Christian Contradictions

I commence with CC. As I understand it, your thesis is as follows. That, although different in particulars, Lutheran and Catholic thought amount in essence to the same thing (over against Daphne Hampson): that what Catholicism says in relation to baptism, Lutheranism holds in relation to salvation – namely that the human is ‘established’ in God. That it is true not only of Lutheranism, which I describe as ‘dialectical’, but also of Catholicism that it is this: by which you mean that Catholicism finds a newness in the future as revelation takes precedence over reason and Catholic ‘grace’ over Catholic ‘nature’. In short, that there is nothing essentially novel about Luther; he simply made religion more ‘personal’. Now it must seem to me that these propositions are mistaken all down the line: indeed it rather astonishes me that one who has read my book could hold them. Thus it seems to me evident that: (i) what we might mean by ‘establishment’ is quite other; (ii) that Catholicism is in no way ‘dialectical’ in the sense in which this is true of Lutheran thought, but rather ‘linear’; and that (iii) in consequence the two traditions are differently related to ‘the future’. Furthermore it strikes me that the belief that the Reformation was as you describe it has served to blind Catholics to the fact that Lutherans structure Christian faith otherwise.

I will first summarise this difference in structure. Diagrams may serve us here. Then I shall elaborate so far as I am able in the space available. I would ask that readers turn to CC chapter I for a fifty‐page explication of the structure of Lutheran thought.

(i) ‘Establishment’. For Lutheran thought the mark – no less – of what it means to be a Christian is that we are ‘established’ in Christ in God (and not ‘in ourselves’). The Christian lives extra se, by an extrinsic righteousness, the righteousness of Christ. To be a Christian is to have this different self‐understanding. Hence Luther writes, at the climax of that revolutionary essay in which, gathering his thoughts together, he broke through to a full Reformation position, ‘The Freedom of a Christian’(sent to Rome when in 1520 he was threatened with excommunication): ‘A Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour. Otherwise he is not a Christian’(my italics).Footnote ³ The British Luther scholar of the last generation Philip Watson captures this well in speaking of a transfer of ‘centre of gravity’.Footnote ⁴ To be a Christian is to live from the knowledge of God's acceptance of one for Christ's sake, that is to say by Christ's righteousness. By contrast Catholics would surely want to say that in giving us HisFootnote ⁵ grace, His very self, God establishes and transforms that which in creation He has made. Catholics have often protested to Lutherans that Catholicism is not (as they suppose Lutherans think)‘Pelagian’. But it is not that Lutheranism is – as Catholics seem to think – somewhere out beyond Augustine in saying that ‘all grace comes from God’. Lutheran thought is a switch in paradigm from the Catholic‐Augustinian. We live extrinsically by Christ's righteousness (and not by anything we could be ‘given’ for ourselves).

(ii) ‘Dialectic’. Lutheran thought is structured by an either/or. By contrast Catholicism – from Augustine forwards and at all times (such that one might also call this structure ‘Augustinian’)– is linear. What has impressed me in my work is that it is held so axiomatically by Catholics that ‘grace transforms nature’ that any other way of structuring Christian faith is unthinkable. But Lutheran thought conceives that there are two contrasting stances which the human can take to God; the one, faith, is that of a creature in relation to the Creator; the other, sin, represents the failure to let God be God to one. In faith the human trusts in God, looking to God in everything; that is to say lives extrinsically in God in Christ. Catholics should note that this stance may be named, indifferently, creation or salvation, since salvation is nothing other than a reinstantiation of that relationship intended by the Creator. However the position taken up by the natural man in his sin is quite other. Sin is a non‐relationship, the turning of one's back on God in a bid for independence. Quintessentially sin is pride, hubris; the attempt to be adequate (also coram deo, before God's face) in and of oneself. The Lutheran ‘dialectic’(as I have called it) between these two stances is strictly non‐comparable with the Catholic proposition that grace transforms nature.

