The Roots of our Catholic and Reformed Identity
Dear brothers and sisters, A year ago I taught a course on Anglicanism at Truett/Baylor. I thought that I would post from time to time parts of lectures for that course. Here is one that deals with the prelude to the Reformation, and the roots of our thinking of ourselves as both catholic and reformed. Peace +GRS
In this talk I want to set him in the context of the late medieval period for the Anglicanism of the Reformation period. Here we are borrowing from the perspective of scholars like Heiko Oberman and Stephen Ozment, for whom the break between late medieval and reformation is not so sharp. Of course it isn’t- Luther was a creature, like all of us, of his time. If he was, then so was Cranmer, who heard about the daring ideas from Germany in the White Horse Tavern in Oxford in his youth, and never abandoned their direction.
First of all, in the world of 1500, Christendom in Europe was thought of as one. Clerics and theologians moved across borders. To be sure, there were strong feelings of nationalism, and resentments at the control, and taxation coming from Rome. This goes back centuries in England, for example with praemunire where a debate was about who could appoint bishops. But they are tensions within one Church. To be sure, the Church had lived through the Avignon captivity, when there were no less than three feuding popes, so there was a real sense that the Church was broken, but still, it was one broken church. One result of that debacle in the 14th century was the conciliar movement, the desire to gather the bishops to reform the Church, though the council in that era did not suffice. Still the idea that the church needed to, and could be reformed, remained. It is good to recall that figures like Luther and Cranmer themselves had hopes in the 16th century of a council.
If we turn to theology, the key truth is the following. Everyone, reformer, catholic, was an Augustinian. In other words, the 16th century was a fierce debate which did have a considerable background of agreement. This was shared by popes, Calvin, Luther, etcetera. What do I mean by this? Theologians in the Augustinian tradition would say that they are simply Pauline theologians, with his contrast between grace and works. Augustine was like most ancients confident that the human being could know the good. But he had a ground-breaking (and Romans 7) insight that knowing the good and not being able to do it are not the same. For this reason salvation cannot be attributed to the human will, in whole or in part, but must be attributed to God. To be sure, also by God’s grace, we can, after conversion, cooperate with Him in sanctification. But this too is a work of grace. The assumed opponent here is of course Pelagius- another way to put the matter is that in the late middle ages and reformation period, no one wanted to be called a Pelagian. Now how the interaction between divine and human agency was a question that continued to be debated, and we will see that different vocabularies were employed. Can one be a ‘moderate’ Augustinian? that is an open question. Still all the participants were content to be contained by the guardrail of Augustine. The Christian West was in that way at least still a coherent tradition. This is an important point, for it means that 1) the Reformation debate about grace was inherited from the scholastic theology of the middle ages, and 2) it was in an important sense a ‘family fight.’ You can contrast here the outlook of the Christian east, which had neither an Augustine nor a Pelagius and simply didn’t pose the question in the same way- this is a better way to put it than to say that the East was itself Pelagian.
Let us pause for a moment over this question of grace. It is distinguishable from, but connected obviously to the question of predestination. If only God can save us, then it is his decision to do so, and why he exercises that decision in some cases and not in others presents itself immediately. Of course the wise theologian wants to nuance the matter- God also knows all, and can foresee our course in life. Furthermore, the attitude of hauling God into the dock to answer for his decisions, Job-style, is open to critique. There is also the question of what and how much to ask- we are, as Luther was well aware, on firmer ground talking about our own confidence of salvation, Heilsgewisstheit, based on the promises, than we are speculation about others. When then do we retire into an humble silence? But the New Testament has lots to say on these questions, and some of it is sobering.
The other key question of that time has more of an apologetic side- what about the issue of fairness, the possible appearance of capriciousness on God’s part with respect to those who are saved? And what about taking the real but limited gift of will that we do have, though it presents itself alongside our own sinfulness both of will and of mind (as we think about these things)? I should add that it would certainly be mistaken to suppose that these questions are relics of some other era- if the great question of the modern era is our own overweening sense of our capacities of self-creation, then we too live in an era in need of the Augustinian dissent.
