Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals E-Book

Gavin Ortlund

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 401

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Restless for rootedness, many Christians are abandoning Protestantism altogether. Many evangelicals today are aching for theological rootedness often found in other Christian traditions. Modern evangelicalism is not known for drawing from church history to inform views on the Christian life, which can lead to a "me and my Bible" approach to theology. But this book aims to show how Protestantism offers the theological depth so many desire without the need for abandoning a distinctly evangelical identity.  By focusing on particular doctrines and neglected theologians, this book shows how evangelicals can draw from the past to meet the challenges of the present. 

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“In an age of head-spinning change, Gavin Ortlund rightly calls evangelicals to stand their ground and recover the theological ground already plowed by earlier generations. When the very foundations are being shaken, it is vital that churches recover their center of gravity by retrieving the past—what Bernard Ramm once called ‘the evangelical heritage.’ Evangelicals are not the first generation to have received the gospel. Accordingly, Ortlund here issues a manifesto about the importance of retrieving theological tradition. He then practices what he preaches in a series of astute case studies that mine the past to fund the present.”

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Research Professor of Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; author, The Drama of Doctrine; Hearers and Doers; Biblical Authority after Babel; and Faith Speaking Understanding

“Anyone convinced that evangelical and ancient are opposites should read this book. Gavin Ortlund provides a compelling case for retrieving patristic and medieval theology. Mining the premodern tradition, Ortlund reminds us of neglected and forgotten insights on the Creator-creature distinction, divine simplicity, and atonement theology. An excellent contribution to Protestant retrieval theology!”

Hans Boersma, Chair, Order of St. Benedict Servants of Christ Endowed Professorship in Ascetical Theology, Nashotah House Theological Seminary

“Ortlund argues compellingly that evangelicals can and should claim the classic theological heritage as their own. And then he actually does it, opening up the treasury of the great Christian tradition and dispensing theological wisdom with both hands. To look into this book is to look through a doorway into a world where there is such a thing as evangelical theology that is richly resourced, deeply informed, and ready for action.”

Fred Sanders, Professor of Theology, Torrey Honors Institute, Biola University; author, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“Gavin Ortlund, a committed evangelical, calls for a robust engagement with the first fifteen hundred years of the Christian tradition, patristic and medieval, East and West. Retrieval, not repristination, is the goal, and Ortlund shows here how this can be done—to the glory of God and the upbuilding of the church. An exciting and important book!”

Timothy George, Research Professor, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University; general editor, Reformation Commentary on Scripture

“For those who struggle with whether, how, and why to appropriate the church fathers and medieval doctors within their own theology, piety, and ministry, this book is a welcome resource. Leading us by the hand through a wide range of instructive examples, Gavin Ortlund demonstrates a principled Protestant approach to drawing upon the pastors and theologians of the past for the sake of the church’s renewal in the present.”

Scott R. Swain, President and James Woodrow Hassell Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando; coauthor, Reformed Catholicity

Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals

Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals

Why We Need Our Past to Have a Future

Gavin Ortlund

Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals: Why We Need Our Past to Have a Future

Copyright © 2019 by Gavin Ortlund

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

Cover image: Procession of the Knights of the Bath, Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) (1697–1768) / by courtesy of Dean & Chapter of Westminster Abbey, UK / Bridgeman Images

First printing 2019

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-6526-7 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-6529-8 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-6527-4 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-6528-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ortlund, Gavin, 1983- author.

Title: Theological retrieval for evangelicals : why we need our past to have a future / Gavin Ortlund.

Description: Wheaton : Crossway, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019000335 (print) | LCCN 2019021797 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433565274 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433565281 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433565281 (epub) | ISBN 9781433565267 (tp)

Subjects: LCSH: Theology—History. | Theology—Methodology. | Evangelicalism. Reformed Church—Doctrines.

Classification: LCC BR118 (ebook) | LCC BR118 .O785 2019 (print) | DDC 230—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000335

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2020-12-30 10:49:24 AM

For Mom and Dad,

who are not only my wonderful parents, but my dear friends

Contents

Preface

Part 1: A Manifesto for Theological Retrieval

 1  Can Evangelicals Retrieve Patristic and Medieval Theology?

 2  Why Evangelicals Need Theological Retrieval

 3  Benefits and Perils of Theological Retrieval

Part 2: Case Studies in Theological Retrieval

 4  Explorations in a Theological Metaphor: Boethius, Calvin, and Torrance on the Creator/Creation Distinction

 5  God Is Not a Thing: Divine Simplicity in Patristic and Medieval Perspective

 6  Substitution as Both Satisfaction and Recapitulation: Atonement Themes in Convergence in Irenaeus, Anselm, and Athanasius

 7  Cultivating Skill in the “Art of Arts”: Gregory the Great on Pastoral Balance

General Index

Scripture Index

Even if history were judged incapable of other uses, its entertainment value would remain in its favor.

