Developed and Undeveloped Federalism

Is the doctrine of the Covenant "a development?"  Reformed say that we hold to the the covenant as the locus where God and man meet in Jesus Christ.  Our critics charge that Federalism is a medieval innovation.  What are we to make of that claim?  Certainly, it was further developed in the middle ages, but when we read of God's covenantal promises to his people in Scripture, are we to reply,

"No, no, God.  The covenant wasn't developed until much, much later"?

Why do Latins get a free pass when the gloss Exodus 3:14 as essence and Orthodox get to see Palamism way earlier than palamism, but when the Reformed say "covenant" we get charged with reading federalism back into the Scriptures?

Review of Michael Horton The Christian Faith Pligrims on the Way

In Tolkien’s Two Towers Gimli, Aragorn, and Legolas attack a while-clad old man, thinking him Saruman. Realizing their error, they apologize to Gandalf saying, “We thought you were Saruman.” Gandalf says, “I am Saruman, or rather Saruman as he should have been.” We may say with this work that Michael Horton is Karl Barth (or NT Wright; insert your favorite villain) as he should have been.

Horton has given us the first presentation of a systematic theology derived along dramatic categories. Other treatises capture the drama of Scripture or its historical unfolding, but Horton sees the historical unfolding of God’s plan as a drama. Narrative and systematics need each other. The narrative keeps theology from becoming abstract, and systematics shows “crucial implications of that plot and the inner connections between its various sequences” (Horton 21). 

The narrative structure also helps one’s epistemology. Horton skillfully interacts with recent postmodern challenges and notes that many of the challenges simply miss the Christian story. With Jean-Francois Lyotard, we agree that metanarratives are dangerous. Horton simply denies the Christian story is a metanarrative in the sense that modernity is.

Horton’s section on ontology is quite fine. He gives a summary of his “Overcoming Estrangement” essays and suggests that one’s epistemology follows one’s ontology. If one sees the body as simply a prison of the soul, then epistemology will be a kind of “seeing the Forms” or “getting beyond sense experience” (47). But if one holds to an ontology of covenantal embodiment or finitude as a divine gift, pace Plato, then the primary metaphors for knowledge will be “oral/aural” (49). This is the real strength of Horton’s project. He is able to show (with admirable skill) how non-Reformed and non-covenantal views simply default to a pagan metaphysics.

Horton is consistent in applying the speech-act theory. God’s speech-acts, understood in a Trinitarian manner, rooted in Triadology, ground our understanding of inspiration. The Father’s speaking is the locutionary act; the Son is the content or illocutionary act that is performed by the speaking, and the Spirit’s work is the perlocutionary effect (157). As Horton notes, this keeps the model from being too “”mechanical (simply the Father’s speaking) or a canon-within-a-canon (as some Christomonic models intimitate) or enthusiam per hyper-Spirit models. 

Horton gives us a brilliant review of Christology. He takes the key gains from Wright et al and reworks them around a Reformed covenantal approach--all the while maintaining the Chalcedonian and Nicene values. His review of historical Christology is good, though he didn’t address all of the tensions created by Chalcedon. He (and I) rightly affirm Chalcedon, but Chalcedon’s other commitments to deification-soteriology and substance-metaphysics would prove troublesome for later thinkers. I refer to Bruce McCormack’s fine essay on this point.

Criticisms and Concerns

To his credit, Horton is aware of Barth’s challenge to the term “person” in the modern world. If person means something like “center of reflective self-consciousness” (which is usually how people today, Christian or otherwise, use the term), then it is obvious we cannot apply it to God. In God, so reasons classical theism, there is one mind, will, and unity of operation. The modern usage of the word “person” would imply at least three minds. That is polytheism. 

Horton says we can save the term person by using it analogically of God (295ff). This is certainly true. The Father-Son relationship is the model from which we conceive of earthly father-son relationships. But still, it is not clear how far analogical predication helps on the definition of person. Even if we grant there is not a univocal relationship between the idea as it applies to God and man, it is still true that the definition as it applies to God (whatever it is, it cannot mean three centers of self-consciousness) and man (a center of self-consciousness) is, quite frankly, different.

On the other hand, despite Barth’s earlier usage of “huparchos tropos” in CD I/1 (which itself has a respectable Patristic pedigree and does not have the same problems as “person”), in later volumes he seems to have no problem using “Person” as it is used in traditional dogmatics (CD II/1: 284).

