MetaCatholic

(This post is part of a series on the 39 articles of the Church of England)

I’m vaguely aware that Christmas is past and that I want to get to the end of the 39 articles by the end of 2007. Unfortunately, I’m not at all sure what to make of the next one to come under scrutiny, the thirty-seventh. More than many, it breathes the air of a bygone age, but it also throws up subjects like capital punishment and war which need whole series of posts of their own.

XXXVII. Of the Civil Magistrates

The King’s Majesty hath the chief power in this Realm of England, and other his Dominions, unto whom the chief Government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign jurisdiction.

Where we attribute to the King’s Majesty the chief government, by which Titles we understand the minds of some slanderous folks to be offended; we give not to our Princes the ministering either of God’s Word, or of the Sacraments, the which thing the Injunctions also lately set forth by Elizabeth our Queen do most plainly testify; but that only prerogative, which we see to have been given always to all godly Princes in Holy Scriptures by God himself; that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evildoers.

The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.

The Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences.

It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.

It is noteworthy that the sole (quite frequently quoted) reference in the articles to the pope comes in this article on civil power. “The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.” No doubt in part that recognised the de facto reality that the pope was one among many competing political powers in Europe, whatever else his role might have been. Alongside this, during the whole mediaeval period, bishops more generally were powerful nobles in their own right, and exercised considerable secular power from their castles and palaces. On the ground it was not easy to distinguish between temporal and secular authority. Handing heretics over to the “secular arm” for the death penalty because the church could not execute people was in some respects a legal fiction. This jumbling up of authority was the daily reality of life, irrespective of theological perspective, even as it was increasingly coming under threat from the widespread social changes that marked the end of the late mediaeval period, and the beginning of the early modern, with the bourgeoisie coming into their own, and changing the balance of power between monarch, nobles and bishops.

What was largely different theologically was that where the Reformation generally made a theological virtue out of the practical necessity of turning to princes for protection from the pope, the Anglican Reformers developed a particular theory of monarchical power rooted in the Old Testament. So in the early stages of the Reformation they proclaimed the boy-king Edward VI as a new Josiah, and took the model of the Deuteronomic reforms as the model for Protestant reformation. In a way, Anglican England began life as a theocracy, and as the symbiosis between temporal and spiritual power diluted itself in myriad ways in the succeeding centuries, competing accounts and visions of authority emerged, none being particularly successful nor becoming triumphant.

In many respects this was not, and is not, simply an Anglican problem but a Christian one. (Even Rome’s answer is only achieved by maintaining a small corner of the Eternal City as an independent theocracy.) The primary theological resources of the New Testament (and its earliest interpreters)  had little to say about the exercise of power or any theology of the State. The church was ill-equipped to respond to becoming either the official or a majority religion, and has continued to struggle with it. The Reformers’ abandonment of the mediaeval theologians’ work exacerbated the lack of guidance in the patristic era to which they turned. The best they had was Augustine, veering between his magisterial vision of the City of God, and his practical turn to the secular power to defeat the Donatists. In the end, perhaps, they were more ready to follow the lead of Eusebius’ baptism of Constantine’s ascendancy as providence.

Something of the problem is suggested by the last two clauses of the article, asserting the rightness both of capital punishment and waging war. With the partial exception of John Paul II, there really has been very little coherent theology done on either of these two topics by theologians working within the mainstream churches in their varied relationships with the State. The only Anglican theologian of any note working in this area I’m aware of is Oliver O’Donovan, whose work seems a marginal interest for most. The loudest voices come from the descendants of the Anabaptist tradition, ruled out as “slanderous folks” by this article, and generally condemned by the magisterial Reformers. The European consensus on these matters, largely shared by the international left-leaning parties, that both war and the death penalty are largely failures of a civilised society, is usually simply assumed. In fact there is a greater gulf between the Christian tradition and the contemporary consensus here than there is on any matter relating to sexuality.

In the spirit of this article, I fail to see how the Anabaptist tradition offers any answer other than an opt-out, a misplaced application of eschatology to the created order. The Anglican tradition may have been singularly poor at producing a coherent political theology for a multi-cultural democracy in the modern world, but its history points strongly to the need for an affirming one that gives God an interest in the ordering of society, and encourages political participation as a Christian vocation. I cannot see that a term such as Anabaptist Anglican, however well-intentioned, is anything more than an oxymoron. For Anglicans, a commitment to God’s ordering and re-ordering of the world as a question of justice means that a theology of law, statehood and even of war is something at which the church and its theologians should be working. However difficult it is now, and however inadequate or wrong-headed it was in the past, this is an aspect of the tradition that no church—concerned for its members to live in the real world—can afford to neglect.

