problems or glossing over difficult parts of the biblical text. Origen in particular was accused of doing this, but Louth believes that he was really looking for beauty and harmony behind apparently disjointed and disorderly (yet inspired) texts.

He moves on to how allegory actually operates. When we think of the doctrine that Scripture has multiple senses (often three or four: literal, moral, allegorical, and maybe anagogical), it's easy to think that the nonliteral senses are alternate ways of using Scripture that ignore the literal sense, and therefore seem arbitrary and frivolous. Against this, Louth says we should think of it not just as a list of senses, but as an order or movement, a recurring pattern: from history to allegory, old to new, shadow to reality, letter to spirit, fact to significance, promise to fulfillment in Christ. The literal sense helps us discern the mysteries at work in the text; the allegorical sense attempts to understand them. This pattern is still somewhat extant in some parts of Protestantism, though it is more commonly called typology. Ironically, typological interpretation was one of the things in the evangelical tradition that used to cause me doubt and confusion; this was probably because its ancient grounding in patristic theology clashed with the much more modern way in which I was used to reading Scripture.

To warn against the excesses of allegory (which are rightly deplored), Louth notes the distinction between allegoria facti and allegoria verbi. The latter, he argues, is concerned purely with the words of the text rather than the reality they speak of and "is only justified as a kind of embroidery of allegory of fact, not as a freely created, merely literary conceit." (119) As an example of bad allegorical wordplay he refers to the interpretation of the "two swords" in Luke 22:38 (which Jesus says are "enough") as justifying the division of ecclesiastical power wielded by the Pope and temporal power wielded by kings and rulers (or, as in Unam Sanctum, the subordination of all earthly authorities to the spiritual authority of the bishop of Rome). "This word-play", he says, "has no basis in any allegoria facti," in other words is not in any way a movement from the literal meaning of the text, and "is in no way an attempt to penetrate more deeply into the mystery of Christ." A better example of the two kinds of allegory working together positively is the parallels frequently drawn between the xylon or lignum (both words referring to wood in general, a tree, or something made out of wood) by which Adam and Eve fell and that by which Christ, the second Adam, redeemed their fall. (I wish this wordplay transferred better to English; I still don't appreciate hymns calling the cross a "tree")

This movement from fact to significance, faith to understanding, is not merely intellectual, but of realizing our participation in the mystery of Christ with our whole selves. Tradition does not merely disclose to us a normative way of interpreting Scripture; the dogmatic fruits of interpreting reveal to us the mystery of Christ, a mystery which is not merely timeless but eternally present, a mystery which draws us into itself, invites our response that it might be fulfilled in us. Thus, Louth argues, allegory is hardly arbitrary because it is "firmly related to the mystery of Christ." (121) It is a way of relating the whole of Scripture to that mystery, of glimpsing a single vision out of all the images and events in the Bible.

The allegorical way of understanding especially comes into its own in the liturgy. For it is in the liturgy first and foremost that the central mystery of Christ is celebrated and displayed. The readings from Scripture and the rhythm of the liturgical year are meant to draw out different aspects of this mystery for us to perceive. As an example, Louth describes how the liturgy celebrates the baptism of the Lord. This event is considered to be a revelation of the Trinity (the Father as a voice from heaven, the Son being baptized, and the Spirit descending from heaven as a dove). The imagery of the Spirit as a dove is expounded on, and applied to how we should be: innocent, gentle, and responding with a soaring desire to see God. As the heavens were opened at the baptism, so through Christ the heavens are opened to us. All of these themes are picked up not just at the festal liturgy for the baptism of Christ (Theophany), but also in the baptismal liturgy, in which we are considered to reenact the events of Christ's. The allegorical interpretation of the scriptural text and the liturgy both serve as "echo chambers" that help us to see the resonances of the significance of this event in the life of Christ.

In closing, Louth explains that the apparent complexity of allegorical interpretation is meant to lead us to a simple message: love. Just as "the Scriptures tell the story of God's way of leading men back into unity, and the way has to be from the fragment to the unified" (130), so allegory helps us to see Scripture as a kaleidoscope, fragmented but looking forward to the unity and simplicity of the One who restores all things. Allegory not only helps us discern this pattern, but also to restore within ourselves this lost unity and simplicity, coming once again to love. "The heart of Scripture is the end"—that is, the goal—"of Scripture: the love of God in Christ calling us to respond to that love." (131)

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This chapter was a really helpful explanation of allegorical interpretation: the rationale behind it, dispelling many myths I've grown up with, and how it functions. Louth's idea of a movement from history to significance, from literal to allegorical sense, echoes the intuition I had already been developing about allegory: allegorical interpretation must grow out of the literal sense, be rooted in it, not ignore it to make some other point reflecting extraneous biases (like the "two swords" theory). Thus there is a place in Orthodox hermeneutics for Bible/historical scholarship; for all the value of the allegorical interpretation of the Fathers, there is still plenty to learn about the literal, historical meaning of the text.

