(The following is a conversation between myself, Oriental Syriac/Indian Orthodox, and Bill R., Anglican Use/Ordinariate Roman Catholic, from a private FB group.)
Bill (OP) :
Yet another Anglican bishop, this time the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, has announced that he is resigning his post and entering into full communion with the Catholic Church.
There's always a rightful celebration with announcements like this, but I fear there's also always a Catholic temptation to Schadenfreude as well. The theological collapse of Protestantism in the last two centuries, the absolute demographic collapse of some denominations, and the relative demographic decline of others, can be a real temptation to celebrate not the reunion of Christendom, but the defeat of our Protestant "enemies." However, our separated brethren, despite the incontrovertible ways in which their philosophies and schisms and peculiar church-state relationships have contributed to the rise of secular modernity, have at least been a bulwark against the ravenous, revolutionary secular modernity that they unwittingly engendered. If the rise of Protestantism meant the rise of secularism in all its liberal, Marxist, and Nietzschean variants, the collapse of Protestantism means their triumph.
Thus, as De Tocqueville observed in Book II of Democracy of America nearly two hundred years ago, “Thus there have ever been, and will ever be, men who, after having submitted some portion of their religious belief to the principle of authority, will seek to exempt several other parts of their faith from its influence, and to keep their minds floating at random between liberty and obedience. But I am inclined to believe that the number of these thinkers will be less in democratic than in other ages; and that our posterity will tend more and more to a single division into two parts—some relinquishing Christianity entirely, and others returning to the bosom of the Church of Rome.”
This image is exhilarating, but it should also frighten. This future is one of greater Christian unity within the ambit of a proportionally larger Catholic Church, but also of a much smaller Christian population relative to the overall sea of unmoored egocentric identity-seekers. That isn’t to say that some particular denomination won’t maintain its institutions and overall character in the midst of relative but not absolute demographic decline. The LCMS, living in the Midwestern fringes of our cosmopolitan empire, is probably a good candidate for just that, as are similarly cantankerous Orthodox jurisdictions like ROCOR. But the largest Protestant blocs (or any with over a million members in weekly attendance), like the Southern Baptists and evangelicals, will likely go the way of the mainlines. They will dissolve further into either Moralistic Therapeutic Deism or woke leftism, and consequently be overrun by generational losses. Anecdotally, that’s what I’ve witnessed happen to nearly all of my evangelical friends at youth group and nearly all of my peers who remained evangelical at Messiah College. And this puts Christianity basically back to the second and third centuries: a mostly united Catholic Church, facing on the inside a spectrum of non-creedal and only nominally Christian sects and, on the outside, facing the great sea of the population, not committed to any particular cult but pinching off a bit of incense to Caesar here, touring the temple of Aphrodite there, singing hymns of triumph to Apollo, and all the while slaving away in fields owned by the priests of Hephaestus.
Thus, I can only hope that what Joseph Ratzinger wrote in 1967 is true:
“From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members….
“But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.”
Me :
I speak as an Oriental Orthodox person (so, neither Roman nor Eastern Orthodox). I too watch closely at what is happening in LCMS and among the conservative Anglicans. I see Rome as the Orthodox Church of the West, and, for the sake of most arguments, I am willing to theoretically and temporarily concede papal supremacy among bishops, in order to resolve other points toward unity, and leave only that one final issue.
Here are follow-up questions that I've been struggling with.
- Is there a difference between 'two kingdoms' (Protestant) and 'two swords' (Catholic) -- are both equally wrong or equally right?
- Is the Gospel (the core message of redemption and atonement and God's acts in history, corporately and individually) salvageable from at least Lutheranism and Anglicanism? Is a kernel of truth present (as Catholics see it) OR is it sufficiently heretical that it inevitably leads to Therapueti Moral Deism or Woke Leftism? (My apologies to my dear Lutheran and Anglican friends here). Along the same lines, what do you think of the Reformed/Presbyterian factions? What, if anything, is salvageable?
Bill (reply to question 1) :
Great questions. They've very near to the heart of my concerns.
On the first, I think there is a substantial difference, although "two swords" is a bit outdated from a Catholic perspective, and the two kingdoms doctrine has been forced to change on the Protestant side.
So, the Protestant two kingdoms doctrine parallels the law/gospel distinction (or law/grace distinction if you're a Calvinist). None of those three pairs are identical, but they track. Thus, governance over the realm of "law" is properly the function of the "left-hand kingdom," and so too the right-hand kingdom is God's exercise of power through the proclamation of the gospel. This doesn't necessarily break down into institutions like church and state, but these also roughly track. Thus, it is the proper duty of the state to govern in the realm of law, and the proper duty of the church to exercise divine power through the proclamation of the gospel.
