Then and now have specific autobiographical meanings in what
follows. "Then" means the period of my personal development before I became
immersed in the meeting with and study of the ecumenical councils and leading
ancient consensual exegetes. "Now" means what has happened since that meeting
became a serious matter for me in the mid-"70s. "Consensual exegetes" are
Athanasius, Basil, Gregory, Nazianzen and Chrysostom in the East and Ambrose,
Jerome, Augustine and Gregory the Great in the West.
If I rhetorically exaggerate differences between then and now, shaped
as I am by present passions, my intent is to describe major reversals between
then and now without allowing them to die the death of a thousand qualifications.
I am not disavowing my former social idealism, but rather celebrating it
as having been taken up into a more inclusive understanding of history
and humanity.
The pivot occurred when my irascible, endearing Jewish mentor, the late
Will Herberg, straightforwardly told me what Protestant friends must have
been too polite to say, that I would remain I uneducated until I had read
deeply in patristic and medieval writers. That was in the early '70s, when
with long hair, bobbles, bangles and beads and a gleam of communitarian
utopianism in my eyes, I finally found my way into the fourth century treatise
by Nemesius, peri phuseos anthropon ("On the Nature of the Human"), where
it at length dawned on me that ancient wisdom could be the basis for a
deeper critique of modern narcissistic individualism than I had yet seen.
If you had asked me then what my life would look like now, I would have
guessed completely wrong. It now seems that life is more hedged by grace
and providence than I once imagined.
I now revel, in the mazes and mysteries of perennial theopuzzles: Can
God be known? Does God care? Why did God become human? Is Jesus the Christ?
How could he be tempted yet without sin? If Father, Son and Spirit, how
is God one? How does freedom cooperate with grace? How can the community
of celebration both express the holiness of the body of Christ in the world
and at the same time engage in the radical transformation of the world?
How is it possible daily to refract the holiness of God within the history
of sin? How shall I live my present life in relation to final judgment?
Not a new question on the list, nor a dull one.
Then I fancied I was formulating totally unprecedented issues and ordering
them in an original way. Later while reading John of Damascus on the oikonomia
of God (in The Orthodox Faith) I began belatedly to learn that the reordering
of theology I thought I was just inventing (the sequence now shaping Systematic
Theology) had been well understood as a received tradition in the eighth
century. All my supposedly new questions were much investigated amid the
intergenerational wisdom of the communio sanctorum. It was while reading
Chrysostom on voluntary poverty that I realized that Peter Berger's sociological
theory of knowledge elites had long ago been intuited. It was while reading
Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lecture on evidences for the resurrection
that I became persuaded that Pannenberg had provided a more accurate account
than Bultmann of the resurrection. It was while reading the fourth century
figure Macrina and the women surrounding Jerome that I realized how pro
foundly women had influenced monastic and ascetic disciplines. It was while
reading in Augustine's City of God of the ironic providences of history
that I realized how right was Solzhenitsyn on the spiritual promise of
Russia. And so it went.
Then focused on interpersonal humanistic psychology, now personal reflection
is occurring in the light of the theandric (God-man) One in whom our humanity
is most completely realized. Then blown by every wind of doctrine and preoccupied
with fads and the ethos of hypertoleration, now I suffer fools a little
less gladly.
What has shifted in my scholarly investigation between then and now?
Psychologically. the shift has been away from Freudian, Rogerian and Nietzschean
values, especially individualistic selfactualization and narcissistic self-expression,
and toward engendering durable habits of moral excellence and covenant
community; methodologically away from modern culture-bound individuated
experience and toward the shared public texts of Scripture and ecumenical
tradition; politically away from trust in regulatory power and rationalistic
planning to historical reasoning and a relatively greater critical trust
in the responsible free interplay of interests in the marketplace of goods
and ideas.
Now I experience, wider cross-cultural freedom of inquiry into and within
the variables of Christian orthodoxy mediated through brilliant Christian
voices of other times and places. Now I experience a liberation for orthodoxy
in the endless flexibility of centered apostolic teaching to meld with
different cultural environments while offering anew the eternal word of
the theandric, messianic Servant in each new historical setting. Then I
was seeking to live out my life mostly in accountability to contemporary
academic peers; now awareness of final judgment makes me only proximately
and semiseriously accountable to peers.
My trajectory changed because of a simple hermeneutical reversal: Before
the mid '70s I had been steadily asking questions on the hidden premise
of four key value assumptions of modern consciousness: hedonic self-actualization,
autonomous individualism, reductive naturalism and moral relativism. Now
my questions about decaying modernity are being shaped by ancient, consensual,
classic Christian exegesis of holy writ. The history of Christianity is
a history of exegesis whose best interpretations are offered by those most
simply seeking to state the mind of the believing community. Then I was
using the biblical text instrumentally, sporadically and eisegetically
to support my modern ideological commitments. Now the Bible is asking my
questions more deeply that I ever could before. Then mildly contemptuous
of patristic exegesis, now I thrive on patristic and matristic texts and
wisdom. Now I am at every level seeking guidance in the written word as
ecumenically received and consensually exegeted. Now when I teach my brightest
graduate students, I have nothing better to offer than the written word
as viewed through the unfolding meeting of brilliant and consenting minds
in time with that written word (Athanasius, Ambrose and company). Now I
preach less about my own sentiments and opinions and more from testimony
canonically received and grasped by the believing community of all times
and places, trusting that seed will bear fruit in its own time and that
word will address these hearers without too much static from me
While reading Vincent of Lerins's fifth-century aids to remembering
(Commonitory) I gained the essential hermeneutical foothold in defining
ecumenical teaching under the threefold test of catholicity as "that which
has been believed everywhere, always, and by all" (quod ubique, quod semper,
quod ab omnibus creditum est). From then on it was a straightforward matter
of searching modestly to identify those teachings.
I have learned nothing more valuable than confessing my own sin honestly
and receiving God's mercy daily. Meanwhile I curb pretenses of originality
and listen intently to those who attest a tradition of general lay consent.
I do not mean by "then" that I was unconverted or lacking faith in God;
rather, I was lacking attentiveness to apostolic testimony and the sanctification
of time through grace. I do not mean that now I have ceased being a modern
man or become bored with secularization. The world has become ever more
alive to me because of the seed of the Word being planted in this fallow
soil of the decaying wastes of modernity.
Then I was always on the edge of theological boredom; now no trivial
pursuits. Among theological issues most deeply engaging me in the past
year are sin in believers, the virginal conception of the Lord, providence
in history, prevenient grace, the holiness, catholicity and apostolicity
of the one church, radical judgment at the end of history and the rejection
of sin by atoning grace.
Then I distrusted anything that faintly smelled of orthodoxy. Now I
relish studying the rainbow of orthodox testimonies and happily embrace
the term paleo-orthodoxy if for no other reason than to signal clearly
that I do not mean modern neo-orthodoxy. Now I am experiencing a refreshing
sense of classic theological liberation. Paleoorthodoxy understands itself
to be postlib, postmodern, postfundy, postneoanything, since the further
one "progresses" from ancient apostolic testimony the more hopeless the
human condition becomes.
As a Protestant I grow daily more catholic without experiencing any
diminution of myself as evangelical. When my path becomes strewn with thorny
epithets like fundy or cryptopapist or byzantine or (my favorite) "Protestantism's
most Catholic theologian," I feel like I just got a badge of honor. I do
not mind being charged by conservative Protestants with drawing too near
Rome, for that only opens up an urgent and significant dialogue. I sometimes
find myself in the comic position of publicly debating liberal Catholics
and suddenly realizing that they are consorting with the old liberal Protestant
strumpets of my seedy past, while I am setting forth their own traditional
arguments from their magisterium. I grow daily in appreciation of what
traditionally grounded Catholics can do for Protestant evangelicals and
charismatics, who need their solidity and teaching tradition in order to
have something to bounce off of and even at times fight. Now I find few
questions in modern society that are not dealt with more thoughtfully in
Osservatore Romano than in National Catholic Reporter or Christianity and
Crisis. 'Then I was a regular reader of journals forever commending accommodation
to modernity; now I am drawn to the tough-love countercultural criticism
of Communio, First Things, New Oxford Review and Thirty Days.. Among those
I most admire are John Paul 11, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Solzhenitsyn
and the mother of Gorbachev.
My shift from then to now is from a fixation on modernity to the steady
flow of postmodern paleo-orthodox consciousness. Postmodern does not mean
ultramodern. What some call postmodern is an already-dated expression of
the last gasps of modernity, an ultramodern phase in its dying throes.
