Per Caritatem

Some Contemporary Reflections on Sin:
Matt Jenson’s use of St. Augustine in The Gravity of Sin

By Jason Ingalls, M.Div. Princeton Theological Seminary

Matt Jenson’s recent book The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther, and Barth on Homo Incurvatus in Se (London: T&T Clark, 2006) contributes to contemporary Augustinian scholarship and hamartiology.  Perhaps most interesting is that Jenson attempts to resuscitate contemporary use of Augustine’s theology for the purpose of talking about sin (a brave feat!).  In this post, I will summarize Jenson’s argument, describe how Jenson appropriates and critiques Augustine for his project, and trace the line through Jenson’s remaining interlocutors before briefly concluding with some thoughts on Jenson’s contribution to the way we talk about sin.

In brief, Jenson argues that the metaphor homo incurvatus in se (“humanity ‘curved in on itself’”), coupled with a relational anthropology, is the best way to construe the human person and sin (Jenson 2, 4).  He claims the coupling does not fall into the traps linked to substance and existential ontologies, is true to Scripture and tradition, and provides a way to appreciate and appropriate feminist theological critiques.  His argument starts with Augustine, moves through Luther, considers Hampson’s critique of Luther, and ends with Barth, to show that incurvatus in se can, in fact, do the theological work that he claims for it.

Jenson is quick to use Augustine for his project since Augustine already offers a relational account of sin.  Jenson explains that Augustine sees our prelapsarian state as necessarily relational and social in character, and that Augustine’s ideas of “participation” in God through Christ shows that this participation is basic to human beings qua human beings (Jenson 8).  Even Augustine’s explication of St. Paul’s “in Adam all sinned” is basically relational in character (16), the origin of evil is placed squarely in the human will (cf. 20), and evil is described as a privation of the will, a turning away from the will’s proper object, in other words, a break in relationship.  Jenson summarizes: “Self-love and love of God are simply incompatible” (15).

The problem for Jenson is that Augustine has not reflected on this account as systematically as Jenson would like, and Jenson is particularly worried about Augustine’s telos for humanity: the beatific vision of a fleshless God.  This is not yet “sufficiently Christian,” and Jenson will look to Luther (and eventually Barth) to fill in this gap.  Jenson’s treatment of Augustine seems tentative at points, as if he feels like he is addressing an audience that is predisposed against St. Augustine for any number of reasons.  In some ways, this account of Augustine’s doctrine of sin is meant to rescue the saint from theology’s dustbin.  This should be noted and applauded, I think.  But, for now, we will look at Jenson’s specific objections.

In the end, then, the Christian tradition seems to have been convinced that Jesus really does offer the best remedy for sin, the ‘medicine of immortality’, as many Fathers described the Eucharist.  If our sin involved us more than anything in a parasitic love affair with ourselves, what more fitting counter could there be than to look outside ourselves to one who is not ourselves?  Despite the legacy of his inward turn, Augustine was himself aware of this; and his call for humility suggests a move in this direction.  Nevertheless, while the features of a relational understanding of sin were set up by Augustine, he did not follow them through to a sufficiently objectivist, extrinsic, and materially mediated account of the Christian life (Jenson 45-46, emphasis mine).

First, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently objectivist.  A sufficiently objectivist account would focus the human person outside of him- or herself on Christ, the unceasing advocate and Lord.  But, Augustine pushes the individual, especially in The Trinity, to look beyond Christ, even after all of Augustine’s stress on Christ’s mediatorial role.  “Christ’s humanity seems ultimately instrumental and of only temporary importance. . . . [O]ur hope is in the day when his office of mediator will cease and we will participate in the divine life directly” (Jenson 35; cf. The Trinity I.iii.20.80).  This bothers Jenson because to be insufficiently objectivist is to be insufficiently Christological and therefore insufficiently Christian.