—Marc Bloch

Preface

I can remember the day I discovered Anselm. I was sitting at the airport, waiting with my family for our flight. Somehow I’d gotten my hands on an article by Alvin Plantinga, defending a modal version of Anselm’s ontological argument. Although I had no clue what the word modal meant at that time in my life, I remember being utterly captivated. Could God’s existence really be logically proven from the mere idea of God in the human mind? I spent about thirty minutes looking at the syllogism he provided, trying to figure out what the catch was—surely it couldn’t be a sound argument! This led me to read Anselm’s formulation of the argument. I spent a lot of time with it, but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. (Actually, I still can’t.)

What I found so valuable in Anselm, however, wasn’t so much the argument itself but the whole way of doing theology that I found modeled in his writing. Anselm helped me understand something of how enthralling it is to think about God. I had already believed there is a glory and gravitas to God, but Anselm impressed upon me that there is also a glory and gravitas to the idea of God. This is one basic and somewhat colloquial way to summarize the import of the ontological argument: that God’s uniqueness and necessity bombard us at the realm of thought as well as at so many other levels of our existence. In this way, Anselm opened up in me an awareness that would, years later, make me sympathetic to Barth’s comment that theology is the “most beautiful of all disciplines.”

My interest in Anselm never left me, and when I was studying abroad a few years later in college, I somehow got my hands on the Latin text of the Proslogion (the book in which Anselm advances his so-called ontological argument). I gave the argument a more careful reading in its original context, and I began to be intrigued by the spiritual intensity of Anselm’s writing. Why is he writing this argument in a prayer? Why does he go on and on about seeing God (isn’t God invisible)? And, related to this, what are all these later chapters doing, after he’s proven God exists? Ultimately these interests led me to my doctoral work on the Proslogion.1

Anselm then led me elsewhere. I became more and more interested in the peculiarity of medieval theology as a whole and what I could learn from it as a contemporary evangelical. I also began to read the church fathers with greater interest. I used the coursework stage of my PhD at Fuller Theological Seminary to pursue a number of studies in theological retrieval, immersing myself in the classic texts of church history, as best as I could, for help in doing theology today. Having grown up in evangelical circles, my previous experience in historical theology had focused primarily on Protestant theologians such as Martin Luther or Jonathan Edwards. So I was stepping into a new world as I sought to engage theologians such as the Cappadocian Fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, John of Damascus, Thomas Aquinas, and others. I can vividly recall sitting at my desk in the spring quarter of 2013, doing research for a study on patristic and medieval views of divine simplicity, and thinking, Wow! There is a lot of treasure to be mined here. This is like discovering Anselm all over again. (The results of that study are roughly represented by chapter 5 of this book.)

It is difficult to describe what these excursions into the classical texts of historical theology have done to me. The best I can do is compare them to getting lost in a profound piece of literature, or spending significant time in a foreign country. It has been a formative experience that has shaped not only my theological positions but my whole approach to theology. At the same time, my interest in historical theology has always seemed somewhat disconnected from my broader life and ministry in evangelical contexts. Most of the Christians I interact with regularly have never heard of Anselm or struggled to understand what value there could be in studying a monk from the Dark Ages. So an abiding question in my life as an evangelical Christian and minister has been: How does my theological interest in classical theologians such as Anselm relate to my calling and context in the United States in the early twenty-first century?

Let me lay my cards on the table right up front in an effort at explaining what is basically driving this book: I think evangelical Christians can and should engage Anselm. Or Tertullian. Or Athanasius. Or Photius. And so forth. This book stems from the conviction that has been formed in me about the tremendous value of retrieving the past and broadly aims to encourage more evangelicals to join in this effort. The first section lays out an overall manifesto for theological retrieval, and the second puts it into practice with a series of case studies.

Why have I spent the larger half of the book focusing on specific retrieval efforts? My approach to engaging history emphasizes “snapshots” more than running commentary. If you are trying to get to know an unchartered jungle, it will likely be more helpful to establish three or five reliable outposts or bases from which you may make further explorations than simply to slog through from one end of the jungle to the other. So if we consider pre-Reformation church history like a dark jungle (an apt analogy for many modern evangelicals), our goal here is to carve out several outposts from which further retrieval expeditions may be made.

In this respect Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation has served in my mind as something of a model for the strategy of historical engagement attempted here.2Ellis credits the style of history telling attempted in his book—covering six particular episodes in early American history as a way to enter the whole of the Revolutionary era—to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, which he describes as “a combination of stealth and selectivity.”3 Strachey’s quoted justification for this method may serve well as explanation of our own effort:

It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hither-to undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.4

Another model in this respect has been Mark Noll’s brilliant book Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, which in its preface articulates several benefits to focusing on key “turning points” as a way to narrate history.5 I think similar principles can be at play when engaging historical theology specifically as opposed to church history more generally.