(iii) ‘The Future’. Commensurately, the two have a different relationship to ‘the future’. Within Catholicism the future is a goal; it is ‘future’. Life is lived towards that goal; it is a via for our transformation, that finally we may be one with God. But we have not yet arrived neither are already perfect. The Lutheran dialectical structure is very different. There is a sense in which we are already one with God. As Luther expressed it in the sentence immediately following that which I quoted in ‘The Freedom of a Christian’: ‘by faith[the Christian] is caught up beyond himself into God’. Thus he lives ‘from’ this relationship to God towards the world (if one is to express this in directional terms). One may put it in this way: in the Lutheran universe person always comes before works. We first need to be ‘established’ in Christ in God, but in so establishing us God turns us to the world in service. Hence faith leads to love – and the sentence I have just quoted concludes ‘by love he descends beneath himself into his neighbour’(my italics). Theology (the relationship to God) leads to ethics. (Whereas within Catholicism one might well say that an ethics made possible by God's grace leads to a relationship with God.) It is not, for Lutheranism, that by being good we are brought into a relationship to God; rather do we first need a revolution in the constitution of our person that good works may result. As Luther expresses it: ‘faith remains the doer, love the deed’Footnote ⁶.

These contrasting structures may be represented diagrammatically as over the page. As we have said, within Lutheranism the basic understanding is that the Christian lives (extra se), in Christ in God. The Christian's response to the revelation of God's love is thus aptly called faith (Latin fiducia, trust, not fides belief). In trust I transfer my gravity to another. ‘Grace’ also acquires relational connotations: God's graciousness towards me, that I am accepted irrespective of any merit on my part. It is this in which the good news, the kerygma, of the gospel consists. It is important to note that, that this is the case, runs counter to expectation. For we should expect that God would punish sinners and reward the righteous, by what Luther calls an ‘active’ righteousness. Luther's breakthrough came when – seated in the alcove formed by a tower on the corner of his lecture theatre (still there today), hence his ‘tower’ experience – and struggling with the text of Romans I in the original Greek, Luther read Paul's ‘the righteousness of God’ to mean that passive righteousness by which, lending us His righteousness we may say, God justifies us and by which we live.Footnote ⁷ Hence the centrality of preaching and the break (the dialectic) brought about by the gospel. For against expectation we grasp that in His agapeistic love God accepts us independently of any merit for Christ's sake. Thus gospel is set over against law,Footnote ⁸ and revelation against reason.

That Lutheran thought has this structure has profound implications for our sense of the Christian life. Henceforth we come to live as though our will were one with God’s. Whether this is what it means to have a God, or whether there is thereby within Lutheran thought an inadequate sense of self, is a profound question. But it is very different from a humanist, or Catholic, stance. One could say that the Lutheran ‘virtue’(the sense of the Christian life which this structure brings with it) should be designated a freedom from self‐preoccupation. But this again is going to raise questions as to whether we do not in some way have to ‘come to’ ourselves then to inter‐relate with others and with God. Catholicism has a strong sense of human dignity; that God Himself respects the creature whom he has made. Within the Lutheran structure one might say that to think of God as one with whom one inter‐relates, the human standing as it were on his own ground, just doesn’t make sense. It is a failure to understand that God is God. Thus as has well been said (by a teacher of mine thirty years ago)Footnote ⁹ in an observant remark, Protestantism drives towards dependence, Catholicism towards equality. Note how true this is also of the Reformed tradition (of both Schleiermacher and Barth). The Tridentine decree by contrast envisages that we may be so transformed through God's grace that we may in the end stand in God's presence.Footnote ¹⁰

It is worth turning to Catholic misunderstanding here. It is not that Luther is a ‘determinist’ in common parlance; though he does think God the power which enables all (in parallel with Aquinas). In regard to what Luther calls things ‘below’ us (he instances the choice of spouse or career) of course we have freedom. As he quips, quoting a proverb: ‘The kingdom of heaven was not made for geese.’Footnote ¹¹ Nor that the human's every act is sinful (in a Catholic understanding of sin). Rather what Luther is saying is that the human cannot perform what Catholics would call a ‘meritorious act’, an act through which he should earn merit. It follows that a concern for works (note that in the late Middle Ages a good work was indifferently an ethical action or a religious observance) is beside the point; indeed to head off on the wrong direction, for such works will deceive us into thinking that we can somehow be adequate for God.Footnote ¹² Rather does Lutheranism have what Barth would call a ‘negative’ joining point (Anknüpfungspunkt). It is when the human fails in his own eyes that he is open to the gospel message that it is both impossible for him in and of himself to be just before God and also unnecessary, for God has already accepted him in Christ; and consequently, repenting, puts his trust in another, in Christ. Whereas within the Catholic diagram I have depicted a smooth transition from A to B as ‘grace’ transforms ‘nature’, in the Lutheran the arrow representing ‘repentance’ shows movement between the two possible stances ‘through the back door’.

