The Meaning of Protestant Theology

Luther, Augustine, and the Gospel That Gives Us Christ

Cary, Phillip

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781493416677
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book offers a creative and illuminating discussion of Protestant theology. Veteran teacher Phillip Cary explains how Luther's theology arose from the Christian tradition, particularly from the spirituality of Augustine. Luther departed from the Augustinian tradition and inaugurated distinctively Protestant theology when he identified the gospel that gives us Christ as its key concept. More than any other theologian, Luther succeeds in carrying out the Protestant intention of putting faith in the gospel of Christ alone. Cary also explores the consequences of Luther's teachings as they unfold in the history of Protestantism.

Part 1: Spirituality and the Being of God

1
Philosophical Spirituality

The drama of Protestant theology begins on a stage set in large part by Augustinian spirituality, which is why we shall spend a good deal of time with the great church father Augustine in part 1 before we get to Luther, the founding figure of Protestantism, in part 2. The stage is furnished with many taken-for-granted beliefs in the background, which include not only the teachings of Scripture but elements of ancient philosophy, especially Platonism. Augustine has set this stage by combining Bible and philosophy in ways that have become so familiar over the centuries that people in the drama have not always noticed the difference. Part 1 of this book is an exercise in noticing the difference, beginning in this chapter by introducing some of the Platonist elements, and then proceeding to examine Christian appropriations of Platonism, especially in Augustine.

Critical Appropriation

The aim is not to eliminate the Platonism that has found its way into Christian thinking. On the contrary, as the church fathers recognized, Plato and his followers got some things right, and some of their stock of concepts can be useful for Christian thought if critically appropriated.1 This means, of course, both appropriation and criticism—making something our own precisely by asking the critical question, Is it really true? The reason for recognizing the difference between Platonism and Christianity is not that the two have nothing to do with each other, but rather in order to pursue this critical question well, with eyes open, knowing that there can be both truth in Platonism and falsehood in the Christian tradition. In that way we may discern not only how the Christian faith and Platonist philosophy have been allies over the centuries but also why their alliance has been more valuable in some respects than in others.

This chapter shall not present anything like a full or adequate account of Platonism, but only some key concepts that were important to the church fathers, the orthodox theologians of the early centuries of the Christian church. The church fathers are the first Christian theologians whose writings are found outside the Bible: Gentile writers, for the most part, figuring out how to teach the Gospel on the basis of Jewish scriptures—including the New Testament, which was written almost entirely by Jews. Those of the fathers who lived within the Roman Empire came to this task equipped with a classical Greek or Latin education, which was focused especially on rhetoric but included at least a passing familiarity with the philosophical tradition stemming from ancient Athens, including Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics. The church fathers have sometimes been criticized for “Hellenizing” Christianity, making it too Greek—as if thinking in Greek were foreign to the New Testament. This “Hellenization” thesis is rightly repudiated by most theologians today, but it is important to recognize that when ancient Gentile thinkers taught Jewish scriptures, there were inevitably some losses. Much of the life and lore of ancient Israel up to and including the time of Jesus was unknown to the church fathers and needs to be retrieved by modern scholars in order to arrive at a robust understanding of the New Testament in its original historical context. Church fathers like Augustine could bring immense conceptual sophistication to their task—and frankly, they are often much smarter than the scholars who write about them—but they seldom sympathized with or even understood how Israel thought of its own relation to God, as we shall see at the end of part 1.

In general, I shall be arguing that the metaphysics of Platonism has proved most valuable for Christian thinking, its ethics less so, and its epistemology less still. That is to say, the Platonists got many things right when it comes to abstract questions about the being of God, but not so many when it comes to our relation to God, and especially not when it comes to how we know God. Their key epistemological concept, which I shall label “intellectual vision,” concerns a power of the soul that I think we do not actually have, and it shaped Augustine’s spirituality in a way that displaces faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the fundamental form of the knowledge of God. Since epistemology and ethics—how we know and how we live—profoundly shape each other, especially in the area of spirituality, this concept is at the center of what I shall be critical about in the critical appropriation of Augustinian Platonism.

But I shall begin at the other end, with the things that the Platonist tradition gets right about the being of God. I use the word “being” as equivalent to the Greek philosophical term ousia, which can also be translated “essence.” The term was incorporated into the Nicene Creed, in which the church confesses that Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, is “of one being [homoousios] with the Father.” This little phrase illustrates what I mean by critical appropriation: using a Platonist vocabulary, it says something subtly but profoundly different from anything an ordinary Platonist could accept. The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, to which this phrase makes a central contribution, is in fact the most fundamental reckoning the Christian tradition has had with Platonism. The church fathers who formulated this creed appropriated Platonist concepts of the eternity and immateriality of God, then used them to say something about Jesus Christ that would have astounded Plato: that this particular man has the same being as the God who created heaven and earth.

