There do appear to be a few at least partial dissenters, filling the role that good conservatives fill in all essentially modernist movements: adding respectability and preventing mistakes from being corrected. But any movement that considers verbal games insinuating that Richard Dawkins is really a “non-theistic Christian” profound, as some kind of big “agree and amplify” of protestant heretics, is either a dead end or worse.
The claim that Dawkins is a “non-theistic Christian” is not a ‘verbal game’, but neither is it a claim that atheism is Christian in essence. It is cladistic in nature, modern, Western atheism is an evolution (in the neutral, non-progressive sense of the word) of Christianity and Christian culture.
Here’s (part of) the original writings on the topic:
So: Professor Dawkins is an atheist. But – as his writing makes plain – atheism is not the only theme in his personal kernel. Professor Dawkins believes in many other things. He labels the tradition to which he subscribes as Einsteinian religion. Since no one else has used this label, he is entitled to define Einsteinian religion – perhaps we can just call it Einsteinism – as whatever he wants. And he has.
My observation is that Einsteinism exhibits many synapomorphies with Christianity. For example, it appears that Professor Dawkins believes in the fair distribution of goods, the futility of violence, the universal brotherhood of man, and the reification of community. These might be labeled as the themes of Rawlsianism, pacifism, fraternism and communalism.
Following the first two links above will take you to UR discussions of these themes, in which I outline their evolutionary history in the Christian clade and make a case for their morbidity. I have not yet discussed fraternism and communalism, but I’ll say a little about them later. If nothing else, they are certainly very easy to find in the Bible.
If Professor Dawkins was not a Christian atheist, but rather a Confucian or Buddhist atheist, or even an Islamic atheist (some clades of Sufism come daringly close to this rara avis), we would not expect to see these obvious synapomorphies with Christianity. Instead, we would expect to see synapomorphies with Confucianism, Buddhism or Islam, and we would have to construct a historical explanation of how these faiths made it to Cambridge. Fortunately we are spared this onerous task.
Nontheistic Christianity, therefore, can describe any tradition in the Christian clade in which the ancestral God theme has been replaced by the derived theme of atheism or agnosticism.
This is no more surprising than the replacement of the ancestral Trinitarian theme, which was part of all significant Christian traditions for a thousand years, with the derived Unitarian theme. Every variant of Christianity, by definition, considers itself orthodox. And as such it must question the legitimacy of any other Christian tradition which contains conflicting themes. To a good Trinitarian circa 1807, a Unitarian was simply not a Christian. Today, while most Christian traditions still officially conform to Trinitarianism, few spend a huge amount of time worrying about the Holy Ghost. If more examples are needed, denying the divinity of Jesus is another obvious intermediate form between Christian theism and Christian atheism.
We can also ignore the fact that Professor Dawkins does not classify Einsteinism as a form of Christianity, and nor do any non-Einsteinian Christian traditions. Clearly, accepting a tradition’s classification of itself, or of its competitors, is foolish in the extreme. These minor thematic features are best explained adaptively.
For example, it would be maladaptive for Einsteinism to self-classify as Christian. One of the most adaptive features of M.42 is that nontheistic or secular Christianity can be propagated by American official institutions, which are constitutionally prohibited from endorsing its ancestor and competitor, M.41 or theistic Christianity. Considering as this set includes the most influential repeater network in the world, the US educational system, it’s hard to see what could justify abandoning such a replicative advantage.
It would also be maladaptive for theistic Christianity to classify nontheistic Christianity as Christian. M.41 deploys the unchristian nature of its enemy, the dreaded “secular humanism,” as a rallying point for its dwindling band of followers. If Einsteinian religion was Christian, M.41 would have to define its (increasingly ineffective) counterattack not as a defense of faith, but as a mere theological spat. Once this may have had some resonance, but in a world where God Himself is under fire, it’s hard to excite anyone over such sectarian minutiae.
Therefore, I conclude that claim 1 is satisfied: nontheistic Christianity is a sensible concept.
As for claim 2, I’ve already described some of the links between Einsteinism and Christianity. Let’s sharpen this claim, however, by proposing a hypothetical chain of events that outlines the exact historical connection.
My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also be described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc, etc.
