Spouse and Kingdom, revisited

In response to my earlier post on “Spouse and Kingdom,” Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio writes,

“it strikes me that the WCF’s dualism in describing the Church reflects the typical Western dualism that was congealing during the 17th century. Invisible and spiritual matters can be described in poetic, imaginative, metaphoric, fuzzy ways, but things we can perceive with the senses, “that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands,” must be described with a more precise vocabulary. The political/juridical vocabulary is more precise, almost scientific, and so more suitable (for 17th century thinkers) for actual living and breathing congregations.

“Your observation helps me understand better why so much Presbyterian ecclesiological writing is more comfortable in describing the Church as a court rather than a community.

“In his essay, ‘Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,’ from the book of the same name, Wendell Berry distinguishes between communal concerns and ‘public’ concerns, and argues that some commitments and relationships (e.g., marriage and sexuality) cannot be adequately understood or governed by ‘the public,’ which are procedural and rights-based, but only by communities, which are organic and love-based. You might find some interesting resonances in that essay to the argument you’re working with about the Confession.”

He adds, “In an essay called ‘The Empty Universe,’ C. S. Lewis, who understood intimately the cultural effects of the assumptions undergirding modern science, observed:

‘At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities . . . . [Yet] [t]he advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was imagined . . . . The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just as mistaken (and mistaken in much the same way) when we attributed “souls,” or “selves” or “minds” to human organisms, as when we attributed Dryads to the trees . . . .’

“Lewis’s reference to the loss of colors, smells, sounds, and tastes, is a reference to the effects of the so-called two-substance theory, the dualistic framework pioneered by Galileo and developed by Descartes, which became the orthodoxy of science. As cultural historian Franklin Baumer summarizes it, the two-substance theory ‘divided the world into two great realms of mind and matter, or of thought and extension. Mind—as signified by final causes—was ejected from nature. So also were all the qualities that had formerly kept nature close to man: the fragrance of flowers, the songs of birds, the color in everything, including light itself. Mind, soul, purpose, belonged to man’s world, no longer to nature’s. Nature, it now appeared, was like a great machine or clock, made of dead matter, possessing fundamentally mathematical characteristics, functioning mechanistically rather than teleologically, obedient to invariable natural laws. This dualism, a triumph of simplification, allowed scientists to pursue their inquiries without paying more than passing attention to theology and metaphysics. Though it created some formidable philosophical and epistemological problems, dualism provided the conceptual framework for a spectacular advance in the sciences.’

“I wonder whether the mentality that informed this sort of dualism infected the Westminster divines at this point, in establishing a different ontology for the ‘visible’ and the ‘invisible’ church. Again, I’m commenting not as a theologian but as someone interested in, not exactly the history of ideas, but the history of intuitions.”