The latest issue of the Journal of the History Ideas includes my article on Milton and toleration: “‘Following the Way Which Is Called heresy’: Milton and the Heretical Imperative,†JHI 69:3 (2008), 375-93. (If you’d like a copy, just email me.) This is part of a larger project I’m currently working on, exploring the theological basis of the secularisation of politics in the 17th century. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“If the underlying basis of a free society is the practice of individual religious choice, what then becomes of those who refuse to engage in this practice? What becomes of Roman Catholics, who simply refuse to become heretics in Milton’s (positive) sense – that is, they refuse to make the individual conscience the locus of religious authority? In Milton’s conception of English society, such persons are clearly excluded: their refusal of individualistic choice is tantamount to a repudiation of the entire social order, so that the possibility of their toleration by the state cannot even be entertained. In other words, Milton’s relativization of heresy, if carried out as a social program, would lead to precisely the same impasse as Locke’s theory of toleration: the practice of subjective Protestant piety gives rise to the right to toleration, but the resulting construction necessarily excludes those who do not practice such piety, or who practice the wrong kind….

“I am not suggesting that Milton’s conception of toleration is merely ‘inconsistent,’ or that his otherwise rational theory of toleration is hampered by an unfortunate remainder of religious prejudice. On the contrary, Milton’s theory of toleration is theological through and through. The right to toleration is grounded on a specific Protestant understanding of the nature of faith; and the exception to this right is inextricably connected to the whole logic of toleration. Indeed, the normative ‘centre’ of Milton’s theory is constituted precisely by its exception, by its exclusion of certain groups who are declared incapable of moral participation in the sphere of politics, and who thus forfeit the right to toleration.â€

Labels: church history, heresy, John Milton, politics

Mathias Eichhorn, Es wird regiert! Der Staat im Denken Karl Barths und Carl Schmitts in den Jahren 1919 bis 1938 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994), 290 pp. (review copy courtesy of Duncker & Humblot)

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Or what could Karl Barth possibly have in common with Carl Schmitt? A Protestant theologian who passionately opposed Nazi ideology in the 1930s – and a Catholic state-jurist who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, and who was even briefly dubbed “the crown jurist of the Third Reich.†It would be hard to imagine two more unlikely discussion-partners – but in this fascinating study, Mathias Eichhorn brings these two towering thinkers into conversation with one another. Although this is not a new book (1994), I thought it would be well worth reviewing and discussing in light of all the current interest in “political theology.â€

So anyway, why bring Barth and Schmitt into dialogue? First of all, Eichhorn argues that both thinkers made their fundamental intellectual decisions in the face of the catastrophe of 1914-18. Barth and Schmitt both believed that the catastrophe in Europe was a political consequence of the Enlightenment, with its liberalism, its rationalism, and its doctrine of progress.

In Schmitt’s view, the category of “the political†is constituted by the irreducible relation of friend and enemy (Freund und Feind). And according to Eichhorn, the closest structural relation between Barth and Schmitt lies here: the same accusation which Schmitt brings against political liberalism – that it is no longer capable of perceiving the distinction between friend and enemy – is directed by Barth against theological liberalism. While political liberalism pursues the dream of rational consensus and so pretends that there is no longer an enemy, theological liberalism similarly eliminates the category of heresy, so that the theological distinction between friend and enemy disappears.

And this disappearance of heresy, Eichhorn argues, has grave political consequences. In Barth’s view, liberal theology had forfeited the capacity to resist the National Socialist regime. Indeed, Barth’s own struggle against liberal theology was precisely an attempt to reintroduce the distinction between truth and heresy, so that a theological intervention in the state would again be possible (just think of the Barmen Declaration, with its profoundly political deployment of the concept of heresy). In short, Eichhorn argues that the (Schmittian) friend/enemy political distinction requires a (Barthian) theological distinction between truth and heresy.

Eichhorn thus points to a fundamental irony in Schmitt’s thought: in spite of his concept of the enemy, Schmitt refuses to recognise the validity of theological judgment as the means of distinguishing friend from enemy. His concept of the enemy thus lacks its internal theological criterion, without which it finally becomes arbitrary. Indeed, Schmitt was even tempted to regard the theologian as the fundamental enemy who endangers the state – even though the theologian, with his concept of heresy, is the only one who might have authentically distinguished friend from enemy.