Life, in a Lutheran understanding, is lived within a dialectic (as between the two stances) as once and again we cease to trust in God, relying on ourselves. Whereupon, failing, we again hear the gospel and repenting come to trust in God. We are, says Luther, semper peccator, semper penitens, semper justus.Footnote ¹³ And again: ‘Progress…is nothing other than constantly beginning’.Footnote ¹⁴ But then we are not speaking of ‘progress’ in terms of self‐transformation. This does not however mean that ‘nothing changes’: that Catholic reading (as it has often been) is a failure to understand Lutheran dynamics. Lutheranism is a challenge to the idea that one must think in terms of an internal state in order to speak of a renewed life. The Lutheran sense is again relational. As Luther puts it, if God has done this for me, loving and accepting me irrespective of merit on my part, shall I not likewise love my neighbour (irrespective of merit on their part)?Footnote ¹⁵ Lutherans have consequently been suspicious of any coupling of merit with service of neighbour (such as they find in Catholicism). For if there is something in it for me the neighbour's need will be distorted in relation to myself. Sin for Lutherans is being caught up in one's own problematic apart from God (and such pride leads to concupiscence). Thus typically one speaks of sin as a stance, in the singular. By contrast within Catholicism (for which ethics is prerequisite for the relationship to God) one speaks of sins, in the plural, as infractions of a (God‐given) moral order.

We should note how difficult it would be for Catholics (given at least a classical Catholic theology) to acknowledge the basic Lutheran insight: that God loves sinners. The problem here stems from the Aristotelian underpinning to Catholic theology (and we see how fundamental the break with Aristotle was in enabling Luther to say what he did).Footnote ¹⁶ For Aquinas (and Catholicism more generally) the relationship to God is predicated upon a likeness between the human and God, a likeness given in the first place through creation. Catholics speak of being in a ‘state’ of sin or grace (with the implication that one first has to be brought into a state of grace before one is in relationship to God). The whole of Catholic ecclesiology is predicated on this. By contrast for Lutherans the church is the place where the gospel (that God accepts sinners) is preached. Of course for an Aristotelian mind‐set existence is itself a good, and being and goodness ultimately interchangeable. Thus Aquinas can comment that insofar as a sinner exists that is a good, but insofar as he is a sinner he is unlike God and hateful to God in respect of his sin.Footnote ¹⁷ Catholics seem unable to respond to Lutherans here?

Commensurately with the different shaping they give to theology, Catholics and Lutherans have a different sense of the Christian life. Catholicism has what we may call an imitatio tradition: we are to become Christ‐like. Lutherans speak rather of a nachfolgen, a following after (the German word Nachfolge also being the word for a disciple). The implication of nachfolgen is suffering; if they have persecuted me.…The difference is well captured in a letter of Bonhoeffer's from prison, musing on a conversation of many years earlier with a French priest.

And Bonhoeffer continues (in wholly Lutheran mode): ‘One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman (the priestly type, so‐called!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one.’Footnote ¹⁸ Bonhoeffer would rather have ‘faith’, that transfer of gravity to Christ.

We may well draw this discussion to a close through considering the difficulty Catholics have had with that Lutheran formula which encapsulates Lutheran faith, that we are simul justus et peccator. Catholic misunderstandings are legion. Thus previously (before ecumenism) the phrase was often declared nonsense; a contradiction in terms. Otherwise it is taken to mean (as indeed Augustine uses it and as perhaps it must mean if translated into a Catholic framework) that the human is in via: part just, but part still a sinner.Footnote ¹⁹ When it is recognised that this is not Lutheran intent, but that we are (wholly) just while (wholly) sinners then one (such as notably Hans Küng)Footnote ²⁰ attempts a reconciliation by finding a Catholic parallel in the priest in the eucharist who (assumed in a state of grace) yet asks forgiveness for his sins and those of the people. But this is to make both terms relate to the internal ‘state’ of the person (a concern which Lutherans think they have got away from). On a Lutheran tongue the phrase of course means that, sinners though we are, God accepts us for Christ's sake: we live by God’s, by extrinsic, righteousness.