Critically, however, this means that anything in the church that isn't particular to grace- the content of the gospel and its application in the means of grace, whether word or sacrament- can rightly be administered by the state. Thus, qualifications for pastors, the structure of the liturgy, the operation of schools, finances, etc., can all be administered by the state rather than by the church. That is true only insofar as the state does not hinder the proclamation of the gospel and the exercise of the means of grace, but everything else is properly outside the right-hand kingdom and thus most fittingly the domain of the state.
Thus, when Luther sought to reform the church, he issued his Appeal to the German Nobility, calling only the secular leaders of the country to take control of church operations for the sake of liberating the proclamation of Luther's gospel from the strictures of Catholic canon law (the standard internal mechanism for the administration of church order). Even in the face of the Holy Roman Emperor's opposition to the Reformation, the Lutherans were willing to concede a lot of control of "externals" to the administration of the state, so long as Luther's gospel could be freely preached. And the result was precisely the church-state relationship that prevailed in almost all Lutheran lands, whether in Germany or Scandinavia (or, by extension, England).
As I said, there has been a necessary change on the Protestant side because of changes in the social setting. In one direction, Enlightenment-era princes were interested in the church as an organ of social cohesion (because, well, that's what happens when the state funds clergy, religious education, and charities), and thus insisted on grouping both Lutherans and Calvinists into a single united church with a range of abstract doctrinal differences permitted but enforced unity of practice. In the other direction, Lutherans fleeing this state-enforced union came to America and founded denominations like the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Without state support, Lutherans here were basically forced to completely reinvent the Catholic Church's system of internally directed seminaries, certifications, schools, finances, charities, etc. In essence, like all institutions, the LCMS required a working manual of law, which it had to developed without any assistance from the state. But theoretically, that means that the United States government is really the most proper organ for the exercise of those functions, and that the Missouri Synod is really doing double duty by exercising both its proper right-hand functions and taking care of all its left-hand necessities in house as well.
All of this contrasts strongly with the perspective of the Catholic Church. If the Protestant view is fundamentally a view of division within God's authority (a hierarchical, top-down model), the Church's view is shaped by the biblical narrative and its climax in Christ's Messianic identity. That is, Christ's Messianic vocation is not simply transformed into "saving us from our sins" or establishing an ethereal kingdom in heaven, but in forming a real earthly institution that inherits Israel's rightful place as a global superpower. The real transformation is that the Church must exercise that role as a global superpower, or perhaps a supra-national organization standing outside and above the assembly of nations, without any weapons of war or official power. We have to exercise a global Messianic mission with no weapons except the Cross.
The Gelasian two swords theory takes it starting point from here, except that it couches it more in abstract hierarchical language (and is similar to the Protestant two kingdoms in that respect). There is the spiritual sword, exercised by bishops, and the temporal sword, exercised by kings. The first difference from the Protestant theory is that this does not parallel an internal/external division or a gospel/law division. The power exercised by bishops to hold court, codify canon law, establish monasteries, etc., is natively their own. All of the mechanisms required to run a church, even in the face of persecution by a hostile state or in an anarchic absence of a state, properly belong to the bishops of the Church. The second difference is that the temporal sword is not directly given to kings by God directly, but mediately through the Church. It must be so, because the Church is precisely that Messianic kingdom, weaponless and yet still globally sovereign.
This second issue is extremely thorny, and the post-Westphalian, post-French Revolutionary situation has changed the Catholic Church's position as much as the Lutherans'. In the Middle Ages, the idea that God gave the temporal sword to the king through the mediation of the Church had two corollaries.
In the first case, it meant that the full exercise of Christian kingship could be granted and, importantly, revoked by the papacy. It could be granted, because kingship is, by its nature, a sacred estate requiring ordination, and thus one's status as a Christian king or emperor required anointing from a papal or episcopal representative. It could be revoked, because loyalty to kings is not impersonal, as in the modern state, but bound by personal oaths of loyalty guaranteed by the Church. The pope had only to revoke his guarantee of the oaths binding vassals to lords to undo the bonds of a kingdom.
The second corollary is the idea that Church did not give over the entirety of the temporal sword to the kings and emperors of Christian Europe. That is, they reserved for themselves some sphere of temporal action, whether as prince-bishops within the territory of the Holy Roman Empire, or as pope-kings over the Papal States.
The latter, I think, is clearly not in keeping with the nonviolent Messianism of Christ's institution. And the former, while it served during the long high medieval contest between pope and emperor to keep the state from overrunning the church (as, with Luther's invitation, it eventually did), is just not possible when the modern nation-state exercises power not through oaths of loyalty but through a monopoly of force. And so the irony of the Church's losses in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is that through those losses, the Catholic Church is now in a position something much more like what Christ seems to have envisioned, a universal kingdom without force of arms, with, as John Paul the II said, no power to impose, only propose.