Second, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently extrinsic.  While Augustine shows human beings to be relationally constituted, this is again a soteriologically-focused Christological problem.  Instead of asking the human person to look to Christ, the counsel of The Trinity is to look in, then up.  The problem lies in looking for the imago dei within when The Imago Dei already comes to meet us without in the pages of the apostolic witness and in the life of the Church.  “Instead, the fleshly Christ is merely the way to the ‘homeland of peace’ [Augustine] has caught a glimpse of from ‘a wooded summit’, a land also glimpsed by the Platonists” (43).  Augustine’s “ambiguous inwardness” (37) focuses attention within rather than without, and thereby misplaces emphasis which should be reserved for the Christ.

Third, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently materially mediated.  It is St. Augustine’s use of the humanity of Christ that causes Jenson’s worries.  City of God, Book XIV, according to Jenson, contains healthy reflection on humanity’s participation in God but holds back from talking about its “mechanics.”  Jenson is disappointed.  For him, “that Augustine can speak directly of deification without reference to Christ is indicative of a wider concern,” probably, an “insufficient Christology” (Jenson 11, cf. Jenson 11, n. 24).  The incarnation is a kind of “short-cut” to participation in Christ’s divine nature (Jenson 12; cf. Augustine, City of God, IX.xv).  Once the way is paved, then Christ’s humanity (and his office as mediator) is no longer eschatologically needed to mediate the glory of God.  Jenson: “But in the end, Christ remains a glorious via rather than the redefinition of Augustine’s God” (Jenson 43).  This Christological lack is sufficient reason to move on to Luther and, ultimately, Barth.

Martin Luther radicalized and reorganized Augustine’s insights Christologically around the guiding metaphor of homo incurvatus in se.  Accepting Augustine’s basic emphasis on pride and humility, Luther applies incurvature not only to the totus homo but also to homo religiosus, thereby rejecting any type of incremental growth in righteousness that remained in Augustine’s thought.  Luther also radicalizes Augustine’s ideas about the order of loves in which the soul climbs higher and higher through desire until it finds its rest in God.  Since even the religious person is curved in on itself, desire has no place.  Pride is the paradigmatic sin, as it was in Augustine, and the prideful person can desire nothing but themselves.  Our desires cannot take us to God. Only faith can do that.  In radicalizing incurvature, however, Luther retains the basic structure of ascent in Augustine’s thought while replacing desire with faith and grounding it in the mediation of Christ in a way that Augustine did not.  According to Jenson’s reading of Luther’s famous dictum simul iustus et peccator, we are all – even the most pious among us – completely trapped and curved in on ourselves while simultaneously being turned out from ourselves by our faith in Christ.  This account begins correcting some of the problems that Jenson spotted in Augustine.  Luther’s account is objectivist by being grounded in the completed work of Christ.  It is extrinsic in that what Christ opens for us is a radical type of outward focus first on Christ and (then only subsequently) on the other.  It continues to be materially mediated.  The reason Jenson moves beyond Luther is less Christological than it is practical.

Pride is the paradigmatic sin for both Augustine and Luther, but Jenson does not think this account is adequate. This leads him to interact with feminist theologian Daphne Hampson’s post-Christian critique of Luther in order to complicate the pride-as-sin paradigm.  Hampson critiques the Augustinian tradition’s understanding of incurvature by arguing that considering pride to be the paradigmatic sin does not account for women’s experience of sinfulness.  Hampson argues that women’s cardinal sin is not pride, but is rather a lack of self-assertion, a falling back into oneself that she names self-diffusion or sloth.  It is here that Jenson does his best work in applying Hampson’s insight that the pride-as-sin paradigm is insufficient while offering a substantial critique of her post-Christian feminism.  Challenging Hampson’s implied gender essentialism, Jenson acknowledges that he himself needs the grammar of sloth and self-diffusion to speak of his own sinfulness and that it would be a tragic waste if we were to deny women and men the ability to speak of their sinfulness as either pride or sloth, for they are “complementary aspects of the same pathology” (129, quoting McFadyen, Bound to Sin, 156).  Whether, to follow Kierkegaard, the sin is “in despair willing to be oneself” (pride) or is “in despair not willing to be oneself” (sloth), the basic pathology is still an incurvature, either in activity or passivity.

