Guy on Me

Guy Waters devotes a chapter to my views on sacramental theology in his recent book. While much of it is a reasonably accurate summary of my various writings on this subject, he devotes a few pages to critique. Here are a few responses to that critique.

1) Waters rightly notes that my sacramental theology involves a conscious effort to think through sacramental theology in terms of a “Trinitarian personalism.” In his discussion of this background, he claims that Ralph Smith and I share an “ontological skepticism” that leaves us with little to say about the essence of God “except that it exists.” He is also concerned that Smith and I do not do justice to the unity of God, since Smith’s “perferred means of giving expression to the divine unity is relational but not ontological.”

But this criticism assumes an opposition of relational and ontological that both Smith (OK, let me call him Ralph) and I are challenging. We are not saying that we should conceive the Trinity or human nature as relational rather than ontological; we are suggesting that relationship is ontological, pursuing a relational ontology, or at least insisting that relationship is not epiphenomenal to being. This seems to me a perfectly obvious implication of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The same point serves as a response to the charge of “ontological skepticism.” I’m not an ontological skeptic. I can kick the rock with Dr Johnson. But I am suspicious about an ontology whose founding concept is “substance,” especially if we are trying to think about ontology in a Trinitarian framework.

I have difficulty seeing how Waters arrived at the conclusion that we are incapable of saying anything about the essence of God. Perhaps His point is that we don’t want to talk about the “essence of God” but about “God.” If that’s what he means, he’s correct; I don’t like the “distancing” involved in talk of God’s essence as if it were something distinct from God the Trinity. But that doesn’t leave me with a skeptical apophaticism. On the contrary: I affirm everything Scripture affirms about God, and I have argued (in lecture if not in print) that only a Trinitarian theology can really have a doctrine of God’s attributes (if we can, as I think we ought, understand “essence” as interchangeable with “attributes”). This in fact is the whole point of Ralph’s quite brilliant discussion of “righteousness.”

Waters has some minor criticisms of my Trinitarian work: I may have dismissed Aristotle too readily, and I haven’t given a detailed justification for using contemporary philosophical categories. It’s all true, and my only plea is finitude.

One additional point needs clarification, though: at one point, Waters claims that my philosophical tail is wagging my theological dog (p. 182) but later suggests that one of my articles “shows how Leithart attempts to pursue sacramental theology without reference to ontological philosophical categories and discussions” (p. 370). He’s not being inconsistent, since the emphasis in the latter comment is on an absence of “ontological” categories. I’m guilty of letting a non-ontological philosophy control my theology. Perhaps I am. But what I’m trying to do is let Scripture control my theology, and employing whatever philosophical categories and concepts might come to hand. And it seems to me that Scripture is perfectly capable of talking about sacramental theology without appeal to what Waters would recognize as “ontological categories.”

2) He asks if the grace of regeneration is an “infusion of a habitus, as Reformed theology has often argued.” He believes that this concept protects against the notion that regeneration is a physical change and the notion that it is a kind of “divine possession.” He also asks whether, on my view, we can still say that the works of a believer are properly his own; I am in danger of killing the “biblical synergism of sanctification.”

This is an intriguing criticism, since the Federal Vision is usually condemned as a legalistic not an antinomian move. I think Waters is right to be more concerned about me (and my friends) verging in the latter than the former direction – he’s more on target here than Cal Beisner is in his introduction to the book.

But to respond: Waters is here operating on a nature/supernature scheme that has been the principal object of my polemics lo these many years. All my actions, not merely the good works that come under the heading of sanctification, are both caused by God and by me. They are His and my own. Waters seems to think that we need to protect the “properly his own” of the works of sanctification; but in a decretal, Calvinistic, creationist perspective, where everything is literally settled ahead of time and where God is dynamically concurrently active in every action of every creation, the problem of “properly his own” arises EVERYWHERE. The only way of keeping it from being a problem is to assume (usually without admitting it) that there are creaturely actions that are EXCLUSIVELY the creature’s own. But there aren’t: All of us, regenerated or not, live and move and have our being in Him.

I don’t think we need the device of habitus to formulate the doctrine of regeneration (to turn one of Waters’s criticism of me back on him – is it plausible that Paul was operating with an idea of habitus?). I don’t believe Scripture teaches anything is infused into us in regeneration and sanctification other than the Holy Spirit Himself. I’m a Trinitarian Personalist, after all.

As for divine possession, that’s how the gift of the Spirit looks in the Bible – Samson in battle-frenzy, Jesus suspected of insanity, the apostles drunk with new wine. What’s the problem?

3) Waters criticizes my discussions of sacramental efficacy because it is normally used to refer to the question of the “communication of grace to the recipient,” while I use it in a sociological sense. He cites WLC 161’s language about sacraments being efficacious to salvation to illustrate. My formulations tempt people to think of “redemption in sacerdotal terms.” Elsewhere, he claims that I speak of efficacy “in sociological terms” and leave open the question of “whether this sociological change is the only change of which we may speak.”

