On Whig History, Proto-Protestantism, Sola Scriptura, "The Key of Truth," Lamanites, Pealing Back the Onion, and Frogs and Walls, etc.
A ramble, but I write the way I talk
It is funny sometimes where our minds will take us, if we turn off the noise and give them free rein. I end this ramble remembering an absurd episode of frogs jumping towards walls. But it started when I finished an early 19th-century work, The Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church by the Rev. John Lingard. My copy is from the first American printing, much later in 1848. He is better known for his multi-volume A History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans, which I plan to tackle next. His is an unabashedly Catholic work, though Lingard graciously manages to make his points without resorting to harsh polemics. His standard is always to use the primary sources for the period, for as he says, “Who would draw from the troubled stream, when he may drink from the fountain head?”
In his era, Rev. Lingard had to contend against what later became known as ‘Whig History.'" By the time Herbert Butterfield coined the term in 1931, the idea had begun to be discredited, after running rampant through British historiography for about three hundred years. The concept lives on today largely in the U.S., though under other names. Butterfield noted that “it was part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present.” The interrelated precepts of Whig Historicism are Presentism and Progress; the idea that all history has been building inexorably towards our present reality. In the U.K.’s case, scholars of this persuasion viewed the past as one continuous stream: the age-old English struggle for freedom, marked by the establishment of parliamentary, and by extension, liberal democracy, the rule of law, free markets, and of course today, the championing of human rights. The Reformation, the English Civil War, the “Glorious” Revolution, and the Enlightenment were seen as mere way-stations on this inevitable March of Progress.
The exemplar of this approach had to be the Victorian historian Thomas Babington McCauley. I have a Folio set of his work, but am now a little embarrassed by it. They are no longer at eye level, but just as inexorably as he viewed history itself, these pompous tomes are destined for the march upward to the disregarded and more inaccessible upper shelves. I have not opened one of his volumes in over thirty years. All I remember is his dismissive reference to the Irish as the “aboriginal peasantry.” That was jarring, even then.
Whiggery provided a brand new template for the overhaul of church history. By Lingard’s day, the Church of England held the smug and self-affirming view that the old Anglo-Saxon Church—that is to say, Christianity in the British Isles prior to 1066—was in fact, proto-Protestant; concluding that Anglicanism was nothing more than English Christianity as it had always been before all those pesky Papists showed up and ruined things. From the actual historical record, to accomplish this, you must turn your head just right and squint at one isolated primary source, and then use 17th-century Protestant speculations as your guide for its interpretation. Lingard lays waste to such pretensions, but is always a slightly bemused gentleman in doing so.
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I have also recently enjoyed reading Arthur Machen’s The Secret Glory, where the author had a grand time skewering the smug Anglican pomposity of Victorian England. His Dr. Cresson, an Anglican divine, presided over a public school (that is to say, a private boys school in American parlance) in the heart of the “the unspeakable scenery of the eastern Midlands…dull, monotonous, squalid, the very hedgerows cropped and trimmed, the trees looking like rows of Roundheads…" He explains the Parable of the Talents to his charges:
[we are] each endeavouring to do his best for the good of all. In our studies and in our games, each desires to excel, to carry off the prize. We strive for a corruptible crown, thinking that this, after all, is the surest discipline for the crown that is incorruptible…Be sure that we never win Heaven by despising earth.
Dr. Cresson then richly contrasts his students, striving for success, with the deluded souls he encountered in a Catholic monastery, who in his telling, are wasting away their Talents. So, even the Parables of Jesus were enlisted to promulgate the bourgeoise gospel of “getting ahead,” and “making one’s mark in life.” We may scoff, but is it so very different from Your Best Life Now©?
Of course, Machen is preaching to the choir with me on this. Machen was strongly sympathetic to Catholicism, but never converted. His loyalties always lay with the Celtic Church, which, to Rev. Lingard at least, may not have been as much of a separate thing as Machen imagined. But no matter, he knew that the Anglicans’ blinkered interpretation of the early church was wrong-headed from the start, and he recognized the adherents of the old faith as his allies.