We are already living in a postmodern era, but it is not the postmodernity
being described by those who fly that flag (the unhappy campers following
Derrida, Foucault and the deconstructionist "Posties"). The after-deconstructionist
good news is that the disillusionments of the illusions of modernity are
already being corrected by classical Christian teaching. They are also
being corrected by conservative and orthodox Jewish consciousness. the
best traditions of Islam and ancient Hindu and Buddhist teaching. The return
to classic forms of religious consciousness is the hope of the deteriorating
modern situation, the source of its most profound critique and the practical
basis for living through and transcending its identity diffusion, discontent,
moral relativism and frenetic quest for relevance. The reason I am now
trying to write almost nothing that is currently relevant is that tomorrow
it will be less relevant. I am seeking to understand what is perennially
true, not what is ephemerally relevant
No current moral issue is more deep-going than the acid destructiveness
of modernity. No political project is more urgent for society than the
recovery of classic Christian consciousness through the direct address
of texts of Scripture and tradition. There is nothing better I can do for
the moral dilemmas of our time than offer undiluted the ancient wisdom
of the community of celebration. From that singleminded decision, everything
else has followed. I am only reporting what has very gradually, silently
and unspectacularly happened: a slow metamorphosis that still looks slightly
ugly to old friends who want me to be more like my old radical activist
self.
You may wonder how this reversal has redefined my moral and political
commitments. This quiet theological work is more effective politically
because less entangled with partisan biases and immediate interests. Then
I was devoutly and sentimentally attached to a particular wing of a political
party. Now with broken wing I walk more freely through the wide open fields
of political options I could not have imagined myself considering a few
years ago. Now chastened and somewhat more aware of the transpolitical
nature of ordination, I am learning belatedly (out of the countercultural
tradition from Polycarp to Menno Simons) some measure of political repentance,
mostly in the form of silence, after sinning much politically. That itself
is a vast political decision, to turn from partisanship toward political
engagement along different lines: teaching the written word. Now I experience
greater freedom to attest the received text and let the chips fall. Offering
word and sacrament to penitents with conflicting and ambivalent political
understandings is quite different now than when I pretended I had some
superior political gnosis.
Some may counter that I am just growing quite a bit older, which I am
grateful not to have to deny. I am waist-deep in middle age, with three
grown kids, all delightful friends very different from Edrita and me --
having negotiated the hazards of post modern history without crippling
effects. For those who might have wondered about my physical, condition,
I did have open-heart surgery in July of 1989 followed by a myocardial
infarction and a second surgery all on the same day -- they cleaned out
the old pipes and replaced a few -- but within a month of that ordeal I
was walking ten miles a day, and now, in the best physical shape I have
been in for years, I am running 12 miles a week, so no one need be overly
concerned. Through this brush with death my awareness of how God's strength
is made perfect through human weakness has deepened. To my significant
other, the courageous woman who has accompanied me for 38 years of this
journey, I am incalculably grateful; without her I cannot imagine where
I might be -- probably not here, maybe not anywhere.
I want to be permitted to study the unchanging God without something
else to do, some pragmatic reason or result. This is what I most want to
do theologically: simply enjoy the study of God, not write about it, view
it in relation to its political residue or pretentiously imagine that it
will have some social effect. The joy of inquiry into God is a sufficient
end in itself.
Some dear old friends know how to ask me only, one question: Why are
you merely studying God? Why aren't you out there with "our side" on the
streets making "significant changes"? -- which usually means the imagined
revolutions of introverted knowledge elites. Plain theology is wonderful
enough in its very acts of thinking; reading praying, communing and uniting
with the body--not for its effects, its written artifacts or its social
consequences, though it has these. Spirit-blessed theology is not merely
a means to an end of social change, though I can think of no action that
has more enduring political significance. The study of God is to be enjoyed
for its own unique subject: the One most beautiful of all, most worthy
to be praised.
I relish those half days when nothing else is scheduled, when I have
no worldly responsibilities but to engage in this quiet dialogue which
I understand as my vocation. It is not something I must do or have to do
or am required to do, but am free to do. Summer is juicy, and a sabbatical
leave is a foretaste of the celestial city. Why? Because I can do what
I am cut out to do. Not write, but think. The writing is only a means to
clarify my thinking.
When there is nothing on my calendar and I can do what I want, I readpray,
studypray, work (so it seems) pray, thinkpray, just because there is nothing
else better to do and nothing I want more to do. Then occasionally my old,
pragmatic activist friends say to me, But why are you not out there on
the street working to change the world? I answer, I am out there on the
street in the most serious way by being here with my books, and if you
see no connection there, then you have not understood my vocation. I do
not love the suffering poor less by offering them what they need more.
We have lived through a desperate game: the attempt to find some modern
ideology, psychology or sociology that could conveniently substitute for
apostolic testimony. That game is all over. We have no choice but to think
about modernity amid the collapse of modernity. We must reassess the role
of historical science amid the collapse of historical science. I do not
despair over modernity. I do celebrate the providence of God that works.
amid premodern, modern and postmodern personal histories. Most people I
know are already living in a postmodern situation, though they may still
worship the gods of modernity that are everyday being found to have clay
feet.