This cladistic taxonomy traces Professor Dawkins’ intellectual ancestry back about 400 years, to the era of the English Civil War. Except of course for the atheism theme, Professor Dawkins’ kernel is a remarkable match for the Ranter, Leveller, Digger, Quaker, Fifth Monarchist, or any of the more extreme English Dissenter traditions that flourished during the Cromwellian interregnum.
Elsewhere non-theistic Christianity is referred to as Crypto-Christian or ultracalvinist:
If you are not an ultracalvinist, you are probably some other kind of Christian, presumably one who still believes in God, the Bible as revelation, non-universal salvation, etc. Therefore you see ultracalvinism just as Catholics once saw Protestants, or Trinitarians saw Unitarians – as not Christians at all. So the result is the same. The ultracalvinist cloak of invisibility is only at risk from freethinking atheists, such as myself – a tiny and mostly irrelevant population.
We can see the argument is not that progressivism is Christian in essence. Rather, the argument is that progressivism is a non-theistic evolution of a particular sect of Christianity, puritanism, that has discarded the essence of Christianity but kept the accidents of it. (Although, it could be argued that universalism is the essence of puritanism, while Christianity was an accident of it).
Either way, accepting that ultracalvinism is an ideological adaptation of puritanism is not a verbal game and is definitely not “denying God”.
Zippy could argue that calling these heretical puritan progressives “non-theistic Christians” is mistaken. I personally think it captures nicely the self-contradicting nature of progressive thought, but theism is a part of the essence of Christianity, so I could buy the argument that calling post-Christian atheists ‘Christian’, even in the cladistic and cultural sense, is anti-essentialist and wrong.
But if that is the case, then instead of throwing around accusations of blasphemy, Zippy could have simply made the point that even if it is the cultural and intellectual descendent of Christianity calling a post-Christian ideology ‘Christian’ is wrong.
****
Zippy also commented on the Mark Shea affair, remarking that Neoreaction was childish. I don’t know how much Zippy knows of the affair, so I’ll outline.
This whole thing started when Mark Shea slandered neoreactionaries on his blog. Some neoreactionaries tried to honestly engage him but he deleted their responses. I myself, pointed out a few Bible verses contradicting his position, which he deleted. While he deleted the rational and reasonable posts he purposely left up some of the worst ones (yes, neoreaction has crazies like every other grouping) to create an impression we were all insane haters.
So someone decided to illustrate his ignorance of neoreaction and his willingness to slander us by giving him an opportunity to show his own willingness to do so by sending him something incredibly and unbelievably absurd about neoreaction. Mark Shea then illustrated his willingness to slander by posting the absurdity.
Rather than apologizing for the slander and humbly admitting he was uninformed regarding neoreaction, Mark Shea used the incident to double-down on the slander.
What’s that saying, ‘you can’t con an honest man‘? If Shea had been willing to engage with intellectual honesty and hadn’t been looking for ways to slander neoreactionaries however he could, this would not have occurred. The letter was quite effective in making its point, that Mark Shea had no idea what he was talking about and was engaging in slander, and one can’t help but see the humour in it.
As for lying, would any honest, rational analysis lead to someone thinking that swearing upon Darwin and “inspect my phenotype” are anything but a joke. A practical joke is usually not considered a moral lie. Submitting something absurd for someone to publish to prove a point about their absurdity is usually not considered either childish or a lie.
Even so, almost every neoreactionary on Twitter not involved with crafting the letter almost immediately pointed out the absurdity of the letter on Twitter and numerous people pointed out on his blog that he had been punked.
Now, neoreaction does have its own in-jokes and memes and has adapted a fair bit from internet culture, some of which can be juvenile. But as CS Lewis wrote:
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Calling a post-Christian, heretical ideology ‘Christian’ is wrong, indeed.
Calling a post-Calvinist, heretical ideology ‘ultracalvinist’ is equally wrong, since it has left behind actual Reformed doctrine and the Christian faith, itself.
It’s one of several beefs I have with the neo-reactionary community, despite being a fellow reactionary.
Oh well; c’est la vie.
Mark Shea is clearly an idiot, though, in his groundless attacks on neorxn.
