Theology, Politics, And The Value Of Tradition

Reformed theologian Dr. James White was recently attacked on Twitter over some comments he made about government overreach during the COVID-19 crisis. I don’t care to cover all the details, but it’s notable that even White’s soteriological nemesis opponent Dr. Leighton Flowers is sticking up for him. And as much as I’ve criticized White on this blog, I happen to think his tweets over the past couple weeks have been absolutely spot on regarding the erasure of our Constitutional liberties.

But I also think that White himself sometimes uses the very weapon (in a theological context) against his opponents that tyrannical governments use (in a social/political context) to manipulate and browbeat the people. That weapon is, of course, the degradation of attachment to specific tradition.

White frequently disparages tradition when engaged in theological debate. His open letter to Dave Hunt is a prime example, but White has also accused Dr. Flowers and other non-Calvinists of being blinded by or slavishly devoted to a theological tradition rather than Scriptural exegesis. The implied argument is that tradition is worthless when compared to a careful, rational exegesis of Scripture, so we should be quick to abandon our traditions.

The relevant political parallel is that significant government overreach requires convincing the people that advocating for existing (i.e., Constitutional) restraints on power is just a blind or slavish devotion to tradition. The implied argument is that political traditions are worthless in addressing this or that crisis, and that only a careful, rational (or “scientific”) approach to the problem will do, so we should be quick to abandon our traditions.

White would have us Americans remain firmly committed to our our legal traditions while trying to convince the vast majority of Christians worldwide (i.e., non-Calvinists) to reject their theological traditions. Is this position tenable? White’s certainly not guilty of a contradiction that I can see, but there is undoubtedly something fishy about treating tradition – abstractly considered – so very differently from one realm of human experience to the next.

White’s see-saw attitude toward traditions likely comes from simply never considering what the proper human attitude toward traditions ought to be. (I hasten to add this isn’t a criticism so much as a mere observation, since White isn’t a philosopher.) And while I won’t try to answer that question in a single blog post, perhaps I can sketch how someone with White’s commitments might modify his views to bring his political and theological approach to tradition closer together.

I propose that Protestants who regard Scripture as the only source of doctrinal authority ought to seriously reconsider Sola Scriptura. Instead, we ought to regard Scripture as first in theological matters in the same way that we ought to regard the U.S. Constitution as first in (U.S.) political matters.

What would this entail? Primarily, it would affirm the importance of exegesis; we need to understand the original meaning and intent of Scripture to engage in theology, just as we need to scrutinize the original meaning and intent of the Constitution to engage in statesmanship.

But here’s the kicker: Just as any serious constitutional lawyer must have a healthy understanding of (and some measure of deference to) the existing body of constitutional law, so the serious theologian must have a healthy understanding of (and some measure of deference to) Church tradition.

Notice that “some measure of deference to” doesn’t mean “absolute surrender to”, nor does it mean “place on equal footing with” the respective text. I think Protestants are right to be willing to question theological developments that are handed down and practiced in light of Scripture, just as we had better be willing to question political developments (e.g., Roe v. Wade) handed down and practiced in light of the Constitution itself.

If I thought tradition was equal to Scripture, I’d be a Roman Catholic. And if I thought constitutional law was equal to the Constitution, I’d be a pro-abortion, America-should-invade-the-world, eminent-domain-for-private-profit raging statist. I’m neither, because I recognize that traditions can and do go awry; it is therefore the proper role of reason to systematize and correct our traditions. (However, I am convinced that 2 Thess. 2:15 gives the Catholics a far stronger position – relatively speaking – than anything to which American progressive liberals might appeal in the Constitution.)

But to use reason to systematize and correct tradition, we must live and breathe within that tradition. It must be criticism from the inside, as one who loves and cherishes what his forefathers have handed down – even though it is imperfect.

I regard legalized abortion as an abomination; no doubt there are Protestants who feel much the same about purgatory or Papal infallibility. But in both cases, the choice is not between accepting what is handed down and secession/schism. Dissenting voices can work within a tradition to change its trajectory, while still maintaining unity in a larger sense. However, this third way is absolutely closed off so long as (1) Protestants are unwilling to accept tradition as a valid source of authority and (2) Catholics are unwilling to more critically examine certain traditions and practices.

Total disregard (or outright hatred) for tradition stands in the way of this larger unity. This is how progressive leftists have created such a serious rift in the American political fabric. The same arguably happened to Western Christianity in the Reformation (see Frank van Dun’s excellent paper here). In either case, I think healing and reconciliation – if it is to happen at all – can begin when tradition is restored to it’s proper place.

So let us applaud Dr. James White’s devotion to his American political tradition – imperfect as it is – and pray that he discovers why so many Christians are equally devoted to their imperfect theological traditions, too.

White Vs. Wilson (Part 3)

After sitting through several hours of Dr. James White responding to Dr. Ken Wilson’s thesis and exposing some of White’s obvious errors in Part 1 and Part 2, it became apparent (to me) that White is either unwilling or unable to mount anything like a clear, coherent critique of Wilson – much less a refutation. It also seemed (again, to me) that White himself was generally aware of this and, after several hours of podcast blustering, he’d have the good sense to move on to any of a hundred different topics about which he has something helpful and constructive to say.

Instead, White has gone full Social Justice Warrior and decided to double down. In this podcast from April 13, White claims to have discovered a clear and obvious example of Christian monergism in the 2nd century! Leighton Flowers has already pointed out that numerous scholars – even of the Reformed persuasion – have come to the opposite conclusion, so it appears that one of two things must be true: Either (1) James White has made an incredible, groundbreaking discovery all on his own (yet White himself can’t understand how those dummies at Oxford were just, like, too dumb or lazy to notice it when they were reading Ken Wilson’s thesis a few years ago); or (2) James White has actually sunk to the level of making wild, baseless claims and duplicitous arguments rather than gracefully back down and admit what a host of Reformed scholars have already conceded.

Before I go on to substantiate (2), I encourage everyone to read The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus for yourself; it’s not very long and it’s not hard to understand. No honest reader will find monergism there unless he’s willing to torture the text to fit certain preconceived notions. (I get that White thinks of his preconceived notions as “very biblical categories” though I have yet to find the passage in my Bible that lays these out with the kind of Aristotelian clarity that White seems to take for granted.)

In this blog post, White proposes examining “key phrases that would rightly lead Dr. Wilson to consider this section as teaching the sovereignty of God, the inability of man, etc. (i.e., concepts consistent with Reformed theology, which he boldly proclaims in his teachings, based upon his research, did not exist in Christianity until Augustine).”:

First we have the assertion that God “ordained the season” or, better, the time, specifically, of the sending of the Son as a ransom for sin (the emphasis upon substitutionary atonement in this epistle is simply wonderful). God ordains times? God ordained the specific time of Jesus’ coming? In light of the fact that every interaction Jesus had with anyone during His ministry involved literally millions of “free will” choices, it is truly hard to understand how anyone can think that God ordains only specific actions in time, but does not decree the fabric of time itself. How could Acts 4:27-28 be true, for example, if the existence of Herod or Pontius Pilate was a fortuitous happenstance? No, if major events in history are to be “ordained” by God, the contexts that lead up to those events must likewise be a part of His perfect plan, including the actions of His creatures.

Notice that White has not done any exegesis of the epistle here; all we have is the cherry-picked phrase “ordained the season”, followed by White’s philosophizing about how major events couldn’t possibly be ordained by God unless we accept the Calvinists’ deterministic version of God’s sovereignty. Read all of chapter 9 (it’s only a single paragraph) in the epistle yourself to see just how much White has tortured the text to try and make it appear as though the author were preaching Calvinistic sovereignty. The “assertion” is no such thing; the phrase is used in passing to make a point that is completely unrelated to any question of God’s sovereignty. Instead, the focus of that passage is “how the one love of God, through exceeding regard for men, did not regard us with hatred.”

White, who often complains that his opponents have done poor or no exegesis, knows quite well that anyone can take a three word phrase like “ordained the season” out of context and then construct an argument about what he thinks it means. And he also knows that this is the very opposite of honestly approaching a text for the purpose of genuinely understanding the author.

