Looking into a Mirror Darkly: A Review of Seigel's "The Idea of the Self"

Who am "I"? And in what sense does the word "I" have any content? Is it simply an empty place-holder, a much vaunted distortion or nominal claim that has beset Western metaphysics? Or is there some sense where it is meaningful? We'll return to the foundations at the end of this essay, but this is the goal of Jerry Seigel's The Idea of the Self, a historical account of how philosophy developed the notion of the self from the early modern period till today.

Seigel posits that, since the early modern period at least, there are three definitions of the self: the bodily-material, the social-relational, and the reflexive (5-6). The first is identified with the thing-ness of an individuated human being, namely a body, along with its particular shape and desire. The second is individuation from within a social group, usually a people, as one is one out of a whole. The third is the conscious effort to abstract a "self" out from, and within, both body and society. In other words, it is the attempt to recognize an individual mind beyond mere materiality and sociality; that "you" are not simply identified with a body or a particular set of social relations. This process unfolds as self-consciousness, a particular focus for early modern philosophy as this "self" became important to define (or defeat) in relation to the threat of both materialism and nascent sociological structuralism.

As most things in philosophy, the modern crisis involved certain caesurae in Aristotelian philosophy, which left its imprint upon the Medieval mind (especially among so-called moderns, such as Bacon or Luther, who poured scorn on the Greek). The Aristotelian problem emerged with the radical disjuncture between intellectual-form and bodily-matter. Applied to the self, individuality becomes a mere empirical phenomenon, since the intellect only grasps the form impressed into matter. Yet, when it comes to the bodily-material definition of the self, such is mere accident. Hence "there can be no rational account of what makes a particular individual be the person he or she is: whatever is material in individuality lies beyond the grasp of the intellect". According to Seigel, Aquinas was willing to bite the bullet: our only means of recognizing individuality were sensory, and not rational. Yet this could lead to a belief that the self is a mere by-product of materiality, which increasing rationality will see dissolve. Individuality is something that fundamentally is unreal as the self becomes closer to the forms. Hence Seigel: "From Aristotle's perspective, it turns out, the closer one gets to the essential form that makes human beings human the farther one gets from individual human beings" (50). Thus, for some neo-Platonists (sic), like Plotinus, the boundaries of the self dissolve as one ascends further up towards the One.

This problem was only overcome through haeccity. First Scotus, then Leibniz in his attempt to salvage Aristotelian science with the findings of the new philosophy, postured that the only way to reconcile this problem was to see the principle of individuality was itself a unique form. We'll return to this near the end. But suffice to say, this opened up a new problem: "But to accept this conclusion would open the way to making each person a separate species, with a different end or goal" (51). Hence Seigel will frame modern philosophy's problem with the self, inherited from antiquity:

"We should therefore not be too quick to conclude that ancient thinking, even in its Aristotelian form, conceived the self as given, unquestioned, or free of inner tensions and divisions. Conflicts between active spirit and passive matter, between individuality and universality, surfaced in ancient consciousness as in modern, perhaps because they are inescapable features of human life. But these strains appeared differently, and more easily resolvable in classical theory because ancient culture gave access to a resource of which many moderns have deprived themselves, namely the belief that the world, like the self, is structured so as to fulfill intelligible moral ends" (51)

In other words, the fixed question took on a new urgency because the identity of man as microcosm of Reason had broken down. It was up to Christian philosophers (distinguished from Christians who had divorced philosophy from theology as irreconcilable, for one reason or another) to restore the ancient metaphysics.

One problem that has plagued Marxian historians, as well as other varieties of structuralist materialists, has been the misdiagnosis of the early-modern period as the creation of one-dimensional selves. Whether it is the image of a self-indulgent consumer reading his novel, the calculating merchant quantifying bodies into "labor", or the political economist penchant to look through the "objective" universal eye at society and its many moving parts, the rise of the bourgeoisie are condemned as the fracture of this uncritical (and primitive) spiritual harmony of a world. Seigel rejects this characterization. Liberal and bourgeois notions were neither one-dimensional nor reflecting a linear and calculating materialism (42-44). Instead the supposed progenitor of liberalism, Locke, offers a way through the problems of the self, taking account of all its dimensions. But we will return to him later.

Instead, I will summarize what Seigel considers as failed attempts to overcome the problems, usually at the expense of some dimension of the self. Descartes is one of the first who takes up the task, reknitting an Augustinian-Platonic moral universe with the new empirical sciences. Seeing in the nature's mechanism, Descartes turned inwards. But this was not to turn the individual consciousness as the new fundament for freedom, but because he had a critical belief that God would meet him in the depths of the self. Unlike later Kantian philosophy, the caesura between the mechanical-physical and intellectual-mind would because the turn inwards was the way out into the realm of the Forms, the path God would save the soul from within its material lesser-state (73). The Aristotelian disjuncture remained, but on radically new terms. The problem was less ontological (matter as inferior, passive, mere potentiality) than determinative (physical as locked into endless chain of cause-effect). Descartes attempted to revive Augustine's speculative inward reflections as the solution out of this mechanical box.

This put an emphasis on the third-dimension of the self, abandoning the body and its social relations as mere flux. Yet the problem of identifying this individual mind as something other than self-subsistent form (where each individual is, to himself, a unique species) remained. Later theorists would invert this Cartesian paradigm, abandoning the intellectual and reformatting reason as strictly empirical-physical. Many English political economists turned to sociality as definitive for self-hood. The problem was that, which Mandeville posed, sociality was not sufficient to develop virtue (117). Evil society could prosper and expand, and produce a race of vile people (the real meaning behind his "Fable of the Bees"). This shift to the second-dimension makes sense as a response to the development of increasingly mercantile and commercial societies. For Mandeville, something more must be done (particularly a government-led Patriot platform of austerity and virtue). For those like Smith, chastened by Mandeville, offered that even vice could, against itself, serve to produce the kind of benevolent society that fostered virtue. Commerce created more abstract bonds between people, expanding their capacity for sympathy. This sympathy would produce the kind of self-possession (an individual aware of plight over there) that would make people more virtuous (159). Perhaps the baker, butcher, and candlestick maker act in their own self-interest, but this engagement in commercial relations would ameliorate these people. Commerce, not republican austerity, would serve this end.

The turn to the second-dimension was not so much a rejection of the third-dimension, as it was a product of novel social developments. Nevertheless, its being muted also could unveil the difficult challenges of reflexivity. The most obvious is Hume's misunderstanding of Berkeley to reject self-hood as a mere nominal function of life together. Our passions and thoughts reveal all kinds of internal contradictions that are irresolvable, thus individuality is merely a product of our body being physically different from other bodies, and a social convention when among others. Nevertheless, Hume was favorable to the Scottish Enlightenment's hopes in commercial society as producing better men. Republicanism took root more strongly among French philosophes, especially Rousseau. Reflectivity and commerce made man immoral and flabby: tainted with a selfishness that was unwilling to acknowledge and submit to the General Will. This kind of civilization ruined men. Thus the social contract was a necessary process to subordinate man's evil self-love. Ideally it would operate in a Spartan republic of equals, but Rousseau feared this reality was impossible. Social relations would produce jealousy that would make men evil and taint the virtue of any society (218-228). Thus, Rousseau settled for a Hobbist constitutional order, a sovereign that molded society forcibly as representative of the People and the General Will. This was not merely a speculative concern, but exhibited in Rousseau's very life. The desire for wholeness, of all-in-all, destroyed any relation that failed to fully submit. Rousseau found himself disgusted with his many lovers when they failed to give themselves entirely to him. Thus, in a way, Rousseau metaphysically finds himself back to the Aristotelian caesura. True individuality is when it is lost in the will of another, and consummately only when it is lost in the supreme will, Nature, exercised through the People's General Will. Individuality is thus merely a stage on the way.

Similarly, other French philosophers refused the meaningfulness of the third-dimension, of an individuality that subsists beyond mere physicality and sociality. Diderot's materialism turned to man as the lettered ape, capable of discerning himself as a product of his animal sociality. Similarly, Condillac's materialism led him to see reason as fundamentally a product of human language, which is itself a wholly natural cause. Man may rise above his mere physical status, but this process is circumscribed through the material boundedness of man. In other words, man may gesture towards the heavenlies, but it's ultimately a babble, as man cannot think what he cannot speak. Later, a liberal constitutionalist like Constant dwelt drearily on any use for self-reflection. Like Hume, he recognized that the turn inward only manifest contradictions and irreconcilable intentions/passions. Commercial society weakened this impulse, as man became conformed to sociality. Reason weakened to plumb inwards, but this itself helped preserve the order (276-278; 286). This French restatement of republicanism, as well as with its aping of English commercial philosophy, collapsed into a heap of contradictions, weakness, and weariness.

But a turn back to the third-dimension was unleashed with Kant's revolutionary philosophy. The copernican-turn was to revive reflexivity through a reintroduction of the Aristotelian caesura in critical terms. The world of science, of cause and effect, was mechanistic and deterministic. But for this world to exist, it subsisted within the boundaries of the noumenal. The meaningless bouncing of atoms was enveloped by the purposive real, of which the self was apart. Thus, it was precisely within this disjuncture, between phenomena and noumena, that the self (discerned through critical philosophy) had the potential for freedom, the spontaneous act of the will (298; 316-317). It was in this way that Kant adhered to the Leibnizian rationalism that he hoped to both save and overcome. Leibiniz' world of monads was similar to Scotus' haeccity (which Seigel doesn't fully grasp in its modal metaphysics), where each monad was itself a world to itself, a fundamental principle. The various bonds, held together in bonds of relation, interacted without confusion or interpenetration. The cosmic order purposive, linking together monads into a harmony of difference, in themselves lovingly conjoined under the oversight of God (74-75). For Kant this purposive cosmic order, which encircled the mechanistic physical world, was postured and developed through the critical philosophy. Yet, again, the caesura between the two opened a new avenue of inquiry. Hence began the project of German Idealism.