It is in conversation with Karl Barth that Jenson finally develops the “sufficiently objectivist, extrinsic and materially mediated account of the Christian life” that he wanted from Augustine (46).  Barth defines human sinfulness by means of Christology and plots his three forms of sinfulness (falsehood, pride, and sloth) along a Christological grid.  The first sin, and the covering for the other two, is falsehood in which the human being denies the knowledge that the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ includes them and was for them by grace.  But once human beings become aware of this claim, their reaction is characterized by the other two forms of sinfulness: pride or sloth.  In pride, we deny our participation in Jesus Christ’s servant humility, thus trying to establish our own being.  In sloth, we deny our participation in Jesus’ royal resurrection and ascension where we are set in him at the right hand of God the Father.  In pride, we amplify our being in order to deny the call to humility.  In sloth, we subsume our being in order to deny the call to victory.  Whether by self-assertion or self-diffusion, we try to deny what is basically true of us in Barth’s account: we are established from all eternity in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

In conclusion, Jenson offers contemporary theological thinkers something of great worth.  First, he sets about to rescue Augustine for contemporary reflection.  For some, Augustine never needed saving, but for others the saint has been coupled with degrading and oppressive ideas of sin and humanity.  When Jenson argues that St. Augustine’s account of the human person and sin is itself relational in character and thus in harmony with many contemporary concerns, he gives the latter group the opportunity to reread Augustine with fresh eyes.  Second, Jenson’s argument is strongly Christological.  While the book is ordered historically, it draws its material circle around Christ.  Granted, his account of Christ is strongly influenced by Barth and Luther, but its strong theological grounding allows for its profound pragmatic, personal, and pastoral value.  Which brings me to the last part of Jenson’s contribution, he provides a grammar for sin.  The grammar is Christologically grounded (and therefore objectivist, extrinsic, and materially mediated), and this concreteness saves it from the navel-gazing that might come from a similar, contemporary account.  I personally have been helped by his description of homo incurvatus in se and his dipolar exposition of sin as pride and sloth, and I have seen this vocabulary ignite people’s eyes as they, in a number of situations, came to understand a part of themselves for which they had struggled for words.  While ordered very differently, Jenson shares Augustine’s concern that our theological language be useful in some way, that it not only bear witness to God but also to who we are in relationship to the Holy Trinity.  For as critical as Jenson is of Augustine’s legacy, Jenson has done us a great service by drawing him back into our conversation about sin and allowing him to again speak words of grace.  I cannot help but think that somewhere the old saint from Tagaste smiles.

Commentary on Dr. Cary’s Essay
by Dr. Joel Garver,
Professor of Philosophy,
LaSalle University

Professor Cary’s paper helpfully explains the relationship of Luther to Augustine, particularly Luther’s notion of the Gospel as an efficacious promise, communicating what it signifies and offers.  As Cary notes, this marks a shift away from Augustine for whom the alternative to the Law’s condemnation is faith’s working to receive the grace to seek righteousness.  Moreover, according to Cary, Augustine has no notion of an external sign that gives what it signifies.  But this raises a couple questions in my mind.

First, is Augustine so monolithic concerning signs as Cary suggests?  Perhaps Cary’s recent book addresses this in greater detail, but it seems to me that Augustine’s view of signs shifts some from De Magistro to his later writings.  Moreover, there are places where Augustine’s language suggests to me something more like the instrumentality of signs in conferring what they signify.  I think here of his discussion of baptism, especially of infants (e.g., In euangelium Ioannis tractatus 80.3) or his eucharistic doctrine with its notion of the sacrament’s virtus for those who receive it rightly.

