Things To Remember

If you write things long enough, you may actually say something that you remember, that others remember, something that's worth grasping. Today, I woke up with this in my head: "The fundamental posture of any person in the sphere of revealed religion is that of a receiver." It's mine, but like anything, it's cobbled together from who knows what that I have read or heard. (Almost on command, my mind goes to a philosophical teaching--maybe St. Thomas?--"That which is received is received according to the mode of the receiver." I digress.) That first idea is that desire to be simply a creature in humble submission to God. When someone says, "You have no principled way to distinguish between revelation and human opinion,"--whether that claim is true or not--he's laying a very serious charge at your feet. He's saying that, in your system, there is no way to take one's fundamental posture toward God.

It goes right along with the fundamental reason why I cannot be any version of Protestant. Call it the JK Corollary, maybe: "One cannot be both the arbiter of divine revelation, and a humble receiver of it at the same time." What I call the Tyranny of the Plausible is the multiplicity of arbiters in the form of churches or at least putative churches. If a church is to be a true arbiter, it must have the very gift of infallibility in some context, because that infallibility is actually a sign or mark of God's authority, which allows the creature to take his proper place in submission to God. So when we say to Mathison, "You have failed to distinguish Sola Scriptura from Solo Scriptura in a principled way," another way to say that is, "Your proposed mediating authorities are not true arbiters." If I hold the Ace, they don't. So, Sola Scriptura + invisible Church is a master-stroke of individualist arrogance. No, the true genius of the whole thing is convincing all of us that we weren't individualists and fundamentalists the whole time. That'll be hard to hear for some of you. You're proud of your "historic" whatever, your "creedal" whatever. What did I call it before? "A deeply historical, reverential, Chestertonian Protestantism." Too bad it's ad hoc. If I hold the Ace, they don't. It doesn't really matter who "they" are.

And that reminds me: Some people say that pointing these things out puts us in a "combat zone" that they don't like to enter. Why not celebrate what we agree on as Christians? Well, we do. But what we do not agree on actually matters. If it didn't, those people who allegedly don't want theological combat wouldn't be so bothered by the fact that we don't agree with them. Isn't that funny? Besides, discussing settled matters gets boring fast.

Have you seen this guy? It's so funny, and (mostly) true, it'd make a Lutheran out of me...but for the fact...well, you know. Anyway, if you watch a lot of these, he'll eventually get around to saying something like, "The Christian Church has always held," or some such. And that's where the trouble is. Inevitably, that "Church" is conceived by him as fundamentally invisible. It would have to be. There are no visible bonds, no sacramental bonds, (save baptism) etc. between my community and his. To whom is he referring? For whom is he speaking? When he says something distinctively Lutheran, he doesn't speak for me. And this is where "We're all united in what matters" dies the death of harsh reality. The steps beyond the celebration of that which is held in common are inevitably of a more polemical nature, and are summed up as, "Did that idea x really come from God? How do you know?" If we find the principled means for knowing both of those things, then and only then can we find the Church, and dare to speak for her.