Seigel believes that the Germans failed to overcome the balance necessary to hold all three-dimensions in tension, as well lacking the humility of distinguishing each from the other. Fichte, as a Jacobin, attempted to locate the tangent in the ego's will, but this was itself an echo of the universal will, whose holy crusade was to posses the inert world of objects. Thus, one would end up in a metaphysical Robespierre dictatorship of the People (370-371). Schelling, as a mirror image of Fichte, saw the self as part of a process in between a Neo-Platonic exitus-reditus, requiring submission to the divine absolute of Fate (390). Seigel's problem with both, as well as to the project of German Idealism, is that the world (phenomenal) and self (noumenal) were isomorphic, expected to image each other identically. If the world was not, indeed, suffused with moral purpose, but was lifeless mechanism animated by some ghost, then the attempt to refashion microcosm-macrocosm will end in artificial systems-building. Perhaps the greatest stride forward was Hegel's undertaking Kant's problem, but nevertheless trapped in the same set of problems. Seeking to overcome Kant's dualism, Hegel worked through the problem but resulted in an ideal self that, through dialectical aufehebung, was fully free, but in practice was limited through his precise historical moment (423). Perhaps Seigel sees Hegel in more an ontological key than a logical one, that this trans-historical process is something working itself out, rather than the process one witnesses macrocosmically and microcosmically that the self can undertake. In the latter form, Hegel indeed presents a way for the individual, through rigorous dialectics, reason himself into the vantage of the Absolute Subject, to see the world as it really is. It's for this reason Hegel believed his philosophy was Christianity restated in wholly rational, philosophical, terms, divested of its mythic/historic particularity. It's also perhaps why this form of Hegel was attractive to Nishida of the Kyoto School. But as Nishida postulated, Hegel (as was Christianity) was incomplete for he failed to advance one step more. Still there was the duality of God and the world, Creator and creation, which Zen sought to overcome to reach the true threshold of Nothingness.

Seigel then continues on to explore later philosophy which rejected the Newtonian universe for an increasingly fluid and amorphous physicality. The pinnacle of this shift is Foucault, who draws upon Nietzsche and Heidegger, to posit a transcendental self emerged out of corporeality. (603-605). For Seigel this too finds itself in a privileging of bodiless of the first-dimension, which disgusted or confused earlier modern figures. But philosophy was no longer concerned with Christian questions of individual subsistence, since the idea that the embodied and ensouled individual would maintain a singular identity before the Judgement Throne of Christ. Instead, one can pursue a corporealized Neo-Platonism as one finds in the infinite fragmentation of corporeality as individuation of pure potentiality, matter. I'm not doing all the subtleties of Continental philosophy justice, thus I will leave it off here. But circling back, Seigel does not believe liberal-bourgeois man is one-dimensional, but rather later philosophies which rejected the quest for a reflective self that was circumscribed in body and body-politic. The sacred state of individuality, despite its ambiguities, seems to be a core element of his project to define as not merely naivety or convention. Here we return to Locke.

John Locke seems the least likely source to resolve the problems introduced. In fact, he was the one who shifted much Enlightened discourse in England and France towards sociality. Locke had rejected the notion of innate ideas (famously positing man as a tabula rasa), which exploded any Platonistic account of the soul as a principle or purposive monad. The self, rather than working out its own principle, was a product of experience. This account threatened to dissolve all personhood into a legal fiction (89-91). But to stop here is to misunderstand Locke's entire project. Like Hume later, Locke recognized the internal chaos of the given natural self. Bodily passions, desires, intentions, as well as the many overlapping and interlocking obligations and rights of society, threatened to tear a man apart. Certainly much tragedy juxtaposed these as a permanently wounded self. Antigone could do no other than die before the demands of family and city. Othello was torn to pieces between his honor and his jealous love, as the devilish Iago exploited this caesura into murder. Hurled into this world, man was bombarded with the contradictions of physical and social life. Locke recognized man was weak, but he also had the divine gift of reason. In this way, Locke could be considered doctor humilitae: Locke forces man to reconcile with limits. Locke rejected the mind-body dualism of Descartes, but postured the seemingly deus ex machina of mind superadded to matter. Reason is something supernatural, nevertheless to man it is wholly natural. With reason, despite individual human's halting attempts to use it, man has a fighting chance to bring these contradictions together. In a way, not unlike Locke's view of labor and nature, man must use his reason to unify a self out of his bodily sensations and his social bonds. Antigone may have been torn apart, but she reasoned to choose to be the faithful sister who buried her brother (which means she fulfilled natural law, despite the rule of Creon). Hence the Lockean battle-cry, derived from a claim in his Second Treatise: Appeal to Heaven!

For Locke, reason was man's best chance to bring order, cultivating his own internal garden of freedom and moral responsibility out of the chaos (92). Man was given a task to cultivate paradise, even as he was not one of the gods or made of the eternal, but a contingent being drawn out of the dust of nothingness. But this task of self-fashioning was not like the aristocratic Neo-Stoicism that had been popular, a process of (often vain) self-willing and modeling. Often these selves are brittle, smashed to pieces by the challenges of life. Beyond Seigel, I'm reminded of Benjamin's assessment of the trauerspiel: the German prince's tragedy was his sovereignty exceeded his Neo-stoic self-fashioning. He could do none other than Fate decreed and thus could only find solace in shutting his inner-eye, sorrowfully submitting to inscrutable providence, paralyzed by the power he could not wield. Locke instead staked his hopes on the eschaton. To summarize Lock's pluralized-yet-unified self:

"From this we can conclude that even though Locke seems to present personal identity as a single thing, his discussion actually suggests that it has three different aspects (independently of our identity as 'men'). We are selves to others by virtue of what they know about our mental and moral life; we are selves to ourselves, but incompletely so, through the imperfect consciousness we have our lives and deeds in the here and now; and we can imagine and hope to be complete selves in light of the transparency that God can and at a certain point will open for us" (103)

Seigel offers a comment here that for those who don't believe in the third-aspect will have to find contentment in an ultimately undefined self-as-project. This articulation can find appeal to the modern liberal, subsumed in a Dewey-esque valorization of endless debate. And perhaps that's why Seigel finds Locke to be the hero of his narrative (though perhaps he's religious, I don't know). Nevertheless, it's particularly this Christian and eschatological referent that allows Locke's humility to be grounded in an eschatological reality. Reason (the third-dimension process of reflective selfhood) brings together our empirical sensations and our social bonds, fashioning a unified self out of them. But this project is unfinished. We are ourselves by dint of both others' perceptions of us and our own perceptions of ourselves. But these are all unfinished perspectives and we will not fully know who we are until the Final Judgement, when God opens up all the books. Rather than searching inward for a metaphysical source of unity, man's contingency is allowed to fully flower. Unlike Stoic self-fashioning, one's self-knowledge is partially mediated through the several relations we have. And finally, unlike modern liberal relativity, God is the ultimate author of our selves. Today we see in a mirror darkly, but one day we will see as we are seen.

From this vantage, Locke becomes a solidly Christian philosopher, in a similar light as Scotus and Leibniz, who seeks to preserve a unified vision of man as the image of God, bearer of eternal significance. The caesura is ultimately closed, all dualisms fulfilled, through man's own quest to become what God called him to be. Yet this self is itself entirely creaturely, contingent and subject to a battery of cosmic forces. Nevertheless, God gave man the means to begin this process and overcome the morass of confusion.

A problem with this vantage is that Locke's God seems some remote from the particular shape of God given in the Scripture. One way of looking at it is that Locke is giving a metaphysical account that would then undergird the reading of Scripture. Nevertheless, the lack of specificity can loan Locke a Deistic air, applicable to Nature's architect or any other Theistic account. It's not hard to see how Locke could be bent into a variety of other contexts, which synthesize Lockean empirical humility with the new (or faux) liberal project of utilitarianism and pragmatism. Even so, Locke's eschatological grounding of the self can cut through the presentist metaphysics of many forms of idealism, as well as the turn towards materiality and sociality to ground the self. The fullness of a man's haeccity is not seen until the End, humanity defined less in terms of something internal (form or otherwise) rather than man's external temporal extension. The End gives meaning not only to the hic et nunc, but defines even proctology. Man's historical contingency, which is what is finally unveiled and judged before God, is allowed to bloom as something fundamentally real. The "I" becomes more real through history, the mere (formally empty) individuation (the core meaning of hypostasis) subsumes the formal characteristics of the person (prosopon). Your mask-face is *you*.

Through this vantage, Locke might open up some interesting vantages on selfhood. Putting Locke in dialogue with the Cappadocians (and their metaphysical grammar of hypostasis), along with Scotus and Leibniz might bear fruit. One can even reconcile some elements of Locke's thought with Berkeley's empirical idealism. Seigel's historical reconstruction may have all kinds of misdiagnoses or misreading (I won't judge), but his appraisal of Locke opens interesting new paths of inquiry. For it's only, ultimately, in the End that (as CS Lewis titled his tragicomedy) we will have faces.

In Defense of Sola Scriptura

**posted originally at North American Anglican**

 

A key vector in online apologetics is the role of Scripture in Protestant theology. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox partisans will gleefully point out that while Scripture may be infallible, its canon is not. In other words, an infallible Scripture has a fallible canon. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that this neither a problem for traditional Protestant theology (let alone Sola Scriptura), but that it involves something of a shell-game (let alone a dishonest use of tradition). I don't inscribe bad faith to individual apologists who indulge in these strategies, I think they're genuine in how they think this 1-2 punch is a "gotcha" for the average Protestant. But, not unlike the Roman Catholic revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism in the seventeenth century, it will inevitably cause blowback. Nevertheless, a robust Protestant understanding of Scripture will clear the ground to not only advance Sola Scriptura as a tenable position, but rebut the skepticism deployed against it. The hope here is that dialogue between Christians can proceed on firmer grounds, and despite differences, Scripture will have a firmer base against opponents of Christianity.