At least, I imagine Augustine could be read and received that way, whatever Augustine himself actually intended.  The medieval period leading up to Luther was far from monolithic.  In seeing sacraments as disposing the subject towards grace and as occasions for granting inward grace, Bonaventure arguably held to a doctrine of signs more closely aligned with the one that Cary attributes to Augustine.  Yet other sorts of sacramental theories developed, likewise appealing to Augustine, but with a strong tendency toward affirming the instrumental efficacy of the sacramental signs themselves.  If Cary is correct that Luther’s notion of signs is closer to Aquinas than Augustine, then what are we to make of the reception history of Augustine that allowed both Aquinas and Luther to see themselves as fundamentally Augustinian?

Per Caritatem’s first annual Augustine Blog Conference is now underway!  Below is the first of a series of posts bringing Augustine into conversation with philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages, Reformation, Modernity, and Postmodernity. The format of the conference is as follows:  an essay will be posted for approximately two days, then a short commentary on the essay will be posted and will remain on the site for two days or as long as (good) discussion continues.

AUGUSTINE AND THE REFORMATION

Dr. Phillip Cary
Professor of Philosophy
Eastern University

Augustine and Luther

In a modification of the Augustinian heritage that had an immense impact on Western Christianity, Luther shifted focus from Law and grace to Law and Gospel.  The meaning of the shift becomes clear when we look at what Luther did and did not find in Augustine’s key anti-Pelagian treatise, On the Spirit and the Letter.  This treatise is a recurrent reference point in Luther’s early lectures on the letter to the Romans (1515-1516), where he was groping for a doctrine of justification that would take seriously the quandary of sinners like himself who had nothing good to offer God, not even good intentions.

What Luther found in On the Spirit and the Letter, to be brief, is an account of the Law in which we sinners cannot be helped by being told what to do (for love and the inward obedience of the heart do not come that way) but need to be terrified by the threats of the law so that “in faith we flee for refuge to the grace that justifies and, delighted by the sweetness of righteousness by the gift of the Spirit, we escape the punishment threatened by the letter.”[1] Thus for Augustine grace is a gift of delight given by the Holy Spirit, making it sweet for us to love God with our whole hearts and our neighbors as ourselves, which is the righteousness demanded by the Law.  This is an inner gift that cannot be given by the Law, which is “the letter that kills” (cf. 2 Cor. 3:6), serving to mortify our pride and alarm us in our complacency so that we flee to the grace which alone can make us truly righteous.

The problem is: how does one flee to grace?  “In faith,” Augustine says here, and to spell that out he proceeds to speak of prayer.  In a passage of great significance for Luther, he contrasts the law of works, in which God says to us, “Do what I command you,” with the law of faith, in which we reply by praying, “Give me what You command.”[2] This picks up on a leitmotif of Augustine’s doctrine of grace going back to the Confessions, where he prays, “Give what You command, and command whatever you will.”[3]

For Luther this turned out to be insufficient.  Of course he thoroughly agrees with Augustine’s teaching that the righteousness of God comes to us by faith as a gift of grace, not by our efforts of obedience to the Law.  That is the common Augustinian heritage of the West, and Luther does nothing new when he heartily endorses it.  The problem is that Augustine’s “law of faith,” by which we pray for grace, is something we have to do–a good work, in Luther’s terms.  And in young Luther’s late medieval context, where penitential works of prayer had become a requirement of preparatio evangelii in which the penitent must earn grace by the merit of congruity (essentially doing your best, facere quod in se est, by eliciting an inner act of loving God above all things–and all before receiving the gift of justifying grace![4]) the pursuit of grace had become a long, drawn-out work of anguish that had no end.

