Protestants Need to Go Back to Basics
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, November 27, 2023
A time of social upheaval and chaos such as ours is likely to send even the most devout Christians into despair unless they can place the terrifying flux of life in the earthly city against the unchanging reality of the sovereign God himself. It is the same with personal suffering. What patient suffering from cancer wants a doctor who has cancer too? They want a doctor who can overcome their illness. That is the God of classical theism. He does not need to suffer as God. He needs to take human flesh and overcome death in that flesh.
Last Monday I had the pleasure of delivering the opening lecture for the newly-founded Center for Classical Theology. The brainchild of Matthew Barrett, of Midwestern Baptist Seminary, its aim is to reinvigorate Protestantism by reconnecting it to its historical and theological roots in the patristic and medieval periods. Unfortunately, much of modern evangelicalism sorely needs to recover “classical theology”—the term Barrett uses to describe orthodox Christian doctrines as set forth by the creeds, the Great Tradition of theology exemplified by the ancient ecumenical councils, and traditional Protestant confessions such as the Westminster Confession.
Recent scholarship in both the ancient church and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestantism have exposed an unfortunate problem with large swathes of the conservative, and especially evangelical, Protestant world. Much good work was done over the last century in both articulating a high view of the authority of Scripture and developing more self-conscious and sophisticated theological approaches to biblical interpretation. But at the same time, many Protestants became disconnected from creedal and confessional teaching on the doctrine of God (and thus by inference, from Christology). Many conservative Protestants did not even notice that this was the case, as their understanding of what the creeds and confessions actually claimed was refracted through a biblicist lens that was detached from the history of doctrinal debate behind these documents.
Hence, doctrines such as simplicity, immutability, and eternal generation have been redefined or have vanished altogether in certain Protestant communities, even as many who played a role in this maintained a verbal commitment to the Nicene Creed or the Westminster Confession of Faith. The conservative criticism of liberal Christians—that they use orthodox words but mean something different—somehow did not apply when the people doing so affirmed the historical resurrection but rejected the basic elements of the classical doctrine of God.
A recovery of classical theology is thus long overdue for a variety of reasons. The language of confessional Protestantism and orthodox evangelicalism was historically rooted in these classical doctrines. The Reformers and their hearers took it for granted that theology is always to be done in careful dialogue with the past and, as much as possible, in continuity with it. But this is simply counter-intuitive to an evangelicalism shaped more by revivalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the fundamentalist-modernist strife of the early twentieth.
That points toward one of the reasons classical theology and classical theism now seem implausible to many. True to its roots, evangelical Christianity in our modern day is too often impatient with language that seems speculative and abstract and with doctrine that cannot be easily instrumentalized.
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Natural Law and the Colonial Roots of American Constitutionalism
Natural law thinking profoundly shaped the way American and British leaders approached issues involving rights, sovereignty, and constitutional government. However, the imperial authorities and their colonial opponents often appealed to different, and even conflicting, strains of the natural law tradition.
This essay explores the role of natural law philosophy in the imperial crisis between Britain and the American colonies in the twelve years leading up to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Both the British governments and the colonial champions during the crisis were the inheritors of a complex tradition of natural law philosophy dating back centuries. At its core, this tradition revolved around the proposition that there is a standard of natural justice that exists independently of human contrivance, and that acts as a measure for the legitimacy of civil laws and political institutions. Natural law thinking profoundly shaped the way American and British leaders approached issues involving rights, sovereignty, and constitutional government. However, the imperial authorities and their colonial opponents often appealed to different, and even conflicting, strains of the natural law tradition. The tension between the various understandings of natural jurisprudence involved in the imperial dispute would have serious implications for the evolving, and ultimately incompatible, British and American conceptions of the Empire.
In order to understand the intellectual context surrounding the imperial crisis, it is important to appreciate the pervasive influence of natural law philosophy in early-modern Europe and America. Educated Britons and Americans were the products of a rich intellectual heritage spanning from medieval to modern times. St. Thomas Aquinas founded the Christian natural law tradition in the 13th century by articulating a conception of natural justice rooted in reason and God’s rule over the created world. By the 17th century, natural law philosophy had developed into a multifarious body of thought with distinct conservative and radical strains.[1] The conservative natural law school exemplified by such thinkers as Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf drew decidedly authoritarian political implications from the natural law principles of natural liberty and equality. They tended to emphasize a strong, and even absolute, version of political sovereignty and generally rejected popular self-government and the right of revolution. For their part, radical natural law theorists such as John Locke, Benedict Spinoza, and Algernon Sidney built an argument for popular sovereignty on the bedrock principles of individual rights, especially the right to property and the right of conscience, as well as a natural right of revolution. It was to this complex natural law inheritance that both Britons and Americans appealed in their quarrel during the imperial crisis. However, their different interpretations of this philosophic tradition are what account in large measure for their divergent arguments and attitudes throughout the crisis.