Next, White tries to establish total inability:

[N]otice the phrase, “having demonstrated in past times the inability of our nature to obtain life.” Here is depravity, inability, in the very words of the epistle. This is not libertarianism. This is not “we simply choose not to grasp hold of the life so graciously offered.” No, this is ἀδύνατον, inability, in the very words of the text, and attached to our “nature” (φύσεως).

White is claiming that “inability” attaches to “our nature” without qualification, which if true would indeed strongly imply Calvinistic total inability. But the text does not speak of the inability of our nature simpliciter, but rather of the inability of our nature to obtain life (i.e., to obtain salvation). No Christian – Roman Catholic, Arminian, Orthodox, you name it – denies this claim; it is simply that salvation is by grace, not works.

Here’s why I am forced to conclude, sadly, that White is not merely mistaken but has engaged in downright duplicity: Dr. White is quite rightly regarded as an expert in Biblical Greek, and as such he clearly has sufficient skill as a grammarian to recognize an infinitive phrase when he reads one. So yes, White is correct that ‘inability’ is attached to ‘our nature’, but he completely ignores the infinitive phrase ‘to obtain life’ that modifies ‘inability of our nature’. He is trying to convince his readers that the epistle is describing total inability of our nature full stop rather than the inability (of man as he naturally is) to obtain life. White is obviously a smart guy; he knows better.

It gets even worse for White’s argument, because for some bizarre reason he thinks this rules out libertarianism. In other words, White is asserting that “inability of our nature to obtain life” is the opposite or negation of “able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances” (which is a decent, basic definition of libertarian free will).

But obviously that does not follow. Put another way, my being able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances does not imply that I am able by my own nature to obtain salvation, any more than it implies I am able to flap my arms and fly around the room. Libertarian free will is not in itself at odds with the total and absolute necessity of grace to achieve our salvation.

Finally, let’s all take a step back and try to remember how the whole dispute got started: Wilson’s Oxford thesis claims that Augustine’s proto-Calvinist teachings were supported by an interpretation of key Scriptures that was previously unknown in Christian writings, but nonetheless did exist in Gnostic and Manichean authors which Augustine himself likely read when he himself was a Manichean; therefore, those aspects of Calvinism which appeal to Augustinian interpretations of Scripture are, perhaps unwittingly but as a matter of fact, built upon an interpretation that originated outside the Apostolic traditions.

That White has resorted to abusing an anonymous epistle in order to “refute” Wilson is telling, very telling indeed.

White Vs. Wilson (Part 2)

I’ve just finished reading Ken Wilson’s The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism. The book is intended to be a more accessible summary of his longer Oxford dissertation, but in my estimation is still academic enough to make “popular” a poor descriptor. Contrary to White’s characterization of it as some sort of baseless rant filled with “simplistic error” and “forms of argumentation [that] are stunning – stunningly bad“, I thought the arguments generally focused and well-defined.

The main take-away from reading the book is that, in James White’s first four podcasts purporting to deal with it, he doesn’t actually address any of the substantive claims in Wilson’s book. And though Leighton Flowers’ response to White is generally OK, his format doesn’t really lend itself to demonstrating just how pathetic White’s analysis (so far) has been. To do that, we need to dig into (some of) the details of Wilson’s thesis, point by point.

1. Ground zero of Wilson’s thesis is his view that earlier Augustine scholars misdated certain portions of the Augustinian corpus, because those portions were revisions Augustine made to his own works. This line of argument is interesting and pretty well developed in Foundation, but White doesn’t mention it at all.

2. If Wilson is correct about the dates/revisions Augustine made, then it becomes clear that Augustine did not develop the deterministic aspects of his theology that Calvin, et. al. latched onto until after he began his battle with the Pelagians in 412 AD. That would mean Augustine did not write anything Calvin or Calvinists could meaningfully appeal to until at least 16 years after reading Romans and Galatians. Again, White does not address this point.

3. Therefore, if Augustine did not, as was previously thought, develop his deterministic views shortly after reading Romans and Galatians, a scholar might reasonably wonder, “What did cause Augustine to change his views?” Wilson argues that the timeline suggests, quite plausibly, that Augustine’s shift was prompted by his battle with the Pelagians and therefore more rhetorical/polemical than textual/exegetical. Once again, White does not attempt a reply.