What we find in Luther’s Romans lectures, accordingly, is a doctrine of justification in which justifying grace is something we are “always seeking. . . . never possessing.”[5] From Augustine’s requirement that we pray for grace, Luther draws the conclusion that the life of faith is “nothing else but prayer, seeking and begging.”  These are not works of the law but they are indeed works, “works which are performed in order that we may seek justification. . . . no longer the works of the Law but of grace and faith.”  Thus Augustine’s “law of faith” produces what Luther in these lectures calls “works of faith,” which are distinguished from the works of the law because they are done not because they are righteous, “but that they may seek righteousness.”[6] The result–a very strange result in light of Luther’s later theology–is that that justification by faith alone means our lives are wholly devoted to works.  For “the people of faith spend their whole life seeking justification,”[7] and the way to seek justification is by works of faith.

The reason why seeking justification must never become finding stems from the penitential setting of Luther’s “works of faith.” We seek grace by accusing ourselves, which is a work of faith because it means believing God’s word of accusation: “by faith alone we must believe we are sinners. . . . we have to stand under the judgment of God and believe His words with which He says that we are unrighteous.”[8] To believe this word is “to blame ourselves, to judge, condemn and hate ourselves.”[9] The most we can do to seek justification–in effect, Luther’s version of facere quod in se est–is hate ourselves deeply enough to desire sincerely to be damned so as to affirm the justice of God’s condemnation: only this is sufficient to guarantee our justification.[10] What we must never do, in any case, is have the presumption to believe we are justified and righteous in God’s sight.  This is clearly not Luther’s mature doctrine of justification!  It is in fact a vivid dramatization of what Luther would later describe as the torment of conscience he endured as a monk.

What is striking about this horrifying piece of spiritual masochism (I have never understood why some Lutheran scholars admire it) it that it already contains a doctrine of justification “by faith alone” based on the righteousness of God, which is not “the righteousness by which He is righteous in Himself but the righteousness by which we are made righteous by God,” a concept that he found in Augustine’s On the Spirit and the Letter.[11] The crucial difference from his mature view is that the word to which we must cling by faith alone is not a word of grace but a word of condemnation.  We seek the righteousness of God by agreeing with one who is our accuser and our enemy,[12] and for this very reason we must never believe we have found the justification we seek.  We are always to stand before God confessing our guilt, never believing we are righteous.

What gets Luther past this is a change in the word we are to believe in, from a word of condemnation  to a word of grace–a promise of God in which he gives the grace he promises, which is the kind of word Luther later has in mind when he uses the term “Gospel.”  What this adds to Augustine is a specific place to turn when one flees to the grace of the Spirit.  Instead of fleeing by prayer, a human word that seeks grace, one flees by clinging to the Gospel, a divine word that promises to give us Christ and all his grace.  And that promise is efficacious: it gives what it promises.  Hence in his later work, Luther modifies Augustine’s contrast between law of works and law of faith into a contrast between two forms of God’s word, Law and promise: “For the Law demands, ‘Do this!’  The promise grants: ‘Accept this!’”[13] Similarly, he modifies Augustine’s prayer for grace, “Give what You command, and command what You will,” into good news about where grace is to be found: “the promises of God give what the commandments of God demand.”[14]

It is worth thinking about why Luther did not find everything he needed in Augustine.  To begin with, the late medieval context had made praying for grace into a far more elaborate piece of work than Augustine ever envisioned.  Augustine was confident that our prayers for grace would normally get answered, even if they were not perfectly sincere.[15] But medieval developments of the practice of private confession could make the sinner’s prayer for grace into an introspective battleground, a fight for sincerity and un-self-centeredness that became an agony of terror for scrupulous consciences like Luther’s.  The very act of seeking to be justified, as Luther saw it, was just one more example of self-seeking, of a self so “curved in on itself” that even its desire to love God was only a desire for its own justification and salvation.[16] Luther’s early theology was a perfect double-bind of his own making, all set up so that he just couldn’t win.

