When John Cardinal Newman wrote … The Idea of a University in the late 1850’s, he was hopeful that Oxford might re-engage with its long Christian past and halt the relentless slide to secularization.
“Alas! For centuries past that city has lost its prime honour and boast, as a servant and soldier of the Truth. Once named the second school of the Church, second only to Paris, the foster mother to St. Edmond, St. Richard, St. Thomas Cantelupe, the theatre of great intellects, of Scotus the subtle doctor, of Hales the irrefragable, of Occam the special, of Bacon the admirable, of Middleton the solid, of Bradwardine the profound, Oxford has now lapsed to that level of mere human loveliness, which in its highest perfection we admire in Athens.”
When John Cardinal Newman wrote these words in his “The Idea of a University” in the late 1850’s, he was hopeful that Oxford might re-engage with its long Christian past and halt the relentless slide to secularization. This, “secularization,” is itself a term which may or may not have been suitable for use in Newman’s mind, but is familiar to Christians in our time as a concept which is usually used in a pejorative way, especially in conversation about the trajectory of our culture. In listing the scholar-saints, men of whom Oxford once boasted but now think “cute” or “medieval,” Newman sees, rather uncritically, a better and more Christian university. He was, however, looking at the history of interaction between the older intellectual and philosophical tradition and the Christian Church and faith through the lenses of a western Christianity which had largely forgotten its eastern roots.
I find it interesting that Newman brings forth the “doctors” of the medieval university as the prime examples, superior to that of fourth century SS. Gregory Nazianzen and Basil of Caesaria who he mentions near the end of his book. In treating them in this way, Newman, in a qualified sense, simply solidifies that which he seeks to undo. Newman, like so many scholars up to comparatively recent times, largely ignores the nuances and conclusions of eastern Christianity.
The doctor-saints Newman points to might be, to a great extent, the problem rather than the solution, for it is with them that we see the “coming of age” of a propensity of the Latin mind, evident in early Ecumenical Councils but routinely corrected by the scholars of the east for a millenium, to break things down into the sum of their parts, to the eventual exclusion of any possibility of a truly holistic view; be it of God, of life, of man or of learning. “Four Steps to a Christian Marriage,” “Eight Habits of Christian People,” “Six Mistakes Christian Husbands Make With Their Wives.” We expect to find titles like these at our local Evangelical bookstore and fail to notice that the rationale is not at all different than “Seven Deadly Sins,” or “The Seven Cardinal Virtues” or the “Four Works of Mercy” or any of a host of other boxed pieties which were worked out at least in part by the medieval doctors on Newman’s list, including, yes, the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin. The staunchly evangelical proprietor of the bookstore selling titles like the fictitious ones just noted would certainly find it strange if not insulting to be told that the literature his store offers might simply be representative of a somewhat eccentric Roman Catholicism; a school intending to be Christ-centered cannot afford to overlook the possibility that the “schoolmen” so admired by Newman were in fact prime contributors to the Christian University’s demise.
As an Excel student, the question asked in the title may be too difficult to answer. I live forty miles away, I am on campus only one night each week with twelve or fifteen others who are also Excel students, I do not attend athletic, theater or lecture events and am not involved in the life of university in a way that a conventional undergrad might be. In this sense I am largely unqualified to comment. Yet, as a Christian minister, I am at least competent to respond on a different level, and I merely ask if Christ-centeredness, in the fullest sense, is even possible when using the university model of the twenty-first century, with its Title IX’s and its state-imposed compliances and the tremendous pressure to produce competent business people for a world that often looks askance at Christianity? Has the uncritical acceptance of the ultimate premise, of breaking things into their component parts which is in fact what has happened in terms of the various disciplines made it impossible to, if you will, reconstruct Humpty-Dumpty?
When the medieval doctors Newman lionizes had completed their work, a Christianity had been formed which would not have been recognizable to SS Gregory and Basil, for the doctors completed the divorce of nature from grace. Sacraments were now, instead of a participation in the divine life, a juridical necessity to avoid penalties. Symbols were drained of their ultimate efficacy merely by being defined as “instead of” rather than “participates in” divine realities, and the reformers would quite logically dispense with them altogether. Man was now “totally depraved” rather than, while certainly weakened and mortal in the first Adam, still the image-bearer of the divine and an object of God’s love in the second Adam. The Incarnation of our Lord was now doctrinally protected but largely ignored in a relentless march toward competing justifications and sanctifications, fides and scripturas, which continues unabated in the equally relentless fragmentations of Protestantism. Is this the Christ-centeredness Huntington proposes to institutionalize?