In conclusion, consider the row which almost ditched the ‘Joint Declaration on Justification’, finally signed between the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation in 1999.Footnote ²¹ For there can surely be no real ecumenical progress (if indeed this is possible) until Catholics understand where Lutherans are coming from (and there is scant evidence that they have begun to grasp this). A previous German ecumenical statement had spoken of justification as the ‘criterion’ of faith: German als Kriterium– the German does not require an article. In translation this became ‘the criterion’– whereupon the Vatican said not a bit of it, there are many such criteria (the presence of a trinitarian formula for example was suggested). The Catholics were thinking of justification as a Lutheran doctrine; Catholics tending to think of faith as fides, belief in doctrines. But for Lutherans, in saying that justification is ‘that by which the church stands or falls’ one is not so much speaking of the necessary presence of a particular doctrine (one among others) as speaking of the structure of Christian faith. There is no problem in this structure being cast in other terms (as revelation over against reason, or gospel over against law) not employing the word ‘justification’; indeed Luther more commonly expressed it otherwise.

After Christianity

I come to a discussion of epistemology, best considered in conjunction with my argument in After Christianity and your critique. Because I do not hold to your epistemological starting point in theology I do not see that it follows that my work exhibits ‘a failure to attend to or understand with sufficient gravity or seriousness the philosophical issues that underlie the practice of theology’(H 3)? For what it's worth Fergus was so kind as to comment of that book (in an editorial in New Blackfriars): ‘[It] is first of all a vigorous defence of epistemological considerations that need to be dealt with if traditional theological ideas about faith and reason are to remain tenable.…No theologian should evade the very deep metaphysical issues in Hampson's book.’Footnote ³⁴

I must give here a synopsis of my argument. I take it for granted that nature and history exhibit an inter‐related causal nexus and that there are no interruptions or one‐off unique events. Thus I would hold a priori that there could be no such thing as a purported ‘resurrection’. Now Christians must surely by definition believe there to have been a ‘uniqueness’ associated with the events surrounding Jesus of Nazareth (to state what could rightly be called Christian in the widest possible terms). Incidentally my comment that ‘Catholics have not faced the fact that Christianity cannot be made to fit the world as we now know it to be’(CC 242) relates to this epistemological question, having nothing to do with any view of the self as you, Laurence, suppose. To its credit Protestant (Continental) theology has, since the Enlightenment, faced up to the problem which the regularity and inter‐connectedness of nature (as we now know it to be) poses for Christianity. In his Philosophical Fragments(1844) Kierkegaard states in exemplary fashion where this places Christian claims. There is the sphere of knowledge (which comprises all – except Christian claims.). How then – Kierkegaard asks – would things have to be for them to be other, to fall outside this? There would have to be revelation, in which something new was ‘given’, which ‘knowledge’ could only be related to through faith (not reason). I would simply deny that there can be any such other.

Taking this for granted and myself a theist I believe that we must needs enlarge any narrow ‘Enlightenment’ conception of that which is – always and everywhere – the case. For I am convinced that the experiential evidence is that there is such a – what I name ‘dimension’– of reality (that one reality of which we are a part). As do many women whom I know (and surely many men also), I believe beyond reasonable doubt that quiet loving attentiveness (or prayer) for another is efficacious, that healing both of body and mind is available we know not quite how, and that something akin to extra‐sensory perception may allow us to be aware of what it is not otherwise apparent how we could know. (I repeat: to credit that there is such a dimension to reality, which is always and everywhere at least potentially available and able to be brought into play, is not in anyway to think that there could be interventions in the causal nexus or one off‐events.) Just as we should expect, it is evident that these things have been recognised (and described in varied ways) in societies widely divergent in time and place. Not least, it is clear from what we know of him that one Jesus of Nazareth was deeply open to and able to draw on this dimension of reality. It is our grasp that there is this which gives rise to theology; indeed it is the only basis which that discipline could have, given that there are no interventions or a revealed particularity. (Thus I would think Christianity a vehicle, or myth, which has served to carry human awareness of God; but which is itself a mistaken way of formulating what is the case – in that in Christianity this dimension of reality is hypostasised, cast an anthropomorphically shaped being, and then projected.)