Me (brief response) :
wow -- this is beautiful! Thank you for the detailed response. I appreciate all the points you've made.
I'm not sure if you know -- but, I am an anarchist. I see it as both a logical necessity as well as part of the explicit Gospel message. In modern secular terminology, I would be what is sometimes labeled an ancap or voluntaryist.
Everything you've said makes perfect sense and I see the vastly greater superiority of the 'two swords' position as you've outlined it over the 'two Kingdoms' doctrine.
I've always intuited that the Church must dispense judicial work in addition to the Sacraments (1 Corinthians 6:1-8, Exodus 18). 'Two swords' is much closer to what I believe than 'two kingdoms'.
Rephrasing a point you made in my own words and synthesizing with other things I believe : the enforcement of justice (i.e. self-defensive or restitutionary) under natural law is the right of all men -- however, it is serious enough that it might require the oversight/explicit ordination/explicit blessing/explicit sanction of the Church as opposed to other vocations like farming or construction.
I can't wait for your answer to question 2!
Bill (reply to question 2) :
So, on your second question. I hesitate to rule on the entirety of any of those classical Protestant traditions, because they're each so diverse. And I guess it depends on what you mean by "salvageable." If by that we mean that there are Lutherans and Anglicans who preach the Gospel, the answer would have to be: absolutely, without a doubt. The good news the Church exists to proclaim is that God has definitively brought his purposes in creation and the election of Israel to completion, by uniting himself to humanity in its nature in the incarnation, uniting himself to humanity in our suffering and death in his crucifixion, and transforming the totality of human existence by deification in his resurrection and ascension. That Christ was born, suffered, died, and rose for us is the Gospel, and even without that particularly participatory/theositic twist I just put on it, the good folks in the LCMS and ACNA (for example) undoubtedly preach it.
Obviously, there are many Anglicans who are happy to proclaim the Gospel in that distinctively Catholic/Orthodox manner that I just did, so I'll leave the Anglo-Catholics aside. But evangelical Anglicans, Lutherans, and the Reformed are a different manner.
I think the Lutheran tradition introduces something deeply problematic into the body of its theology that, like a genetic disorder, tends to manifest as its body of teaching develops over time. And unfortunately (and if any Lutherans are still reading this, I'm going to catch hell for it), that's the particularly Lutheran (and Reformed) interpretation of what Paul means when he says that we are "justified through faith." Lutherans, the Reformed, and relevant Anglicans (henceforth collectively "classical Protestants") all confess that what Paul means by that formula is "the salvation of the individual by the imputation in God's accounting of Christ's moral standing to that individual ("justification") on the basis of an unmerited gift ("grace alone") received by nothing other than the individual's fiduciary trust ("faith alone"), which has its origin exclusively in the encounter with the supernatural act of God's giving said gift."
Most Catholic-Protestant dialogue gets stuck on the idea of the the relationship between faith and future works, unmerited grace and the supernatural rehabilitation of the natural will, and so on. But when it comes to the devolution of classical Protestantism, I think the more troubling issues are A. that this process involves an invisible reckoning of Christ's merit points (or "alien righteousness") to the individual purely within the mind of God, external to the subject ("extra nos"), and B. that the proclamation of the Gospel as Word is a sufficient means of grace to achieve justification.
This puts all classical Protestantism in a position where the complete justification of the sinner can be accomplished in an invisible manner without any bodily involvement. It internalizes the entire event (I almost wrote "process"), divorcing the external status of the visible "sinner" from the internal status of the invisible "saint." Simul iustus et peccator, in the classical formulation, doesn't mean that one is partially on the road of justification or sanctification, torn between the past life of sin and the future life of righteousness. It means that one has a dual identity, the one fleshly and visible, the other spiritual and invisible.
Lutheranism fights valiantly against this tendency, largely by affirming that the sacraments are also genuinely and objectively means of grace alongside the proclamation of the Word/Gospel. Thus, baptism is genuinely regenerative and the Lord's Supper is genuinely (or genuinely contains) the body and blood of Christ. However, it fails to combat this genetic tendency toward dualism in two ways.
First, as one can see in Luther's On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther approaches the whole doctrine of the sacraments from a standpoint of skepticism. The idea that the material can be united to and convey the spiritual can only be established with the express warrant of Scripture. That isn't just an application of Sola Scriptura (however problematic, I'll accept it for the sake of argument); it imports a fundamentally dualistic understanding of the world and assumes that instances of divine action through material means must be exceptions to be proved rather than the natural way of things. The idea that Paul's handkerchief could have been transformed by his sanctity and thereafter communicate healing as a sacred relic (Acts 19:12) is absolutely foreign to Luther's pre-Scriptural worldview that he brings to bear on the text.