Louth's reflections on sola scriptura and the need to allow Scripture to bring us to the mystery of Christ, within tradition, put a damper on the idea of simply expecting people to encounter Christ in the pages of Scripture with no context. Of course this does happen, and God can work this way, but Louth helps explain why plenty of people find nothing in the Bible except things to deride or scorn. The context in which the Bible is read is important—modern western culture, at least, is deeply at odds with the mind of the Church, and people formed by it (unless they are already influenced by Christianity somehow) will more than likely misunderstand Scripture when reading on their own. It may even do more harm than good. People may build up a deep resistance to Christian claims because of their perception that their God is a violent tyrant, or that Jesus was merely a moral teacher worthy of respect but not worship. Such misconceptions, which keep people from discerning the mystery to which the Bible witnesses, are inevitable if we claim that our faith is defined by the biblical text and that this text is clear enough that anyone can understand (it also doesn't help that some who call themselves Christians actively teach these things, and tend to get significant media exposure). It is much more accurate to say Orthodox believe that the Bible is the "book of the Church" than that they are "people of the book".

Tradition in the Church

This is my fourth post on the book Discerning the Mystery, by Andrew Louth. The first post can be found here.

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In this chapter Louth goes into much more depth on what tradition is and how it works in the Church. In introduction, he first comments on the conflict over tradition that has existed between Catholics and Protestants since the Reformation. Louth argues that in this dispute both parties misunderstand the nature of tradition: namely, both seem to view it as something comparable with Scripture, either a complement or a rival to it. They are both objectified, as sources of truth we are seeking to understand. This tends to assume that what is being revealed or understood is a collection of objective, independent truths, so that tradition is seen as revealing additional truths not written down in Scripture. Of this, Louth comments, "The problem of how we know at all, what it is that is taken for granted when we seek to understand God's revelation, has not been broached with any very searching intensity." (73) This understanding of tradition as parallel to Scripture was not held by the  early Church Fathers.

The central truth or mystery of the Christian faith, he says, is not a matter of words, ideas, or concepts, but of deeds, of reality. The words of revelation, even the words of Jesus the Word, are secondary in the Christian faith to the ultimate reality of who he is and what he accomplished. "To be a Christian is not simply to believe something, to learn something, but to be something, to experience something." (74) The Church is the place in which this being, this experience, can take place. He correlates this with 1 John 1:1-3:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life-- the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us-- that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship [is] with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.

What John proclaims is not only a message, but a physical (and metaphysical) reality; what he asks from his readers is not simply belief, but fellowship. "Joining a fellowship, commitment to a community, involves more than assent to its beliefs, but rather a sharing in its way of life, in its ceremonies, and customs and practices." (75) Presumably these things are not seen as simply derived from more basic beliefs. This understanding of engagement with the truth calls to mind Polanyi's idea of community and tradition as the context for our knowing, and Gadamer's idea of bildung or paideia as the initiation into the preconceptions that allow us to know rightly. Indeed the early Christians adopted the concept of paideia from Greek philosophy, seeing in it an affirmation of the nature of man as a social being and the inherent goodness of creation, over against the Gnostics with their secret, individualistic knowledge.

In his treatise On Christian Doctrine, Augustine does not limit his use of the word doctrina to simply mean "teaching", but appears to mean something similar to paideia, or even what we might think of as "culture" in the broadest sense—a deeply Christian culture learned within the community of the Church, which is seen as the Spirit-enabled fulfillment of human societies. The goal (or at least a major goal) of the Scriptures, Augustine writes, is to teach us to love God and neighbor rightly (both to truly love them, and to order these loves properly), and it teaches us this using signs, namely the words of human language. Augustine points out that since words and language are, in a sense, arbitrary (the signs are not intrinsically related to the things they signify), they depend for their efficacy on consent between human beings. So the whole enterprise of human understanding, and human society in general, is dependent on and grows outward from a shared tradition of sorts, a "common sense". This is not even a tradition of the Church, but a common human tradition. Augustine's understanding of the importance of tradition in Christian formation is visibly a Christian development of the classical Greek idea of paideia.