I have written with pastors, theology students, and interested lay Christians especially in mind. This is a sort of mid-level book that engages the scholarly machinery but ultimately hopes to influence a broader readership. Historically, my overall leaning has been toward those people and debates and contexts that have been particularly neglected in our own context; thus I favor patristic and medieval theology over Reformation and modern, and particularly those figures at the transition from patristic to medieval who are often neglected today, especially Boethius, Gregory the Great, and John of Damascus (in the third chapter I introduce these three figures as examples of theologians we often overlook).

Earlier versions of several chapters have appeared in the following publications:

“Why Should Protestants Retrieve Patristic and Medieval Theology?,” in The Task of Dogmatics: Explorations in Theological Method (Los Angeles Theology Conference Series; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017).“Explorations in a Theological Metaphor: Boethius, Calvin, and Torrance on the Creator/creation Distinction.” Modern Theology 33.2 (2017): 167–86.“Divine Simplicity in Historical Perspective: Resourcing A Contemporary Discussion,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 16.4 (2014): 436–53.

I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these journals for their permission to republish these articles here. A few paragraphs from this preface, chapter 1, and chapter 3 are loosely related to earlier material from online writings.6

I want to express my thanks to Oliver Crisp and John Thompson, my professors at Fuller Theological Seminary who oversaw several of these studies in their embryonic development. Dave Lauer has also proofread several chapters and sharpened my thinking with our many theological discussions over lunch. Joel Chopp offered helpful suggestions to the first part of the book. Above all, I want to express my thanks to my precious wife, Esther, who supports me beyond what I could possibly hope for in a wife. None of my writing—indeed, very little of anything I do—would be possible without her loyalty, friendship, and encouragement.

1. Gavin Ortlund, Anselm’s Pursuit of Joy: A Commentary on the Proslogion (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020).

2. Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage, 2000).

3. Ellis, Founding Brothers, ix.

4. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, as quoted in Ellis, Founding Brothers, ix.

5. Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2000), 12.

6. E.g., “Gospel-Centeredness Is as Old as the Gospel,” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/searching-for-gospel-centered-theology-before-the-reformation; “3 Ways Our Culture Is Different From Every Other Culture in History,” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/3-ways-our-culture-is-different-than-every-other-culture-in-history; and “Is Christ in All of Church History,?” https://gavinortlund.com/2013/08/03/reflections-on-studying-church-history.

Part 1

A Manifesto for Theological Retrieval

Just over a decade ago John Webster drew attention to the rising influence of “theologies of retrieval,” describing them as too diverse to constitute an official movement or school.1 If retrieval practices have grown only more diverse since that time, they are nonetheless so pervasive throughout contemporary theology that it is difficult not to conceptualize them as a kind of movement.2 Like the turn toward theological interpretation in biblical theology, the turn toward retrieval in systematic and historical theology lacks official boundaries and resists precise definition. It is better understood as a set of shared loyalties or instincts in theological method—an overall attitude guided by the conviction that premodern resources are not an obstacle in the age of progress but a well in the age of thirst.3

Of course, in one sense, theological retrieval is nothing new. A posture of reception and transmission is a basic part of Christian identity, and the church has always drawn from her past to meet the challenges of her present.4 Nonetheless, retrieval has come to have a more specific and deliberate use in the late modern West, where the individualism and freedom from authority that characterize the secularizing culture have compelled the church to look for new sources of inspiration and synthesis. It is this cultural context, perhaps, that explains why retrieval movements are springing up in so many different traditions—from the ressourcement theology or la nouvelle théologie of Henri De Lubac and other French Roman Catholic theologians to the Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank (Anglican), the paleo-orthodoxy of Thomas Oden (Methodist), the ecumenical labors of Donald Bloesch (UCC) or Robert Jenson (mainline Lutheran), the ancient-future movement of Robert Webber (also Anglican), and so forth.5

Alongside these various Catholic, Anglican, and mainline Protestant movements, retrieval is on the rise in evangelicalism. In 2015 two book-length treatments of theological retrieval came out from evangelical authors, published by evangelical presses and covered with blurbs from evangelical theologians.6 At the same time, there remains considerable ambivalence in many Protestant circles, particularly evangelical Protestant circles in the United States, about the retrieval of patristic and medieval theology. One manifestation of our historical short-sightedness, at both popular and technical levels, is sheer neglect; one wonders how many evangelical pastors or divinity students could say a single solitary thing about, say, the tenth century, or the seventh. Cardinal John Henry Newman complained in the nineteenth century that England’s “popular religion scarcely recognizes the fact of the twelve long ages which lie between the Councils of Nicaea and Trent.”7 If Newman’s conclusion that “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant” did not strictly follow, its overall sentiment is difficult to dismiss—particularly because underneath the anti-historical bent of popular Protestantism lie deeper patterns of historical interpretation that have often marked even the most eloquent expressions of the Protestant faith.