He so got pwned, if I may borrow a juvenile Millennial term.
“Calling a post-Christian, heretical ideology ‘Christian’ is wrong, indeed.
Calling a post-Calvinist, heretical ideology ‘ultracalvinist’ is equally wrong, since it has left behind actual Reformed doctrine and the Christian faith, itself.”
It’s wrong from your perspective because your engaging in group competition with said group. From a classification perspective it’s correct if your group blinders won’t let you see it.
Perhaps most ironic of all is that it is Mark Shea himself who first taught me to question the shibboleths of the Enlightenment rationalism that is the de facto state religion. His blog was where I first read the term “endarkenment”, and his persistent opposition to the Iraq war and the torture that resulted are a major reason I’m a reactionary today. ( NB His opposition is to his great credit, whatever other problems I have with him.)
I don’t read him much anymore, due to his hostility to traditionalists and his embrace of blank slatism. I suspect that like many milquetoasts, Mark is smart enough to realize that the implication of his positions lead to the crimethink of reaction, but he doesn’t want to go there himself. He therefore lashes out at NrX in order to distance himself from the unpleasanter aspects of his own policies.
I think Zippy’s point is that you can’t call Dawkins et all heretical Christians without really twisting the meaning of the word Christian in its essentials. It’s a fair point.
I think Moldbug’s argument could be just as easily made if the Cathedral types were described as post-Christian secularists who behave like a church and have formed a kind of non-theistic religion. It makes some sense that this new non-theistic religion would have certain elements in common with the earlier, theistic religion called Christianity, for historical and cultural reasons, but in its essence it isn’t any more of a continuation of Christianity than Islam was. I think his point is that calling them heretical Christians really just muddies the issue, on the one hand, while also playing fast and loose with the essential meaning of the word “Christian” on the other, and is therefore fundamentally a modernist game.
I suspect that Moldbug may have chosen a better way to phrase this if he himself were a believer, and I also suspect that many in the NR (who are not believers … the non-believers seem a clear majority in the NR) grok Moldbug’s approach for the same reason.
Zippy’s objections boil down to semantics, which is always a cause for sturm and drang when discussing the “loose, vague, and indeterminate.”
Memetics is infamously so hard to pin down, that particular applications, of which Moldbug’s classification of Progressive Liberalism as a memetic descendant of Puritanism was sure to draw fire, not only from Protestants who are scandalized by the relation, but Progressives as well. The subjectivity of assigning nomina and genus to memes makes the whole affair easily dismissed by those inclined to do so.
A good parallel case might be Islam, which can be understood as starting out as a break away Christian sect that turned into it’s own thing. Progressivism can be understood in much the same way, though it’s far more pathological than Islam ever has been or could be.
@Novaseeker
I watched a PBS special on Martin Luther a few years ago. Done from a very progressive perspective with lots of glossing over his crimes. It was clear that the progressives who made the show viewed Martin Luther as distant kin.
If Catholics and Eastern Orthodox are willing to extend the use of the word Christian to Protestants (which they do) then the same should be extended to the progressives who descended from Protestantism.
What Novaseeker said. And I agree about them not even being heresies, since they’re different, ideologies rather than religions, and past any conception of the transcendent.
Just because some vestiges of modes of thinking have been retained, doesn’t make them still partly the original thing. Like Novaseeker said, it’s an error that only a non-believer, as an outsider who doesn’t completely ‘get’ the exclusivity of terms, would make.
Christianity is not merely fulfilled Judaism; Islam is not a variety of Christianity.
I’m not in any spiritual competition with the ‘ultracalvinists’ for the spirit of what is understood as Calvinism; on the contrary, their godless ideology is so far removed from Calvinist, Christian faith, that it’s not even in the same universe.
I am, however, in opposition to them as progressives, as godless, wicked folk, our spiritual enemies.
Anyone who buys into the misguided prog notion that Martin Luther and John Calvin were crypto-progressives should (a) carefully consider their actual beliefs and practices (look them up if you don’t know), and (b) read Herbert Butterfield’s ‘The Whig Interpretation of History’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Butterfield#The_Whig_interpretation_of_history
Ironically, the neorxnaries make the same damned mistake as the progs, just from the opposite direction, hating on the Reformers, rather than lauding them – but otherwise buying into the same Whiggish, prog error about them and their effects, seeing the past in terms of present issues, warping the interpretation of the past to make it thus conform.