And while the politically anti-liberal Schmitt was undecided about theological questions, the theologically anti-liberal Barth was able to be passionately committed not only to theology, but also to democratic politics. This difference, Eichhorn suggests, is not coincidental, since each thinker’s stance in relation to theology was constitutive of his understanding of the state. Indeed, when Schmitt “threw himself into the arms of Behemoth†in 1933, he showed that he had become incapable – theologically incapable – of distinguishing friend from enemy.

Drawing on Schmitt’s own remark that the enemy is always “my brother,†Eichhorn thus concludes this fascinating and provocative study with the poignant observation: “The enemy is always a part of me, not a stranger and not remote from me. In this sense, Karl Barth was – like no other – the enemy and the brother of Carl Schmitt†(p. 276).

Labels: book reviews, Carl Schmitt, heresy, Karl Barth, politics

by Kim Fabricius (his 25th set of propositions!)

1. Heresy comes from the Greek hairesis (literally “choice†or “thing chosenâ€) and denotes an “opinion†or a “school of thought.†In I Corinthians 11:19 the RSB translates haireseis as “divisionsâ€, the NRSV as “factionsâ€; and while Paul suggests that “there have to be (δεῖ) factions among you,†as a way of separating the wheat from the chaff, nevertheless, as the context confirms, he deploys the word in a negative sense. See also the list of vices (“works of the fleshâ€) in Galatians 5:20: “factions†(NRSV), “party intrigues†(REB).

2. Of course what constitutes heresy is not pre-packaged; there is no timeless, pure dogma, discovered, simpliciter, like a diamond. On the other hand, a purely constructivist account of orthodoxy is inadequate, as if it were costume jewellery. There is a real sense in which dogma gives expression to what has been given to the church from the beginning, to what the church already knows before it recognises it, yet comes to recognise it only through relentless arguments about it, arguments issuing in fine and fragile articulations that say neither too little nor too much, and sometimes say it in negatives (cf. the apophaticism of the Chalcedonian Definition). The rough diamond has to be cut.

3. The early cuts, set in the creeds, were made in the context of ferocious Christological controversies. In dispute was the very identity of God, the God who creates and redeems us, to whom the church witnesses and prays (lex orandi, lex credendi). The arguments were not “academic,†what was at stake was “personal,†viz. the experience of salvation in Christ, and the transmission, through careful conversation, of the parameters within which the experience may be realised. Augustine called sound doctrine the hedge that protects the field where the Christian encounters God. I would only add that a hedge is made of shrubs, not bricks and barbed wire.

4. Another image: if orthodoxy is the bull’s eye, heresy is, as Rowan Williams puts it, the “near-misses†– which actually help guide the church towards the target (cf. Schleiermacher’s reference to his own teaching on God as “inspired heterodoxyâ€). The early heretics were generally neither knaves nor fools but pious and passionate men, zealous for God, morally serious, scrupulously scriptural. They were very clever, but conventional, fetchers and carriers for the zeitgeist. Heretics like a “wrapâ€, and heresies are fastidiously neat and tidy, the product of minds stuck inside the box of common sense. “Consistency,†said Oscar Wilde, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative.†Unsurprisingly, then, heresy is aesthetically unattractive, even ugly.

5. I think it was Alfred North Whitehead who said that there are no such things as whole truths, there are only half-truths, and treating half-truths like whole truths plays the devil. Whitehead might have been talking about heresy. Heretics are one-eyed, they lack the “vision thingâ€: failing to see the bigger picture, they take the part for the whole. That’s why heresy is inevitably rather boring. Heretics have no sense of adventure; they go only so far, they won’t go “all the way.†You could say they are theological prudes, often wearing philosophical chastity belts, who resist being ravished by revelation.

6. Marcion was a literalist who couldn’t get his head around the apparent contradictions between Old and New Testaments, and so he hacked the Bible in two. Arius was monomaniacally monotheist and uncompromisingly conservative and resistant to conceptual innovation; his “notion of unity is devoid of the richness – and the mystery – of God’s unity. It is devoid of the unity of love†(Arthur C. McGill). Eutyches was “a confused and unskilled thinker ... blindly rushing forward to defend the unity of Christ against all attempts to divide Himâ€; while Nestorius, if not perhaps a Nestorian, launched such a “maladroit, crudely expressed exposition of the Antiochene position†on the two natures of Christ that he was never able to explain coherently what constitutes His centre (J. N. D. Kelly).