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Reading Lingard’s response to Church of England proto-Protestantism was somewhat familiar territory to me, for fundamentalist preachers join Anglican bishops and divines in projecting their current status onto an unsuspecting past. I spent twenty-five years in a Restorationist cul-de-sac off the main Protestant highway. As with Church of England Proto-Protestantism, our quirky little sect had real problems when it left the page and encountered actual history. Of course, our Mormon friends have an even worse problem. At least Anglicans and American Restorationists have a real history to play with, rather than an imagined Lamanite Mesoamerica peopled with Semites.
Speaking of Mormons, I find it interesting that they are similar to my old group in that both are restorationist outgrowths of the American Second Great Awakening; just that their unique additions put them in a category all by themselves. (And as the recent book, above, indicates, I am far from the only person to note their similarities.) I have recently had a number of very pleasant conversations with the young elders working our community. While Baptist women slam doors in their faces after telling them they are going to hell, I invite them in for lemonade. So, my study provides a break from the norm for them. They do like the fact that I have actually read their Book of Mormon, and have a copy, somewhere. Then they press for what I think of it. These freshly-scrubbed Utahans and Idahoans are not familiar with Southern polite obfuscation. When we say something is “interesting,” what we really mean is that it is bizarre, or even outright hogwash.
But back to our particular fantasy: simply put, there was just nowhere to “fit” our Imagined view of church history into any actual narrative of real people, places or events. We believed that there was a pristine “New Testament church” of the First Century which quickly fell away into Apostacy until “restored” on the American frontier in the early years of the 1800s by Alexander Campbell, a Scots-Irish Presbyterian who had drank deeply from the rationalist wells of the Scottish Enlightenment. These Campbellite churches were anti-sacramental, anti-liturgical, and anti-hierarchical; in short, everything the church of the early centuries wasn’t. But, no matter.
Indeed, little credence was given to the actual lived life of the church up to that point, as our group taught that the proper rationalist hermeneutic applied to Scripture would yield the church, regardless of what had gone before. It seemed like we tried not to think of history at all. Indeed, the Campbellites paid little attention to the Reformation itself, judging that movement to have only gone half the distance. They viewed their movement as being totally outside the Reformation. Indeed, we did not even use the language of sola scriptura, for its association with Luther and the rest. Scripture had to be interpreted the right way, and the Reformers had not shed their “doctrines of men.” In the Restorationist view, their own teachings never fell into this category.
One problem (among many) with this approach to history, is that it flied in the face of Scripture itself, which tells us in Matthew 16:18 that the “gates of hell shall not prevail against” the church. The Restorationists were not going to spend much time with the historical record itself, but designed a narrative to fill-in the 1,700 year gap and address the whole “gates of hell” thing. The solution was as straight-forwardly constructed as the Anglican proto-Protestants and LDS proto-Mormon indigenous peoples: proto-New Testament Christians. The narrative went like this: there had always been these “Bible Christian” renegades: iconoclastic, congregationalist New Testament Christian bibliolaters throughout history, who “went by just the Bible.” That’s it. I understand that some Baptists have a variation on this, but I forget what they call it.
These isolated believers were never specifically identified. One imagines these “First Century Christians” throughout the ages, huddled in their isolated hovels, pouring over their leather-bound KJVs, so they could know how to be '“just Christian.” Church histories connecting the pristine First Century with the Restoration Movement might devote a few paragraphs to these seventeen hundred years. We noted in passing any dissenting sect we had latched-on to as evidence of this: the thread ran from the Paulicians to the Bogomils to the Albigensians or Cathars, and included the Waldensians, as well. All of this was constructed without knowing the first thing about what any of these persecuted sects actually believed.