Eighteenth-century Britain witnessed the emergence of conservative natural law principles adapted to the unique conditions of parliamentary rule. In the decades following the Glorious Revolution, the British political nation adopted a conservative interpretation of the events of 1688–89, which emphasized continuity, the legal fiction of King James’s “abdication,” and most importantly asserted the institutional sovereignty of the tripartite Parliament including king, lords, and commons. The radical principles of popular sovereignty and individual natural rights were for the most part rejected. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was the dominant political and constitutional ideology in Britain. This hardening of the orthodoxy of parliamentary sovereignty can be seen in the influential writings of Sir William Blackstone published at the start of the imperial crisis. With clear echoes of the conservative natural law conception of sovereignty championed by Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf, Blackstone insisted that in every constitution there had to be a “supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority in which . . . the rights of sovereignty reside.”[2] The implications of this commitment were obvious. British efforts to tighten control over the colonies through taxation rested on the philosophical premise that Parliament is the highest law-making body in the empire and is thus in the legal sense absolute and irresistible inasmuch as colonial legislatures are subordinate vis-à-vis Westminster. The depth of the British commitment to this conservative conception of sovereignty was crystallized in the Declaratory Act of 1766, which followed the repeal of the Stamp Act. While the Ministry repealed the stamp tax on prudential grounds, the Parliament asserted its right in principle to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”[3] As parliamentary sovereignty was the governing philosophy of Britain, so too by extension must it logically be the organizing principle of the British Empire.
The colonial position in the imperial crisis was also informed by natural law philosophy; however, supporters of the American cause interpreted this tradition rather differently from the British. Most importantly, the radical natural law theory of Sidney and Locke, long déclassé in Britain, flourished in the colonies alongside typically conservative philosophical commitments. With the radicals, Americans insisted that some element of popular control over government was vital to secure liberty—a condition impossible in a distant parliament in which the colonies were not represented. Thus, Americans defended the principle that only the colonial legislatures could legitimately tax the colonists. However, in the early stages of the crisis most supporters of the colonial cause also expressed deep admiration for the British balanced constitution produced in the Glorious Revolution and its replicas in the colonial governments (in which the Crown appointed governors who shared rule with the elected assemblies). Moreover, many early colonial champions conceded the British point that Parliament is sovereign in the empire, although they disputed the rightness of its taxing the colonies directly as opposed to merely regulating imperial trade policy. While accepting the theoretical principle of parliamentary sovereignty, Americans had not actually experienced their political life as being subject to Parliament in the century of benign neglect prior to 1764. In practice, they felt that assertions of parliamentary sovereignty were a dangerous innovation in imperial relations.
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The Death of Emily So
We prayed for a miracle, we sought the best medical care, we listened to experts and would-be experts, and it could easily have become frantic. But underneath are the everlasting arms (Deut.33:27). God’s determining of our days did not make for fatalism – we wish His will were very different – but did provide comfort that however unsettled and disturbed we were, His purposes would prevail. And His purposes are for good.
The imminent death of little Emily, aged five, has hung like a black cloud over our family ever since her diagnosis with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) in late October 2021. The world suddenly shrank, and any sort of equilibrium seemed to have gone. Finally on Tuesday 24 May 2022 Emily breathed her last. Death stalks the land, and no one will escape.
For the past seven or eight months, Emily has dominated my thoughts in a way that l could scarcely have imagined, and that has been true for others in the family, especially Emily’s devoted parents. People have struggled for words in expressing their empathy and sympathy, and I have likewise struggled. In 1758 Jonathan Edwards died after a smallpox vaccination went wrong. His wife, Sarah, wrote to their daughter: ‘What shall I say? A holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud.’ I have the same question: ‘What shall I say?’
God determines our times here on earth.
Before we were formed in the womb, God had written in His book all of the days that were determined for us even before there were any on them (Ps.139:16). ‘Man who is born of a woman is few of days and full of trouble … [and] his days are determined, and the number of his months is with You, and You have appointed his limits that he cannot pass’ (Job 14:1, 5). Not a sparrow will fall to the ground apart from our Father’s will (Matt.10:29). The Lord gives and the Lord takes away (Job 1:21; see 1 Sam.2:6).
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Living in the Light of the Resurrection
On a day-to-day basis, do you consider your life significant, important, or worthwhile? I mean apart from landmark events like marriage, the birth of children, baptism, and other special moments or seasons of life. Do you find yourself at times just going through the motions, thinking that as soon as this week, month, or season is over you’ll accomplish all the things you’ve been meaning to do? Maybe you’re struggling with living by faith and you’re caught in a loop of temptation and sin. If you resonate with any of those descriptions, I have one more question: How does the second coming of Jesus and the future resurrection affect your daily life?
Of course, in times of crisis, tragedy, and loss, we look forward in hope to the day of Jesus’s return and the resurrection. In that hope we endure hardships of various kinds. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians about Jesus’s return and the resurrection so that they “may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13), and he expected his teaching to be a source of encouragement (4:18). We do not, however, always live in times of grief.
In the New Testament, the future that began in the resurrection of Jesus is meant to shape and influence daily life. For instance, Jesus frequently exhorts his disciples to live in expectation and anticipation, always ready for his return (e.g., Matt. 25:13; Mark 13:35; Luke 12:37). Peter expects belief in Jesus’s return and the apocalyptic destruction of the present order to flow into obedience. In view of what God promises to do, “what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness?” (2 Pet. 3:11). This future perspective on life in the present is nowhere more evident than in 1 Corinthians 15.
The Eschatological “So-What?”
First Corinthians 15 begins with Paul’s summary of the gospel. Paul proclaims Christ’s death for sins and his resurrection. His resurrection was witnessed by the Apostles, another 500 people, and finally by Paul himself (1 Cor. 15:3–8). On that foundation, he refutes false teaching about the resurrection.
Simply put, if there is no future resurrection, then Christ is not raised—there is no gospel. Without the resurrection there is no forgiveness of sin, and there is no hope for the dead (1 Cor. 15:16–18). Yet, Christ is raised, and he guarantees the resurrection of the dead. As all died in Adam, all (believers) will live in Christ (1 Cor. 15:20–23). Without the resurrection Paul’s suffering in ministry is inexplicable (1 Cor. 15:30–32).
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