Where does such a mercilessly introspective conscience go to find the grace of justification?  What Augustine does not give Luther is a place to find what he seeks.  Augustine does not have the notion of an efficacious divine promise, an word of grace that bestows the gift it speaks of.  There are systematic reasons for this, rooted in Augustine’s semiotics.  For Augustine words are external signs that never give us the thing signify, but rather serve as admonitions to look elsewhere to find it–which means, for spiritual things, to turn in a more inward direction.[17] Thus in On the Spirit and the Letter, the contrast between Law and grace is a contrast between outer and inner, as “the letter that kills” threatens us with words written externally in human language, driving us to seek the sweet delight that is possible only when “the Spirit that gives life” writes directly on the inmost heart.[18] So the best an external word can do for us is admonish us to go looking for grace within.

An inward turn is precisely what Luther’s introspective conscience did not need.  Looking within his own heart is what young Luther did far too much of, until he found that he could cling to an external word of grace by which God gives the love and obedience that He demands. With such a Gospel, “justification by faith alone” comes to mean believing that God gives the righteousness he promises, so that we are justified in his sight, not just believing that God’s accusation is true, so that we always remain sinners.  (The fact that both accusation and promise remain true results in Luther’s famous affirmation that every believer is both righteous and a sinner at the same time, simul justus et peccator.[19])

But if Luther did not find the notion of the Gospel as an efficacious promise in Augustine, then where did he find it?  It turns out that he had been hearing the word of grace all along and not really believing it.  For all his focus on penitence, Luther had given very little thought to the sacrament of penance. In particular, he had scarcely mentioned the word of absolution in his writings until the controversy over indulgences, sparked by his posting of the 95 theses in November of 1517, made the sacrament of penance into a focus of intense scrutiny.  As Oswald Bayer has shown, the first time in Luther’s writings that he identified an efficacious promise of grace was when explaining why penitents are required to believe the word of absolution spoken by the priest in the sacrament of penance, when he says: “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”[20] To believe this word, on the strength of the promise of Christ in Matt. 18:18, is to believe precisely what Luther had been saying two years earlier one must never believe: that one is righteous before God.  One has a right to believe this precisely because one has an obligation to believe it, lest one call Christ a liar.  The external word of promise thus required Luther to embrace the good news of justification which otherwise his introspective conscience would not permit him him to believe.

This is a point of some ecumenical significance.  For Luther the Gospel promise can give what the commandments of the Law require because it has a sacramental efficacy: it is an external word, which is to say a sign, that gives the grace it signifies.  In a Christmas sermon in 1519 he is explicit about this: he teaches that “the Gospel words and stories are a kind of sacrament, that is a sacred sign, by which God effects what they signify in those who believe,”[21] and proceeds to hold out the infant Christ for his hearers to receive, as the gift which is given through the Gospel story.

All the more striking then, that Augustine has no such concept of Gospel.  He does not want us clinging in faith to external signs such as words and sacraments, which signify a spiritual gift that must be sought within.  The difference between his sacramental semiotics and the medieval view taken up by Luther is  indicated succinctly in the 12th-century Summa Sententiarum attributed to Hugh of St. Victor, which teaches with Augustine that a sacrament is a sign of grace, but then adds that it “not only signifies but also confers that of which it is the sign.”[22] What the medieval author and many theologians after him did not realize is that in Augustine’s view, external things may signify but not confer an inner grace.[23] The striking consequence is that Luther’s faith in the power of the Gospel to save us is fundamentally much closer to Aquinas’s teaching than to Augustine’s.

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[1] On the Spirit and the Letter 10.16.

[2] Ibid. 13.22. Quoted in Luther’s Romans lectures on Rom. 3:21, LW 25:243.  LW = the standard American edition of Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. J. Pelikan et al. (St. Louis: Concordia and Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955-1976).

[3] Confessions 10:29.40.

[4] For this late medieval theology of grace cf. H. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology (Durham NC: Labyrinth Press, 1983), esp. pp. 131-160 (= chapters 5.2 and 6.1).

[5] On Rom. 3:27 (LW 25:251f).  This and the next two quotations follow hard on the heels of Luther’s quotation from Augustine on “the law of faith.”

[6] On Rom. 3:7 (LW 25:218).

[7] On Rom. 3:27 (LW 25:252).

