Sean Michael Lucas Responds to Jeremy Jones' "Renewing Theology"

In February 2008, Jeremy Jones  gave the second talk, "Renewing Theology,"  at the Denominational Renewal (DR) conference.  The transcript is not available due to a publishing contract, but you may listen to the audio of Jeremy's talk by clicking (here).

This is the second week of a five week forum scrutinizing the five talks given at DR. For more on the structure of the five week forum at CGO on this conference, click (here).

During the week of September 22-25 we will host essays from John Frame, Sean Michael Lucas, Howard Brown, and Michael Walker in response to Jeremy Jones' talk. On Friday, September 26,  Jeremy will respond to his respondents.

We welcome discussion that is both robust and gracious. I [Glenn] will moderate all comments and those comments that exemplify graciousness and love for one's brothers and sisters will be approved. First and last name, and one's current, valid email address are required for comments. Also, please focus on Jeremy's  talk and/or the response essay.

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Sean Michael Lucas is the Chief Academic Officer and Associate Professor of Church History at Covenant Theological Seminary. He is the author of On Being Presbyterian: Our Beliefs, Practices, and Stories and Robert Lewis Dabney: A Southern Presbyterian Life.

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I’m grateful for the opportunity to respond to Jeremy Jones’ talk on “renewing theology.” Perhaps it might be helpful to start with areas of agreement and then move to some constructive response.

One major area of agreement could be summed up this way: the task of theology is to witness to the apostolic tradition for the present cultural moment. In order to witness, not only must theology seek to understand the apostolic tradition (biblical exegesis/Scripture), it must recognize its relationship to previous witnesses (historical theology/confessional tradition) as well as its current cultural moment. This way of putting it relates Scripture and confession in a hermeneutical spiral that both limits and offers opportunity for theological preservation and creativity. It also relieves us from trying to re-establish some sort of golden age; each age’s witness has something to offer us as we determine how God is calling us to witness to our own age.

This leads to another major area of agreement—namely, that sectarian theology ultimately undermines the church’s commitment to “one body, son Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all” (Eph 4:4-6). Our Reformed and Presbyterian forefathers understood this—whether John Owen, whom historian Carl Trueman characterized as a “reformed catholic”; Samuel Davies preaching on the “sacred import of the Christian name”; or James Henley Thornwell who vowed to “embrace all other denominations in the arms of Christian fellowship and love.” There is a fundamental catholicity that must characterize theological reflection in order to be truly Christian.

Not only must there be a commitment to catholicity, but theology must also demonstrate a commitment to fundamental Gospel doctrines. This is simply another way of saying that theological reflection must be evangelical; it must distinguish between “more central and less central doctrines,” reserve the category “heresy” for truly heretical beliefs (which 1 John centered on the nature and person of Jesus and his relationship to deity), and especially demonstrate Gospel orthopraxy as well as orthodoxy.

Thus far, Jeremy and I are agreed, I think (and there is much more besides). Perhaps where I might prod him and others to more thought on renewing theology would center on three thoughts: first, it strikes me that his proposal for renewing theology holds out great hope for “creative theological thinking.” And yet, if we pay attention to those witnesses of the past, like Irenaeus and Tertullian, they stressed not their creativity, but their unoriginality. For example, when Irenaeus sought true missional impact, he stressed “this kerygma and this faith the Church, although scattered over the whole world, diligently observes, as if it occupied but one house, and believes as if it had but one mind, and preaches and teaches as if it had but one mouth.” Perhaps the agenda for renewing theology should not be to look for “creatively faithful, constructive theology,” but for a continuing witness to “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

Second, and related, while a great deal of energy recently has focused on the relationship between biblical and systematic theology, the unspoken tension in Jeremy’s paper is actually between “theology” and “history.” That is to ask, how does this rich confessional tradition (or, to maintain the stream of thought, collection of witnesses) called “the Reformed tradition” speak to contemporary theological reflection? Should “the Reformed tradition” be a privileged witness among other witnesses for those who subscription to a Reformed confessional standard? If so, how does such privileging work?

A final thought: if the renewal of theology depends on a contextualized theology, I wonder what exactly that means in light of Tim Keller’s observation that “there can never be a culture-free gospel.” I would take it to mean that all our theological reflection is inevitably contextualized from the get-go—we are never decontextualized, blank slates when we theologize. And so, it strikes me that the task before us is not to “contextualize” our theological witness (it already is, after all), but to become much more self-critical about our contextualization or enculturation (or “cultural captivity”). And the only way we can do so is, ironically perhaps, by becoming much more historically-minded.

And this means that perhaps the way forward for the renewal of theology might actually through a renewed appreciation for and embrace of the confessional commitment and traditions of the church catholic and especially of our own particular branch of the church, Presbyterianism.

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For further reading, Sean Michael Lucas recommends:

Sean Michael Lucas, On Being Presbyterian: Our Beliefs, Practices, and Stories (Phillipsburgh: P&R, 2006).

Richard Muller, The Study of Theology: From Biblical Interpretation to Contemporary Formulation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991).

Carl Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man (London: Ashgate, 2007).

Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: WJKP, 2005)

Comments

[Greg Thompson]

Hi Nathan--Thanks for your engagement with me. I'm sorry for the delay in responding. The wheels turn slowly here, but they do turn...