Second, despite the affirmations of baptismal regeneration and Eucharistic real presence, which are admirably strong, these doctrinal affirmations don't actually accomplish anything except in the case of infant baptism. A convert who has already heard and believed the Word is already justified; a subsequent baptism does him no good except, importantly, as a token of assurance. A Christian who has already listened in faith to the sermon or the Words of the Institution already has justification; the reception of the sacrament itself is nugatory. The Small Catechism is shockingly clear on this point: "Question: How can bodily eating and drinking do such great things? Answer: It is not the eating and drinking, indeed, that does them, but the words which stand here, namely: Given, and shed for you, for the remission of sins. Which words are, beside the bodily eating and drinking, as the chief thing in the Sacrament; and he that believes these words has what they say and express, namely, the forgiveness of sins."
For all practical purposes, then, this is no different in practice from the Reformed, no matter how different in theory. And it isn't hard to see how the Lutheran tradition will develop, absent the Catholicizing restraints imposed by the later Confessional and Orthodox Lutheran generations, in the direction it did. It's a small step, then, to Friedrich Schleiermacher's view that religion is a "feeling of total dependence" (inward trusting faith in the ultimate gift of being!) and Adolf von Harnack's "universal Fatherhood of God and universal brotherhood of man."
That's not to say Lutherans, or even other classical Protestants, are necessarily going to go there. But there are tensions within the classic Protestant formulation of the faith that tend to push the development of that tradition toward Pietism (which takes justification for granted and then feels free to pursue moral growth and social advancement) and then liberalism (which further throws off the constraints of tradition by getting rid of the tradition that is the biblical canon), at which point you have a faith that is privatized, spiritualized, and some combination of MTD, woke leftism, or both. You can do what the confessional versions of these did and impose hard doctrinal limits to the development, but that's a rearguard action that requires an absolute refusal to comprehensively think through the implications of a fundamentally dualistic system and an attempt to recover an authentic first century Christianity shorn of later traditional and developmental constraints.
So while I applaud groups like the LCMS, OPC, PCA, WELS, and ACNA for their attempts to stand against the tide, I think they fail to recognize that they're not just fighting against a culture war without, but a developmental, genetic tendency propagated from within. And that's why, while I really, really love so many of the treasures produced from within those traditions, from the Anglican biblical and Prayer Book traditions to Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist hymnody, I think that the Ordinariate/Eastern Rite model of incorporation, which makes no compromise on Catholic doctrine, is the only way to proceed in saving what remains from these fine traditions.
Bill (response to anarchism tangent) :
No, I didn't know that. I'm definitely not an anarchist, but I would agree that, while not strictly necessary, it is easier for a society to pursue the goods of human flourishing when sanctified by ecclesiastical blessing. For me, that generally means a constitutional monarchy on a national scale (like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) or an aristocratic republic on a city-state scale (like Florence or Venice), but with Aristotle I'm open to diverse forms of social organization.
Paul (concluding gratitude) :
your second to last epic reply brought tears to my eyes -- you are speaking pastoral wisdom and words of grace into my heart and an ongoing and current conversation between my wife and myself on these very same subjects.
I have intuited almost every point you make (save for a few) and almost down to the very nuanced detail. Yet, it was a joyful surprise to hear, from another person, all the details and even the nuanced differences between the various Protestantisms, and to finally hear that the hymnody is an example of something that can be salvaged -- these are strikingly my own inchoate thoughts of the last several years.
My wife and I had to and are still walking a road that is not easy as we move away from our childhood Reformed faiths and fully embrace the Orthodox-Catholic faith (putting aside East-West distinctions for now).
I have more to say and I will get back to it in the next reply.
Your three essays (OP, reply 1 and reply 2) should be made into an article that is a good follow-up to many current conversations emanating, for example, from the work of Charles Taylor ('A Secular Age'). If you are not interested, I will make a verbatim blog post out of them with appropriate credits.
[Minor tangent : when I say 'anarchism', I mean it as the most logically and ethically consistent form of anti-leftism or anti-Marxism or true traditionalism. If this surprises you, we can chat on that in a different conversations. If you already knew this, we don't need to dwell on that subject. If you are confused, I am in this group since Aaron is a good FB friend and we've gotten into it a few times in the past].
Bill (final remarks) :
I'm a huge fan of A Secular Age, about 80% through it right now. Let me think about turning it into an essay!
But yes, I love so much of classical Protestant hymnody, and I'm very fortunate that the Ordinariate uses so much of it- O Sacred Head, Jesus Lover of My Soul, Crown Him With Many Crowns, Abide With Me, all the typical Christmas/Eastern classics, etc., but with historic Gregorian sequences like Pange Lingua and Ave Verum Corpus alongside them.