[8] On Rom. 3:7 (LW 25:215).

[9] On Rom. 3:7 (LW 25:218).

[10] On Rom. 9:3 (LW 25:381-384).

[11] On Rom. 1:17 (LW 25:151f).  Luther quotes here from On the Spirit and the Letter 11.18, though 9.15 is even closer to his thought, where Augustine speaks of “the righteousness of God, not that whereby He is Himself righteous, but that with which He endows man when He justifies the ungodly.”  One should not be distracted by scholarly fuss over the nature and date of Luther’s so-called “tower experience” (cf. LW 54:193f, as well as LW 34:337), when the key conception of the righteousness of God was ready to hand in his favorite author (also in Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John, 26:1).

[12] For the recurrent theme of “agreeing with the accuser,” see LW 25:54, note 16 (where the term “Gospel” means, in effect, “Make friends with your accuser”) as well as pp. 217 and 236 (“God. . . is not a Father but an enemy. . . one must agree with this enemy and . . . . thus He becomes a friend and a Father”).

[13] From the 1535 Galatians commentary, on Gal. 3:18 (LW 26:303).

[14] From the epochal 1520 treatise The Freedom of a Christian, LW 31:349.  If any single text deserves to be called the founding document of Protestantism, this is it.

[15] The key example of this is Augustine’s conversion narrative, with its famously half-hearted prayer for grace: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet!” (Confessions 8:7.17)

[16] Cf. the famous analysis of the sinner incurvatus in se in the lectures on Romans, on Rom. 5:4 (LW 25:313) and on  Rom. 8:3 (LW 25:345).

[17] A crucial lesson of Augustine’s semiotics; see esp. On the Teacher ??33-36.

[18] On the Spirit and the Letter, 19.32.

[19] See especially the 1535 Galatians commentary, LW 26:232f (on Gal. 3:6).

[20] See O. Bayer, Promissio: Geschichte der reformatorischen Wende in Luthers Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1971), especially ch. 4. The first text in which Luther’s new understanding of absolution is worked out is a little-known set of theses written in 1518, Pro veritate inquirenda et timoratis conscientiis consolandis in D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883-1993) 1:630-633 (henceforth cited as WA, the standard abbreviation for Weimarer Ausgabe).  I know of no English translation of the theses, but most of them are incorporated into the little 1519 treatise on The Sacrament of Penance found in LW 35:9-22, which thus provides English readers with their best view of Luther’s new understanding of the Gospel in its earliest form.  See also Luther’s 1518 explanation of the 95 theses, where the explanation of thesis 38 (LW 31:191-196)  presents the new understanding, which the earlier explanation of thesis 7 (LW 31:98-107) has not quite reached.

[21] WA 9:440.  This Latin sermon is found in a set of manuscript notes that had lain forgotten and unpublished until late in the 19th century; I have not found it in English.

[22] Summa Sententiarum, 4:1, Patrologia Latina 176:117.

[23] For a full-scale argument in support of this claim, which is not uncontroversial, see Cary, Outward Signs: the Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), especially chapters 4 and 8.

In the final section of Billings’ book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift:  The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ, he suggests various ways in which Calvin’s theology of participation might speak into our current theological milieu.

While Calvin’s theology of participation is wide-ranging, it is distinctive in relation to contemporary discussion, because it brings together what are usually held apart:  organic images of transformation into Christlikeness by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit with forensic images of God’s free pardon; a strong account of humanity’s sin with a soteriology based on the restoration of a primal uniting communion with God (p. 196).

Throughout the book, Billings has been at pains to demonstrate that Calvin’s theology of participation, contra the claims of “Gift theologians” (e.g., Milbank) involves an inner transformation of the believer as s/he is incorporated into the Trinitarian life of God.  In other words, given Calvin’s understanding of the duplex gratia, imputation does not necessarily rule out ideas of infusion and partaking in the very life of the Triune God (including feeding on the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist).  Billings also points out the importance of the corporate dimension of the Christian life for Calvin’s doctrine of participation-being united with Christ necessarily unites us with our fellow Christians in a genuine and mystical bond.  Hence, concerns for social justice and love of neighbor are intrinsic to Calvin’s understanding of participation in Christ.