So how did someone like myself who lives and breathes history end up in such a decided ahistorical group? First, it was my tradition. I grew up in a non-religious household, but this was the faith my dad was brought up in, and you might say his mother’s people had been Campbellites even before Campbell. And then looking around at the vacuity of my broadly Evangelical Protestant world, this, at least, had some substance to it. While acknowledging the incredible naiveté in believing that no one before had ever dispassionately approached interpreting Scripture as they had, I did, however, believe that the Restoration Movement had a better take on it than anyone else. Of course, my context was just Protestantism, and if considered only within those constraints, I would still believe such. With the history part, I determined to make the best of it. But as one of their ministers later told me, “it was never a good fit for you.”
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Most members of my church viewed my interest in history with suspicion, particularly our head elder (our strictly autonomous churches officially did not have “head” elders, and yet I never encountered a congregation without one de facto.) In that world, amateur historians were allowed, as long as they confined themselves to the Civil War and World War II. I remember being at a barbeque once at the home of my wife’s best friend. I was herded over to sit next to someone’s brother-in-law because “they liked history too.” I felt very much like being on the nerd’s sofa at the fraternity mixer in Animal House. Turns out, his interest in history was confined to talking about World War II. That sort of thing happened more than once, and is perhaps the reason I have never shown much interest in the Second World War.
But I threw myself into our history, such as it was. I prepared my MA thesis on our church in ante-bellum Texas, becoming something of an expert on Restoration history, corresponding with the few scholars of such in our colleges. And I was intrigued with the various rabbit trails you could follow in pursuit of these elusive New Testament Christians down through the ages. Take for example the Paulicians, a group I was convinced was an example of New Testament Christians going “just by the Bible.” Apparently they practiced believer’s baptism, which was all-important to us. This was in the days of the very early internet, so research was a bit harder. I did discover, however, that in 1898 an English antiquarian, F. C. Coneybeare, had translated from Armenian The Key of Truth, supposedly containing an exposition of their beliefs. I could never locate a copy.
Now, of course, the text is readily readable online. This sect, founded by an Armenian named Smbat, existed primarily between the eighth and twelfth centuries. They indeed practiced believer’s baptism, and rejected iconography and the hierarchy of all churches; Latin, Orthodox or Armenian, except their own. In fact, they saw themselves as the only Christians—which so far conformed to what some (many? most?) in my Restorationist group believed of themselves. But The Key of Truth goes far beyond that. Their heresy included the belief that Jesus was never God, and in this they seem to run past Arians and Jehovah’s Witnesses. To them, He was merely the “new Adam.” And they rejected the ever-virginity of Mary. In fact, they claim she lost her virginity not later with Joseph, as per all of Protestantism, but at the Annunciation with the Archangel Gabriel. Whatever else you can say about this sect, considering their Christology, the Paulicians were not Christian in any real sense of the word, in any era. Remarkably, a quick internet search shows that there are still people out there trying to make the Paulicians work for this or that fringe of Protestantism.
In 1998, my son and I climbed to the top of Queribus, the ruined Cathar eyrie perched high in the French Pyrenees. The Cathars, or Albigensians, were the end of a tenuous thread that went back to the Paulicians, perhaps, by way of the Bogomils, again perhaps. But upon invesitigating these dualistic gnostics, I found next to nothing American Restorationists could relate to other than opposition to Rome. In fact, all of these supposed examples of the persistence of New Testament Christianity down through the ages turn out to be just variations of standard run-of-the-mill heretical sects with whom we would share few common beliefs.
I did not become Orthodox because of the history. I worry about those who do so solely for that reason. Nor did I become Orthodox because of the beauty, as much as that speaks to me. I became Orthodox because it is true. Having the history, though, is certainly nice; and the history is real, rather than pristine fairy stories.
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Two recent readings relating to the doctrine of sola scriptura entered my mix of synthesizing Lingard and Machen with Restorationists—my own and Mormon (and a hat-tip to my favorite aggregator at Tipsy Teetotaler for this.) Lingard notes, in another context, that “the religion which teaches that death removes the soul beyond the influence of human exertion, teaches at best, a cold and cheerless religion.” I believe this conclusion equally applies to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura as well. I never spent a lot of time thinking about it when I was in a church that practiced it in the extreme. My understanding now is far removed from that casual, unthinking acceptance: what a flimsy and divisive foundation it is for a faith. It is certainly never a case the Bible ever makes for itself.