I fail to follow your depiction (or judgement) of my position here Laurence. You seem to suppose that I hold what I do through some feminist commitment to Enlightenment thought. But the matter has nothing in the wide world to do with feminism! It is simply a question of adhering to what we now know to be the case (and not crediting that there could be purported events which contravene this). Nor, I submit, is it a ‘philosophical position’ to hold this; as though the matter were up for grabs and there could be other, equally tenable, positions. Thus to speak of my supposed ‘commitment to progress in thought’ having ‘radically hampered [my] own understanding of metaphysics’(H 15) strikes me as absurd. Have we not now recognised what is the case in a way that at one time people had not?(I well recall Donald Mackinnon commenting in a seminar that we cannot think that water could be turned into wine, for wine has carbon atoms and water does not: carbon atoms cannot appear from nowhere.) That Christians may in faith hold something which is not a part of, indeed cannot be made commensurate with, what we otherwise know to be the case, is another matter.

Whatever one may think of my theistic, but non‐Christian, position, it doesn’t strike me as ‘lacking attention to the philosophical issues which underlie the practice of theology’(see p. 14)? As I said, might not the boot rather be on the other foot Laurence? I could well accuse you of not facing reality. Let me go on the attack here. Take the example of a purported virgin birth, of which you make much. What for you would count against this? And if you cannot say, then what status do your remarks have? You rage against academic standards in theology. But – I may ask – how can one be an intellectual at a university while not taking cognizance, for example, of biblical and historical criticism, or progress in biological science? In the case of the virgin birth: (i) it would seem to be apparent enough that, wishing (as was his wont) to show that prophecy is fulfilled in Jesus, Matthew is making reference to the Septuagint of Isaiah 7 which speaks of a virgin, whereas the underlying Hebrew simply connotes a young girl; (ii) it was not infrequently said of eminent men in the ancient world that their father was a god and their mother a virgin – the world in which Christianity came into being knew a different cultural context; (iii) as we now know, in the creation of a foetus an equal number of chromosomes come from the female and from the male and the Aristotelian flower‐pot version of human reproduction (whereby the male seed – for so it was thought to be, the new human in his entirety – is simply planted in the ‘earth’ which is the womb) is false: indeed, were there to be a case of parthenogenesis the foetus would necessarily be female as no ‘Y’ chromosome would be present. From my perspective, I don’t see how a waving of the hand in dismissal of all this is useful to the future of theology?

Christian Contradictions Revisited

In view of the above consideration and returning to Christian Contradictions we can elucidate another matter. What really makes you edgy is that you think (falsely) that I ‘[seek] to identify [myself] with what [I] believe Catholicism to be’(H 5)! What I in fact say – within the context of a certain argument – is: ‘I find I am closer to “Catholicism”, but it is a Catholicism shorn of revelation’(CC223). Let us consider this.

Lutheranism, so I would contend, particularly in the work of Rudolf Bultmann, has shown a peculiar ability to respond to the epistemological crisis brought on for Christianity by what in modernity we know to be the case. Hence I judge Bultmann the most adequate Christian apologist of whom I am aware. The debate with him (as the person most likely to persuade me that I could be Christian) has consequently been seminal for me; while the dismissal of his position leaves me clear that (on epistemological grounds) I cannot be Christian. (I may also have ethical and feminist grounds for not being Christian.)