Before we sketch out Sola Scriptura (which is central to a Protestant doctrine of Scripture), it will be helpful to understand what, precisely, we mean by canon, as well as the ancient notion of Scripture. Canon referred not to a question of inspiration or infallibility, let alone its binding definition as *Scripture*, but rather what was read in church. Among the Eastern Orthodox, this more fluid definition remains, with the Greek church traditionally not reading Revelation as part of the New Testament readings, but the Russians including it. Such does not mean there is a divergence between Orthodox churches as to what books apply as infallible or inspired, but rather an ecclesiastical question. Thus, when the Council of Carthage professes "that besides the Canonical Scriptures nothing be read in church under the name of divine Scripture" this refers to both a recognition of inspired status and its subsequent right to be read in church. As many know, the Council of Carthage includes the deuterocanon, as well as the standard Old and New Testaments of the Protestant canon. While this claim may appear as QED for proponents of the expanded canon, it should be noted that the Lutheran and Anglican lectionaries include these same books to be read. Is this an aberration, or make them less "Protestant"?

What do Protestants say about these books? First it should be stated that many Protestant confessions do not include any enumeration of books of Scripture. The Augsburg Confession (1530) does not even have a category of Scripture! The Lutherans take a stable doctrine concerning Scripture for granted. Similarly, several Reformed confessions of faith appeal to "the Scripture" without any reference to particular books (e.g. Genevan Confession [1536], Scots Confession [1560]). However, as the century progressed, Reformed numbering of the books did not remove the deuterocanon from the Church's "canon". Rather, the deuterocanon (or apocrypha) were recognized per their name: they were books of secondary importance, for establishing good morals and not doctrine.

The Belgic Confession (1561), which will make up one of the three core confessions (Three Forms of Unity) for Continental Reformed, states that the deuterocanon was to instruct in virtue, not doctrine:

We distinguish between these holy books
and the apocryphal ones,

which are the third and fourth books of Esdras;
the books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Jesus Sirach, Baruch;
what was added to the Story of Esther;
the Song of the Three Children in the Furnace;
the Story of Susannah;
the Story of Bel and the Dragon;
the Prayer of Manasseh;
and the two books of Maccabees.

The church may certainly read these books
and learn from them
as far as they agree with the canonical books.
But they do not have such power and virtue
that one could confirm
from their testimony
any point of faith or of the Christian religion.
Much less can they detract
from the authority
of the other holy books.

The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) states that these books are inspired, but not sufficient for establishing doctrine, citing Augustine:

And yet we do not conceal the fact that certain books of the Old Testament were by the ancient authors called apocryphal, and by the others ecclesiastical; in as much as some would have them read in the churches, but not advanced as an authority from which the faith is to be established. As Augustine also, in his De Civitate Dei, book 18, ch. 38, remarks that "In the books of the Kings, the names and books of certain prophets are cited"; but he adds that "They are not in the canon"; and that "those books which we have suffice unto godliness." 

The 39 Articles stated similarly that the deuterocanon were for establishing good living among catechumens, but not sufficient to establish doctrine, citing Jerome:

the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine; such are these following:

The Third Book of Esdras, The rest of the Book of Esther,
The Fourth Book of Esdras, The Book of Wisdom,
The Book of Tobias, Jesus the Son of Sirach,
The Book of Judith, Baruch the Prophet,
The Song of the Three Children, The Prayer of Manasses,
The Story of Susanna, The First Book of Maccabees,
Of Bel and the Dragon, The Second Book of Maccabees. 

The furthest one departed from this trend is in the Gallican Confession, which simply did not mention the deuterocanon (neither to include nor exclude), but that the undisputed canon (the 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament) were sufficient to establish faith. In a point we will return to later, this enumeration is justified from an internal witness, not an appeal to tradition. Nevertheless, from the testimony of the first century of the Reformation, it's clear that the deuterocanonical books, as they were listed in the Council of Carthage, were still considered within the category of "Scripture" even if in a diminished capacity. Nevertheless, the Reformed will call upon Augustine and Jerome to support this contention.

The fatal flaw of many anti-Protestant apologists involves a shell-game. It may be true, granted the above, that a "canon list" does not decisively answer which books are then to be relied upon. As the argument usually goes, if Scripture does not reveal its own content in an infallible way, the Church (which is vaguely defined) must establish the canon of Scripture through a magisterial council. Usually this counter-claim has the added flourish of modern scholars, who list differing canons of Scripture from the first centuries of the church. But there's one problem: is this how the fathers think about Scripture? To the contrary, the fathers state uncritically their reliance on *Scripture* against their opponents. As Gregory of Nyssa will state against his Neo-Arian opponents: "Let the inspired Scriptures then be our umpire, and the vote of truth will be given to those whose dogmas are found to agree with the Divine words" (On the Holy Trinity)

But, one may object, this appeal to Scripture is within the context of a shared canon. It does not answer the question over *what* that canon is. But the earliest apologists, when disputing with Gnostics, argue similarly. As one paragon example, Irenaeus appealed to the Scripture as definitive for man's knowledge of God and of the world:

If, therefore, even with respect to creation, there are some things [the knowledge of] which belongs only to God, and others which come within the range of our own knowledge, what ground is there for complaint, if, in regard to those things which we investigate in the Scriptures (which are throughout spiritual), we are able by the grace of God to explain some of them, while we must leave others in the hands of God, and that not only in the present world, but also in that which is to come, so that God should for ever teach, and man should for ever learn the things taught him by God? (A.H. II.28.3)

How does this argument make any sense against Gnostics (whether Valentinian, Ptolemaic, or Marcionite),  whose epistemological raise d'être was the existence of secret knowledge? If the Gnostics did not possess a shared canon of Scripture, why would Irenaeus appeal to "the Scriptures" as a fixed source of authority? If the canon of Scripture was as fluid as anti-Protestant apologists and modern scholarship say, then Irenaeus (as well as his opponents, it seems) was entirely ignorant of these differences. The ignorance of the Fathers: such is far from a traditional argument for trusting the doctors of the church!

Nevertheless, a certain level of fluidity may be granted to the precise canon of Scripture. An ancient method for counting the books of Scripture appealed to the alphabet of the dominant language. This altered between twenty-two (the letters in the Hebrew proto-alphabet) and twenty-four (the letters in the Greek alphabet). Hence Josephus will claim, against the Hellene Apion, that the Jews have a solid set of twenty-two books as the ancient and divine source of the Jews' doctrine and law:

For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another, [as the Greeks have,] but only twenty-two books, (8) which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. (Against Apion, I.8)

Scholars have raised the specter that these books are not listed and thus this adds nothing to the debate. However it makes little sense that if there was as much chaos and confusion over the list of sacred scripture as scholars say then this argument is a pathetic rhetorical bluff. Couldn't Apion, a trained scholar in Homeric hermeneutics, look for himself? The Torah (if not more) had been translated into Greek for Egyptian Jews. At the very least, Josephus' uncritical claim of a stable set of books as divine Scripture makes it difficult to sustain that it was epistemic chaos to know, precisely, what those books, generally, were.

I would go as far to argue that there really was no dispute as to what "the Scriptures" was as a category of sacred texts. Rather, there were debates about which books were appropriate to be read in the synagogue or church, as well which inspired books had more or less authority. Thus, at the so-called council of Yamnia (end of the first century) the question was not so much deciding a canon, but whether certain books were more or less sacred as the core of holy Scripture. It was not whether Esther or Song of Songs were inspired works or not, but whether they "stained the hands", that they had the requisite level of holiness to be read in the Synagogue alongside the other, undisputed, works of canon (such as the Pentateuch, the Prophets, or the Holy Writings). The general concern was found in the content of these books: Esther (in its Hebrew form) does not mention God and Song of Songs, read superficially, is royal erotic poetry.

It's in a similar vein that there was really no dispute among Christians as to what the canon was. The controversy around Marcion was the exception to prove the rule: when the canon was critically savaged, it was in a radical and post-Christian way. Marcion rejected the entirety of the Old Testament and most of the New. He did not do this out of a concern for a true canon of Scripture, as much as it flowed from his Gnostic "secret knowledge" that revealed the God of the Old Testament as the Demiurge, a created (and corrupt) entity that had enslaved the world in the bonds of materiality. Christian opposition to Marcion rejected this alternate cosmology, but revealed little anxiety as to what, precisely, the canon of Scripture. It neither reflected the scholar's or modern apologist's notion that the Church needed to magisterially define the canon of Scripture against heretics. Rather, Christian councils claimed that they were merely restating what the Church had always believed. There was no development of doctrine or innovation. Even changes in grammar, as shown in Athanasius' apology for Nicaea, required major justification. Most Christians believed, as the Apostle Paul and Irenaeus did, that the form of words was important to preserve the doctrine deposit that the Church's bishops were to faithfully guard and pass down unchanged.

Given later Protestant use of the deuterocanon (even as they rejected its equivalence with the Scriptures proper), there's no reason to think that the patristic era had a different notion about their use in argument. While Protestants certainly are averse to using Wisdom of Solomon as a prophecy of Christ, the aversion is not from text in itself. What prophecy of the suffering servant in Wisdom 2 is not unlike what one finds in Isaiah. Therefore, given the later context of dispute about canon of Scripture from within the world of Humanist textual criticism, it's unnecessary. The patristics lacked much of this scpetical analysis, but even Jerome (as Protestants are fond of citing) doubted the inspiration of texts like Tobit and Judith. Nevertheless, he submitted. Again, the question is not whether these texts are inspired and sacred, but whether they operate the same way as Scripture proper.