7. And then there are those perennial pests, Pelagianism and Donatism (technically a “schism,†an error of love rather than faith). A fair-minded comparison of Pelagius’ exegesis of Psalm 14, and Donatus’ interpretation of the parable of the Wheat and the Tares, with Augustine’s is initially embarrassing. But when the bishop of Hippo raises the bar, deconstructing the human soul and insisting that God is always greater than we think, the two heresiarchs, the one monkish and severe, the other hawkish and charismatic, both perfectionists, are out of their depths. They are noble figures, and theirs are heroic theologies, but, as Rowan Williams observes, commenting on Augustine’s legacy, “God asks not for heroes but for lovers; not for moral athletes but for men and women aware of their need for acceptance, ready to find their selfhood in the longing for communion with an eternal ‘other’.â€

8. “Remember,†wrote Chesterton, “that the church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer.... This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into the foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.†And the mark of the mad: “this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.†And so: “Whenever we feel that there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.†Heresy is uncomfortable with the oddness of God.

9. “The truth of dogmas does not depend on the fact that the church maintains them. But is this really so? This is an abiding question, and dogmatics must always leave it open!†(Gerhard Sauter). Tradition always gets the benefit of the doubt, but might some of it be but “agedness of error†(Milton)? An ancient dogma, now widely contested, is the divine impassibility. With Moltmann, Jüngel declares that the cross “has destroyed the axiom of absoluteness, the axiom of apathy, the axiom of immutability, all of which are unsuitable axioms for the Christian concept of God.†Process and liberation theologians join the troops, while Thomas Weinandy and David Bentley Hart mount rearguard actions. Were the Theopaschites (if not the Patripassianists) right after all? In any case, claims to infallibility – a kind of tradition fundamentalism – bring orthodoxy into disrepute, and church history is littered with enough ill-conceived defences of orthodoxy to warrant theological vigilance and modesty. Moreover, while doubt plays black to trust (Wittgenstein), the acute post-enlightenment awareness of the historical and social location of ideas, and the undeniable insights of Tendenzkritik regarding the power-interests that texts serve and legitimate, entail a loss of dogmatic innocence that must give suspicion its due.

10. Finally, what do you do with heretics? Burn ‘em (though in fact none of the early heresiarchs were murdered)? Or at least track them down and corner them? If you’ve got a magisterium, you can fire the Küngs and the Currans. If you’re a powerful and aggressive church leader, you can threaten to take your ball and go home while at the same time invading other pitches (or is it Bishop Akinola who is the [Donatist] heretic?). Karl Barth warned against witch-hunts against Bultmann, and the author of the Barmen Declaration found the contemporary “confessional movement†“dead, cheap, fly-sieving, camel-swallowing, and Pharisaic.†On the other hand, I’m sure Barth would have approved of declaring apartheid a heresy. Finally, however, Stanley Hauerwas is right: “That one of the tests of orthodoxy is beauty means orthodoxy betrays itself if it is used as a hammer to beat into submission those we think heterodox.†And, of course, unless orthodoxy itself issues in orthopraxis – because truth is not so much thought as done (John 7:17) – well, hypocrisy isn’t heresy, but it ain’t pretty. The telos of orthodoxy is not conformity but faith working through love in joyful obedience.

Labels: church history, heresy, Kim Fabricius

The Aussie writer Peter Sellick has posted an excellent polemical piece on the non-existence of the spirit world. He discusses the Arian heresy as an example of rationalist biblical literalism, and he remarks:

“I can’t help thinking that attempts to make Jesus subordinate to the Father are produced by a refusal to accept that the man on the cross, on the stinking dunghill of Golgotha, outside of the city walls and abandoned by all, is God. This is the offence at the centre of the Christian story.â€

Labels: heresy

At the group-blog God as the Mystery of Theology I’ve posted some theses by Eberhard Jüngel on heresy and superstition. Here’s an example:

“A mere recitation of confessions of Jesus Christ does not preserve theology from becoming heretical, but makes it all the more heretical. The mere recitation of confessions is christological superstition.â€

Labels: Eberhard Jüngel, heresy