Count me out of such mindlessness.
Moldbug wrote: “Since no one else has used this label, he is entitled to define Einsteinian religion – perhaps we can just call it Einsteinism – as whatever he wants. And he has.”
That is terribly wrong.
Einstein encountered fools like Dawkins; Einstein denounced them and tried to avoid being associated with them.
Since Einstein denounced atheism, it is not fair for Dawkins’ claptrap to be labeled “Einsteinism.”
Down with Moldbug!
Moldbug said somewhere, and Foseti quotes him:
The existence of God is a superficial feature of Christianity. ALL THE TEACHINGS OF CHRISTIANITY are superficial features, they are irrelevant. That is, whatever Christianity is, it’s not its content. So we have a society ruled by an elite that rejects Christianity and he calls it Christian.
Free Northerner, I can’t believe you guys push this guy’s BS.
Zippy’s skull is among the densest substances known to Man. You can’t expect much there. I respect Will S., but “that’s wrong” doesn’t rip any major holes in your argument.
This is worse than Zippy’s showing in the Game Wars; he has a crazy and emotional argument in favor of exterminating Christians in the male line through ideologically enforced involuntary celibacy. It’s desperate and weak. It does, however, resemble an argument based on a wildly heretical version of something resembling Christianity (though Zippy’s lunatic theology has no more in common with Christianity than do Dawkins’ weird ethical notions).
But these guys have no argument at all against recognizing Dawkins’ historically-traceable post-theistic mutant descendant of Protestantism. They just burst into tears and stick their fingers in their ears, like feminists or something.
Is this the best we can offer now? Imagine Chesterton engaging with opponents that way!
“Anyone who buys into the misguided prog notion that Martin Luther and John Calvin were crypto-progressives should (a) carefully consider their actual beliefs and practices (look them up if you don’t know), and (b) read Herbert Butterfield’s ‘The Whig Interpretation of History’.”
Martin Luther was a nut job that got 1/3 Germany murdered. He bounced from one extreme position to another during most of his life with expected results. He protested that indulgences were a form of usury and then embraced usury as fine when he needed money for his reformation. He set people free to make up their own minds about the Christianity and then condemned them for doing so when that freedom led to insanity. The only consistent thing about the guy was his constant I’m holier than you attitude.
Martin Luther and other reformers Pol Potted the holy roman empire more completely than the communists did to Cambodia. If that type of fruit doesn’t convince you that he was a nut case leftist, then nothing well.
“Non-theistic Christian” may not be just a word game, but being honestly believed makes it worse, not better.
The fact of the matter is that there simply is no such thing as a non-theistic Christian. Moldbug may (indeed, I think he does) have a point when he calls Dawkins a Protestant. That does not mean Dawkins is Christian.
We are dealing with a process here. It begins with protesting, among other things, contrition, the need for the Sacrament of Confession, etc. (http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo10/l10exdom.htm). It then proceeds to protesting the authority of the Magisterium, the virtue of priestly celibacy, the real presence in the Host, the existence of free will, and so on and so forth, not to mention that each man being his own magisterium (the doctrine of Sola Scriptura) leads to death, pluralism, or both. Sooner or later this progression leads to the protesting of the lordship of Christ. At this point, the name of Christian can no longer be honestly applied, though many claim it regardless. Dawkins, to his credit, does not practice such a base deceit, not merely protesting, but openly and forthrightly rejecting any and all such claims and regarding those who do not as his enemies in the greatest and most momentous war ever fought, as indeed we are.
So, then, there is a spectrum. At one end are the saints, and at the other nihilists. There is a line which to cross means one is no longer a Christian. The fact that some on both sides are closer to that line than others does not mean that the line is not real. Merely because Dawkins is the intellectual descendant of men who had been for centuries moving ever closer and closer to that line does not mean that, having crossed it, he has still not crossed. To use another example, suppose, for the sake of argument, that the theory of evolution is at least loosely accurate, in that men are the descendants of fish. This does not mean that men, or lizards or birds or anything not a fish, are just non-gilled fish.