But I don’t leave that question open, not even a crack. My discussions of sacramental efficacy start from the point that, when we’re talking church and sacraments, there is nothing “social” to talk about that is not always infinitely more than “social.” (I agree with Milbank that there is no isolatable “social” anywhere, but that’s a slightly different point.) And, I refuse to talk about “grace” except as a personal gift, which includes a self-gift, from the Triune God. The criticism, in other words, again simply assumes what I’m challenging. I’m not saying “social as opposed to soteriological”; I’m saying that when we’re talking church and sacraments the social is soteriological, and vice versa.

I don’t agree that this leads to “sacerdotal” views of sacraments. I instead think that the polarization of the social and soteriological (which is, after all, only one manifestation of a polarization of nature and supernature) is the source of “sacerdotal” views. And I would argue that Waters, by maintaining the polarization, is giving more aid and comfort to sacerdotalists than I am.

4) Waters concludes that my views o

n sacramental theology do not “leave Westminster’s doctrine of the sacraments untouched,” and says that since I define my terms differently I am suggesting that “the classical sacramental distinctions but also the sacramental doctrines themselves, as traditionally formulated, are illegitimate.”

I’ll leave to my Presbytery the question of whether my views are out of accord with the Confession. I do think that certain traditional distinctions and terms have done more harm than good.

5) He says I am “most comfortable” when speaking of sin and redemption in corporate rather than “moral” terms, but, since I won’t give up the moral, he suggests, quoting Warfield on Chafer, that this leaves my mind divided between two systems of religion, and thinks I should “choose one and set the other free.”

I simply do not understand this criticism. I have written a good deal about the communal aspects of sin, but I don’t see how this in any way comes at the expense of the moral or theological. Unless one assumes that “moral” means “individual morality,” talking about the communal dimensions of sin is also talk about moral issues. Righteousness is, inevitably, theological and moral and social all at once – and so is sin; sin is always offense against God, an individual moral fault, and damaging to community.

6) Waters thinks he spots a contradiction between my “ontological” talk about grace in one place and my insistence elsewhere on a “relational” conception of grace. I’m sure I’ve not been perfectly consistent in my use of language, and I definitely have changed my mind on a host of things over the years. But that’s only a contradiction if one assumes that “ontological” and “relational” are separate concerns, which is of course precisely what I, as a Trinitarian personalist, deny.

7) Waters claims that my affirmation that “Baptism is baptism” has disastrous hermeneutical implications. By the same hermeneutic, we have no way to discern between literal and figurative speech, we might as well affirm transubstantiation, and we’ll be left with problems of harmonization in the gospels.

I think that Waters is confusing issues here, though I may be misreading what he’s about. I’m concerned with a question of referent: When the NT uses “baptism,” I believe they’re referring to the rite of water baptism (not invariably – Jesus is “baptized” on the cross). That’s a question of what the writers are referring to. I think that Waters changes the subject when he begins talking about anthropomorphisms and transubstantiation. We can talk about the same referent in literal and in figurative ways – we can speak, say, of God’s arm or His power. But those two ways of speaking have the same object in view. I’m not sure that this is an adequate response, however.

8) Waters claims that I commit “us” to a “mechanistic doctrine of sacramental efficacy.” No, I’m committed to personalism through and through. God is always free and sovereign, an infinite Person, a Trinity of Persons. But He’s a God who does what He says, who meets us where He promised to meet us.

9) He claims that I haven’t proven that the Spirit came on Saul “only officially and externally.” Well, the text says that Saul became a new man, which seems pretty strong to me. And, again to turn Waters’s criticisms back on him, isn’t the use of “official and external” categories an anachronism? What evidence does Waters have that the OT writers thought in these terms? More generally, I have argued in various places that sealing off internal and external in self-contained sections of experience is contrary to Scripture and the product of modern, or late medieval, notions – specifically, the nature/supernature polarity, once again.

10) Regarding his exegetical responses to my articles on baptism, I can only say that I don’t find his exegesis persuasive. Perhaps I’ll have time to deal with his objections in detail at a later point. I need particularly to ponder his argument that the experience of Simon Magus conflicts with my claim that the Spirit works in baptism.

11) Distinguishing the Spirit’s work from water baptism, he argues, helps preserve the distinction of visible and invisible church. He claims that I share a view of “undifferentiated covenant membership.” That’s not accurate, since I do believe that covenant members who are on the way to apostasy are in a different sort of relationship with God than covenant members who are on their way to glory. The analogy of marriage is useful: A couple whose marriage will end in divorce have a different quality of marriage than a couple who will celebrate their golden anniversary happily. But both couples are equally married. This analogy highlights once again my emphasis on personalism, which, far from giving us an “undifferentiated covenant membership,” gives us a richly varied and nuanced view of covenant membership. In the course of history, people in covenant are related to the Triune God in all sorts of complicated ways; there are all shades and variants of covenant membership, from Moses-like faithfulness, to Aaron-like vacillation, to David-like faithfulness with great sin, to Solomonic apostasy after a time of faithfulness, and so on.