Horton’s most problematic area is where he thinks he is using the Eastern Essence/energies distinction. On surface level it sounds good: we can’t know God in his essence but only in his energies (operations towards us). Fair enough. He also says this is what the East believed. Well, it depends on which Eastern father at which time. As it metastaized in Gregory Palamas, the energies of God were the only way God could interact with the world. For the post-Palamas East, nature and persons were hyper-ousia. This means, among other things, that you can’t have a personal relationship with Jesus because he is beyond being; this is the precise critique that Orthodox writer Vladimir Moss made of John Romanides).

Horton is using “energies” as God’s covenantal speech-acts. I like that. It is really good. It is simply the opposite of what the East means by it. As Orthodox philosopher David Bradshaw points out, the energies are the peri ton theon, things around God. And contrary to Horton’s earlier (and good) criticisms, you approach these peri ton theon by means of apophatic negation and the ascent of the mind (shades of Origen!). Eastern monks, as documented by John Meyendorrf, are very clear on this point.

I also disagree with Horton on the millennium, but I won’t go into it here.

Evaluation

Criticisms aside, this book is magnificent. While it cannot replace Berkhof, Horton admirably deals with current challenges to traditional protestantism. Few Reformed folk can really go toe-to-toe with neo-Hegelians like John Milbank. Horton meets him head on and wins. Horton also responds to recent Roman (Ratzinger), Eastern (Zizioulas), and Anabaptist (Volf) models with much skill. His true value, however, is using Vosian covenantal insights to structure systematic theology.

Penal Substitution: Cutting and Judgment

A piece on Penal Substitution (hereafter PSA) is here.  The good thing about the piece is it is a) almost vitriolically anti-Western and b) shallow in analysis.   The guys at OB like it, but I think most honest seekers will come away disappointed.   

I do want to address a potential weakness in Reformed treatments of PSA, however.  Reformed theology on one level has always assumed a substance-metaphysics.  That was their received heritage from the medieval church.  I don't fault them for that.  However, Reformed thinkers also developed a robust idea of the covenant.   Throughout the centuries Covenant Theology was continually honed.  While I don't endorse his ethical system, Meredith Kline's work on Ancient Near Eastern treaties is the coup-etat.

It's not surprising that you don't really see a full PSA in the Fathers, given their commitment to a form of impassibility and substance-metaphysics.  If God is completely impassible and the divine essence is stasis, then there can't be any perturbations whatsoever.  This is why you really don't ever see the Orthodox talk about God's wrath as anything more than an anthropomorphism.  If God's substance is utterly impassible and beyond being, then it can't feel anything like wrath.  

Similarly, if the Son is of the same substance with the Father (and I believe he is), then how can the Father "cut" off the Son?  How can the Son experience God's wrath?  Some Reformed writers have opted for the Nestorian route. I don't think that is necessary.  Instead of a substance-ontology, we need a Covenantal Ontology.

A Covenantal Ontology

A covenantal ontology isn't worried about things like essences, beings, enses, however important they may be in their own rights.   Rather, a covenantal ontology sees speech-acts, cuttings, judgments, presence, and promise.  In other words, what you see in the Bible.  

A Covenantal Ontology also means an Eschatological Ontology

1. Words and signs create a covenant.  They do not “fuse” essences (101).
2. There is no nature-grace problem but a sin-grace problem.
3. Eschatology creates a tension:  we have a foretaste of the future feast now, which creates in us a painful longing for the Age to Come.   Eschatological presence intensifies Jesus’s ascended absence.  This actually helps us on the doctrine of assurance.  Assurance is mercilessly attacked by Anchoretic traditions (Trent even condemns to hell any who speak of it), since how can we, as finite humans, “infallibly” know something in the future?   Eschatology and a covenantal ontology can help.  Who are we to ridicule assurance when the King of heaven feeds us from his banquet and promises to strengthen our faith?  Any questioning of assurance is merely treason against the King.  Because of eschatology, assurance will remain in tension–but it is still real assurance because God says it is! (Speech-Act theory).