So then, word game is the most generous possible interpretation of the phrase “non-theistic Christian.” If it is a word game, then could be supposed by the author that it is understood that it is a rhetorical device tending toward a certain end or point, rather than a literal truth. The alternatives are that the author is being deliberately deceptive or is himself deceived.
Progressivism is a Christian apostasy, not a Christian heresy. So, in a token gesture of respect towards Christian readers, we should probably call them post-Christians, rather than non-theistic Christians. Post-Christian makes it clear that they’re not Christian anymore.
The rest of the analysis stands, as far as broad strokes go. The details are weak, but not important.
I expect that many center-right Christians will continue to resist this analysis however. There seems to be a segment of that population that is incapable of recognizing the similarities between progressivism and Christianity as anything worthy of analysis. The similarities between progressivism and Christianity are nothing special if you assume that the only possible form of morality is Christian / Progressive Ressentiment based inverted / slave morality. A number of people are simply going to be incapable of imagining anything else.
This does not mean that men, or lizards or birds or anything not a fish, are just non-gilled fish.
Actually, it does. For instance, professional literature now uses “non-avian dinosaurs” to refer to what non-professionals just call “dinosaurs”, because there is no consistent way to define the dinosaur lineage while excluding birds, which are a part of that lineage. In human evolution, “hominin” has had to be adopted (replacing older “hominid” and other terms), for the same kind of reasons. Men are chordates, vertebrates, etc. all the way to our specific lineage.
Look up “cladistics”, “paraphyly” and “synapomorphy” to get the hang of it.
Of course, cladistics has been developed as a way of understanding the succession of lineages in the biological evolution of organisms. It is by no means evident that it will prove useful in the study of the succession of lineages in the historical development of currents of thought. That has to be evaluated in a case-by-case basis.
IMHO, it is somewhat useful; thinking of Dawkins as a “Calvinist atheist” as compared to a “Muslim atheist” does tell us something about his thought and its origins that would have been murky without cladistic analysis. But that doesn’t mean we should get carried away and forget the limits of this approach. Being a good student of cladistics and using phrases like “non-avian dinosaurs” doesn’t mean you have to think a chicken and a tyranossaurus are identical. (And I don’t think, BTW, that Moldbug’s or NRx’s use of cladistics, in general, falls into this error).
It seems to me both sides have a point here. Progressivism is often driven by Mainline Protestantism, or vice versa. In either case, Mainline Protestantism with their Modernist Roman Catholic friends are institutional manifestations of progressivism. However, their beliefs bear only the faintest resemblance to Christianity in any historical sense, to the point that they are another religion entirely, albeit one that is dependent on Christianity. Post-Christian is probably a better term. Even better than that would be secular non-conformism, especially in the English speaking world, possibly secular Anabaptism in other countries. In this regard, it is remarkable how much pseudo-Christian justification is used to further progressivism, and I doubt whether their cause would go far without it.
Not only its self-contradictory nature, but also its vapidity. Its content, such as it is, it steals from its host to use against it. Otherwise, the nihilistic nature of secularism would show itself immediately as an ideology devoid of life and content, and would not get very far.
Sigh. Where to begin…
Lewis also observed the destruction of language if “Christian” means something other than following Jesus Christ. He used “gentleman” which meant a property owner, but came to mean manners. Hence those who deny Christ and his father aren’t Christian.
Lewis describes the Natural Law and objective morality, so Ayn Rand would be a better example. He called it the Tao, and Confucius and Buddha taught similar things. Dawkins is as much a Buddhist or Confucian, if you do a fuller comparison.
Yet Dawkins and the rest fail because they will insist (some) morality is not objective. And usually pertaining to sex and marriage. Jesus had a lot to say about that too (as the Tao), but Dawkins and co. reject all that. Hitchens?
Reject his divinity and half of his moral teachings? No, they aren’t Christian by any stretch.
Equating “Christian” with a public affirmation of faith in certain credal formulations would be the last thing I would expect a Catholic to do.