One thinks, for instance, of the recurring identification of the antichrist with the papacy, a view that finds its way into the Westminster Confession of Faith.8In more recent times, Protestant interpretations of church history are often shaped by the old Enlightenment caricature of the medieval era as a “Dark Ages” of superstition and ignorance,9 and by the Anabaptist and Restorationist10 view of a “great apostasy” or “great fall” in the early church.11 Today, Protestants generally affirm the ecumenical creeds; we appreciate early Christian martyrs; we approve of Augustine’s Confessions; on rare occasions, we might even quote a John Chrysostom sermon or a Bernard of Clairvaux poem. But on the whole, we tend to regard the Christianity of Caedmon and Charlemagne as more different from than similar to the Christianity of John Bunyan and Billy Graham.

This book is fueled by the conviction that one of the church’s greatest resources for navigating her present challenges is her very past—indeed, her entire past. In this first part of the book, therefore, we argue that the affirmation of a robust Protestant identity need not prohibit, but should rather encourage, an appropriation of the wisdom of the early and medieval church.12

We will proceed in three movements. First, we probe different Protestant attitudes toward pre-Reformation church history, contrasting B. B. Warfield’s engagement with Augustine with the retrieval practices of various earlier Protestants whom we put forth as a more helpful guide (chapter 1). Then, having established a broad framework for Protestant retrieval of early and medieval theology, we turn to explore why such a practice is particularly needed within contemporary evangelicalism in light of both cultural developments outside the church and theological developments within her (chapter 2).13 Finally, we identify several specific ways that theological retrieval may resource evangelicals amidst their current needs, as well as several corresponding dangers (chapter 3). Here we also identify several particular theologians who may be especially helpful to retrieve, whom I have tried to rehabilitate somewhat in this book.

In sum, these chapters aim to establish that evangelicals may retrieve (chapter 1), need to retrieve (chapter 2), and should retrieve (chapter 3). Of course, retrieval is a complicated task, and there are scores of issues involved in it that are not answered or even raised in what follows. My aim is simply to establish a broad vision of the value of retrieval for evangelicalism—a brief manifesto of sorts for theological retrieval. It is hoped that these chapters will further this aim and prepare for the specific efforts at retrieval that follow in the subsequent chapters, even if others must come after me and say much more than I have said here.

1. John Webster, “Theologies of Retrieval,” in The Oxford Handbook to Systematic Theology, ed. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 584.

2. The first book-length treatment of theological retrieval as a contemporary “movement” appeared recently by David Buschart and Kent Eilers, Theology as Retrieval: Receiving the Past, Renewing the Church (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015).

3. Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain offer a more substantive description of retrieval from a Reformed perspective as stemming from the conviction “that theological renewal comes through dependence upon the generative resources of the Triune God in and through the gospel and that such dependence is best expressed in our particular historical moment by way of retrieval.” See Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic, ed. Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 2.

4. Of course, different Christian traditions disagree regarding what the reception and transmission of history should look like, and such differences are among the chief causes of division within Christendom. For an overview of some of the differences within and between Protestant, Anglican, and Roman Catholic views on Scripture and tradition, with a special focus on Albert Outler’s recent employment of the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral,” see Edith M. Humphrey, Scripture and Tradition: What the Bible Really Says (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 9–17.

5. Scott R. Swain and Michael Allen, Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 4–12, offer a list of twelve different contemporary movements in the church characterized by retrieval.

6. Buschart and Eilers, Theology as Retrieval, provide an overview and guide to retrieval, focusing on six different “typologies” of what it looks like in practice; Swain and Allen, Reformed Catholicity, offer a “manifesto” for a specifically Reformed account of retrieval. Evidence for evangelical renewed interest in retrieval includes also the rise of various projects such as Zondervan Academic’s New Studies in Dogmatics series (ed. Allen and Swain) and Baker Academic’s Evangelical Ressourcement: Ancient Sources for the Church’s Future series (ed. D. H. Williams).

7. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,6th ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 8.

8. Westminster Confession of Faith 15.6.

9. This characterization of medieval intellectual life is ironic in light of the fact that the modern university is essentially a twelfth-century medieval invention, deriving from the great monastic schools of the eleventh century that in turn grew out of the tenth-century cathedral schools spawned by the Carolingian Renaissance. For a recent defense of medieval Christianity against its usual caricatures and a call for evangelical Christians to humbly engage this aspect of our heritage, see Chris R. Armstrong, Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016).

10. The term Restorationism is sometimes used more generally in reference to various Christian views calling for a return to the purity of the early apostolic church and sometimes used more specifically in reference to the “Restoration Movement” or “Stone-Campbell Movement” of the early nineteenth century.