Other Church Fathers depict how the Church deepened and developed this idea. Clement of Rome highlights the continuity of the sending as described by Christ in John 17:18 or 20:21: "As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you." Christian tradition is not simply the continuity of the human search for truth, but of the divine sending, the divine mission, passed from Christ to the apostles to their successors and so on, the mission of the Church which she pursues in the world. This sending is in the power of the Spirit (John 20:22), who gives the Church the power to be a witness for Christ in the world. (15:26-27) In this sense, the heart of the tradition of the Church is the life of the Holy Spirit in her, her fellowship with the Trinity.

Louth turns to a well-known passage from Irenaeus next:

True knowledge is the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient constitution of the Church throughout all the world, and the distinctive manifestation of the body of Christ according to the successions of the bishops, by which they have handed down that Church which exists in every place, and has come even unto us, being guarded and preserved without any forging of Scriptures, by a very complete system of doctrine, and neither receiving addition nor curtailment; and reading [the word of God] without falsification, and a lawful and diligent exposition in harmony with the Scriptures, both without danger and without blasphemy; and the pre-eminent gift of love, (2 Corinthians 8:1; 1 Corinthians 13) which is more precious than knowledge, more glorious than prophecy, and which excels all the other gifts. (Against Heresies IV.33.8)

Here Irenaeus describes the process of apostolic succession, by which not just doctrines or teachings but the "distinctive manifestation of the body of Christ", or what Louth calls "the whole character of the Christian community, its rites, its ceremonies, its practices, and its life." (84) This tradition manifests pre-eminently in the gift of love; it is not simply a message, but a life. Irenaeus often spoke of a "rule of truth" (called a rule of faith by others), the fundamentals of Christian belief and their significance, handed down from the apostles and received in baptism. And "the fact that it is received is almost as important as what is received—tradition is not something we make up, but something we accept." (85) Tradition is a shining example of our interdependence and commonality, of humanity in general and of the Church much more so

Basil the Great, in his work On the Holy Spirit, makes a distinction between the public proclamation of the Church and its dogmas, "which we have received from the tradition of the apostles and given to us in secret." (XXVII.66) Basil is not speaking of a secret unwritten body of teaching in parallel to the written Scriptures; this is the kind of thing whose existence Irenaeus vehemently denied against the Gnostics. From the examples he gives—the sign of the cross, prayer to the East, and other elements of the liturgy—we see that he is not speaking of teachings, but practices as the "secret tradition". These things are not publicly proclaimed or taught, but are nonetheless a subtle part of tradition, part of the 'tacit dimension' of the life of the Christian. "Christianity is not a body of doctrine that can be specified in advance, but a way of life and all that this implies." (86)

This is illustrated in Basil's "proof" of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which is based not on explicit scriptural evidence but on the Spirit's indispensable role in uniting us to God, enabling us to participate in his life—in other words, on the inward experience of Christian spirituality. This is the context in which this and other "secret" teachings of the Church can be proclaimed and understood. In other words, much of Christian tradition does not consist of "objective" truths that can be proclaimed and understood by anyone regardless of context. "They are not 'objective' truths which could be appraised and understood outside the bosom of the Church: rather, they are part of the Church's reflection on the mystery of her life with God."

So tradition is not really another source of teaching parallel to Scripture; it is the inner life of the Church, "that life in which the individual Christian is perfected in the image of God in which he was created." (88) It is not believed in itself, but received, participated in. It is not individual, but communal; not only active in the mind but in the heart, the way by which we are perfected in the image of Christ and enabled to know, to receive God more truly.

We can now see how central liturgy is for the enactment of tradition, for the liturgy is the Church's practice and tangible expression of that inner life. It is most fundamentally in the liturgy that we celebrate and share in the mysteries at the heart of the Christian tradition. "For the heart of the Christian faith is not merely something conceptual: it is a fact, or even better, an action—the action, the movement, of the Son sent into the world for our sakes to draw us back to the Father." (89) The liturgy echoes and repeats this movement; heaven and earth become intermingled, God comes down to us and we ascend to him.