Here is where Sola Scriptura comes into play. To summarize a major thread among the Reformers (constituting it as one of the solae), the question is authority. When Luther, Zwingli, and other Reformers examined the claim of authority, they were baffled. Apologists of Rome may claim the councils, but which ones? What if they contradicted? They claimed tradition, but which strand of tradition? The fathers don't always speak with a single voice. They claim the authority of the papacy, but papal bulls revised each other. For many of the Reformers, soaked in Humanist methodology of ad fontes, using techniques of textual criticism and scholarship, the question of authority reached a boiling-point. What if the Church had required belief in something that not only had no justification, but was spiritually harming the lives of the faithful? What if the sales of indulgences (and the requisite belief in purgatory) had made Christians lose sight of God's grace? What if the canonical fasts had made Christians self-righteous, focused on outward performance and neglecting an inward conversion? It's for this reason that Luther nailed his ninety-five theses (1517) and Zwingli led his band of reformers to eat sausage during the Lenten fast (1522). The only way out of this morass was the appeal to Scripture as the ultimate authority to bind the conscience with life-saving doctrine. The question is not whether there are other sources of authority besides Scripture. All the Reformers accepted the role of textual scholarship, reason (scholastic or otherwise), and the tradition of the Fathers and the councils. The question was that when these authorities disputed, Scripture operated as the supreme referee.

A major qualifier in the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura is binding the conscience. It is not a question of what one can believe, in se, but what beliefs are necessary for eternal life. Hence, as the early Reformed confessions explicated, the doctrine of God and Christ (shared with Rome) flowed naturally into Christ's saving and atoning work. These doctrines were the several jewels that surrounded the core of saving faith: the interrelated doctrines of justification by faith alone (Lutheran emphasis) and union with Christ (Reformed emphasis). While it may be true that the Virgin Mary was an ever-virgin (something that most Reformers emphatically believed), this doctrine was not necessary to safeguard the atoning work of Christ (and thus is not included in any Reformation confessions of faith). In contrast, the meritorious invocation of saints, purgatory, and the Mass as meritorious sacrifice of Christ damaged the once-and-for-all atonement and Christ's sole mediatorship between God and man. Thus these doctrines were ejected as harmful errors. Similarly the Reformers repeat the laundry list of Christological heresies that all churches had denied. Arians, Nestorians, Doceticists, Ebionites, and Eutychians were denounced as diminishing Christ as mediator. If Christ was not, according to Chalcedonian orthodoxy, both God and man, a single divine person, with divine nature, who assumed a human nature, then Christ's could not atone in the way Scripture described. Christ had to be described in this way, as God and man, in order to be the mediator between God and man.

The alternative view, pace Apologists, was not Papal fiat, conciliar authority, or the tradition of the fathers. The appeal to these was precisely the problem, because if they conflicted (as the Reformers made clear they did) how were they to be resolved? Rather than the Reformers' notion that the Scripture (Old and New) were the binding word of God, Rome split the Word into two: the written (Scripture) and unwritten. As Session III at the Council of Trent puts it:

the purity itself of the Gospel be preserved in the Church; which (Gospel), before promised through the prophets in the holy Scriptures, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, first promulgated with His own mouth, and then commanded to be preached by His Apostles to every creature, as the fountain of all, both saving truth, and moral discipline; and seeing clearly that this truth and discipline are contained in the written books, and the unwritten traditions which, received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Ghost dictating, have come down even unto us, transmitted as it were from hand to hand

To restate the problem: how could Christians know whether a council was faithful to the Word of God or not if they contradicted? For Rome, the appeal was to a dual source of authority: the Scriptures and the Unwritten Tradition. The latter subsists precisely as unwritten & thus whatever past authority mentioned something that pertained to current Roman practice, such was not authoritative in itself but described what Christ had dictated. If the Reformers asked where the papacy or the cardinals were in Scripture, the Roman apologist would appeal to this unwritten tradition. Christ had privately taught these doctrines as binding, and references to these through time were testimonies to this original doctrine. In a way, this argument involved a kind of fideistic presentism that allowed Rome to retroject itself backwards as a timeless and unchanging bulwark against novel heresies. Again, it should be clear that this approach is not what most contemporary apologists posit. It is far more similar to the ultramontanism fideism of Cardinal Manning than any claim of developed doctrine or that the traditions, in themselves, are sufficient for additional doctrines. Of course, most apologists are relatively ecumenical, not threatening Protestants with damnation for continuing in their error (even the papacy effectively teaches ecumenism, both in and out of Christianity proper). The Eastern Orthodox struggle to gain their composure in the particular confines of this debate, and often ape Roman arguments without understanding what this means for their own doctrine. There are ways out for them (such as the ecclesiastical organicism of the 1848 Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs or Georges Florovsky's "Mind of the Fathers"), but I won't judge them. But this leaves no wiggle room for Protestants in terms of Sola Scriptura. It's either that or an unwritten tradition. But in the same vein, this opens the rich use of the Fathers, councils, tradition, and reason that defined Protestants through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was not Rome, but the Lutherans, who developed Patristics as a serious humanistic field of inquiry. It was this notion of Sola Scriptura, where Scripture was the final authority, that made Anglican ministers the stupor Mundi in their learned exegesis and textual scholarship. And thus the Reformation advanced this doctrine of Sola Scriptura upon this generally given definition of Scripture.

It should be noted that this stable basis for canon suffered some turbulence during the rise of Humanist textual scholarship. Prior to and during the Reformation, Christian humanists had their questions about the contents of the Scripture. While it's true that Luther had dismissive words for the Epistle to James, he was not alone in questioning this book (along with Hebrews and Revelation) as truly canonical. Lutherans till this day (whether out of traditional concern or modernist theology) will distinguish between the homolegoumena (undisputed primary books) and the antilegoumena (books of disputed, but still accepted, orthodoxy). Hence why the New Testament, as a bound book, is ordered with the four Gospels first, with Acts following, and then Paul's canon of letters; at the end of the book are included 2 Peter, 2-3 John, Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation, which took a lower priority in determining the doctrines of the Scripture. Even as these concerns existed among both Roman and Reformation humanists (Cardinal Cajetan had similar doubts about the canon), these antilegoumena were widely accepted and nevertheless valid. Their disputed inclusion itself defined the role these books played in shaping doctrine. While Luther should be censured for his cavalier commentary about James, it is true that the clarity and primacy in Luke or Romans should not be doubted against a statement in James. Despite the occasional bad conscience from James' denunciation of "faith alone", the Reformers from the very beginning interpreted James in light of Paul in Romans and Galatians. Flowing from Sola Scriptura, the Reformers emphasized Scripture interpreting Scripture. Clearer statements of faith (e.g. Rom. 10:9) should interpret more ambiguous statements. This ordering in no way jeopardizes the authority of Scripture, but is a subsequent question as to how the good bishop or priest utilizes his office to properly teach from the Scriptures.

Returning to the content of canon, it's not only the early Fathers and the Reformers which had this similar approach to canonical definition. In John of Damascus's An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, after extolling the authority of Scripture, proceeds to enumerate the books of the Old Testament:

Observe, further , that there are two and twenty books of the Old Testament, one for each letter of the Hebrew tongue. For there are twenty-two letters of which five are double, and so they come to be twenty-seven. For the letters Caph, Mem, Nun, Pe , Sade are double. And thus the number of the books in this way is twenty-two, but is found to be twenty-seven because of the double character of five. For Ruth is joined on to Judges, and the Hebrews count them one book: the first and second books of Kings are counted one: and so are the third and fourth books of Kings: and also the first and second of Paraleipomena: and the first and second of Esdra. In this way, then, the books are collected together in four Pentateuchs and two others remain over, to form thus the canonical books. Five of them are of the Law, viz. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. This which is the code of the Law, constitutes the first Pentateuch. Then comes another Pentateuch, the so-called Grapheia , or as they are called by some, the Hagiographa, which are the following: Jesus the Son of Nave , Judges along with Ruth, first and second Kings, which are one book, third and fourth Kings, which are one book, and the two books of the Paraleipomena which are one book. This is the second Pentateuch. The third Pentateuch is the books in verse, viz. Job, Psalms, Proverbs of Solomon, Ecclesiastes of Solomon and the Song of Songs of Solomon. The fourth Pentateuch is the Prophetical books, viz the twelve prophets constituting one book, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel. Then come the two books of Esdra made into one, and Esther. There are also the Panaretus, that is the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Jesus, which was published in Hebrew by the father of Sirach, and afterwards translated into Greek by his grandson, Jesus, the Son of Sirach. These are virtuous and noble, but are not counted nor were they placed in the ark.

Damascene's justification for the inspired, but non-canonical status, works of the deuterocanon flows from a traditional belief that the Scriptures were finished when Ezra placed them in the Temple at the end of Israel's fleshly exile. Juxtaposed from this still patristic source is the nineteenth-century patriarch-saint Philaret of Moscow. In his authoritative catechism for the Russian church, Philaret described the contents of Holy Scripture as the 22 books of Scripture:

34. Why is there no notice taken in this enumeration of the books of the Old Testament of the book of the Wisdom of the son of Sirach, and of certain others?

Because they do not exist in the Hebrew.

35. How are we to regard these last-named books?

Athanasius the Great says that they have been appointed of the Fathers to be read by proselytes who are preparing for admission into the Church.

While this in no way covers over differences over the necessary or licit doctrine of the church, it's clear that Eastern Orthodoxy justified the same canon of Scripture that the early Reformers utilized. The deuterocanon is purely for moral formation, but it's demoted to be strictly for catechumens! Again, there may be alternatives (as listed above) to either Protestant or Roman doctrines of authority, but it does not depend upon the fact that the Fathers (or Orthodox patriarchs) do not know the content of the Scriptures without an authoritative statement from a magisterial council. 