At any rate, I'd like to speak to this question you asked: "Greg, Can you site any of the reformers who support your concept of "creative theology" as an accurate expression of Semper Reformanda?"

I take your question to mean, "Is there a place where the Reformers argued for the kind of theological method you and Jeremy are articulating?"

It's a fair question and one that I think actually pushes the conversation forward, so thanks for asking it.

I have to run to an appointment, so I can't be as careful as I'd like, but in order to respond I'd like to make two points by way of answer:

First, to summarize the method we're describing (so as to be clear what we're asking of the Reformers): Our vision of creative theology is to take the truth of the faith handed down to us, to listen to the questions that emerge from our context (by "context" we mean the ideas, practices, and cultural characteristics of a given moment), to see the gifts that our context gives to us, and to put these all together in a way faithful to the Scriptures, attentive to the tradition, and engaged with the context. That is, in theology we don't just simply re-state the tradition to the context. Nor do we abandon the tradition in light of the context. We take the tradition, listen to the context, and labor to re-articulate, and, in some cases, to re-conceive the tradition in dialogue with the context.

I take your question to be whether the Reformers ever argued for such a thing.

My answer is yes and no.

First, the no part. I can't think of a place where one of the magisterial reformers explicitly advocated for the kind of theological method I'm describing. I don't know all of their works as well as I'd like, but in what I do know I can't remember a place where one of the reformers theorized about creative theological method. Bavinck, later, will do so. As will John Murray (Jeremy refers to both of these in his talk). But earlier than those guys, I don't really know of a place. So, with respect to theory, or to an articulation of a creative theological method, I can think of know place to cite where the reformers did such a thing.

Now, the yes part. Even though they may not, as far as I know, have theorized about it, it seems to me that their work demonstrates their instincts toward this very thing.

After all, the Reformation was a contextual theological movement (attending to the ideas, practices, and cultural practices of a given moment) that took the tradition (cf. Calvin's copious usage of the fathers) and re-appropriated that tradition in light of the questions of their day (cf. Calvin's constant attention to contemporary ideological and political developments).
It wasn't mere reiteration. It was affirmation in light of new intellectual developments and cultural questions. Thus the theological method they employed, whether they theorized about it or not, seems to me to be fundamentally creative in the sense I've described.

In this respect then, one could cite almost the entire reformational corpus, but let's stick to a (highly generalized) look at Luther and Calvin for time's sake: Luther's development of the visible/invisible church distinction--a distinction only minimally conceived (for obvious contextual reasons) before this. Luther's appropriation and development of Augustine's thoughts on justification along to the lines of a strong law-gospel dichotomy undeveloped in Augustine. Luther's emphasis on the vernacular (which were seen as novel in Wycliffe's day). Luther's rejection of transubstantiation and development of the idiosyncratic vision of consubstantiation. Luther's treatises on political matters (the role of soldiers in the church, the right of peasants to revolt [or not]). Calvin's Treatises on the Sacraments in which he tries to re-conceive of the sacrament in order to unite protestantism around one table, Calvin’s notion of spiritual presence in the Supper, Calvin’s development of the doctrine of Union with Christ, Calvin's reframing of auricular confession (which he affirmed) in light of the priestly work of Christ, Calvin's philosophically informed notion of the decrees of God, Calvin's political thought, which not only appropriated but transformed Augustinian political categories, etc. etc.

And this is not even to mention Calvin's frank appropriation of humanistic intellectual categories (which is reminiscent of Augustine's appropriation of neo-platonism and Aquinas' use of Aristotle).

As far as I can tell, all of this was creative in the sense that I'm describing. None of it was merely reiterative of the tradition. All of it was an affirmation of the tradition that simultaneously developed it--even as it preserved it. And this, of course, is preisely what the WCF is.

So, like Jeremy, my problem with any notion of theology as a fixed enterprise is two-fold: First, it is simply mistaken as a matter of historical fact. Secondly, it is inattentive to the fact that guarding the faith handed down to us in a given cultural moment requires not only reiteration but also re-conception. After all, as Jeremy says, to say the same thing in a different context is to say something different. We have to work—creatively—to speak the old tradition in a new moment.

Will this creativity entail error? Yes. But so does mere reiteration. Alas, as H. Thielicke says, "all of our theological work will need to be bathed in the justifying blood of Jesus." But I think the creative task actually preserves us from error better than the alternative (which, as Jeremy shows, tends to create the liberalism it presumes to repudiate).

Ultimately, I’m afraid the only way to really "guard against error" is to be silent.

And so perhaps I should!

[Bob Mattes]

GL,

Please allow me to make a distinction that I did not see in your comment. It certainly is possible to propose a modification to the Standards without fear which would clarify or expand upon some point in it. It should also be possible to add a point not addressed in the Standards but agreeable thereto. I don't see any repercussions coming on someone trying these things.

However, if an elder were to propose a change or modification that changed the basic theology of the Standards or contradicted them, then they would, by definition and their own oath of office, be proposing something that would contradict the system of doctrine taught in Holy Scripture. This would compromise the theological basis of the PCA based on our shared understanding of Scripture.

These are two different scenarios with very different underlying propositions. It would be helpful to differentiate between them in this discussion.

By His grace,
Bob