Regarding the “common ground” that Calvin’s theology of participation offers, Billings writes:

While Calvin’s theology of participation brings together what many theologies of participation hold apart, it also has a great deal of common ground with Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox theologies of participation.  Calvin’s soteriology gives a central place to the problem of sin and forgiveness, but it is not fixated on those themes.  Rather, those themes occur within a larger vision of salvation that is, in many ways, a catholic vision.  Calvin is concerned, along with key patristic writers, to affirm the goodness of creation and that redemption is a fulfillment rather than a disruption of the originally good human nature.  Calvin offers a soteriology that is Trinitarian from beginning to end, continually returning to the way in which we are united to Christ by the Spirit, revealing the Father.  Calvin’s theology of participation is both sacramental and ecclesial, emphasizing the centrality of the Word and sacraments for the life of Christ’s body, which can receive the sacraments only in the communion of the church (p. 196).

Though Calvin’s theology of participation is in many ways a rather complex combination of scriptural, patristic, and medieval teachings, it is also from another perspective very simple.  It speaks of a life of Trinitarian participation, in which one is united to Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit and receives the gift of pardon and forgiveness from the Father.  “As such, the life of faith is a life of voluntary gratitude, made possible by the God who restores to sinners what they have lost, and reunites them with God” (p. 197). 

What was the only chapter topic never altered in the many revisions of John Calvin’s Institutes?  Was it predestination?  No.  Was it his discussion of human depravity in our postlapsarian state?  Wrong again.  It was his discussion of prayer, which is also the longest chapter in the Institutes.  As Billings explains in his excellent book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift:  The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ, Calvin opens his chapter on prayer “with a Trinitarian portrait of prayer’s significance” (p. 110).  When a person has been brought to see his or her need of Christ, which is a need for something other than what one is, a gift is bestowed-the revelation and gift of Christ Himself.   Describing this gift  as he begins his discussion of prayer, Calvin writes:

 

The Lord willingly and freely reveals himself in his Christ.  For in Christ, he offers all happiness in place of our misery, all wealth in place of our neediness; in him he opens to us the heavenly treasures that our whole faith may contemplate his beloved Son, our whole expectation depend upon him, and our whole hope cleave to and rest in him.  This, indeed, is that secret and hidden philosophy which cannot be wrested from syllogisms.  But they whose eyes God has opened surely learnt it by heart, that in his light they may see light (Institutes, 3.20.1, trans. Ford Lewis Battles). 

I am currently reading via interlibrary loan, J. Todd Billings’ new book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).  Although I haven’t finished the book yet, what I have read up to this point (about 100 pages) is excellent!  Billings has done a great service to Calvin scholarship, showing himself quite conversant both with major contemporary critics of Calvin (e.g. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock) and with Calvin scholar extraordinaire, Richard Muller.  In chapter two, “Calvin’s Doctrine of Participation:  Context and Continuities,” Billings rather convincingly argues against hackneyed claims made by the “Gift theologians” (e.g., the well-worn, Calvin is a nominalist charge, Calvin radically separates divinity and human which results in a Nestorian Christology and a deficient doctrine of the Eucharist etc.), and builds a very solid case based on a close reading of Calvin’s commentaries in conjunction with the Institutes, Calvin’s shorter works, and an extensive interaction with the current secondary literature, that Calvin has a rich theology of participation in Christ and a metaphysic that, as Billings puts it,

affirms a differentiated unity of God and humanity in creation and redemption, such that humanity may participate in God through Christ; union with God is not only the eschatological end, but a paradigmatic feature of the God-human relationship (p. 26).

Given that the end of the semester is drawing near, I do not have time to give a more extensive summary of the book; however, I hope to do so this summer.