The years of study that led to the four volumes of the Classical Pastoral
Care series and the study of Gregory the Great (Pastoral Care in the Classic
Tradition) helped free me to listen to supposedly "precritical" writers
with postcritical attentiveness. Now disappointed with the meager consequences
of contemporary. so-called "critical" scholarship -- especially the biblical
variety, with its ideological stridencies -- I am, more. aware of the resources
for exegesis, pastoral care and spiritual formation that dwell quietly
in the literature of the first five centuries of the church, the mature
period of the widely received exegetes, the ecumenical teachers.
While some imagine postmodern paleo-orthodox Christianity to be precritical,
I view. it as postcritical. It is far too late to be precritical if one
has already spent most of one's life chasing the fecund rabbits of a supposed
criticism based on the premises of modern chauvinism (that newer is always
better; older, worse). One. cannot. be precritical after assimilating two
centuries of modern naturalistic and.idealistic criticism. If merely to
use sources that emerged before a modern period some call "the ageof. criticism".
is to be precritical, then in that sense I delight in being so. But note
how damning that. premise is to the integrity of modern criticism; it supposes.
that one is able to use only sources of one's own historical period. The
controversy about modernity centers precisely on whether critical thinking
belongs only to our own period. I believe it does not, while much, that
is called criticism continues to assume that it does. After Modernity.
. . What?, a ten-year retrospect on Agenda for Theology, gave me a recent
opportunity to state this critique of criticism more circumspectly.
Once hesitant to trust anyone over 30, now I hesitate to trust anyone
under 300. I have found the late 17th century to be a reliable dividing
line after which texts tend more to be corrupted by modernity. Once I thought
it my solemn duty to read the New York Times almost every day; now, seldom.
Why? It hinges on a "need to know" principle: I seem less to need to know
all the news that is not quite fit to print than to know what Chrysostom
taught about Galatians 2 or Basil on the Holy Spirit. The social and political
events that are affecting my thinking are epic movements of despairing
modernity, not discrete day-by-day scandal-sheet items like most of the
supposed great media events of the past decade. Reading Amos ten times
seems rather more important than the Sunday, Times once. Take away all
network TV and daily newspapers and give me cable stations C-Span, CNN
and A&E, public radio and television, a remote channel selector, some
shortwave radio, some heaped-up helpings of classical music, a decent evangelical
radio station and a few weekly journals, and I have enough media blitz
any given week.
I. have watched my own oldline church tradition decline during the era
of the modern ecumenical movement in which I invested heavily. I have watched
well-intended ecumenicity become twisted in the interest of 475 ideological
assertions and public policy postures. My ecumenical commitment today is
far more to ancient than to modern ecumenical teaching. The modern ecumenical
movement has more than soured or failed; it has brought disaster and spiritual
poverty in its wake. It is now time for the ancient ecumenical teaching
to be recovered and show the way to a new formation of the one body of
Christ embracing faithful Catholics, Protestants, evangelicals, Orthodox
and charismatics. The day is gone when paternalistic oldline Protestant
ecumenical advocates could easily claim the moral high ground.
After decades of well-meaning ecumania, I am unapologetically rediscovering
my own theological tradition, especially its Eastern patristic and catholic
taproots and Anglican-Puritan antecedents. The intriguing study that led
me to edit Phoebe Palmer: Selected Writings for the Paulist Fathers' Sources
of American Spirituality series has awakened in me a burning interest in
the history of revivalism, British and American, particularly in its post-Phoebe
Palmer holiness stages prior to Pentecostalism, a socially transforming
evangelicalism quite different from that shaped by the inerrantist Princeton
tradition.
I find it ironic that this CENTURY series focuses on change while I
steadily plod toward stability. The only thing that has changed from the
old me is my steady growth toward orthodoxy and consensual, ancient classic
Christianity, with its proximate continuity, catholicity and apostolicity.
This implies my growing resistance to faddism, novelty, heresy, anarchism,
antinomianism, pretensions of discontinuity, revolutionary talk and nonhistorical
idealism.
When the Lord tore the kingdom of Israel from Saul, Samuel declared:
"He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he
is not a man, that he would change his mind" (I Sam. 15:29). God's constant,
attentive, holy love is eternally unchanging. Awakening gradually to the
bright immutability of God's responsive covenant love is precisely what
has changed for me. Yahweh must have laughed in addressing the heirs of
the old rascal Jacob with this ironic word: "I the Lord do not change.
So you, 0 descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed" (Mal. 3:6). Still it
is so: "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the
Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows"
(James 1: 17). But how difficult it would be to edit a series on "How My
Mind Has Remained the Same."