Zippy is a joke. His mission seems to be use a lot of random words, claim married men should go without sex, Protestants are to blame for everything. Which is a huge joke considering how far left majority catholic nations went and how early they went leftward compared to the usa. Catholics where a major leftist voting block in the usa openly hostile to WASPS while backing the progressive agenda. In a very real way the progressive agendas would have failed in the usa if they did not import catholics in mass. Now progressives want to important another shit ton of catholics ie mexicans to shore up there strength.
I don’t have it in me to take anything he says seriously let alone a topic like Dawkins. Southron nationalist have known for generations that yankee progressivism was an offshoot of Puritanism. It’s been discussed to death in my circles since I was a child. With a lot fewer words required to get the message across.
@ sfcton:
1st paragraph: Hear, hear! And which Western nation was the first to embrace modern secularism in a big way? France, with the revolution – and it wasn’t Huguenot in the least by that point before falling; it had been previously purged, and was through-and-through R.C. The next big one? The Russians with their revolution – also not Protestant, though also not R.C. (though E.O.s are quite similar). Point being, exclusive-Prot-blaming / bashing on the part of neo-rxnaries, whether R.C., E.O., or unaffiliated Moldbuggers, is stupid. Truly, there’s enough rot and decay on all sides, today – and yeah, Mexicans arriving in America, and dutifully voting Democrat help progressives, not real trads or reactionaries… The Mark-Shea-types, pushing economic and immigration leftism, do America no good…
2nd paragraph: Hear, hear! Though ‘off-shoot’ is the key word; they’ve entirely left behind their ancestors’ faith, even if they’ve kept the theocratic / missionary impulse; having become secularized, it’s an entirely different creature.
Some commenters on this subject see me as a staunch defender of the authentic Christianity of Protestantism (vs Dawkinsian atheism); others see me as laying the blame for all of society’s woes at the feet of Protestantism.
FWIW, corruption in the RCC was definitely one proximate cause of the protestant revolt. That’s how modernist revolutions always proceed: those who hold legitimate authority abuse it, which provides the pretext for the liberals to revolt.
Or maybe, just maybe, the Protestants were right and the Bishop of Rome hath no authority outside of his own province, certainly not an infallible authority. The problem with these sorts of arguments from the Papists is that they are easily reversible. If the Magisterial Reformers were correct in their assertion that Scripture is the sole infallible authority (not sole authority) in the Church, then it is the Pope who has attempted to seize unlawful authority outside of his own jurisdiction. If that is the case, it is the Papacy’s recalcitrant insistence on maintaining unlawful authority that is responsible for the woes that are undoubtedly a result of the religious milieu of Post-Reformation Europe.
nathanjevans:
That would be a good point if sola scriptura were actually a rationally coherent concept. But it isn’t. As with almost all liberal concepts (see e.g. equality — in fact SS is actually a species of equality) SS equivocates between a meaning that doesn’t do the work it needs to do and a meaning that is actively rationally incoherent.
If SS just means that all true doctrines are consistent with Scripture properly translated and correctly understood, well, welcome to the RCC view of Scripture. If it means that the authority of men can be dispensed with and you can rely on the formal text alone to decide what is and is not doctrine, it is rationally incoherent positivism.
Al:
With respect, no, cladistics does not magically make men into fish, post-Christian atheists into Christians, sons into fathers, two into one, the alphabet into cuneiform, black into white, up into down, good into evil, or any other thing that is not a second thing into that second thing.
Cladistics is, to the best of my knowledge, corroborated by the first half-dozen search engine results, a form of classification based on common ancestors. Essentially, if George and Gertrude Smith have two sons and name then Grant and Gerald, it means that Grant and Gerald are both descended from George, and that Grant and Gerald’s cousin Gabe is with them the descendant of their grandfather Galahad. It does not mean that Grant is Gerald, or George, or Gabe, or Galahad, or (heaven forbid) Gertrude.
Cladistics is also not exactly a modern breakthrough. I would recommend perusing the Book of Numbers, some time. A new name does not make cladistics into something it is not, either.
And, yes, the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and their son’s teeth are set on edge.
And yes, sons generally inherit their fathers property, and something of their character. And yes, fish and men are both vertebrates.
This does not make sons their fathers. Neither does it make men fish. And it certainly does not make one who openly renounces Christ into one who acknowledges him.