11. The “fall of the church” paradigm, usually seen as coinciding with Constantine’s conversion or sometimes setting in as early as the second century, has been a classical tenet of Anabaptist theology and is carried on by many free-church and Baptist theologians into the present day, e.g., Malcolm B. Yarnell III, The Formation of Christian Doctrine (Nashville, TN: B&H, 2007), 150–65, esp. 157–58. Yarnell objects to the notion of the invisible church as articulated by Herman Bavinck (54–56); he believes that classical ecclesiology, including its Reformed and evangelical expressions (e.g.,that of John Webster) must be rejected (xiv, 62–67); and he expresses concerns about other Baptist calls for ecumenicity, such as those of Timothy George (71). For a helpful critique of the notion of the fall of the church, see D. H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 103–72. For a briefer overview and critique, see Bryan M. Litfin, Getting to Know the Church Fathers: An Evangelical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 13–16.

12. For a broader case that theological endeavor is well served by listening to the Christian tradition, see Stephen R. Holmes, Listening to the Past: The Place of Tradition in Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 5–36, who argues that theology must engage tradition because of our historical locatedness as temporal creatures and because of our status as members in the larger community of saints, past and present. On this latter point, see also Swain and Allen, Reformed Catholicity, 17–47.

13. Although I am writing primarily with an evangelical audience in mind, I would be grateful if this book could be helpful or interesting to Christians of other tribes. I should also note that here and in what follows, when I speak of evangelicalism, I am thinking primarily of evangelicalism in the Western world and especially in the North Atlantic world and to some extent the United Kingdom, not at all because I think this (relatively small) strand of evangelicalism is more important than others, but simply because I lack sufficient knowledge of global Christianity to generalize further.

1

Can Evangelicals Retrieve Patristic and Medieval Theology?

Whatever be historical Christianity, it is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this.

—John Henry Newman

On October 25, 1844, the twenty-five-year-old Philip Schaff—the German church historian and newly appointed professor in biblical literature and ecclesiastical history at the Theological Seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania—opened his inaugural address with these words:

We contemplate the Reformation in its strictly historical conditions, its catholic union with the past. This is a vastly important point, which thousands in our day appear to overlook entirely. They see in the 31st of October, 1517, it is true, the birthday of the Evangelical Church, and find her certificate of baptism in the ninety-five theses of Luther; but at the same time cast a deep stain upon the legitimacy of this birth itself, by separating it from all right relation to the time that went before. In this way all interest is renounced in the spiritual wealth of the Middle Ages, which however belongs to us of right as fully at least as it does to the Church of Rome.1

Schaff published his lecture the year after as The Principle of Protestantism. In his introduction, John Nevin, who translated Schaff’s piece from German, shared Schaff’s vision of church history, lamenting “what a depressing imagination, if . . . the whole life of the Middle Ages should be relinquished to Rome, as part and parcel of the great apostasy, instead of being claimed as the catholic heritage of the Reformation itself.”2 This more catholic approach to church history, propagated by both Nevin and Schaff as one of the tenets of what would come to be called the “Mercersburg Theology,” related to an ecumenical vision.3 Schaff made clear that he was not calling for a return to Rome; he regarded Protestantism as the “legitimate offspring” of medieval Christianity and the modern Church of Rome, by contrast, as having “parted with the character of catholicity” in its continued development.4 Nonetheless, he spoke of an “evangelical Catholicity” and “churchly Protestantism,”5 faulting the sectarian spirit that characterized many other American Protestants of his day: “It is surely an intolerant and narrow imagination, to regard the whole Roman and Greek communions, so far exceeding us as they do in numbers, as out of the Church entirely, and only worthy of course to be blotted out of history altogether as a gigantic spiritual zero.”6

Schaff came under fire from Joseph F. Berg, a prominent figure in the German Reformed church of which the seminary at Mercersburg was a part. In a sermon presented only eight days prior to Schaff’s address, at the opening of the Synod that concluded to hear Schaff’s address, Berg had sought to trace the history of the German Reformed church through the Waldensians back to the second century. The Waldensians, Berg maintained, were the descendants of a group of second-century disciples of Polycarp in southern Gaul who had fled into the Alps during the persecution of 177.7 It was necessary to seek historical continuity only in separatist movements because, Berg maintained, “if we admit that the Church of Rome has ever been the Church of Christ, you concede the entire ground.”8 Given that these two different conceptions of church history—expressed within eight days of each other in connection to denomination’s gathering—are diametrically opposed to one another, it is not surprising that a controversy ensued. Berg himself led the charge, in fact, accusing Schaff of heresy—though the charges were dismissed and the examination resulted in praising both Nevin and Schaff for their efforts to “build up and honor the welfare of the church.”9