(For the earlier posts on Piper’s book The Future of Justification, see, in order, here, here and here)

Piper spends two chapters looking at justification and law-court imagery. This has been at the heart of Wright’s argument for nearly three decades. Wright argues that God’s final judgement is in view, and that justification is about God’s final vindication of his righteous people Israel. It is a major plank of Wright’s narrative reading of the whole of scripture, which he also believes is Paul’s narrative reading. Again, for Wright, Paul sees this judgement and vindication having already taken place in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Because Jesus is Messiah, vindicated by God in spite of human condemnation, faith in Jesus is both faith in God’s judgement rather than either the judgement of people or Torah, and a standing with Jesus before God. So to be justified is to be identified with the one who has already been justified in the face of the Law’s condemnation. Justification, then, is a present anticipation and experience of what those who are identified with Jesus in his death and resurrection will receive at the final judgement.

I hope such a terse summary (missing out endless nuances) is not too inaccurate, although I’m aware of how many of the details and careful arguments I’ve left out. For Wright in his own words, one of the most accessible web documents is here. For the beginner, I still think one of Wright’s earliest essays in the book The Great Acquittal¹ is the best non-academic introduction of them all, both to Wright’s views and to a very early form of the New Perspective.

Therefore, when Piper says:

… in the theological sense in the New Testament, it [justification] far more often refers to the present reality of justification, not the future. … It is misleading to create the impression that when the word justification is used, the first or main thought coming to anyone’s mind would be final, eschatological judgment.²

I think he rather misses the point. Wright is talking about the present experience and consequences of being identified with the one who has experienced that future final judgement in past history. One might choose to disagree with the whole of Wright’s construal of justification but this particular argument misunderstands how past (the Cross), future (the Judgement) and present (the Christian self-understanding / experience) are related in Wright’s thought.

Piper’s real objection, however, is not to this but to the conclusion that Wright draws from the law-court metaphor. Wright argues that the old Reformation argument about whether God imputes righteousness (the Protestant view) or imparts righteousness (the Catholic view) is simply the wrong argument. A just judge is one who’s judgement can be trusted, a judge who gets it right. So when this judge finds in a person’s favour, or says someone is acquitted, innocent, righteous, they are making a statement that is both just, and if they have the authority to do so, effectual. The judge doesn’t hand over some of his own “righteousness”, he simply passes a verdict which declares someone to be set free from the threat of condemnation, or released from custody.

Although there is an impeccable logic to this analysis, given Wright’s premises, Piper sees this a mistaken version of a Luther-like appeal to sola scriptura and tries to get round the logic by an appeal to tradition:

If Wright is correct here, then the entire history of the discussion of justification for the last fifteen hundred years—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—has been misguided. … Whether we should follow Wright as a new Luther over against the Reformation and fifteen hundred years of wrong-footed conceptuality is open to question. I don’t think so. One of the differences between Wright and the Reformers is that the latter labored to link their thinking to the writings of the church fathers³

I can’t help but be unimpressed by this ad hoc devotion to catholic tradition. If Piper showed the same concern to root the rest of his scriptural interpretation in the Fathers, then he would have to make more room for the sacraments, the saints, the catholic rather than the congregational church and even bishops. He would also have to make a lot less room (if any at all) for his much beloved doctrine of penal substitution. But in fact the language of justification is used relatively sparingly until the Reformation, and it the language is usually rooted in rather different questions and debates to the ones became characteristic in the Reformation period. The real debate between imparted and imputed righteousness, with those terms solidifying into clarified polemical doctrines is a mere 500 years old, not 1500, and in the earlier period between Paul and Augustine justification gets very little play indeed, except in quotation or allusion⁴ The rhetoric of an appeal to tradition has rather less substance than at first appears.

1. Fount, 1980 [↩]
2. p58 [↩]
3. pp 60-61 [↩]
4. Alister McGrath in Iustitia Dei describes it as “inchoate and ill-defined”. (2nd edition 1998, p23) [↩]