However, the caricature between Ultramontane Fideism fighting the paper-pope of increasingly austere biblicists has some root in truth. Without rehashing the entirety of the post-Reformation period, suffice to say that the fighting between Rome and the Reformers (both Lutheran and Reformed, who increasingly divided among themselves) produced increasing rigidity on both sides. Confessions became more elaborate to exclude error. A new wave of Schoolmen sought to build more elaborate systems of doctrine to impose upon the faithful. Generally cooler heads prevailed (manifest in the Epitome of Concord or the Synod of Dordt, which were rather generous in their orthodoxy as they excluded error). Nevertheless, both sides' intensified their defense of doctrines along increasingly self-defeating lines. As mentioned above, Roman Catholics recouped their losses in patristics through a reappraisal of Pyrrhonian skepticism. Textual scholarship, if applied more vigorously, could destroy confidence not only in the manuscripts of the Fathers, but the Scripture itself. The purpose was not apathetic skepticism, but to ring a warning bell. If Christians did not flee to Mother Rome than the scholarly methods of the humanists would lead to atheism. For if the authority of the Church could not backstop the Scripture and the Fathers, than the naked conscience was on its own. Of course, this method found adherents among radical Anabaptists as well. Quakers, in their early wild-man phase, utilized similar arguments in defense of Inner Light. One's subjective experience of truth, given through interior confirmation, alone could ground faith. Not amount of external witnesses, Scripture or otherwise, could shore up truth. 

On the other side, Reformed stalwarts, like John Owen, boxed himself into defending not only the infallibility of Scripture, but of particular texts. The Masoretic text wasn't just an ancient and sure witness to the Scripture, it was itself inspired. However, the problem was that textual scholarship had revealed its vowel-points were an invention of a later age. Owen found himself defending the inspiration of the vowel-points in order to back-stop trust not only in the Scripture (given historically), but a perfect text that existed out there. This may seem like a strengthening of Sola Scriptura, but it fatally weakened it. If scholarship could not adequately defend a particular text, then confidence in the Scripture (free of textual errors) would decline. In contemporary terms, this problem marks out much of the "inerrantist" movement. The problem isn't whether Scripture is infallible or inerrant (a teaching common to all Christian churches), but whether a certain text has a near inspired protection from error. Most inerrantists do not opt to protect any particular textual tradition (least of all the Textus Receptus, which many Evangelicals have simply abandoned without reason). Instead they defend a phantom: the Original. Of course, the originals don't exist and thus this opens the door to constantly revising the content of Scripture. Otherwise conservative Baptist excludes John 8 and the end of Mark 16 from his preaching: these cease to be inspired Scripture since they're, supposedly, not included in the original.

The context for these metastases was not only intellectual. Confessional warfare happened not only with the pen, but the sword. The French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War, the Eighty Years War (or Dutch Independence), and the English Civil Wars reflected confessional divisions on the battlefield. In the aftermath of these battles, Confessional orthodoxy (whether Roman, Lutheran, or Reformed) suffered irreparable loss. Confessional standards were not sufficient to establish Christendom, and thus new methods of rationalism and empiricism challenged historicism and scholasticism as the new basis for social stability. Again, without getting into the changing dimensions of European society and politics, with the rise of increasingly powerful commercial interests, a form of "elite secularity" settled in, changing the role of ecclesiastical polity. And subsequently, as these intensified and reified standards offered less flexible means, they no longer served a means of stability. While still a generous statement of Reformed orthodoxy, the Westminster Confession of Faith reveals the shift towards Sola Scriptura as not only a source of authority, but an increasingly import source of epistemology. It is necessary to quote its first three statements at length:

Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable; (Rom. 2:14–15, Rom. 1:19–20, Ps. 19:1–3, Rom. 1:32, Rom. 2:1) yet they are not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation. (1 Cor. 1:21, 1 Cor. 2:13–14) Therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manner, to reveal Himself, and to declare that His will unto His Church; (Heb. 1:1) and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing: (Prov. 22:19–21, Luke 1:3–4, Rom. 15:4, Matt. 4:4,7,10, Isa. 8:19–20) which maketh the Holy Scripture to be most necessary; (2 Tim. 3:15, 2 Pet. 1:19) those former ways of God’s revealing His will unto His people being now ceased. (Heb. 1:1–2)

After listing the core canon of Scripture (39 books of the Old Testament and 27 books of the New), Westminster delegitimizes the deuterocanon:

3.The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings. (Luke 24:27, 44, Rom. 3:2, 2 Pet. 1:21)

4. The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God

Here we return to the curious clause of Scripture's self-affirmation as an internal assurance.  Formally this may be true, but the importance of traditioned authority is diminished to Scripture's detriment. It's important to recognize that, indeed, Scripture's ultimate authority flows from God. But knowledge of what this scripture is cannot rely on what appears to be an individualized witness of the Holy Spirit, or one separated from the contours of church history. It is important not only to know the content of Scripture from the witness of the Fathers in all ages, but also authorial details. Would Mark possess this received authority if the name "Mark" is really an empty signature for an unknown author? It was precisely through this historic knowledge that this book of Scripture possesses its authority. For as the tradition testified, Mark wrote what Peter dictated to him, a witness of the Twelve to the world. Scripture possesses an interior witness, where reading is a portal to God's presence who confirms that this in fact is his holy word, but it's not a process separated from either history or the church. It's the internal witness of the church, through time, that appeared in and through these historic witnesses. Hence there was no immediate soul-searching, or any manic search for an ur-text, to back-stop the witness of the Scriptures simplicitur.  To repeat: the earliest Reformed and Lutheran confessions don't even offer a list of inspired books. It was simply a given from and through church history.

Protestants must resource the fluid and confident sense of the Scripture that existed at the beginning of the Reformation (so too, for that matter, should Rome and Byzantium). Such is not a return to innocency, as if Christians should simply close their eyes to scholarly developments. But it's the deep appreciation of the witness of the Fathers, which the early Reformers possessed, which grounds the doctrine of Scripture, even Sola Scriptura. Hence Anglicans should retvrn to Bishop Joseph Butler above all. It's in his use of probabilistic reason, grounded in historicist use of sources and a dependence on the testimony of the centuries, that Protestants can find their footing. The recent historical scholarship of Anglicans like Richard Bauckham have fruitful potential to not simply give up the field to skeptics (both believing and unbelieving). Instead of a quest for an ur-text or entering into a mush of traditionalism (which usually fails to understand the core issues at stake during the Reformation), a dynamic Sola Scriptura will restore a lively faith in the text as given. 

In short, rather than staking one's faith in an academic textual guild or the particular politics of this or that magisterium, Christians should once again state with Jude: 

"contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints"

My Kingdom is Not of This World: A Critique of Newman and Development of Doctrine

**Posted originally at North American Anglican**

 

Among many self-professed traditionalists and apologists, the newly sainted Cardinal Newman is the fount for their rhetoric and argument. Often considered unassailable against "Protestantism", Newman's ghost haunts many well-read & historically aware Protestants. His oft repeated quip "to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant" often leaves the non-Roman (or, nowadays, non-Orthodox) a bad conscience. Are you really so wise or perceptive to properly interpret the annals of church history? Are you really able to stand with a motley band of Humanist revolutionaries who decried centuries of errors and claimed to correct course? This essay hopes to dispel this false phantom, but only through leaning into the crisis the Reformation lay bare. Newman's rhetoric may in the end fail, a mirage the traditionalist will gesture at without arrival, but it does destroy a certain kind of Protestant. Newman, rightly, makes certain strands of Anglicanism impossible. In a way, as a former Tractarian, Newman obliterates Anglo-Catholicism, the via media between Rome and Wittenberg, on their own terms. While the Cardinal believed that this left only Rome and Socinians, the bulwark of the papacy against the chaotic masses of demagogic critics, instead he opens the possibility of a historically-grounded Evangelical churchmanship, which Anglicans sorely need in this age of phantom High Churchmanship and outright rejection of the gospel.

In his Development of Doctrine, Newman prefaced the 1878 edition with the warning that his argument does not so much defend Rome, as much as frame the terms of the debate. It was not a clear-cut vindication for Catholicism, but "to explain certain difficulties in its history, felt before now by the author himself, and commonly insisted on by Protestants in controversy". Before digging into the text, it's helpful to adumbrate how revolutionary Newman's method was. Contrary to most other Roman Catholic polemics against Protestants, Newman ceded most Protestant arguments about the past. The early church did not exactly look Roman Catholic in the way that its apologists had claimed. There was no unchanged and fixed identity that was handed down through the ages. Rather, Newman takes a very novel view of tradition to save it from itself. As a former Tractarian and heir to the Church of England's exceptional patrology, Newman knew the historical arguments of High Church Protestants like the back of his hand. The accusation was not against the fathers, but an appeal to them over and against current Roman corruptions. Thus, Newman's revolutionary paradigm-shift was to repurpose history within a scheme that wedded a defense of ancient institutions to Continental trends in philosophy to defeat the infidel critics which dominated German universities. In the fields of theology and metaphysics, Newman most certainly was a counter-revolutionary.

To set the table, Newman denied that he was the rear-guard. Every account of history depended on some paradigmatic account of history. Whether it was a Hellenistic "fall" of Christianity (corrupted by "Oriental, Platonic, Polytheistic sources, from Buddhism, Essenism, Manicheeism") or the Church defined as the faithful few in many times and places (maintaining the kingdom of Heaven in the "hidden and isolated life, in the hearts of the elect"), any account required prolegomenon of its first principles (4-6). Nevertheless, if it came to any account of institutional continuity, history was not on the side of any set of Protestants. Against "Chillingworth and his friends" (who famously posited the Bible as the Religion of Protestants), no historic Christianity looked like this. With spleen, Newman asserted that whatever the truth is, "the Christianity of history is not Protestantism" (7-8). But Newman's point is not about any particular Protestant church or confession of faith. Rather it reflected the truth inherent in his contemporary panic over the Erastianism of the Church of England, and the Evangelical and Broad churchman diminution of patristics and traditions among Anglicans. Such was no freak accident of history, but inherent to the phenomenon of Protestantism as a principle.

The problem was not simply one of history. Contrary to optimistic Anglicans, who believed unity could be found in the early centuries of the Church (per Andrewes' succinct summary: "one canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries"). The Vincentian canon, which promised foundational truth through catholicity in space and time, was useless. The fathers were themselves inconsistent if judged by a static measure of orthodoxy, a core set of doctrine which remained unchanged through the centuries. For if one were to judge this way, would not a Christian condemn the fathers themselves for heresy? Newman goes through a laundry list of suspicious statements and ambiguities from the venerable:

-Basil of Caesarea accused Dionysius of Alexandria of planting the seed of Arianism in Egypt

-Hippolytus was ignorant of the eternal sonship of Christ

-Methodius "speaks incorrectly" about the Incarnation

-Justin Martyr is Arianizing

-Irenaeus was patripassian

The way Newman's former brethren utilized the Vincentian Canon would not only condemn the fathers for their failure to adhere clearly to the standard of orthodoxy, but embolden Unitarians and Socinians to assume the mantle of tradition (10-19). The only solution is to embrace a new paradigm to save both history and orthodoxy. Enter Development.

Drawing on the theories of Mohler and de Maistre (both romantic counter-revolutionaries), the Doctrine of Development posits a living principle at the heart of interconnected phenomena. Over the annals of history, a principle will, like a seed, plant into minds and institutions and spur its own outworking. As an idea seizes a mind, in both "intellect and heart", it will reach perfection after "longer time and deeper thought" until it is fully elucidated (30). The idea or principle (the terms seem generally equivalent for Newman) has a synergistic relationship with the mind which thinks it. The idea energizes the human mind, which then develops this idea, working through its various implications. This process can create tensions, contradictions, and conflict, which then are worked out, growing into a system of thought. True development reflects the internal characteristics of the principle, bringing them to fuller fruition. It is only if "the aspects of an idea are brought into consistency and form [...] being the germination and maturation of some truth or apparent truth" that true development has taken place. Thus, per Newman's own example, one cannot see a genetic relationship between a monarchy and a republic, but one can see it between a democracy and a tyranny (37-38). This process is worked out through history, not mathematically in the mind of a philosopher. Development is not "like an investigation worked out on paper, in which each successive advance is a pure evolution from a foregoing, but it is carried on through and by means of communities of men and their leaders and guides". Instead a principle possesses these institutions, making external history a revelation of various principles in conflict, as these ideas seize these institutions "giving them a new meaning and direction, in creating what may be called a jurisdiction over them". From this, in the wranglings of schools and parliaments, the drama of history unfolds. In a way not unlike Darwinian metaphysics, the development of various principles provokes conflict between institutions possessed and developing them. The ideas then go to war: "each of them enterprising, engrossing, imperious, more or less incompatible with the rest, and rallying followers or rousing foes" (38-39). Thus history is a story of rival ideas, developing and growing, battling for domination over the souls of men and the societies they inhabit.

This process may sound violent (given the peace of God's reign) and may breed corruptions and confusions. But it is necessary: "In a higher world it is otherwise, here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often" (40).

Such is the paradigm of Development. Applied to Christianity, there exists a divine principle that works through these all too human forms. Newman determines that, given his reading of church history (and not unlike later liberal Anglicans like Bishop Gore), the principle of Christianity is Incarnation. This principle is orbited by three aspects (sacraments, hierarchy, asceticism), as well as no less important doctrines and devotions (36). While there are various kinds of development (political, economic, mathematical), the main focus for Newman is theological development. Unlike political development (marked by its "often capricious and irregular" due to it involving power), theological development occurs when the mind "habituated to the thought of God” reflects “with a devout curiosity to the contemplation of the object of its adoration”. These thoughts occur, one after another, through time, eventually developing a body of dogmatic thought. Thus the principle expands,  which “was an impression on the Imagination has become a system of creed in the Reason” (52-53). For Christianity this leads to the contemporary stance of the Roman Church. 

The alternative is Protestant-ism, an alternative principle: Individual Judgement. Thus, despite protestations of confessional orthodoxy, the principle of Protestantism inevitably forces Protestants to heterodoxy, heresy, and infidelity. Luther is the architect of this system. Despite the monk's rich sacramental theology and claim for sola fide as axiomatic, Luther's revolt depended on his own authority to interpret the scriptures. The "Here I Stand" is the secret core of Protestantism, the vaunting of the 'I' over God's living Church. Therefore Luther will always lead to Socinus as the telos of Protestant-ism, the principle animating these diverse (and often conflicting) churches. For a Protestant to stand with Luther and denounce Calvin and Socinus is akin to "living in a house without a roof to it" (96). And history had proved this development. Hadn't Luther's theology, when systematized, provoke the success of the Pietists? Hadn't Spener stood on Luther when he shifted the theological emphasis to the heart of the individual against the confessions of the church? And hadn't Pietism been the cradle from which Kant and his Copernican Revolution emerged? Like Leibniz's monads which demanded to be actualized, the principle of Protestantism would not stop until the liberal individual stood naked and alone with his authoritative demand to interpret for himself. It was Rome or Oblivion.

There are many places one might want to interrupt the magician's show. 

What about Dissenters? Many free-churches had not followed this path of development. But for Newman, such were the sectarian remnant of grander historical battles. For it was the ferocity of confessional orthodoxy, which Dissent represents, that had lead to the apathy and turpitude of Protestant nations. Was not Germany and Geneva been the hotbeds of radical Protestant agitation? And what were they now? Dens of infidelity and the higher critical scholarship, which had reduced the faith to pious myth. They might offer a lively alternative to the "hollow uniformity" of the Church of England, but both lacked any substantive future outside the relentless drive of Protestant-ism to enact the telos of Individual Judgement (90-91).

Perhaps Protestants are doomed, but why is Rome identified with Christianity? Why not the Eastern Orthodox? They were dead and had denied the inevitable development of the papacy from aspect of hierarchy. On the first count, the Greeks had no contribution to theology but negation. Newman shrugged: "I am not aware that the Greeks present more than a negative opposition to the Latins" (95). He was not suggesting that the Orthodox had no theologians or dogma, only that it lacked any visible development, demonstrating its weakness. They had doctrine, but no principle. Greek Orthodoxy was dead. Such was unlike the Orientals, who could flip-flop between Nestorianism and Monophysitism because their principle was that there was no mystery in religion (181). Rather, the Greeks negated Rome because they had rejected the papacy. Like most other doctrines, the papacy developed from an early reverence into universal jurisdiction. Anglicans had been hypocrites to deny this early testimony, even as they claimed the fathers for a doctrine of Real Presence (24). Like the eucharist, it was clear that early fathers adhered to something like consubstantiality, but such was abandoned as the idea worked out its implication (eventually manifest in transubstantiation and adoration of the elements). Such was the same for Rome, the see of St. Peter, prince of the Apostles. Cyprian may have fought with Rome, but he in no way denied her authority. Chalcedon staked its authority on the Tome of Leo, whose sainted author the council acclaimed as having spoke with the voice of the Apostle. The Orthodox, with their penchant for caesaropapism of an imperial cult of state, had simply resisted the inevitable. For monarchical episcopacy demanded this development. The Nestorians had a Catholicos, the German Lutherans had a general super-intendant, and the Anglicans, developing a global network of churches, had empowered the Archbishop of Canterbury to facilitate intercommunion (155). Orthodoxy, in denying this development, had cut itself off from the vitality of Rome. The impotence of the Greek church before its Turkish overlords was less an accident of time, than a demonstration of weakness. Orthodoxy was doomed to wither, as Rome could meet the challenges besetting Europe.

But what about the core of Chillingworth's claim, that the Bible (not Individual Judgement) was the religion of Protestants? Why could not the canon of Scripture provide the principle that animates Christianity-Protestantism? Newman argued that the Scripture was, fundamentally, a mystical and unknowable source. Scripture's content was so "unsystematic and various", and its style was "so figurative and indirect", that "no one would presume at first sight to say what is in it and what is not" (71-72). Like a wild landscape, Scripture was full of so many unknowns that no Protestant could ever fence it. An Anglican might claim Jesus' words "This is My Body" to justify belief in the Real Presence, but Roman Catholics could point to "saved; yet so as by fire" to justify purgatory or "receiving a prophet's reward" to justify belief in the communicable merits of the saints. Utilizing a skeptical tactic that French Roman Catholics had used against Huguenots (and radical Protestants like Quakers against any Reformed orthodoxy), there was no way to truly know Scripture. Even the canon was unclear, with conflicting lists of books from the earliest centuries. The only hope was anchored in the continuous institution of the church. It was from within the church that one could utilize the fourth and fifth centuries to clarify the ambiguity in an earlier era (125-126). Scripture, unknown and unknowable without charismatic interpretation, was no anchor to ground the faith. Protestant appeals to the Bible obscured the fundamental reality beneath: the individual's right to infallibly interpret for himself the meaning of the text.