How is the idea that Scripture is the sole infallible authority within the Church incoherent? This is a favorite of Roman Catholic apologists, but it is merely a manifestation of their continued illegitimate association of Anabaptist ideas with those of the Magisterial Reformers. Furthermore, if there is any incoherent epistemology involved it’s the joke of Papal Infallibility ex cathedra, which seems to be a virtually meaningless concept.
This is clearly a false dichotomy. Authority need not be infallible in order to be authoritative. No one claims parents are infallible in disciplining their children, but that doesn’t mean parents have no authority over their children. Similarly, Church authority need not be infallible in order to be accepted and not generally rebelled against. You also assume that RCC version of ecclesiastical authority is the proper one, when the mere existence of Eastern Orthodoxy provides a counterpoint. Even if you are right about the need for Ecclesiastical infallibility, that could just as easily prove Eastern Orthodoxy as Roman Catholicism.
The actual claim of sola scriptura advocates, at least the Magisterial Reformers, is that Scripture is the sole infallibility authority and all doctrine must, therefore, be rooted in Scripture either through explicit statement or deduced from Scripture. Also, Scripture itself embodies the personal authority of the prophets and apostles, who in turn spoke for God. Becoming a sola scriptura subscriber in no way demands throwing authority, ecclesiastical or otherwise, out of the window.
nathanjevans:
Because it is a completeness claim about a text. Every statement “it is infallibly true that X” must be decideable from the text and the text alone.
Texts can be consistent or complete, but not both.
Incoherence is about being inherently contradictory. There is absolutely nothing inherently contradictory about saying that we can only access infallible authority through Scripture. That does not mean all truth is contained in Scripture. It only means that any other claim must be consistent with it, it being the only works inspired by God Himself. Also, in particular, there is no other source of theological dogma. God has revealed Himself through Scripture, and while he has also revealed Himself in nature such that we are without excuse, our knowledge through nature has been dimmed and needs the light of Special Revelation to make it clear again.
In what way do Protestants make the claim that Scripture is “complete” that is ultimately different from Roman Catholic claims? Scripture is the works of the Prophets and Apostles. Both of us claim our theological dogma is ultimately rooted in the teachings of the Prophets and Apostles, but Protestants limit our access to that doctrine to the Scriptures while Roman Catholics extend it to “tradition” and Papal infallibility (both really boiling down to Papal Authority in the Papist view). It is difficult for me to see how a Pope issuing an ex cathedra statement is less “positivist” than claiming our only source of infallible authority is Scripture. All you have done is relocate the problem, if there is one.
nathanjevans:
Understanding what makes positivism incoherent is difficult and wildly counterintuitive to modern people, but it is in fact incoherent.
The Catholic claim is that every infallible doctrine is consistent with Scripture. Sola Scriptura asserts that every infallible doctrine is decideable from Scripture: that if a doctrine is infallible it can be deduced from the text alone.
The latter is a completeness claim about a finite text (Scripture). Scripture (a finite fixed text) is proposed to completely specify all infallible doctrines, on its own.
The difference is that in controverted cases a human authority, a person, drawing on tradition, makes an authoritative decision about what is and is not infallibly true.
nathanjevans:
Try this on for size.
The Catholic understanding is that the set of all infallible doctrines is underdetermined by the finite received text of Scripture.
Sola Scriptura claims that the set of all infallible doctrines is fully determined by the finite text of Scripture alone. This claim is (perhaps counterintuitively) rationally incoherent.
@ Will S
Not just France, but Spain and Portugal. Ireland held the line on divorce and abortion for a long time but other wise jumped on the Marxist band wagon pretty damn hard. Gay marriage was legal in Cathloic mexico in 1970 something. Not to mention how far left Catholic South America is and how fast progressivism caught on down there. In the usa Catholics were Marxist horse power and the success of progressivism depended on the Catholic vote. Still does.
Now I am sure the Papist have some long and complicated answer as to why it’s not real Cathloics doing those things but it’s a hollow answer and the leadership of the Catholic church has been hard core progressives from the start.
The usa will never be a nation of small govt and individual rights as long as Catholics, blacks, women etc get to vote.