A faith based on the printed word alone, without a place for oral Tradition was always an iffy thing up until the invention of the printed press. This provided no real answer for the epochs of time and place where the written word was not available to the masses. Access to printed material—the very necessary element in this scenario—was limited to the well-connected and well-healed. The logistics of printed material as the basis of belief—sola scriptura—was pretty much a non-starter for the first fourteen hundred years of Christian history—a belief only really possible after Gutenberg. And of course, this is very much the Islamic view of the Quran, just without the individual interpretation. In fact, this idea of scriptural interpretation without some outside influence smacks of the inherent fallacy of the Enlightenment disregard for human nature itself.
I remember being on the island of Patmos in 2004, visiting the Greek monastery perched atop the mountain. This was a year after I had first encountered Orthodoxy in Bulgaria. In their treasury my son and I saw an enormous codex on display. It turns out that this was just the Gospel of Mark, dating from the the fifth-century, I believe. The entire New Testament would have consisted of a small library. From that point, I knew that sola scriptura was not a real thing, at least up until that point. Nor was Restorationism, which I already jettisoned, or very nearly so. I found the concept completely bogus, perhaps one of the worst applications of Presentism.
Dr. Amir Azarvan, a scholar whose work I have long admired, presents a simple example of just how sola scriptura does not work, here. He and his daughter were attempting to bake a cake as a surprise for his wife. He followed the recipe to the letter, and yet the cake was a flop. What he did not realize was that the recipe assumed a certain level of skill as a baker which he did not possess (nor do I, for that matter.) Azarvan described this as solum consequant, or “recipe alone.” You may say that is to simplistic an analogy. No doubt, the early Reformers probably had a more nuanced understanding, but that is, nevertheless, the way sola scriptura plays out in real life.
Indeed, that is how my former sect approached Scripture. Back in the day (probably less so now), the Bible was compared to a blueprint, from which anyone, assuming an approved hermeneutical methodology, could “restore” the church. Or, Scripture was sometimes compared to a game of baseball, where, if the game ever became extinct (one can only wish), then in centuries to come, it could be restored from the baseball rule book. This was supposed proof of the Restorationist principle. This seemed to satisfy most people, to the extent it was considered at all. They truly believed that they had recreated First Century worship (all by way of the the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment, the 19th-century Second Great Awakening, and 1920s fundamentalism.)
Dr. Azarvan concludes that there must be two conditions for sola scriptura to work: no interpretive authority above the individual, and an end-date for unwritten Traditions. In reality, no one comes to scriptural interpretation free of the human element; either background, training, environment, or any number of factors influence us. Nor does Scripture interpret itself. So, the question he raises is really this: who is able to authoritatively interpret the Bible? Of course, Scripture itself, in I Timothy 3:15 identifies the Church, not the individual believer, as the “pillar and ground of truth.” His second point is one I made earlier: “if God wished to communicate Truth through one medium, alone, why on earth would He choose one that was inaccessible to most people?”
Ryan Adams, here, raises interesting points about the doctrine, finding the whole idea “horrifying.”
It simply isn’t possible to have Scripture alone, since you didn’t receive Scripture alone. Instead, all of us were taught about Scripture by someone else. It didn’t just fall out of the sky and land on us. And even if it did, it’s still given to us by someone, the authors who had lives, cultures, rituals, and all number of things which provide a context for the Scriptures. And context means that Scripture is by no means “alone.”
I have never seen Jacques Derrida quoted in Christian apologetics, but Adams notes this by the famous French philosopher:
there’s a serious problem which arises from the relentlessly individualistic model of Biblical interpretation. Whenever anyone begins their own interpretation of anything, without direction, they form a sort of autobiography in their interpretation. Interpretation of this sort reflects nothing but oneself.
To form an image of God based on yourself is simple idolatry. Adams goes on to make the same points Azarvan does, but concludes with one of his own: Pride.