Newman's arguments have become quite normative among Anglophone converts or reverts, even if dumbed-down or modified through use. But they take the form they do because they are an assault upon the methods which had buoyed Anglican churchmanship in the past. Newman depended heavily on the arguments of bishop Butler, who had the closest thing to a doctor ecclesiae the Church of England had produced in the eighteenth century. Butler's argumentation depended on the use of probability to support general conclusions. Against Deists who had called the standards of Christian orthodoxy, Butler utilized probability from a fair-minded consideration of the texts. The truthfulness of Scriptures could be defended on strictly historical terms, with probability that the texts had accurately described the events in question. Particular doctrines of the church could also be defended on similar terms, including even the canon of scripture. The humanistic methods that the Church of England had developed could service logical and historical defenses of the texts. It was in this way that Butler posited this web of dogma as a dynamic system, which developed in response to controversy. Newman claimed Butler as a precursor to his Development of Doctrine (74-75), though one that required radically different conclusions. Perhaps it was in this vein that Newman stated that while modern Tories adhered to the policies of the old Whig, these were superficial similarities. It took a revolutionary appraisal of the work of the Church of England to successfully lead a counter-revolution against the higher criticism that threatened to overwhelm the world through secularism and socialism.

It is without a doubt that Newman concept of Development was a rhetorical powerhouse. It is an outstanding parlor trick which still mesmerizes the disaffected today. It is hard, when reading, not to feel an overwhelming sympathy with his arguments. However, once you step outside the carnival, you realize the lights disorient than reveal. But, like many today, the strength of Newman's argument depends heavily on the fixation (if not fetish) of epistemology for modern man. The acid of skepticism and divided Christendom left many groping towards something solid. The Cartesian rationalist may claim a stable interior to build an axiomatic foundation, but this more often than not devolves into solipsism. As William Blake had portended, Newtonian mechanism was less world-revealing than world-building. And the logical structures of any positivist program (rationalist or empiricist) reflected less a reality given than a reality constructed. Thus, rather than providing a solid basis, rationalism provoked its own crisis for an all-comprehensive system. In the hands of Spinozists, this rationalist system portended the collapse into the materialism and pantheism of the All-One Deus sive Natura. Such system building had provoked the Pantheism crisis of the 1790s, but had framed the basis of Hume's skepticism against Lockean empiricism, Berkeleian idealism, Reidian common-sense, as well as various efforts to defend or overthrow Cartesian philosophy, Hobbist materialism, and Newtonian science. The turn from revolution to violence, of reason to anarchy, thus framed Newman's interpretation of seventeenth century, where confessional zeal provoked the cool bath of skepticism. It was only (as Pyrrhonian neo-skeptics had argued) an infallible institutional authority which could prevent this cycle into oblivion.

But Newman's anxiety, as well as many modern apologists', is unwarranted. Newman believed that any infallible doctrine based on fallible comprehension was to effectively destroy its credibility. For what good was infallible truth in the hands of a fallible mind? But Newman never really escapes from this need for probability. As a good English Catholic, Newman adhered to the liberal sentiments of limited government, parliamentary politics, and free inquiry. He believed that the infallibility of the Roman Catholic Church, through its living oracular voice in the papacy, did not destroy the individual's search for truth (81-82). For did not Newman himself, through his searching studies, come to Rome from his own judgement? The papacy, rather than destroy individual inquiry, bolstered the defense of conscience from the tyranny of private judgement and caesaropapist statism. But what good was this individual basis to submit to Rome? 

One was still on the grounds of probability, as one had to weigh the merits of Newman's assessment from his contemporary vantage. In the flourish of rhetoric, there's the con-artist's bluff: we all know the obvious conclusion. Many an apologist indulges in the same flourish, with accounts of megachurch charismania and liberal mainline apostasy. For Newman, the picture was European state-churches enslaved to the state and overcome with the complete breakdown of doctrine. The Church of England was bound to the parliamentary state and its High Church party (reborn, somewhat, as the Tractarians) was in decline. The Greek Orthodox languished under Muslim rule and Russians exhibited unchecked barbarism. The obvious answer was Rome, it was the most reasonable answer, the only institution which could resist. In this way Newman exhibited the traits that marked American Pragmatism and Jobism, a kind of de facto appeal to what seemed most effective. History could mesmerize the disaffected Tractarian to swim the Tiber, but it also could breed the same kind of doubt that Newman tried to escape. It was for this reason that Newman's fellow cardinal and convert, Edward Manning, would reject this entire approach through a straightforward institutional fideism. One simply must appeal to the Holy Spirit's working in Rome, full-stop. The appeal to history or development was nothing less than treason, for it confused the sovereign's position for a subject. Newman's argument was to elicit rhetorical plausibility, even as its end result depended on the eye of the beholder.

Hence one could simply wonder if Newman's account of principles is the dishonest showmanship of a sorcerer. Christianity's principle is Incarnation, which Newman compiled from his own rigorous research into church history. But this principle was not clear, since it required several aspects to support it (sacraments, hierarchy, asceticism). Newman did not deny other doctrines and devotions, but they were subservient to these main aspects to this core principle. But why? Again, the argument depends on seductive plausibility. Luther never denied sacraments, hierarchy, or asceticism (though one that called all Christians, not only the religious, to a rigorous life), but these were subordinate to justification by faith alone (the article by which the church stands or falls). Newman can essentially ignore these self-descriptions through a narration of church history. But why could not a contemporary Newman wield the same destructive arguments against Rome. Isn't it the case that Rome was animated not by Christianity, but absolutism or caesarism? Had not the papacy developed increasingly to accumulate more and more power, stretching even into the domain of civil authority? Newman distinguished Development from corruption in several ways, one being that true Development was not revolutionary. Development was slow and long-lasting, while Revolution was short, violent, and ephemeral. But this paradigmatic lens often obscured honest assessment of historical events. Had not French Gallicanism developed over centuries, recovering episcopal authority from an overreaching papacy? Yet it was overthrown in a night, as both Jansenism and Gallicanism had been discredited through affiliation with the deposed monarchy and subsequent support for the early/moderate days of the Revolution. These were corruptions for the simple fact that they ceased. History's unfolding allowed the scholar to simply paint a picture to soothe the conscience. Such narratives are no better than accounts that Scotus or Occam plunged the West into Atheism. Why could Newman's doctrine not justify a genealogical account of how Augustine's bad theology had set the Latin West on a course for the guillotine and the gas-chamber? The strength fundamentally depends on a rhetorical trance, where an assortment of facts are marshaled to perform this rhythmic dance for the weary.

Again, a new Newman could take upon himself a critique of Rome. Animated by some other principle, Rome could be a story of corruption into corruption. The papacy of Francis, serial sex abuse scandals, and the demographic collapse among Western church-goers shows the inevitable failure of a church animated by clerisy and absolutism. While this may seem attractive to those wishing to rebut Rome (from Byzantium, Canterbury, Wittenberg, etc.), it only leaves you trapped in an empty game of rhetorical posturing. Hence the emptiness of contemporary apologetics, who more often than not fail to heed Newman's warning that this development is not done with pen and paper. The moral failings and doctrinal failure of the current Church mitigate against Newman's triumphal, counter-revolutionary, narrative. Of course, that is if you want to plant your feet in anything remotely traditional. The value of Newman is his revolutionary reworking of tradition. Thus, rather than a betrayal or a failure, the Second Vatican Council and its interpretation over the twentieth century is the principle of Christianity working itself out. Pope John Paul II received veneration from Hindus, Pope Benedict XVI kissing a Koran, Pope Francis' admission that good atheists may end up in heaven, all of these may testify to the ultimate flourishing of Christianity. 

Counter-revolution is no less revolutionary and often a product of a contemporary moment. In a world where materialism and secularism have become increasingly normative, many on the"right" find themselves in broad coalitions of the religious. But such equally applies to coalitions of the religious "left", who advocate "ethical capitalism" and environmental politics. In either case, a Newmanian hermeneutic can justify either a Benedict or a Francis, framing the Darwinian metaphysic of clashing clerics. And thus it makes sense that it was these two popes who beatified and canonized (respectively) the Cardinal. This posture may justify a return to clerical marriages and communion for the remarried (which radically undermines the Roman Catholic position on divorce). But it also may be used one day to justify female priests (institutionally beginning through the reintroduction of the Diaconate) and homosexual marriage. As common among partisan literature, attempts are made to ground both in the history of the church as a subterranean phenomenon. There's no reason within this paradigm that Development could not justify these changes. For as Newman admitted, every advance in church doctrine is a novelty. Trent was as much a novelty (as Protestants accused) as Luther's doctrine (57-58).

Ironically it's in this bold statement that Newman unveils his brittle understanding of the Reformation. For Newman decried Anglican hypocrisy, as many Protestant mainstays (royal supremacy, Sunday as the Sabbath, infant baptism) were as foreign to the New Testament as purgatory, papal supremacy, and prayers to the saints. And while not a few High Churchmen may have made these arguments, original Anglicans (as the Reformed Church of England) never claimed these doctrines bound the conscience. It was precisely as adiaphora, things indifferent, that churches could choose as normative these doctrines. But these in no way could damn in their alteration. Thus the norm among English churchmen, ranging from so-called Latitudinarians to Non-Jurors, recognized the presbyterian orders of the Continental Reformed. Episcopacy may be an ancient and very good mode of church government, but failure to organize accordingly or believe in it was in no way damning. The accusation against Rome was not only that doctrines such as papal primacy were unscriptural and anti scriptural, but they bound the conscience, making their adherence an element of salvation. Submission to the pope was not merely a question of convenience or organizational outworking (Melanchthon was willing to submit to the papacy if the Vatican accepted the Augsburg Confession as orthodox), but life or death. The problem is how one knows what is necessary and what is adiaphora, which then is thrown upon the individual conscience. The living voice of the papacy, as an infallible interpreter, solved this crisis. But how was to know what precisely the pope taught, or which statements were infallibly authoritative? As the struggle over Amoris Laetitia demonstrates, it's not exactly clear what the magisterium teaches. Newman blasted Gladstone's interpretation of the Vatican One as ignorant, since it was the magisterium over time which would interpret Papal statements. Thus, we return once again to historical defactoism, where the Church's apostasy is an impossible.