There is the possibility however of subtlety, which makes the issue more complex (and helps us consider the supposedly ‘moderate reformed’ position we will be considering in different forms. Let me begin with the master himself, the 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas. A popular adage of the time went like this: ‘to the one doing what he or she can, God will not deny him or her the grace.’ To be sure, what the human can do may be slight, and the giving is still by God. But you can see how the sentence comes dangerously close to imposing necessity on God, which we know is always wrong. Heh, God, I did my part- now you have to pony up!’ Soon one is at a full synergism, cooperation, I doing my part, His doing his, a team- where did sovereignty go? And can a serious look at our own sinfulness conclude that I can really ‘do my part’ when we are talking about standing before God, for none is righteous, not one, not one able to stand! So here is how Thomas dealt with this classic problem in medieval thought. He said, yes, to the one doing their best, God will answer with grace, but…even that ‘doing what you can’ part is also by grace. First he works in us to do with we can, and then he rewards his work with more grace. Prevenient followed by saving grace. Think how you can now recall God getting you ready for conversion. Now the cynic could say that this just pushes the question back a step, but at theologian you could reply that we are talking about God, whose ways are not your ways… You can easily see however that it would be easy in popular pastoral life to lose Thomas’ nuance and to revert to a simpler and less satisfactory version.
A second twist in the plot which bears directly on the Reformation debate, including England, has to do with the medieval theology of the pactum, i.e. covenant, in this case between God and humankind. It bears some resemblance to our first point. We cannot do much, our contribution puny. But wouldn’t it be a way to understand grace to say that our beneficent God has graciously decided to count multiply our small contribution a million fold. It is like parenting- you child jumps over a stone, and you pretend he or she has polevaulted to the moon! This is called ‘condign’ merit- not merit strictly speaking, but only so because of a prior agreement. That is where the pactum comes in. Now the problem with this is if you look at the state of the heart. Every act of ours has some germ of self-interest, especially when we are at our best! That is what the tradition means by ‘utterly depraved,’ that there is no corner where the germ has snuck in. Luther could not accept that there is this innocent corner, however tiny, since our view of ourselves surveys the whole of us. Still, the point is that the pactum theology does not have to claim that we really merit salvation, only that God has graciously agreed to rules as if we did. But this seems to the reformers like playing a game. (A very thorough account of the pactum is given by Alister McGrath in his magisterial book on justification). My point is that this view is technically Augustinian, and yet it can be readily challenged- hence the kind of debates which filled the reformation period.
So far our examples have dealt with the 16th century struggle over grace, but what about faith. Now there is a ready contrast as to the latter- the medieval catholic view was that faith was an assent of the mind to the truth of the Church’s doctrine as moved by love poured into the heart. It was not solely cognitive, but involved both. The Reformation view emphasized not the fides quae creditur, ‘the faith which we believe’, but rather the fides qua creditur,’ the faith by which it is believed’, the act. Here Luther stressed fiducia, trust, which we have in Christ due to his prior love for us. He leads with the inter-personal; the heart precedes and leads the mind. Now you might say that the angels are dancing on the pin here, since both think it involves both, but you can still see their points. Now I want to add what may seem to be an arcane footnote, but I do think it matters. A Thomist scholar named Stephen Pfurtner made the point that, while faith was first of all cognitive in Thomas, the virtue of hope had a strong element of trust in it. In other words Thomas was working with a different vocabulary emphasizing the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. He has a good dose of fiducia, but it is located in this treatment of hope- with Luther three centuries later things are rearranged and the trust them has become affixed to faith.
The point is that at the level of the great masters of theology, there may have been less daylight between the Augustinianism of Catholic and Reformer than you might think. In the modern ecumenical movement people have come to see this, that they were often driving at the same point by different linguistic roads. Now this doesn’t mean that in the 16th century there were not real problems and real abuses, for at the level of popular piety there was a clear functional Pelagianism, for example in indulgences, invocation of the saints, and how people often imagined purgatory. Likewise you would not want the doctrine of your denomination determined by the opinions of all the folks sitting in your pews. There were indeed abuses, but there was also space to articulate the needed Augustinian corrective in a way that various groups could hear.