Eastern Christianity has certainly lost some of its earlier vitality through centuries of isolation in which energies were concentrated on keeping the relentless hordes of Islam at bay. Much of the engagement with western Christianity begun in the twentieth century has been compromised by peevishness and paranoia on the part of the Orthodox. Melancthon’s winsome sixteenth century correspondence with Patriarch Jeremias of Constantinople is telling and predictive; the Reformers were providing answers to notions which were not even questions for the Orthodox, and the Patriarch summarily closed a discussion he was not ready to engage in. To this day, a good deal of the difficulty in engagement of Orthodoxy with the West has more to do with the uncritical acceptance of a host of theological, philosophical and harmartiological premises, consistent with the “doctors” thinking but which have never been recognizable to the Orthodox.
As an Orthodox Christian, as a deacon who was ordained by a bishop whose apostolic succession reaches all the way back to St. Andrew, the fisherman and brother of Peter, I assert that failure to engage Orthodox Christianity seriously, and to seriously consider the assertion that the uncritically assumed epistemology of the schoolmen can only continue to contribute to de-Christianization, will insure that Huntington will have a difficult time avoiding the fate of becoming a smaller version of Harvard.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Jacob Lehmann // Mar 1, 2008 at 12:02 am
Mr. Myers,
As a Christian who deeply respects the Church Fathers, especially those of Cappadocia, I wholeheartedly agree with the thrust of your essay: the more we compartmentalize the Faith, the more we alienate ourselves from the God in whom we place our faith.
Would you agree that this attempt to separate the essential elements of the faith from the non-essential is borderline Bultmann? I would differ from you slightly that there might be some aspects of worship that one can re-interpret for a new generation without sacrificing the witness that we bear to Christ; I do, however, assert that, since the Reformation, the tendency to discard the “hard sayings” of the Faith has increased at an alarming rate.
All in all, an enjoyable essay with a provocative thesis.
2 Michael D. Myers // Mar 6, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I agree! Many notions of essential vs. non-essential are simply intellectual balkanizations via Bultmannization! It all turns on who gets to decide what is essential and what’s not, doesn’t it?
That said, it would seem to be difficult for evangelicals to avoid precisely this dichotomy, especially in the area you suggest, that of worship. What is worship, anyway?
In my Church, the Orthodox Church, worship is entirely act. It is done with little regard to how I might feel about it, or whether I get a blessing from it; certainly there is little concern about whether the participant “learns,” even though Orthodox corporate prayer clearly states what the Church believes. To the complaint that “I don’t get anything out of it,” i.e., the Sunday morning Liturgy(I know how that one goes, I raised 4 teenagers!) the fact is that I was granted the inestimable privilege of joining the saints in heaven in worshiping the God of the entire universe. Whether I “got anything” is beside the point; to worship in the Orthodox Church at all is to be granted a special participation in the Divine Life of God in Christ.
It seems to me, an outsider, that worship in the evangelical context means something completely different. It seems that worship means many different things in the various strata of evangelicalism, but one thing appears very consistent: whatever an evangelical group chooses to call worship, it is a set-up for the sermon, which is the main event. I would guess that in the minds of some evangelicals the hymns, etc. could be dispensed with altogether in deference to the sermon, even as schools such as Huntington offer very energetic programs in worship leadership. I would venture to guess that a prime reason these programs exist is precisely to address this intellectualized drift to “sola sermon.”
My point here (again, as an outsider) is that worship leadership programs themselves are efforts to “essentialize” hymn singing and other things that will always be viewed as “less essential” than the sermon among evangelicals. Thus, essential vs. non-essential seems to be a fully institutionalized component of evangelicalism’s habitual way of trying to answer the question, “what should we do on Sunday morning?” Difficult to see a way out of it!
3 Jacob Lehmann // Mar 7, 2008 at 4:06 pm
I understand somewhat your opinions. As an Evangelical who plans on joining the Roman Catholic Church as a result of exposure to High Church Anglicanism, I tend to more closely relate worship with action as well as thought.
Depending upon the stream of evangelical thought (whether it blends with a more traditional community or a more contemporary), the emphasis upon worship can differ dramatically. In general, however, the major focus is upon the Word of God preached, rather than participating in the Trinitarian life through the Living Word, Jesus.
Despite my fundamental reluctance to excise aspects of worship, I do believe that a lesson that Jesus teaches His Church through the Incarnation is that we must hold in tension the transcendence and the immanence of God; the message is universal and unchanging as God does not change, but it can also adapt as the community shifts or as new cultures hear and understand His revelation in new ways.
In short, a truly difficult tension to hold.