4. Now, here’s where it gets interesting: Wilson contends that in order to more effectively fight off the Pelagian heresy, Augustine adopted a deterministic interpretation of key passages of Scripture in a way that no prior (known) Christian had before. But neither was Augustine the first to offer said deterministic interpretations; Fortunatus the Manichaean, to take only a single example cited by Wilson, had previously argued that John 14:6 and Ephesians 2:3, 8-9 imply unilateral determinism. Reformed theologians likewise have appealed to deterministic interpretations of these same key passages that were first offered by pagans.

White’s responses on this point are several, but each attempt rests on a laughably bad argument. Against Wilson’s claim that Augustine’s deterministic interpretations of Scripture were previously unknown within Christianity, White protests:

 We don’t have a tremendous amount of the early church’s writings. For many of the earliest fathers what we have is because somebody quotes them, partially, at a later point in time. If we didn’t have Eusebius’s church history, we wouldn’t even know some of these people existed. But the reality is we have only a small portion of the extant literature. And so, one of the first things that caught me, when I first started looking through this, was how many times [Wilson claims] “It was the universal view…” The only fair way of actually saying that is: In the extant literature that we have, that specifically addresses this issue, it seems that the predominant view prior to would be this, and then Augustine changed it. That’s fair. This has no desire to be fair, does not even try to be fair. It is completely imbalanced, horrifically so, just way out there.

-Taken here around the 32:50 43:00 mark **NOTE: This has been updated to reflect the correct timestamp. Thank you to commenter RHUTCHIN on the Soteriology 101 site for catching this mistake***

First, either White misspoke several times or he hasn’t quite grasped the meaning of the word “extant”; indeed, the extant literature is precisely all we have. Second, Wilson’s claim is this: “Of the eighty-four pre-Augustinian authors studied from 95-430 CE, over fifty authors addressed the topic [of predestination]. All of these early Christian authors championed traditional free choice against pagan and heretical Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies”. Sounds pretty unanimous to me.

Third, for Wilson’s conclusion to be “completely imbalanced”, we have to imagine it highly probable that there were many early Christian writers before Augustine who interpreted these passages deterministically, but somehow none of these writings survived. Instead, God – through His meticulous determination of every detail in the universe and in perfect accord with His will – chose to preserve for posterity over fifty early Christian writers arguing the exact opposite (and thirty more who on this issue were silent). This, evidently, is what White considers real scholarship; in reality, it’s just another fallacy.

White tries a different tactic in a separate podcast:

There is no single objective Gnostic doctrine of determinism that is, that could ever, logically or rationally be said to be identical to, parental to, ancestor of, the personal self-glorifying decree of the triune God of the Christian scriptures. That’s the assertion that’s being made. That’s why it’s impossible.

-Taken here around 1:04:50 mark

But, as anyone who has read Wilson’s book will know, Wilson never claims there is a “single objective Gnostic doctrine of determinism”. Nor does any part of his argument depend on this bizarre assertion. Wilson invokes the determinism(s) of Gnosticism in contradistinction to the clear anti-determinism of the early church. This fact is rather inconvenient for White, so he once again offers a fallacious argument.

In yet another podcast, White offers the following:

From a historical perspective, to make a long story short, when [Wilson] says that, basically, if you’re reformed and you believe in the sovereign decree of God, well, that came to you through Calvin, through Augustine, through Manichaeism and Gnosticism… [However] both Manichaeism and Gnosticism have such a fundamentally different worldview and different theological foundations that how can you make that – I mean, to make that connection would require a massive – it would require a demonstration that every exegetical insight, every grammatical insight offered by Reformed theologians from Calvin onward was a brainless, simplistic, [in mock robot voice] “I have to say this because I believe Augustine”. And the vast majority of us today became Reformed before we read Calvin… and we did so on the basis of exegesis.

– Taken here around 24:20 mark

White has really outdone himself on this one, so we’ll have to break it down even smaller. First, it won’t surprise any reasonable person to discover that Wilson makes no claims about how White or anyone else became Reformed. Second, Wilson’s actual argument does not “require a demonstration that every exegetical insight, every grammatical insight offered by Reformed theologians from Calvin onward” is based on slavish devotion to Augustine. White is here attempting to move the goalposts.