The pride of Sola Scriptura, if it is even possible, is in its rejection of those who have taught us: our parents, our preachers/priests/teachers, the history of the Church (the saints, the councils, the Fathers), and through this, even the Apostles, those who learned everything directly from the mouth of Christ himself; in favor of a vain autobiography of self-interpretation. A self-portrait painted with the colors of the Gospel….Even the most well-meaning person who takes the “Scripture Alone” seriously will be nothing more than an arm chair theologian, someone who is completely ignorant of the period and context of the texts written and so instead is forced to put their own context and period in as a stand in.
The “vain autobiography” of “an arm chair theologian” rings true. I spent twenty-five years in my own quirky corner of Protestantism (although they vehemently deny they are such; to which I respond, “apply ‘duck test.'“) I listened to over 1,300 sermons over that time, and probably twice that many bible lessons. I do not regret it, for I think that, in a strange way, they primed me for Orthodoxy when the time was right.
I like this from Fr. Andrew Louth:
This engagement with the past is not simply a process whereby we understand the past, but equally a process of self-discovery which can never be complete….It is a process of revising our preconceptions, not seeking to escape from them. It is a growing into what we learn from tradition. The movement in the process is a movement of undeception:
This process of revising our preconceptions rather than escaping from them, the movement of undeception, is much like pealing back the layers of an onion, akin to C. S. Lewis’ “further up and further in.” This process started later in life for me than some. But over all that time in my previous religious existence, four vignettes stand out. These are the stories I tell, and the tales my sons will pass on. Taken together, they are not an unfair representation.
My high-school age son was giving a short devotional at the end of our Wednesday night service. We would gather in the auditorium, sing a song or two, then everybody but the adults would leave for their classes, while we remained there for a bible study. My teaching, such as it was, usually occurred on these Wednesday nights. Then at the end, we would all gather again in the auditorium where one of our young people would lead in a short devotional. My son made the mistake of quoting C. S. Lewis. In the foyer afterwards, the preacher took my son aside and told him that C. S. Lewis was not a member of the “Lord’s Church.” (They were all very careful not to describe people in “the denominations” as Christian. The “Lord’s Church” was our exclusive, and sectarian, identification. The implications are obvious. In all my years there, I never used the term; not even once.) Of course, my seventeen-year old son was already better read than any of the other adults there, and knew all about C. S. Lewis. As an aside, that particular preacher soon left his wife and children for his high school sweetheart, so I am not at all sure he was the best authority to make those judgments. Moments later, the head elder came up to my sold and told him that all of C. S. Lewis’ books should be burned. Nice. This is one way-station on my son’s exit from that group.
The next remembrance highlights our own extreme version of sola scripture. Not only was only Scripture authoritative, but the words on the page were, in fact, the only way one could encounter God. In a Sunday morning auditorium class, I remember our elderly church matriarch pecking her finger on the back of her black leather-bound KJV and saying, “We have to get back to the word!” Of course, in her case, it was “the word” interpreted by way of the fundamentalist East Texas of the 1920s. We really did not know what to do when “the word” became “the Word.” That was the only way, we could encounter Christ: the words on the page.
Towards the end, I was giving a Wednesday class after my 2004 travels around the Aegean. Among many other sites, I visited Ephesus, Patmos and the Areopagus in Athens, so I had plenty of slides I could relate to biblical themes. My power point ended with a view looking over the rooftops of Athens from the Acropolis. In the Q&A following, an older man (later elder) asked: “Are there any Christians in Athens?” I knew what he was asking, but I was going to make him say the unspoken part out loud. I acted as if I did not understand, saying, “Well of course there are. Look at all the church domes here, here, and here.” He replied, “No, no, no. I mean New Testament Christians.” I just looked at him, and replied I did not know how to answer his question in the way that he asked. The ex-preacher’s wife came to my rescue. She said, “Oh yes there are. Sunset School of Preaching in Lubbock has an campus there.” This story has taken on a life of its own, among some of my friends. It is not too dissimilar from an incident from about 2008 or so. A group of young people from YWAM (Youth with a Mission) visited our Orthodox mission. They were missionaries being sent to Greece and came to our church as a field trip to acquaint them with what they might expect. They all stood at the back, clutching their NIVs as if talismans to protect them from the incense and all. Outside afterwards, they informed us that they were going to “take the gospel to Greece.”
