Among the Detritus of the Storm: Calvinism, Intelligent Design, and the End of Friendship
September 14, 2005
Until today it has not occurred to me that Intelligent Design, with its demiurge designer deity, is an attractive heresy principally to those Christians with a reflexive and unreflective Calvinist streak. ID tries to establish philosophically a case for deism, with the idea that one need not stop there theologically. As indicated in this essay by John Piper (a reformed Baptist) on Hurricane Katrina and follow-up commentary on it by David Mills (a fellow papist, I must inquire after his spiritual director), the mingling of ID and Calvinism can lead to a kind of theological reductionism that strongly implies deism.
With its proto-modern anthropology and weak ecclesiology, Calvinism tends to divorce the community of men from one another and from God the father, promoting instead a false yet intense focus on individual sin under the judgment of an all-powerful and inscrutable God. The problem, of course, is not a recognition of divine wrath and judgment, or the acknowledgment of individual sin, or that God isn’t inscrutable, but that all those things can become horribly twisted when preached from a standpoint of enlightenment anthropology and ecclesiology.
Historically, this is how things have played out: Calvinism bred Deism which bred Atheism and a multitude of ever more marginal reaction and reform movements seeking secure ground in and between the extremes of neo- and paleo-Calvinism, with Evangelicalism arising as a somewhat post-Calvinist solution that sometimes borrows from both ends.
As a perceptive reviewer notes, Bernard Cottret, in his biography of John Calvin,
portrays Calvin through the eyes of the harassed Genevans who resisted and opposed him, either by breaking wind and playing skittles during his sermons, or by opposing “fucking predestination.” Cottret does not make Calvin’s theology any more attractive or sympathetic than Calvin himself. “This is undoubtedly the most perfect summary of Calvin’s theology: God speaks, God chooses, God summons,” he says. “Calvin’s God was an absolute sovereign,” choosing and rejecting arbitrarily. This God, “equipped with a square and a compass,” paved the way for the God of the Deists. “Calvin’s God was a tidy God” for whom “cleanliness was next to godliness,” giving rise to Puritan concerns for purity.
Popular reception of Calvin and the various reformational splinters of the 16th Century gives a very different picture from the received wisdom of the “history of ideas” approach which narrates the reformation through a few leaders and big books. Of course this messy patchwork was itself the seedbed giving rise to the reformation. The situation of huge diversity in belief and practice all over Europe as key intellectual issues came to a crisis amid mass publishing, urbanization, and state centralization was both the genesis and mode of discovery of disunity. The paradox of the reformation was that new instruments of control and communication made unprecedented levels of unity conceivable and possible, thereby rendering the old unified-pluralist order of Christendom eradicable and thus unacceptable. That is to say, it could be refused and so it was. The end result was the amplification of old divisions, and not a few new ones, arising out of the quest for unity. The catholic church can’t be understood as ‘christian’ or ‘united’ in the protestant, legal-textualist sense, and protestant unity devolved to mutual acquiescence in necessarily legal confessions: the advent of the constitutional church; the church as an “idea” rather than a fraternal existence with one another and with God under his will.
Calvin’s big heresy wasn’t theological per se. Theology is always secondary, as I have said before. It was political, anthropological, and ecclesiological. His soteriology was essentially Augustine’s, and could have fit quite comfortably within the forgiving confines of Romish unity (and still does in some forms). It was Calvin’s insistence on the possibility of a real break from Rome without claiming catholicism (as Luther and the English did), resulting in a constitutionalized faith, which played into the hands of the burgeoning deism of enlightenment philosophes, especially the moderate Anglo-American ones who didn’t themselves believe but continued to push protestantism on the masses as a good thing to inculcate the democratic ideals of the new constitutional man, keeping him working hard, and within the confines of the law. The result is depleted theology wherein God’s main role is “Guarantor of the Moral Order.” Which is, coming full circle, exactly the purpose to which Mills puts his ID deistic designer: to maintain a ground from which to condemn looters in the wake of Katrina’s destruction and to fortify the constitutional order.
The following account of this theological declension and deformation by an Anabaptist scholar and Pantagruelist Thomas Heilke is instructive. Heilke’s account of Calvin’s recovery of institutional community following the disruptions of the reformation is a description of the constitutionalizing of all modern relationships:
Like Luther, [Calvin] appears unable to conceive of friendship as something more than a relation of pleasure or utility in the course of a life in which we move not toward moral excellence and maturity in that excellence, but toward the overwhelming experience of the grace and election of God that descends upon the solitary individual.