In addition to this ongoing dispute within the German Reformed Church, the Mercersburg theology came under further criticism from the Princeton theologian Charles Hodge. In his review of The Principle of Protestantism, Hodge expressed a number of serious concerns, but unlike Berg, he did not dispute Schaff’s basic historical interpretation of the Reformation as neither a revolution nor a mere restoration: “The middle ages were no doubt pregnant with the Reformation; the church lived through all those ages, and Protestantism was the revival, through the word and Spirit of God, of a backslidden church, and not a new creation.”10 Nonetheless, Hodge criticized Schaff’s portrayal of American Protestantism as sectarian and, although admitting there was much in the book he did not understand, emphasized the book’s dependence on German philosophy and national outlook.11 Hodge’s subsequent writings against the Mercersburg theology, particularly against Nevin’s The Mystical Presence, would become more polemical,12 and he would put more focus on the Hegelian foundations of Schaff’s philosophy of history.13 Ultimately, while Hodge would agree that the Reformation was not a rebirth of the church, he would nonetheless construct a contrasting account of doctrinal development to that of Schaff (and naturally, in turn, that of Newman):

Christianity is a system of doctrines supernaturally revealed and now recorded in the Bible. Of that system there can be no development. No new doctrines can be added to those contained in the word of God. No doctrine can ever be unfolded or expanded beyond what is there revealed. The whole revelation is there, and is there as distinctly, as fully, and as clearly as it can ever be made, without a new supernatural revelation. Every question, therefore, as to what is, or what is not Christian doctrine, is simply a question as to what the Bible teaches.14

This historical vignette raises the question of Protestant identity in relation to church history and draws attention to some of the other issues that are bundled up together with this question. What is the proper Protestant attitude toward the pre-Reformation history of the church and the Protestant identity in relation to her? Is the vision of Princeton or Mercersburg more authentic to the original Protestant effort?

We can clarify this question by envisioning opposite possible answers. In the one direction, we might emphasize Protestant over and against catholic: we are (mainly) Protestant and (in a subsequent, secondary way) catholic. Thus our consciousness of tradition is primarily a half millennium old, with some scattered precursors. In the extreme, this view tends to operate as though little good happened in the church during the span of time between John the apostle’s visions on Patmos and Martin Luther’s epiphany about Romans 1:17, locating (with Berg) the true church only in separatist movements or not at all. (Of course, a special challenge is involved in knowing which separatist movements to include, since most are either heretical or only came about roughly a few centuries prior to Luther.15It is noteworthy, in this connection, that when Pope Francis called the Waldensians “evangelical” during his June 2015 apology, he also called them the oldest evangelical church.)16 In the other direction, we might emphasize catholic over Protestant: we are (mainly) catholic Christians who also happen to be vaguely involved in some kind of ongoing protest. In its stronger varieties, this emphasis tends to correspond with an extreme embarrassment over the Reformation, as though the medieval era was a time of richness and abundance until the Reformation came along and ruined everything.

It is not hard to see how our answer to this question will ripple outwards to influence other areas of theology, such as our historical interest and ecumenical posture. We might attempt to answer it in a variety of ways, but in this chapter we will approach it historically—in essence, seeking to “retrieve retrieval” by considering how previous generations of Protestants have appropriated the early and medieval church. If the Reformers understood themselves to be operating within a catholic heritage, modern views of Protestantism that downplay catholicity become more difficult to justify. Thus here we will consider B. B. Warfield’s appropriation of Augustine as a representative of certain modern views before looking at the views and practices of the Reformers, alongside other early Protestants, as a better model to us. Although there are many additional questions about retrieval that this chapter does not address, hopefully what is said here will broadly contribute to the notion that Protestants can function as vitally connected to the entire stream of church history without thereby compromising their Protestant convictions.

Extracting the Leavened Bread: Warfield on Interpreting Augustine

Some of the eccentricities of modern Protestant interpretation of patristic and medieval theology can be observed in B. B. Warfield’s appropriation of Augustine’s theology.17 Warfield argues that the doctrine of grace is Augustine’s greatest legacy and the truest center of his thought. He locates Augustine’s significance as being the first of the church fathers to give adequate expression to “evangelical religion”—that is, the religion of faith as opposed to the religion of works.18 For Warfield, “a new Christian piety dates from [Augustine],” as well as “a new theology corresponding to this new type of piety,” such that Augustine may be termed the author of grace as well as the father of evangelicalism.19

Warfield is not, however, blind to the aspects of Augustine’s theology that seem to stand at odds with this interpretation: his complex sacramentology, complete with doctrines of baptismal regeneration, a sacrificial understanding of Mass, and an ex opere operato understanding of sacramental efficacy; his hierarchical ecclesiology, complete with an affirmation of the papacy, the magisterium of the church, and an understanding of the visible church as God’s kingdom on earth; as well as his doctrines of saintly intercession, purgatory, penance, merits, and the perpetual virginity of Mary. With these aspects of his theology in mind, Warfield calls Augustine “the founder of Roman Catholicism” who “called into being a new type of Christianity” in which the church is the center of religious feeling.20