I am leaning on Michael Horton's discussion of a Covenantal Ontology in Covenant and Salvation (Westminster/John Knox)

The following are key points of a covenantal (or federal) ontology, taken from Horton:

1. Mediation is not a principle or process, but a person, Jesus (183).  This explicitly denies participationist ontologies, ladders, chain-of-being, etc.
2. The relationship which God guarantees to his people by means of Covenant is seen in the term echo, “having” (184).
3. For example, we have “eternal life” (John 5:24), the Spirit of Christ as the deposit of the consummation.
4. Our union with Christ is by the Spirit and not a fusion of essences.
5. Eschatology is the locus of a federal ontology.  It is an announcement of the good news from afar off (Isaiah 52:7ff).   Participation (realist?) ontologies, by contrast, struggle with the concept of good news. Horton writes, “It is unclear how the gospel as good news would figure into his [John Milbank, but also any Dionysian construction] account of redemption, since ‘news’ implies an extrinsic annoucnement of something new, something that does not simply derive from the nature of things (169).  What he means is that those who who hold to participationist ontologies–chain of being–see a continuum between God and man.  Any saving that happens to man happens within that continuum.   The announcement of good news, by contrast, comes from without.   To borrow Horton’s delightful phrase, a federal ontology is meeting a stranger, whereas a participationist ontology is overcoming estrangement.

A Covenant Ontology as Chiasm

Much of my project consists in rejecting the view that there is an entity behind the entity that is the real entity.  When played out in terms of creation and soteriology, this means that deliverance is the overcoming of estrangement (Tillich/Horton) and the rescue from finitude. (I would quote some examples from Orthodox Bridge where they say precisely this, but people would then call shenannigans since it isn’t a scholarly venue.  Fair enough)   A narratival ontology by contrast is dynamic, forward-moving, and is redeemed by thespoken word whose echoes (literally, since sound is the vibration of air) redeem the cosmos.

Another interesting thought:  narrative and covenant are related.  We really can’t know the existence of a covenant pact except in the narrative from which it arises. Have we not also seen that covenant is a category that can also answer ontological questions?  Which model is more relevant to biblical life, participationist schemes or narratival schemes?  Ontologians (forgive the neologism) speak of ousias, overcoming the carapaces of embodiment (Milbank), entities behind the ousia, etc.   A covenantal narrative speaks of blood, cutting, hair, flesh, presence, and genital emissions.   Which model is relevant not only to the biblical narrative but also to real life?

Reformed theology is accused of being nominalist.  It’s hard to see how this is so.  On the other hand, it is not immediately clear why we should favor philosophical realism in its ancient or medieval forms.   The contrast between these two systems allows the Reformed to posit a more robust ontology:  verbalism.   Realism, whether Platonic or Thomist, sees the forms as extra/intra mental realities.   That’s well and good, but at the end of the day the forms are either still in my mind or in Plato’s world above the world. And that’s it.  The Covenantalist sees ultimate reality in the spoken Word.    Imaging Creator Yahweh, our words, whether good or bad, create new situations and new realities.  To be sure, we can’t create physical entities ex nihilo, but the situations are no less real because of that.   In terms of salvation, these spoken realities approach us extra nos.

(Recommended reading:)
Horton, Michael, Four Volume Series on Covenant
Leithart, Peter.  Brightest Heaven of Invention, pp. 223ff

In Practice

• A participationist model will approach the Lord’s Feast asking how the elements change.  A covenantalist will ask is this not a manifestation of the joy of the kingdomand of Yahweh’s victory?  A covenantalist approach let’s Yahweh feed us and isn’t worried about the elements changing our ontological status.
• A participationist model is vertical.  It is more interested in the Forms and in moving to a higher degree of finitude (which will ultimately be overcome).  A covenantalist is horizontal:  it is focused on the in-breaking of Yahweh’s kingdom in history.  I understand that the anchorites speak of Kingdom in their eucharistic services.  That may be so, but it is ultimately dwarfed by a focus on what the elements do.  Incidentally, this is the real value of what the word “rite” really meant.  When Yahweh spoke of signs, it usually meant “sit back and watch this.”  It meant Yahweh was acting mightily for his people’s deliverance.

Nota Bene:   is not the idea (oops) of Sign eschatological?  It points to the final reality but is not the final reality; yet, the final reality is in some small way present in the sign.  Never lose the tension between the sign and the thing signified, for that tension is in its essence eschatological.