Third – and this is key, because on this point White also claims “This kind of simplistic, straight-line stuff is absurd” (here, around 1:02:30), as though Wilson were putting forth a kind of conspiracy theory of ideas with Augustine (or maybe Calvin) right in the middle of the crazy wall. The only sensible reply is to encourage people to read Wilson’s book for themselves and remind White that intellectual history (or history of ideas) is a legitimate academic endeavor that is prone to discover truths that upset people.

Consider a totally unrelated parallel: probably one in 10,000 self-professed capitalists and Marxists alike would consider that the better part of Karl Marx’s economic system was spun out of the economic principle of Adam Smith. This conclusion may shock and disturb, and yet the dedicated historian of economic thought who really understands the development of the labor theory of value has to admit that it’s not an absurd claim by any stretch.

Now, none of this is to say that I’m completely persuaded by Wilson. To the contrary, the book raises (in my mind, at least) a number of questions that may in the end lead to real difficulties for Wilson’s conclusions about how to understand Augustine and his contributions. If I get curious enough, I might buy Wilson’s dissertation and write about it.

However, it appears White, for the time being, is content merely to take these sorts of pot shots at Flowers’ interviews of Wilson rather than address the factual claims or arguments in Wilson’s book. If that changes, this series may have a part 3. In the meantime, everyone should go buy Wilson’s book! It’s short and it’s only $10, what more do you want?

White Vs. Wilson (Part 1)

Anyone who listens to James White’s Dividing Line program regularly is no doubt are aware of his ongoing disagreement with Ken Wilson. Wilson’s recent book, The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism, has irked White (or perhaps just his listeners) enough that he’s spent a fair amount of time across no fewer than four separate podcasts denouncing it. I’ll have to read Wilson’s book (it shipped a few days ago) and finishing listening to White’s fourth podcast before I comment in depth, but a couple thoughts spring to mind.

First, I wonder why is White bothered by Wilson’s thesis so much? Apparently he’s incapable of simply admitting, “Yes, the early Fathers got free will wrong and the Gnostics and Manichees got it right.” After all, White presumably doesn’t believe that anything outside Scripture is authoritative on matters of doctrine, so why bother about what the early church believed anyhow? Doesn’t White accept Sola Scriptura?

Second, White – as usual – has quite the proclivity for making fallacious arguments that would result in course failure for any first-year student of logic. I quote from White’s podcast around the 1:03:40 mark, where he begins by quoting from Wilson’s book:

Therefore, modern Calvinism, in these deterministic distinctives, has more in common with ancient philosophies and religious heresies than early Christianity. An objective evaluation of the facts cannot avoid this startling conclusion.

And White’s rebuttal to that is:

Here’s my assertion: That’s the conclusion that Dr. Wilson started with, and not shockingly, therefore ended with.

Now, as I say, any first-year logic student recognizes this immediately as a textbook case of the genetic fallacy. (Alternately, we might view it as the circumstantial form of ad hominem.) Even if Dr. Wilson did begin his research with this conclusion in mind, or hoping to find this conclusion, or even with the predetermined goal to make the strongest case possible that the early church fathers embraced free will, this has no bearing on the truth or falsity of the factual claims in Wilson’s book.

What’s particularly entertaining (and, from a psychological point of view, fascinating) is that White doesn’t seem to realize that his “argument” could be turned with equal force against him: “White, you started with the conclusion that Wilson was wrong, therefore it’s not surprising that you ended with that conclusion as well.”

Third, I find it interesting that White began this series by reading from Wilson’s book and then, in the third (and fourth, it appears) podcast, switched to analyzing a YouTube interview of Wilson by Leighton Flowers. (White, perhaps uncharitably, does not provide a link. I think he’s drawing from either here or here.)

Keep in mind, this is after promising his listeners that he would really dig into the sources to refute Wilson. My guess is that White is hoping to placate (or perhaps merely exhaust the patience of) his more intelligent listeners who suspect that it might not be argumentatively sufficient to simply declare Wilson a poor scholar who’s biased and didn’t really deserve his DPhil from Oxford – all of which are obvious examples of the well-known ad hominem fallacy.

More in part 2…