Ascribing to the same person the titles “father of evangelicalism” and “founder of Roman Catholicism” conjures up a sense of ambivalence that may usefully describe Warfield’s broader attitude toward the whole of medieval Christianity stemming from Augustine. Indeed, he suggests, “the problem which Augustine bequeathed to the Church for solution, the Church required a thousand years to solve.”21 Warfield describes these two sides of Augustine’s thought—his “evangelical” doctrine of grace and his Roman Catholic ecclesiology—as “two children . . . struggling in the womb of his mind.” But for Warfield, Augustine’s doctrine of grace is the “child of his heart.”22 Thus in Warfield’s interpretation, the real Augustine is the desperate and prayerful Augustine of the Confessions, the anti-Pelagian Augustine who can pray, “Command what you will, and give what you command.”23 In his doctrine of the church, by contrast, we get the vestiges of Cyprian and Tertullian, taken on unthinkingly by Augustine, and gradually diminishing throughout his life. In Warfield’s metaphor, the leaven of Augustine’s doctrine of grace was working through the dough of his doctrine of the church, but “death intervened before all the elements of his thinking were completely leavened.”24 Thus had Augustine only lived longer, he would have handed down “a thoroughly worked out system of evangelical theology” rather than the contradictions that would instead rend the church for a millennium.25 That these perceived tensions in Augustine become Warfield’s rubric for engaging the medieval church as a whole is evident in his definition of the Reformation as “the triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.”26

Warfield’s interpretation of Augustine poses challenges. One wonders, for instance, whether Augustine was quite so decidedly on his way toward becoming a proto-Protestant, had he only lived longer. But underneath these interpretational matters lies a more basic methodological issue regarding how we do retrieval as Protestants. In Warfield’s method of retrieval, Augustine’s theology seems to get sifted through the grid of the Reformation such that the good in Augustine’s theological legacy is distinguished from the bad basically by its sixteenth-century consequence. Warfield’s approach could give the impression that a modern Protestant’s primary theological community is the last five hundred years of Protestant history, and then from this community one makes a secondary, more tentative step into the previous fifteen hundred years of church history. To construct a metaphor, Protestant theology is the castle in which we safely live: patristic and medieval theology is a dark forest surrounding the castle into which we may occasionally venture.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with Warfield reading church history as a Protestant, with Protestant convictions intact under an overall commitment to sola Scriptura. But affirming Protestant distinctives is not the same as using them as a filter, and a principial sola Scriptura can easily slide into a practical sola reformatione. Approaching the early church indirectly, through the intermediate link of Reformation theology, poses the danger of failing to appreciate patristic and medieval theology on its own terms and in its own context and thus of hindering our ability to learn from it. After all, there are many doctrines that the Reformers held in continuity with the early and medieval church but did not engage since they were not in dispute in the sixteenth century. There are many other doctrines that the Reformers affirmed with the early and medieval church but did so with less eloquence or detail. And there are still other doctrines where the Reformers’ approach was different from that of earlier generations, and yet we may not be convinced that their efforts are the final word on the matter. In Warfield’s account, it never seems to come into view where Protestant theology might be profitably stretched or challenged by Augustine. A figure so sharply divided against himself (indeed, in Warfield’s account, an entire millennium so sharply divided against itself) would need to be disentangled more than heard.

Returning to Patristic Purity: Calvin and Luther on the Reformation as Retrieval

But there are good reasons for favoring a more inclusive approach in which all two thousand years of church history function as our most basic theological community, and Scripture alone stands above as our authoritative norm. Indeed, the practice of the Reformers would suggest that such an approach is not only more practically beneficial but actually more rigorously Protestant. As severe as the Reformers’ criticisms of medieval Roman Catholicism could be, they always distinguished themselves from the Anabaptists, making clear that their intention was to reform, not recreate, the true church of God. To this end they not only regularly retrieved the theology of the early church but in large measure cast their entire reform effort as its retrieval.

John Calvin, for instance, in his prefatory letter to King Francis in the Institutes, defended the Reformation cause against the charge of novelty by grounding the Protestant claim to antiquity in “the right of recovery” (postliminii iure)—a technical legal term referring to the recovery of lost property or privilege.27 Rather than overthrowing tradition, Calvin compiled an extensive list of issues—ranging from eating meat during Lent to transubstantiation to ministerial celibacy—on which church fathers stood with the Reformers and against their Roman Catholic opponents.28 Calvin made this appeal repeatedly in various disputations with Roman Catholic opponents. At Lausanne in October 1536 he reproduced a series of lengthy quotations from the church fathers, taken from memory.29 Later, in his 1539 dispute with Cardinal Sadoleto, he claimed: “Our agreement with antiquity is far greater than yours, but all that we have attempted has been to renew the ancient form of the church . . . [that existed] in the age of Chrysostom, and Basil, among the Greeks, and of Cyprian, Ambrose, and Augustine, among the Latins.”30 With the other magisterial Reformers, Calvin affirmed the ecumenical creeds and councils, stating that words like ousia and hypostasis were necessary to confront heresy. In the section on the Trinity in his draft of the French Confession he wrote, “We receive what was determined by the ancient councils, and we hate all sects and heresies which were rejected by the holy doctors from the time of St. Hilary and Athanasius until St. Ambrose and Cyril.”31