To be sure, friendship, like justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence, are means by which God preserves society, even through the unbeliever, but these good works can all be executed through bad motives, and none are worthy of regard apart from the grace of God. In what way friendship preserves order Calvin does not say. His recovery of a language of politics from its Lutheran demise is a recovery toward authoritarian forms of rule, both in his ecclesiology, as I have noted, and in his account of civil government in the final chapter of the Institutes. The vocabulary of that chapter includes rule and magistracy, law and obedience, sovereign decree and individual conscience, but rarely concord and never friendship. Government may exist to promote piety, but this promotion is doctrinal and institutional, not convivial, effected through common peace and security, and laws that safeguard public manners.
It is possible, finally, to be admitted to [the] friendship of God, but not by any action that we may undertake. On the contrary, though we may be redeemed by Christ, still, until we are engrafted into union with him by the calling of the Father, we are darkness, the heirs of death, and the enemies of God. What the substance of friendship with God, once we are elected to it by God, consist of Calvin does not say. Indeed, Calvin leaves his reader with the distinct impression that friendship is nothing other than that status of election itself. It is in its motives, not its outward appearance, that a deed of virtue, including friendship, is distinguished from one of vice. The friends and family of God are the Church, which has this status by dint of God having elected each individual member individually to divine grace. The substance of such friendship is exhibited in specific acts of obedience, but these acts do not bring us closer to a sovereign, omnipotent and omniscient God in the way that common experience tells us acts of mutual kindness, support, or understanding can deepen or solidify friendships. We cannot be fellow-workers of God except in the sense that God imputes to Himself any acts of His people that display His benevolence. [….]
One might summarize the Protestant socio-political and ecclesiastical problem by suggesting that it reduces to determining how to bring Protestant man back to a consciousness of community after having first encouraged his individualism. In this Luther was largely unsuccessful, but Calvin was not. With his conception of a triangular relationship of ruler, people, and the law, he was able to re-establish the idea of the institutionalized community, but, in my estimation, this idea never recovered the substance of the friendship idea that had animated so much of earlier political conceptions. [….]
In the conceptions of political friendship that take their cue from Aristotle and even the Stoics, virtue friendship is understood to be an activity of improvement—friends make each other better, more complete in virtue. For Calvin, and especially Luther, the sphere of politics can play no such role; oddly (at least until we consider carefully their theologies of divine grace), the church cannot or does not fully play such a role, either. In the accounts of friendship that Aristotle and Aquinas have left us, “the quality of our friendships and the quality of our moral lives are inseparable.” Calvin or Luther may have believed this, but they don’t say so, and I suspect that they did not, in fact, believe it. Their estimation of the quality of a moral life was bound up in the terms of duty, law, command, and grace, not in accounts of a friendship with God or of human beings one with another in which one could give a narrative account of the constitutive elements of one’s own or another’s good and in which that good is understood as something attained in the ongoing development and practice of virtue. Absent an account of human telos that contains a developmental narrative and not merely grace-infused, rule-bound acts in response to commands, the “quality” of a friendship may be judged in utilitarian terms, but not under the terms of its effects on the moral quality of a moral life.
So too is the quality of man’s relationship with God reduced to utilitarian terms by Calvinists and papists alike when they are intent on showing acts of God as fully consonant with the heavenly constitutional order, and in turn showing this deistic God’s dutiful submission to the divine calculus of sin and punishment as the necessary support undergirding our own mortal constitutional order.
To pile irony upon irony, the end result of Calvin’s denuded accounts of man, God, and the law, is a declension not just of religious man, from Christianity to various post-Christian deisms, agnosticisms, and atheisms, but also of political man from self-sufficient freeman and bulwark of a convivial order of fraternal interdependence to dependent and servile victim and suckler on the constitutional teat. To be a member of the post-Christian constitutional community is to be saved not by friendship but by election, which quickly becomes entitlement and birth-right. Such a political order must, by necessity, end in the many universalisms of the protestant church, both outright religious universalism and the more restrained universalism of civil religion which stops at national borders. The lesson remains that inevitably, any theology separated from the church and the sacraments and the hard-assed structures and communities of praxis goes rotten.
This is Among the Detritus of the Storm: Calvinism, Intelligent Design, and the End of Friendship in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Illich vs. Comenius: The Educational Enterprise in the Light of the Gospel | Next: “I’ve Got a Stone in My Shoe” (Pat Robertson) | TrackBack (1) | Comments (0)
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Terry Mattingly has clarified his meaning and terms somewhat regarding the Poynter and GetReligion posts I mentioned here earlier today. He writes that he never mentioned “traditional Evangelicals,” which I think he intends as a reference to my remark … [Read More]
Tracked on September 19, 2005 05:02 AM