The problem is that you are not seeing the Protestant’s claim, instead seeing the Protestant claim about Scripture as some kind of Liberal Constitution. Admittedly, this view is very common amongst modern Protestants, particularly on the American side of the pond, but it bears little resemblance to the original Protestants’ claim. Scripture is a living text brought to life by the personal authority of the Holy Spirit. It represents the personal authority of God through His Prophets and Apostles.
Magisterial Protestants have those people too. We just do not claim their authority is infallible. The authority of the Bishops of the Church is a derivative authority, which means it can be appealed against, and appealing to the Scriptures is appealing to the personal authority of Christ through His Prophets and Apostles. Wolves most certainly arise from even the ranks of the Priests and Bishops (indeed, they are the most likely to be Heresiarchs). The only way to ultimately tell who are the wolves is to appeal to the final authority of the Prophets and Apostles through the Scriptural Witness.
There is no promise or covenant witnessed to in Scripture that promises an infallible continuance of an office within the Church. The Church itself cannot be totally corrupted, but that does not mean there is any particular office that is incorruptible, or the majority of any particular office.
The sixth Article of Religion of the Church of England (emphasis mine):
This is a pretty important phrase in Magisterial Protestant theology. It is where Natural Law and logical deductions from the premises of Scripture (Natural Law being one of those) are made part of the doctrine of the Church, rather than just the Radical Puritan “Regulative Principle” (that applies specifically to worship, but you can see it just about everywhere in their theology) where you have to find something explicitly taught in the pages of Scripture in order for the Church to teach it.
nathanjevans:
Right. That is a pretty straightforward declaration of textual positivism.
You can only say this in any meaningful way by either ignoring the Protestant rationale for their position or redefining positivism into an unavoidable concept, in which case it wouldn’t be the boogeyman you use it as.
nathanjevans:
The rationale doesn’t matter. Why someone adopts an incoherent position doesn’t change an incoherent position into a coherent position.
Mind you, it is possible to abandon sola scriptura without becoming a papist. But sola scriptura is in fact rationally incoherent.
It is perfectly possible to adopt a non-positivist understanding of Scripture: the RCC understanding of Scripture as consistent but as formally underdetermining infallible doctrine (not formally complete), for example. If you think the text of Scripture in itself completely determines infallible doctrine — that the text and the text alone can be used to decide or verify which proposed doctrines are infallible and which are not — then that is positivist.
Finite intensional texts always underdetermine meaning – are always incomplete. A positivist denies this. A postmodern is someone who realizes that positivism is false and freaks out, concluding that definite meaning isn’t possible at all.
Repeating something over and over doesn’t make it true. You have failed to show how the Protestant position is incoherent save repeated accusations of “positivism,” of which you seem to have a unique definition.
Question: Do you believe all infallible doctrine is rooted in the teaching of the Prophets and Apostles?
nathanjevans:
Of course it doesn’t. But it is in fact true that SS is rationally incoherent. Like all incoherent ideas it is, because of (among other things) the Principle of Explosion, difficult to pin down. But that is precisely because it is incoherent.
Of course I haven’t shown it in a combox with some rigorous logical proof. But I’ve given enough of a description that someone with an interest in the subject can explore the issue.
“Rooted in”, sure. Scripture itself is rooted in the teaching of the Prophets and the Apostles, and tells us explicitly that many things were not written down (e.g. John 21:25).
It doesn’t follow that scripture is complete (indeed it seems to assert its own incompleteness). It doesn’t follow that the idea of it being complete is even coherent.
Look, even the rigorous mathematical formalisms of quantum mechanics underdetermine the choice of theories (Bohm vs Copenhagen). It isn’t that every theory is compatible with every formalism (the extreme end of the postmodern error, roughly); but there are multiple compatible theories for any formalism.
Translated somewhat roughly into more everyday concepts, any sufficiently interesting text admits of multiple mutually incompatible interpretations which are all consistent with the text. The text alone cannot determine which of these interpretations is the correct one.
Scripture likewise underdetermines theory choice about any number of important doctrinal questions: e.g. the Donatist question – and some would even argue, with some merit, the Holy Trinity. After all arianism and nestorianism would never have been ‘things’ if Scripture alone could decide the question.