Like Calvin, Martin Luther opposed Roman Catholic doctrine on patristic grounds as well as apostolic. The sharpness of his distinction between the “holy fathers” and the earlier Roman tradition over and against later medieval corruptions is evident in a letter to the Christians at Halle:

I shall not cite here the sayings of the other saintly fathers, such as Cyprian . . . or Irenaeus, Tertullian, Chrysostom, etc. Rather I wish to confine myself solely to the canon law of Popes and the Roman church, upon whose ordinances, usages, and tradition they so mightily depend and insist. They have to admit that they stand in contradiction to God’s word, Christ’s ordinances, Paul’s teachings, and the usages of earlier popes and the usages of the early Roman church, and all the holy fathers and teachers.32

It is striking that Luther set his Roman Catholic opponents over against not only Christ and Paul, and not only Christ and Paul and the church fathers, but also against the earlier positions of Popes and the Roman church herself. Luther also affirmed the four earliest councils and their creeds (Nicene, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon), and he defended the use of technical Trinitarian terminology employed by the church fathers (like homoousios) against Martin Bucer, who protested that we must use strictly biblical language.33 Luther did draw a sharp distinction between the church fathers and the apostolic writings, perhaps not always altogether fairly.34 Nonetheless, Luther’s insistence on Holy Scripture as the highest authority for faith and life did not entail a complete rejection of tradition and creed, as it is often construed today.35 Thus, in his On the Councils and the Church, Luther argued that “the decrees of the genuine councils must remain in force permanently, just as they have always been in force.”36Luther would even publish in 1538 his own edited versions of the Apostles’ and Athanasian Creeds, along with the Te Deum with the Nicene Creed appended to it.37

Later Lutherans followed Luther in this regard, placing the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds at the front of the Book of Concord (as Anglicans would with the Thirty-nine Articles).38 The Augsburg Confession, the primary Lutheran confession and arguably perhaps the most important sixteenth-century Protestant confession, would conclude by affirming the continuity of Lutheran doctrine with the true church: “In doctrine and ceremonials among us there is nothing received contrary to Scripture or to the Catholic Church, inasmuch as it is manifest that we have diligently taken heed that no new and godless doctrines should creep into our Churches.”39

Even from this very brief survey, it is clear that there are some significant differences between early Protestant views of church history represented by Calvin and Luther and those modern Protestant views represented by Warfield. Warfield saw the early church, most basically, as a fall to be recovered from—he could even claim that “to pass from the latest apostolic writings to the earliest compositions of uninspired Christian pens is to fall through such a giddy height that it is no wonder if we rise dazed and almost unable to determine our whereabouts.”40Luther and Calvin, by contrast, saw the early church as a resource to be utilized and spoke of the goal of the Reformation as its retrieval.

Now, granted, the Reformers tended to be cooler in their attitude toward medieval theology than toward patristic. Here we must neither downplay the Reformers’ critiques of medieval Christianity nor fail to appreciate their nuance. If we wonder, for instance, what exactly Calvin means when in his prefatory letter to King Francis he refers to Protestant doctrine as “laid long unknown and buried,”41 we get some clue later in the Institutes when he refers to the church of Gregory I’s day (at the turn of the seventh century) as “well-nigh collapsed” since it “had deteriorated much from its ancient purity.”42Later he appears to regard the agreement between Pepin the Short and Pope Zachary in 751 as marking a new era of papal temporal power.43That Calvin regarded the papacy as falling further into apostasy and corruption from that point is clear from his assertion that the institution was in his own day “a hundred times more corrupt than it was in the times of Gregory and Bernard, though even then it greatly displeased those holy men.”44 The rise of the papacy was accompanied by other errors. Lane marshals evidence indicating that Calvin thinks the heights of papal power were reached only four hundred years prior to the Reformation and compulsory confession for only three hundred—while belief in the carnal presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper had prevailed for six hundred years.45 What emerges is that Calvin appears to regard the medieval church’s decline into corruption as progressive and incremental.

At the same time, unlike “fall of the church” narratives characteristic of the Anabaptist tradition, Calvin staunchly denied that this decline ever resulted in death. In the context of developing his doctrine of the invisible church, Calvin rejected the possibility that the church “has been lifeless for some time,” affirming from Matthew 28:20 that Christ preserves and defends the true church in every generation: “The church of Christ has lived and will live so long as Christ reigns at the right hand of the Father. It is sustained by his hand; defended by his protection; and is kept safe through his power.”46 What separated Calvin from the Anabaptists, therefore, was not simply a different construal of sola Scriptura but a different vision of church history, rooted in Calvin’s affirmation of the preservation of the church.47 In light of this, it is not surprising to find how much energy Calvin spent in the Institutes retrieving medieval theology as well as patristic. He is especially appreciative of Gregory the Great (who is the fourth most-cited theologian throughout his writings), Peter Lombard, and