17 February 2015 A.D. (Presbyterian) Dr. Trueman’s Surrejoinder to (Anglican) Dr. Merrick: Catholicity Reduced to Ashes--Removing Foot from Mouth
17
February 2015 A.D. (Presbyterian) Dr. Trueman’s
Surrejoinder to (Anglican) Dr. Merrick: Catholicity Reduced to Ashes--Removing Foot from Mouth
Catholicity Reduced to Ashes: A Surrejoinder to James Merrick
As understood initially, Dr. Trueman was writing for
Ref21’s Baptyerians and evangelicals. Ref21 appears to have a small (if any at all)
Anglican constituency. Ref21 is largely a Baptyerian, quasi-evangelical affair.
Trueman,
Carl. “Catholicity Reduced to Ashes: a Surrejoinder to James Merrick.” Reformation21. 16 Feb 2015. http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2015/02/i-am-grateful-to-james.php. Accessed 16 Feb 2015.
Catholicity Reduced to Ashes: A Surrejoinder to James Merrick
I am
grateful to James Merrick for his thoughtful and measured response to my piece
on Lent and for providing me with an opportunity to address the matter further.
Reading
Merrick's response, I suspect one of my ecclesiological assumptions needs to be
made explicit. Let me be clear: I have no objection to someone choosing
individually to observe Lent. Indeed, if somebody at my church decided to go to
another church on Wednesday to have ashes imposed, I would not discipline them,
although I may ask them why they did so. I would, however, object to any church
making it a normative requirement or even a highly desirable expectation. That
would seem to me to go beyond the legitimate power of the church.
That
is an important point: While Merrick sees a concern about excessive penitential
practices as driving the Reformed repudiation of Lent, I would argue that it
was as much to do with a concern for the erosion of Christian liberty and the
illicit binding of consciences in which the late medieval church indulged. That
point, the issue of the nature and extent of church power, still applies today
and underlies my concerns.
Merrick
is worried about the matter of catholicity and the truncation of this concept
by the Reformed. Indeed, he expresses the concern that the Reformed tradition
"treats the 1500-1700s as a kind of moment of purity in the history of the
church." Ironically, my own scholarly work has been devoted to proving the
precise opposite: That Reformed Orthodoxy drew deeply and self-consciously on
creedal, patristic and medieval theology in its attempt to formulate its
confessions. For some of us, this Reformed catholicity is hardly a new
discovery: see the subtitle of my 2007 monograph on the theology of John Owen,
or indeed the subtext of my 1998 study of his Trinitarianism. Nor, one might
add, is such historic Reformed catholicity so shallow as to be merely dependent
upon following selected parts of the liturgical calendar.
The
question of catholicity is, of course, more complicated than merely adopting a
practice or a doctrine because it has deep historical and ecclesiastical roots.
After all, Anglicans in the tradition of Hooker have rejected a large number of
the elements of 'catholic' tradition. Roman supremacy, purgatory,
transubstantiation, prayers for the dead, and the cult of the saints all have
good claims to deep catholic roots. So why have Anglicans abandoned these? Presumably
they have done so because they do not think that scripture gives grounds for
retaining them. Well, once the scripture principle is allowed as an arbiter of
true catholicity, the best we can say about Lent is that it might be a
harmless, if biblically unjustifiable, personal preference with some historical
roots - which is a point I never denied.
Yet
if this point about the scripture principle is unpersuasive to Anglicans, let
me offer an observation on Anglicanism along the same lines of Merrick's
critique of the Reformed. Anglicanism's own selective catholicity would seem to
imply that Hookerites regard those same centuries, 1500-1700, as a kind of
moment of purity for the decision as to which prior catholic traditions can
stand and which should be cast aside.
This
is not a new problem for Anglicans. It was a significant part of what moved
John Henry Newman Romeward. Of course, if the brilliant Newman could not
persuade his friend, John Keble, Hooker's greatest editor, of the immense
difficulties of Anglican claims to historic catholicity, it is unlikely that I
will do so with Hooker's present disciples. Yet Newman's critique surely
remains a major challenge to anyone who blithely assumes the straightforward
catholicity of the Anglican tradition as embodied in the Thirty-Nine Articles,
the Homilies, and the Book of Common Prayer. It is actually much more
theologically complicated and historically contested than that.
All
of this is, however, largely beside the point of my original article. My main
purpose was not to point to problems in the Anglican tradition's claims to
catholicity. It was to critique a recent cultural anomaly: The curious
phenomenon of interest in Ash Wednesday and Lent among evangelicals whose
ecclesiastical commitments do not theologically or historically sanction
observance of such.
Certainly,
if these people are motivated by a desire for true catholicity, then I am wrong
in my claims that this Lenten renaissance represents an eclectic, consumerist
impulse. Yet I find it most odd that there might be those who observe Lent as
an act of identification with the church catholic while repudiating a catholic
practice such as infant baptism or a catholic doctrine such as eternal
generation or any hint of catholic polity. I suppose that such confusion is not
beyond the realms of possibility. But if such evangelicals really do think they
are observing Lent out of a conscious desire for recovering historic
catholicity, it would seem to prove precisely the point I am trying to make: The
hold of eclectic consumerism on the evangelical imagination is such that the
notion of historic catholicity itself has become just another eclectic
consumerist construct.
And,
of course, it was that evangelical constituency, not the traditional Anglicans,
who were the primary target of my original article.
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