I give here a thumbnail sketch of Bultmann; readers should please turn to CC chapter 6 for further elucidation. Bultmann knows well that (as I have put it) nature and history form a causal nexus and that particularity (in the sense of what earlier was called the ‘scandal’ of particularity)– which Christianity must needs claim – is not possible. His response is ingenious. There are – so he postulates in parallel with Kierkegaard – two spheres or realities: that of Historie(common or garden history) and of Geschichte(quite what is that?– some kind of higher history, more ultimate reality, or sphere of meaning). In the sphere of Historie there can of course be no resurrection. Now Christians proclaim that this man Jesus who died (an ordinary historical event) was resurrected, finding themselves delivered by this message. (Bultmann is every ounce a Lutheran.) The ‘resurrection’ is an eschatological event, an event of Geschichte. But it is the resurrection of this particular man who died. The two spheres are brought as close as possible while discontinuous with one another. The resurrection thus ‘lends’ the necessary uniqueness to this particular man in Historie. It may well be said that this is nothing other than a transposition into the epistemological sphere of Luther's simul justus, simul peccator(where justus refers to the future eschatological reality on which we base ourselves). (Indeed Bultmann himself makes this equation at the conclusion of his Giffords.)Footnote ³⁵ For myself I must (i) deny that there could be any such other reality as Geschichte; (ii) say that I do not find myself ‘delivered’ by such preaching.

Let us probe the second of these a little deeper. What I find so problematic about Lutheran thought (which, whether in the hands of Kierkegaard or Bultmann, I think epistemologically the only possible way for Christians to stake their claim), is the concomitant structure which it gives to theology. For the structure demands that I constantly break the self (that self which – ethically – thinks it can be itself ‘apart’ from God revealed in Christ, or which – epistemologically – stands by what we otherwise know to be the case) in order to base itself on Christian truth (or in Bultmann's terminology ‘live from the future’). But what if I don’t want to break my self and base myself on that which is other than myself? What if I wish – ethically –(to adapt the poster slogan) to ‘grow where I am planted’ and – epistemologically – can credit no in‐breaking? I must, then, hold a non‐Christian theistic position. (There is no problem with thinking that there is a dimension to the one reality, which we may name ‘God’, and ethically no heteronomy involved.) In Catholic terms one could say that I have a ‘high’ doctrine of creation (though I should not be inclined to express it in that way). Minimally it strikes me that I hold in common with Catholics whom I know a strong sense of that which is God present in the world. But if in this my position is commensurate with Catholicism, it is a ‘Catholicism’ shorn of revelation. (It is not that I think that Catholics think they could dispense with revelation!).Footnote ³⁶ Further, it has moved me that there have been Catholics who have apparently had no difficulty in crediting that I am, in common with them, a spiritual person (although not a Christian). This has been much more difficult for Protestants, for whom the revelation in Christ is everything – and there is nothing else.Footnote ³⁷

Misunderstandings

Finally, Laurence, I have the unwelcome task of responding to aspects of your article which I find distasteful, distortive and wholly unjustified. Excuse me that I must do this. I have devoted years of my life to the work which has gone into these two books and, in the present context, I must say of CC that it would be too bad if it failed to reach its intended readership. That intended readership is in large part Catholic. Why I have desired to explain the Lutheran structure of thought to Catholics – ever since thirty years ago I recognised the confusion present in Catholic writing – I’m not quite sure! One Anglican teaching in an Anglo‐Catholic seminary – e‐mailing me out of the blue and telling me that he’d have to re‐write his lecture on M C D’Arcy's response to Nygren – commented, of CC, that it was ‘much the most interesting, exciting and disturbing theology book I have read in a very long while’. I need some more of this in print if people are ever to find this book. For – as my correspondent had found in commending the book to another – it is of course inherently unlikely that Daphne Hampson, known feminist and enfant terrible of theology, should have written a book such as this. Perhaps I am not quite known for who I am: these debates have been integral to my whole development. Again, thank you Fergus for remarking (in a jacket commendation): ‘It is a remarkably generous exposition of both forms of Christianity: not pseudo‐neutral but wonderfully sympathetic all round.’(How could one not find empathy when writing of men the likes of Contarini or Seripando, or be bowled over as I was initially by Lutheran thought?)Footnote ³⁸ There are profound issues concerning what it means to be a human being and to relate to God involved. That is why it matters so much that we should comprehend where others are coming from.