Louth emphasizes that can simply "understand", much less make up; it must be participated in, with all that we are. The givenness of liturgy, the fact that we are receiving and joining in words and practices that we can't always readily make sense of ("the secret tradition" described by Basil),is important because it is in this way that the liturgy involves us in the "tacit dimension" of Christian tradition, the depths of the mysteries in which the liturgy makes us partakers. "What can be articulated, what can be understood, is only a part, if an important part. The life in which we share as we commit ourselves to the tradition of the Church goes much deeper." (90) This is why it is so dangerous to try to reduce worship to what can be understood conceptually, as is so often the case in modern liturgical reform; to do so is to cut ourselves off from this depth. The fact that liturgy goes beyond speech "impresses on us the importance of the inarticulate" (91)—this inarticulateness about what is most important, not coincidentally, is characteristic of the child we have to become like to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Vladimir Lossky puts forward the idea of tradition as silence or stillness (in Greek, hesychia), the stillness and receptiveness in which we hear the Word of the Scriptures. It is the light that reveals the content of revelation, or the breath which makes the words heard. In Ignatius, whom Lossky refers to, this stillness also connotes a sense of presence: the personal presence of Jesus (which marked out the apostles, rather than simply having heard his words); it is this sense of stillness and presence that tradition conveys. "For the truth that lies at the heart of theology is not something there to be discovered, but something, or rather someone, to whom we must surrender." (95)

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Louth's discussion of Basil's "proof" of the divinity of the Holy Spirit is, I think, highly illustrative of this chapter's message. By arguing for the divinity of the Spirit from the Christian experience of life in the Spirit, Basil seems to assume that not only certain beliefs, but certain experiences, a certain way of being, can be normative or even definitive for the Christian faith. This was a striking realization for me, as I used to assume pretty strongly that Christianity was defined by and shaped around certain fundamental, deeply held beliefs (i.e. God as Trinity and creator, the Incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection...) from which everything else arises. This is implicit in the teaching of sola scriptura that the highest authority for Christian belief and practice, that which shapes and guides everything else in the Christian faith, is basically conceptual: the words of Scripture. But Louth argues that "the central truth, or mystery, of the Christian faith is primarily not a matter of words, and therefore ultimately of ideas or concepts, but a matter of fact, or reality." (74) That is, Christianity is not just a system of belief or a "religion" in the modern sense of the word; it is a way of life, a way of being, with all that that implies, a world-view in the fullest sense of the word.

In discussing the "rule of faith" as the basis of tradition, Louth stresses that the fact that this rule, this tradition is received is almost as important as what is received, for "tradition is not something we make up, but something we accept." (85) Later he adds, "we become Christians by becoming members of the Church, by trusting our forefathers in the faith. If we cannot trust the Church to have understood Jesus, then we have lost Jesus: and the resources of modern scholarship will not help us to find him." (93) This trust in our spiritual ancestors, this childlike attitude of receptiveness, is part of what it means to be part of a tradition, to live within a tradition. A baseline attitude of skepticism, of needing to have things justified or proved to us before we will believe anything, is innately contrary to this receptiveness; it does not place us within tradition but over it, as arbiters. (Expecting teachings to be shown to be objectively true goes even further, denying the particular role of tradition in shaping us to recognize and contemplate the truth.) As I realized while wrestling with the place of tradition in my faith, we cannot pick and choose the parts of tradition we follow; this goes against what tradition basically is. Of course the risk of false teaching is real, as the history of the Church shows, but we can't let this overcome our need to be receivers and participants of tradition; we do not treat everything we receive as false or only provisionally true until shown otherwise.

I can still see why not wanting worship to "make sense" or be "understandable" to a visitor seems like a terrible idea to many. Don't we want our worship to be welcoming and appealing to inquirers, rather than confusing or off-putting? This is the impetus for reforming the "peripheral" parts of worship to make it "relevant" or perhaps "seeker-sensitive", appealing to modern aesthetics while still conveying the important truth. (I have previously examined the assumptions behind this form-content division) The difference between modern and liturgical worship in the kind of understanding being sought is summed up by the distinction between problem and mystery in the previous chapter. If the alternative to worship (or Scripture, for that matter) being clear or perspicuous is its instead being confused or muddled, then of course we will want Scripture and our worship to be clear. But if liturgical worship is unclear or does not "make sense" to the layman, it is because it partakes in the hidden depths of the Christian tradition, hopefully bringing us into contact with the great mysteries which we cannot hope to "understand" as we do a simple, rational message. Again, limiting ourselves to what we (still more the inquirer) can rationally understand is contrary to the receiving attitude tradition means to teach us. Expecting the Christian faith to readily "make sense" amounts to a denial of the treasured depth therein. Any unclarity here is not a confusion in the message itself, but the result of the observer's not being "sufficiently at home in the tradition" (112), as Louth will say next time in the discussion on allegory.