4 Michael Myers // Mar 12, 2008 at 11:32 am
I’m not sure. Nestorius asserted this same tension when he refused to allow that “God could need his diaper changed,” and the fathers at Ephesus struck down his language differentiating immanence and transcendence. Instead, the Ephesian fathers taught that this tension is in fact resolved rather than exacerbated in the incarnation. Chalcedon is often seen as a “corrective measure” to Ephesus; yet the victors at Chalcedon were not the strict dyophysites, but the “Cyrillian Chalcedonians” who were careful to maintain the “one Christ” defined at Ephesus over against Nestorius. Later, St. Maximus the Confessor would assert (and this is fundamental to Orthodox teaching on salvation) that the “deified humanity” of Christ (deified by it’s hypostatic union with divinity) provided all members of Christ in baptism the access to “deification” by grace through the operation of the Holy Spirit. Deification, in St. Maximus’ scheme, proposed that communion with God makes us fully human rather than destroying or “distancing” our humanity, famously including our flesh, precisely because the incarnation provides the full resolution to the problem of distance and estrangement between the human and the divine. (John Meyendorff, “Byzantine Theology”). A Christ who’s person needed to be held in tension, could not, in the grand scheme of things, ascend, because flesh which is not entirely deified is not fit for the right hand of the Father. (Also why it is sad that the Feast of the Ascension gets insufficient attention; our very own humanity is seated in heaven!) At any rate, the primary thing is that the culture needs to respond to the one Christ; “enculturation” is actually quite secondary. (The story told by St. Vladimir’s ninth century Russian envoys to Constantinople is a good example). I’d have to think about this more, but it seems to me that all manner of liturgical larceny has been committed in the name of “relevance,” which in turn seems to assume that one or another “part” of Christ is not so relevant.
5 Fr. David Meinzen // Mar 14, 2008 at 9:58 am
This is a good exchange, and I hope you don’t mind me interjecting some thoughts. Suffice it to say I am in complete agreement with what Dn Michael has written. The schoolmen of the Western medieval university systems divorced doctrinal thinking from the central concern that lead the church catholic (whole) to embrace the labors of the fathers of the seven ecumenical councils during the first Christian millenium; the very same concern that is always at the heart and core of honest Christianity; the answer to Jesus’ own question posed to Peter and the other Apostles, “Who do you say that I am?”
Worship is at the curx of this concern! It is why St. Bernard of Clairvaux was so distrustful of the scholastic endeavor gaining strength in his day. To give in to the temptation to cogitate upon God (and His holy gifts by which He gives Himself to us) appart from the communion of prayer, appart from humbly receiving Him from Himself in the very act of worshipping Him, is to make God out to be a mere catagory, a “thing,” to be sliced and diced under the microscope of subjection to mere human intelectual analysis, rather than to allow He Who alone IS–the Lord and Giver of all life–to remold our twisted minds and hearts anew and aright. This is what He does to us through the ways He has taught us to worship Him. Remember the golden calf incident at the foot of mount Sinai! In that text of Holy Scripture the giving of the Ten Commandments takes up only a small part. The bulk of the text is concerned with the revelation of HOW God wants Israel to worship Him. They (and we) NEED Him to teach this to them (and us) since it is IN COMMUNING WITH HIM ON HIS TERMS that we come to truly “know” Him (and recall that in Scriptures, “to know,” is not about intelectual gymnastics, but about personal intimacy as concrete as intercourse between a husband and wife!). “And this is eternal life, that they know You the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent!” (John 17:3; see also the dialogue with the Samaritan woman at the well, how it turns upon the question of KNOWING Who “we” WORSHIP). God eveals Himself to us! He gives Himself to us! Not the other way around!
In closing let me finally say this. Mr. Lehmann, you wrote, “we must hold in tension the transcendence and the immanence of God; the message is universal and unchanging as God does not change, but it can also adapt as the community shifts or as new cultures hear and understand His revelation in new ways.” In all seriousness, “we” need do nothing of the sort, for the Holy Spirit has guided the shaping of worship precisely to do both of these things, particularly throughout the whole time of the seven ecumenical councils. What “we must” do, first and foremost, is to humbly submit ourselves to be taught by the Holy Spirit preciesely through humbly submitting to worship the Holy Trinity in the ways passed down to us from the times the church was, for the most part, united and guided by the Holy Spirit in the seven ecumenical councils. Only then will we be able to, “hold in tension the transcendence and the immanence of God…[and] also adapt as the community shifts or as new cultures hear and understand His revelation”! Trust us on this. We speak from long, hard (often heartbreaking) experience.
Blessed Easter to you, in Christ our Lord!
Fr. David Meinzen
Leave a Comment