This last memory is the oldest. Back in the 1990s, we had a hotshot young preacher-boy straight out of our most knot-headed preachers school, in Tennessee. For “sound” churches such as ours, this is where you went. In the Sunday School class for the Young Adults (yes, that is how long ago it was for me), he gave the following analogy regarding the evils of drinking. He likened it to a frog progressively jumping half the distance to the wall. On this course, it will obviously never reach the wall. In the same way, he reasoned, if you ever take a drink of alcohol, you will never be completely sober again. Somewhere in Tennessee, there was an instructor who was being paid to teach these boys rot like this. It is to my shame that I did not walk out then and there.
Quite an enjoyable meandering thru histories, both personal and theological. The anecdote on your recent conversations with Mormons made me wish I were in your study with a glass of lemonade myself. It also matches my own experience with their missionaries, years ago in my single days. I welcomed them in, and I'd wager we talked more on orthodoxy than mormonism that day.
It will be a lifelong interest to me I think, how my own growing up orthodox rather than evangelical or "Murica'cian"(improv. Might keep using) has affected my own worldviews and perspectives.
I grew up absorbing a superior attitude(which no one necessarily told me directly, but it was in the air), which once I became aware of as an adult I grew to abhor.
"I'm orthodox. Its the oldest church, so its the right one. We celebrate Christmas on a different day". These are things I definitely thought and said as a child. While I do not think you, or many other members of the church, actively feel this way, those who do are an unfortunate deterrent to converts on the fence in my opinion. Its also just a narrow minded way to view religions.
My current views are agnostic, and I need some time to develop and examine them as well as other aspects of my self before my next iteration arrives. Orthodoxy, while almost infinitely deep in history, beauty, and interesting theology, can also fit into rigid, non questioning, rule following mentality. Perhaps any religion can. I am well aware and respectful of the amount of knowledge you and others I know have regarding the Church. Unfortunately, in my teenage and adult time in it, I more often than not was simply going through the motions. And there are plenty of "motions". Each with meaning and purpose I paid no mind to. There a number of reasons I drifted away, but this is probably the most profound and that which took the longest to acknowledge.
No one lied to me.
No one abused my trust.
No one traumatized me.
These are so often the case I find in people leaving religions.
No. I simply lost interest, and kept going anyway. Holding on to structure. Rules. "Truth".
I know now that I need to put in work to find my way. Hard work, using mental muscles I let atrophy most of my life. Its no one in the churches fault I left, and none of them could coax me back. I have my path to follow, and I'm working on finding a map.
All that aside, Im very glad I still am in touch with you, and will always enjoy and value your writing and perspective. Hopefully 2023 will feature a meet up for coffee or a beer. Happy holidays!
I was enjoying your ramble very much even before you gave me a shout-out. "Favorite aggregator" for you will carry me through the day with a warm glow.
Those Baptists you're thinking of are Landmark Baptists.
You've apparently read somewhat more widely on this than I have, but I had also come to the conclusion that the difference between Protestant Restorationists and Mormons is much less than the Restorationists care to admit. Indeed, I inveigh against Evangelicalism more than against Protestantism these days because the latter is older, and saner, than the Evangelicalism I partook of in my mis-spent youth, none of which seemed to go further back than the burnt-over district.
Its roots in the same soil as (much? most?) American Evangelicalism is one of the reasons I cannot just write off Mormonism as a "cult" as in the Walter Martin Kingdom of the Cults. The other is that, despite Joseph Smith's yarn about angelic revelations that all the early 19th-Century denominations were full of hooey, Mormons increasingly (and bafflingly) want to be considered simply Christians along with all those full-of-hooey folks. Some of them will take offense if you deny them that.