What the Platonists got wrong stems from all the things Plato could not possibly have known about Christ, who was born four hundred years after his death. This includes not just the humanity of Jesus but the fact that he is the Son of God, eternally begotten from the Father and of one being with him. Not knowing this or else not believing it, the later pagan Platonists ended up getting some things right, conceptually, about the being of God, but they were ignorant of who God is. What they get wrong about ethics and especially epistemology follows from this ignorance. They did not really ask who God is, for they thought of God as a principle, power, and goal, but not as someone who chose to act for a particular people such as Israel, and certainly not as someone who could be crucified under Pontius Pilate. Hence they were in no position to recognize that knowing God requires believing in Jesus Christ whom he has sent (John 17:3). In the Platonist tradition knowing God came to mean knowing the being or essence of God, which is a rather less important thing to know than who Jesus is. However, as the church fathers recognized, knowing Christ does have implications for what we know about the being of God, and there the Platonists were right about some things. To distinguish what they got right from what they got wrong is precisely the task of critical appropriation that was carried out in the doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation formulated by the church fathers.

To highlight the difficulties of this task of critical appropriation, I will talk about “spirituality,” which is an important term in part because of its treacherous ambiguity. We can speak of the “spirituality” of God, meaning that God is nonphysical, transcending the world of space and time. (Because the content of the discipline of physics has changed so much since ancient times, we get closer to these ancient thinkers if we avoid the term “nonphysical” and say instead “incorporeal,” meaning not a bodily thing, or “immaterial,” meaning not made up of any kind of material.) But I shall focus on “spirituality” in another sense of the term, which we encounter when it is used to describe human devotional practices, the forms of piety or spiritual journeys that are meant to bring people closer to God. Much of what we today call “spirituality” stems ultimately from the Platonist philosophical tradition. The area where Christians should be most critical in their appropriation of Platonism has to do with this sense of spirituality, where the focus of the word is not on God so much as on our relationship with God.

Of course these two senses of the term “spirituality” are connected, and that is why the term is ambiguous and sometimes treacherous: it is so easy to try deriving human spirituality from the spirituality of God. This is where I shall urge us to be especially critical, since I believe our relationship to God must be formed not by human spirituality but by divine carnality—not by our spirit but by Christ’s flesh (carnem in Latin). I want to heed Martin Luther’s warning against “making spiritual what God has made bodily and outward.”2 At the end of chapter 2, we shall arrive at a specifically Christian sense of “spirituality” based on the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Christ incarnate. And I shall often use the phrase “divine carnality,” in order to emphasize the way God has made himself bodily and outward, according to the Christian doctrine of incarnation (which means literally “enfleshment”). The term “incarnation” is easily confused with terms for quite different concepts, such as reincarnation (the non-Christian idea that souls are reborn in many bodies) and embodiment, which applies to all living creatures that have bodies, whereas the Christian doctrine of incarnation applies solely to Jesus Christ, the only person in all creation who is God incarnate.

Platonists against Materialism

If you want to work out a coherent account of the incorporeal being of God, then the Platonist tradition is the place to go. Other traditions of philosophy are not so helpful on this point. When ancient philosophers, for instance, spoke of “spirit” (spiritus in Latin, pneuma in Greek, both of which could literally mean “breath”), most of them thought of material things such as breath or fire or some extrafine “spiritual” material such as light or the aetherial stuff of heaven. (Light, after all, is perfectly physical, something observed and investigated in both ancient and modern physics.) Cicero spoke for a great many ancient writers when he described spiritus as a “fiery breath” and identified it as the material the soul was made of.3 He was following the Stoic philosophers, who identified pneuma or spiritus with the heavenly fire that made up the being of the stars and gave light to the earth. In other words, because most philosophers in those days were materialists, they thought of “spirit” in material terms. They had a lot to say about soul as well as spirit, but they thought of both as made out of a distinctive, “spiritual” kind of material, perhaps light or the aether of heaven. Af...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• A Note on Citations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Spirituality and the Being of God
• Part 2: The Gospel and the Power of God
• Part 3: Christian Teaching and the Knowledge of God
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Luther’s Devils
• Appendix 2: Gospel as Sacrament
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover