I had this specifically in mind when I said to Mervin let’s see what happens as we discuss it here.
Penner’s second type of apologetic violence (which was only hinted at in the conversation with Craig) is central to his understanding of premodern society.
That is generously non-territorial of you to allow. I can imagine from your POV it is like watching the baby monkey cuddle up to the cold wire substitute for his mama. I know my comfort will never equal your own but given my limitations I accept it gratefully and appreciate you just the way you are.
I appreciate your willingness to even try to find a way to make sense of faith from the vantage point closest to an insider’s that you can find. That is rare. It makes conversations possible that other wise could not happen. Thanks for trying.
I suppose Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans … maybe others too would all bristle to hear you call the sacraments unbiblical. I’m an Anabaptist, so we aren’t exactly “high-churchy”, and it is probably ironic, then, that I should take it upon myself to defend any sacraments - but I will, though only to a certain extent - I won’t be doing anything close to dying on this hill to get you to agree with me.
Just because the word ‘sacrament’ might not be anywhere in scriptures (and I don’t think it is … like ‘trinity’), doesn’t mean that the concept wasn’t formulated directly from scriptural events, such as the Lord’s last meal with his disciples, and the instructions - the command actually, given there.
Now - to the extent that a very certain “correct” practice of rites representing ‘sacraments’ come to dominate church life, to the point of becoming just a salvific formula - a kind of magic totum or ritual to comfort one in the midst of an otherwise nonChrist-oriented life? Yeah - if that’s all the ‘sacraments’ are, them I’m with you … mostly. But even here I still feel a pause. Because these things could be the last little thread of connection that an otherwise dissolute life may have with the divine. It might be the crack in the door that the Spirit eventually uses to more fully break in. Who are we to write off such possibilities?
Well put! And provoking too. Penner does set a high bar for this whole process, though - and it may be in some other later chapter - I don’t recall. But he insists on something like the ends being known by the means used (in stark opposition to “ends-justifiying-means” thinking). So, holding him to his own standard, I’m not sure that even a single trampled flower-bed could be justified.
That said, I’m still with you on this, Mark. I find writing to be a special kind of “truth-telling” spiritual (and yet it can too often be prideful too) practice for myself. The medium is a real gift that our age is able to enjoy more than any other in history. It’s therapy too. Unlike in conversations and even debates, you can speak your whole mind - to the end, with no fear of anyone interrupting you. You can go back and “listen to yourself”, and cringe and edit appropriately - literally taking words back; as long as you hadn’t yet hit the ‘post’ button, and maybe even after. None of that is true for speech, which is very surfacy, very reactionary, based more on real-time stream-of-thought than on deep reflection. Speech is valuable for very different reasons - dangerous ones, even. It does provide some window into your heart, but it is an unfiltered window, and the speaker is not entirely in control of what that window reveals. The notorious “Freudian slips” may reveal more about us than we meant or wanted to reveal. Which makes it the preferred communication for interrogations. So speech too, can have its apologetic violence. But if we are always afraid of offending, (and face-to-face brings on that fear in spades for many of us) then we may be denying others any opportunity to learn things about us that lurk below the speech surface. By writing in public places like this, (unless we are obliged to hide behind anonymity - an understandable practice for most in these situations), we are baring a deeper part of our soul to countless present and future strangers in ways that those around us physically might never get access to othewise. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Yes. I know I don’t know everything I’m going to know and don’t always know what to think until I begin to communicate - preferably in editable writing to accommodate those future insights just up around the next corner … or wherever this horse is off to next.
Edited to add I also don’t know everything I used to know (for age related reasons) and probably only agree with some fraction of that now.
I suppose a real worry would be if postmodernism had the effect of leading Christians to understand the evolutionary benefits of religion as stemming from its ability to provide a cultural imaginative framing for received knowledge would that make the wheels come off and land us all in some ditch?
Edited to add that while I feel appreciative and affectionate toward Christianity it hasn’t been enough to lead me to put a credal ring on it. I’d like to think if I’d gotten to that point prior to seeing things this way, it wouldn’t have been enough to make me take ring off. But I can’t know that for sure.
That’s not what I wrote.
As in the only way to know God is through Word and sacrament.
Thanks for correcting that. I read too hastily.
Yeah - I do totally agree then. Saying God can only be known through sacraments … along with you, I’m pretty sure that bucket won’t carry water.
I’m more confident in Jamie Smith’s analysis as a philosopher, and would dare not underestimate his ability to understand how liturgical practices affect belief formation.
If Penner were to attach the work of the Spirit to his understanding of belief formation, he and Craig might find themselves on a closer trajectory.
That Smith wrote such a congratulatory foreword to Keener’s Spirit Hermeneutics, may well signal the path Smith is also headed.
At the risk of repeating answers already given somewhere … I see Penner answering this toward the end of chapter 1 that it’s essentially about our culturally embedded perceptions of the universe (enchanted vs. disenchanted).
From Penner (p. 44)
Unlike Craig’s classical apologetics, when Thomas talks about “knowing,” “reason,” or “truth”—or any other theoretical entity—he simply does not understand these concepts in the terms spelled out by the modern paradigm. To begin with, he does not find himself in the modern condition of secularity and does not imagine himself to be engaged in an objective, dispassionate discourse outside of political power. His apologetic strategy is also not based on the assumption that the universe is impersonal or that the reasons we have for belief in God can be held rationally apart from a worldview that has minimally theistic commitments. That this realization eludes Craig and most other Christian apologists is a function of the self-forgetfulness generated by their commitment to the modern epistemological paradigm (OUNCE) and the modern practices that disengage self and reason from the universe.
How accurate Penner’s conclusions about Aquinas are here, I’m not in a position to say, not having read Aquinas myself. But I’ll admit it is hard to think that Aquinas would not have been aware of his own “minimally theistic commitments”, given how thoroughgoing he was said to have been about proving God’s existence. If there was a “pre-modern” world to be recognized as distinct from the modern one (and I think Penner is correct about this), then I imagine Aquinas was on the tail end of a long pre-modern continuum that was already having birthing-labor pains with modernism by Aquinas’ time. And Aquinas may have been one of the more significant midwives of that transition.
I also think Penner overstates Craig’s apparent blindness to all this, and in light of their later exchanges, I shouldn’t be surprised if Penner would have worded it differently if writing it now. I do think Penner still is on to something, though, in suggesting that for the majority of us all, who are much less formal with our philosophical discourse than somebody like Craig would be, are still going to have our modernist blinders preventing us from taking stock of how the apostolic emphases of the early church age do not align with the modernist emphasis we just assume now.
So it seemed to me also. But–pardon my ignorance–when I read Penner “calling Craig out”, in Chapter 1, I thought: “Ah, Penner, … you weren’t expecting Julie Roys, a “Craig-devotee”, to bring you on to her podcast AND give Craig a microphone too; you got shy, didn’t you?”
I heard that, and made allowance for it. After all, Penner’s an Anglican priest, “Word and Sacrament” are staight out of Martin Luther’s mouth, so to speak, and “synonymous” with “the Foundation of the Ministry”. [For reference, take a quick peek at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana’s website: The Foundation of Ministry: Word and Sacraments.
How do you understand this? Is it being said Aquinas saw himself doing philosophy within political power?
It could be said that by the very act of engaging Aristotle via the Muslim tradition, Aquinas was doing modern apologetics.
I think so too. At some point I think it’ll be worthwhile to look at his later essay on the unknown mover.
I understand it as Penner’s claim that in the pre-modern world (the world that Penner sees Aquinas in), they would not have thought, as we moderns do, that there exists some neutral ‘public square’ to which all different religions and perspectives could come to traffic their ideas in some sort of large and objective market place of ideas. The premoderns instead already shared a commitment to an ‘enchanted’ universe which was itself a domain of God or gods, and political powers, religious powers were all just members of this inhabited universe and individuals too had their places within these various dominions - which was their entire universe. There was no “stepping outside of those influences” to try to adjudicate things from outside, because … there was no “outside”. The entire universe, from any ivory towers, to any fortress towers, to any palace, to the peasant’s hovel, and the streets outside that hovel - all of it was the inhabited playground place for these powers-that-be. You could set yourself against some of them, or be in subjugation to others - but they were your co-inhabitors to contend with if you could. They filled your entire universe - there would be no ‘private place’ such as your own home where you escape these dominions, and no ‘public’ place where any of these dominions would be banished or restricted for any purposes of a not-even-yet-concieved ‘neutrality’. You were probably under the authority of a good many of them, and there would be no escaping that, short of bloody (probably for you) rebellion.
That’s what I see as Penner’s characterization of the premodern world.
Thank you Mervin. That’s helpful to see “political power” in relation to a “neutral public square.”
If you’re interested. Paul Strathern has a helpful introduction to Aquinas, ‘Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes.’
I like how well he describes the social and cultural context of Aquinas. I learned that there’s general agreement his first work, ‘Summa Contra Gentiles,’ is written to an imaginary audience of intellectual Arabs. How many Arabs subjected themselves to his grueling work and reached the same conclusion as Aquinas is unknown.
I am interested … Especially if he is a recognized and respected scholar.
He appears competent as a historian for that period. Negative reviews of his book tend to focus on it being weak as a summary of Aquinas’ philosophy. As for history, it’s informative and entertaining.
Me too. I just wish he hadn’t used Kierkegaard. Some 45+ years ago, I picked up a used copy of Kierkegaard’s “Attack Upon Christendom”. I can no longer remember anything in it, but I distinctly remember reading some of it and writing “Caveat Lector” on its cover. I remember my father, a Lutheran-Missouri Synod pastor, smiling when he read what I had written.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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