Where does this leave us? For Newman, the options are between the individual or the Church, infidelity or orthodoxy. And such is compelling if we accept Newman's Tractarian definition of the church. Anglo-Catholics are trapped within the logic of Newman's accusation, weakly trying to turn his arguments for their benefit (through invented doctrines like Branch Theory). Newman is right that historicist arguments implode through research. There is no unified core teaching among the patristics that stand uniformly behind later standards of orthodoxy. It becomes a hypothetical game of special-pleading over whether Justin Martyr would've joined with Nicaea or Arius. But there's another alternative in a very unlikely source.

Benjamin Hoadly became notorious in his day for his stalwart attack on the Non-Juror schism (or, from their point of view, orthodoxy against the conforming revolutionary Church of England's apostasy). Generally misunderstood as a Latitudeman and Erastian, even misrepresented by his later fans (Hoadly was neither a Lockean nor porto-liberal, but thoroughly Hookerian), Hoadly stood against the clerisy of those both within and without the Church. But Hoadly's appeal to conscience was not a defense of the individual or the absolute authority of private judgement. Instead, the main point of contention was precisely how Christ governed his Church: directly or indirectly. Against High-Church polemics that distinguished the Church from the Kingdom of God, Hoadly claimed both were equivalent terms. And if Christians subsist in the Kingdom of Heaven, how exactly is Christ the King? For his High Church and Non-Juror opponents, Christ reigned but did not directly rule. He had passed spiritual government onto his Apostles, who successively passed it onto the bishops. Thus episcopacy, in councils, could bind the conscience. While distinct in many ways from later Tractarians (who claimed these churchmen as precursors), they both claimed a hieratic authority for the clergy to govern the conscience. A priest who denounced a congregant for heresy had the governmental right to damn. Interpreting Jesus' promise that whatever the Apostles bound in heaven as bound on Earth, Anglican clergy had a right to frame, mold, and arrest the conscience. For Newman later, this principle right was what lead him to believe in the need for the papacy as the single, active, charismatic voice to authoritatively interpret and bind the conscience. Newman has a point about the liberality of the papacy when one looked at the use of this clerisy among jure divino Presbyterians and other practitioners of priestcraft. What was one monarch against a horde of contradicting petit lords? Nevertheless, it was the college of bishops, which governed the spiritual kingdom of Christ's church, limited by an eschatological re-reckoning when church was fully actualized as the Kingdom (which allowed clerical misrule to be overruled when Christ assumed the Judgement seat).

But Bishop Hoadly believed Christ actively governed his church. In his (in)famous sermon, which kickstarted the Bangorian Controversy, Hoadly thundered his contention:

"If Christ be our King; let us shew our selves Subjects to Him alone, in the great affair of Conscience and Eternal Salvation: and, without fear of Man's judgment, live and act as becomes those who wait for the appearance of an All-knowing and Impartial Judge; even that King, whose Kingdom is not of this World." (The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ, 1717)

If Christ were in fact king, he would rule in the hearts of his people. It was this great infallible judgement which gathered up the people of God. And it was this eschatological (not fully realized or gathered, and thus invisible) Congregation whose teaching, through her Head Christ, was infallible. Hoadly and his opponents agreed that there needed to be a living voice to judge and govern, but the latter had settled for an indirect authority. The question was whether Christ was King or had handed his authority over to another. To claim that Christ had handed his government to his subordinates, it was effectively a clerical atheism, where God had gone to sleep at the behest of his subordinates. For, analogously, how could the King of England be said to govern in Ireland if he handed his entire authority over to the Lord-Lieutenant? In all ways the latter was effectively sovereign, thus utilizing the royal name to justify an unlimited authority in the king's name. In someways, this clerical arrangement demonstrates philosopher Giorgio Agamben's point about the fracture between sovereign and government. As God receded into nothingness at the heart of a providential arrangement, so too did the sovereign exist only to legitimate his government. Thus, to put it dramatically, Christ either ruled directly or it was the pope (or some other arrangement of clerical government). For Hoadly, the Kingdom of Heaven was fundamentally eschatological, a future reality which shaped the present, and thus was solely conscience. Hoadly didn't deny the need for a clergy, but that their function was not to govern the conscience, but to teach and instruct. They could persuade, not bind, an authority which belonged to Christ's active rule. While this seems to justify precisely the anarchy of individualism that Newman feared, it put trust on the ability to perceive Christ's active word in the heart, rather than the ability to interpret papal clarifications.

Newman's desire to defend papal authority fundamentally derives from the belief that Scripture is unclear. Papal declarations, as living words, could actively interpret Scripture and the traditions of the church. But as seen above, this provokes a crisis of infinite regression. For why not inscribe infallibility not only to Scripture and the pope, but to a certain organ of interpretation? And why not an interpretation of the interpretation? Plausibility masks that it is, in fact, turtles all the way down. Instead, one could double-down on Scripture. As Newman recognized, interpretation derived not only from the sheer materiality of the texts, but from the mind that interpreted. Why not offer a trust that God would lead his church into the fullness of truth overtime? Newman, per his age, dismissed the Orientals as backwards and outside the dynamic developments which only took place in Western Europe. Thus it's no surprise that ecclesiastical development and teaching in churches outside the bounds of the Roman church (such as the Assyrian Church of the East) would simply be ignored. Protestants need not give up the ground: maybe the early church did look more like Protestants than Rome. But I digress. Contrary to fear of higher critics, intensive scholarship has defended many basic doctrines of historic Christianity. Whether its Bauckham's defense of the historicity of the Gospels, N.T. Wright's coherent integration of Paul within the story of the Old Testament, or Larry Hurtado's defense of a high Christology within the New Testament, scholarship can help elucidate the text of Scripture to clarify a generous and deep orthodoxy.

Per Newman's quotation of Bishop Butler, Christianity offers "a scheme or a system; not a fixed, but a progressive one" (74-75). This is not Development of Doctrine, but an attention to the oracles of God. And such awareness, in its full and comprehensive sense, is not individuals aimlessly interpreting for themselves, building their own systems. Rather, one can hope for a spiritual unity derived from the active Word of God shaping the consciences in men. Thus, is it any surprise that the strongest branches of Christianity exist among the heirs of the Fundamentalists? Despite institutional divisions and substantive doctrinal disagreements, they still adhere to the basics of the faith revealed in Scripture. On the contrary, Rome's institutional unity is riven with division in practice, teaching, and life. How is Fr. James Martin not only allowed to freely undermine the normative sex ethics of the church in his public teaching, but receive tacit approval through promotion (appointed to the Vatican's Secretariat of Communications)? Hence why conservatives and traditionalists attempt to fence the scope and extent of teaching through ex cathedra statements or ecumenical councils. The problem is that this narrowness is precisely what Newman hoped to avoid, instead looking to an active voice that was constantly working out its kinks and growing into fullness. 

Newman not only offers nothing for Anglicans, but a return to the catholicity of Protestant ecclesiology is preferable. Thus, instead of utilizing tradition or councils as chains, infallible clarifications of doctrine, they should be seen as expositions of the infallible fount of doctrine: scripture. Such was how the Nicaean fathers saw their task. They were not receiving an oracular clarification of the source material, but faithfully stating what they had always believed. Hence why even such a stalwart defender of Nicaea, Athanasius, strenuously argued for the use of the non-scriptural concept of homoousious. If one, like Newman, must appeal to an arbitrary or contemporaneous zeitgeist, rather than the tradition understood within a historical epoch, what point is defending tradition? Hence the self-defeating nature of Newman's counter-revolution. Better to stand with Bishop Hoadly, with a wide and deep trust in the active ruling of Christ over His people through the binding words of Scripture. St. Paul did not claim clerical authority over the Bereans to accept his oracular authority, he praised them when they searched the Scriptures for themselves. But how could they? Scripture was unknowable! Did they not know the skeptical acid that awaited this naive hermeneutic of Scripture interpreting Scripture?! If the Bereans are given in Scripture as a faithful model, perhaps all our epistemic obsessions are symptoms of a failed mind.

Probability and historical scholarship provide the grounds to make the move to faith, the weak hand grabbing hold of Divine Word who never lets go. It's precisely the opposite of Newman's supposition, that the revealed impression on the heart/imagination then moves to reason. Rather, it is reason that unveils its limits, its boundaries, and its historic determinations. It's from within the natural given context of God's providence that Revelation occurs. Rather than the vain babbling of pagan shamans, the oracles of God summon man's attention. And it is in this way that Bishop Hoadly (who also gained infamy for denouncing the emotive and hysterical preaching style of his High Church opponents) understood the active government of Christ. Scripture was not a dead book, but a living Word. Christ still spoke through it, slicing through bone and marrow, cutting the heart. Thus, to return once more, Protestants are too quick to reject Chillingworth's claim. For the Bible as religion is in the sense of religion's possible etymology: religare, to bind. Only Scripture can bind the conscience, and it is a living trust in Christ that he applies it through the ministers of his church. They are shepherds, not lords; they are guides, not masters. One does not need a magisterial prince or senate to determine the contents of this Scripture. For as all the fathers, from Irenaeus to John Damascene, put it: the Scripture is a given. Newman must believe in a Spirit, not unlike that of the Hegelians, who uses the "cunning of reason" to advance its goals, even if against the intentions of its agents. The canon of Scripture is not as much of a problem as some make it out to be, which I've briefly sketched out elsewhere.

 Again and again, let us attend to Wisdom. Either the Word of God governs, or He has gone to sleep and delegated His authority elsewhere. I prefer to stand with Hoadly and believe the former. There is no need for Newman's hysteria or magic. Instead, it is enough, as it has been for the Church in every age, to listen to the living Voice of Christ, of which the Scriptures bear constant witness. It is this living Word who built a Kingdom "not of this world". Rather than build upon sand, let us give a hearty Amen.