Retrieval from the Margins

Through “Thick” and “Thin”

Editor’s note: This article is part of a symposium on the current state and future of Protestant retrieval in response to John Ehrett’s article, “The End of Protestant Retrieval.”

In George Orwell’s 1984, the Party demonstrates how retelling a story can warp experience for individuals and institutions by rewriting history to align with the changing requirements of the moment. The Party, in one instance, abruptly changes Oceania’s enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia, declaring that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Historical records are revised to reflect this falsehood, and during a public rally, the shift is announced with fervor, prompting the crowd to immediately accept the new narrative and condemn Eastasia without hesitation. Those who recall the truth are either too fearful to speak out or begin doubting their own memories. This scene illustrates the Party’s ability to control reality through propaganda. 

John Ehrett’s essay, “The End of Protestant Retrieval”, is just such an unwitting exercise in propaganda but its end is the death of retrieval. There was no development of protestant retrieval from an original and more pure “tweed” discourse about theology proper into a fall into more recent “pugilist” bouts over sex, polity, and the social order. Protestant retrieval always was engaged in the hard questions in every discipline. Its practitioners were making significant applications for individuals, the church, and the social and political order from the beginning.

The modern protestant retrieval agenda (e.g., “thick” retrieval) is expansive. Early practitioners on the now defunct website, The Calvinist International, wrote often in defense of ecclesiastical and civil polity, the natural family, classical two kingdoms, natural law, etc., inhabiting the past, seeing through the eyes of protestant peasants and luminaries (e.g., Martin Luther, John Calvin, Philip Melanchthon, Richard Hooker, etc.), to confront the present. This confrontation was not purely, or mostly, devotional or confessional, but prospective and hopeful for a new beginning for magisterial protestantism. Retrieval essays and argumentation cleared away decades, sometimes centuries, of confusion and misdirection, not merely to recontest tradition, a hopeless vanity, but to come face to face again with Nature and Scripture. 

The sources of protestant retrieval were many and varied and it simply cannot be said that we all “often appeal to the same authorities.” There was, and still is, an important pressure to discover the rich experiences and differing perspectives within the protestant magisterial tradition. This project has only just begun. Retreating to monographs about and around the same topics and theologians painfully reveals the problem. This retreat to systemization around recent discoveries has an important place in any decelerating movement. Seeking broader legitimacy at this stage is important for securing hard fought gains. But it does reveal the end of the first iteration of protestant retrieval. That’s not a bad thing. But any ascendancy of this new and “thin” attitude toward retrieval is simply tragic. 

Ehrett says that there is a fight “playing out among those interested in the methodological practice of Protestant retrieval, specifically the revisiting and retranslation of primary-source texts from the era of Protestant scholasticism.” This is, once again, false and misleading. The interest in “retranslation” is small but the excitement about new directions in translation is an ever accelerating mass. This new stage in retrieval is a continuation of the original trajectory of uncovering new sources for lingering on old questions. In that respect, nothing has changed. The fight actually is about a growing conviction among “thin” retrieval practitioners to control retrieval and artificially direct future possibilities. There is also some reluctance to allow equal access to the fountains of protestant retrieval.

Protestant retrieval is not “the desire to build out a more intellectually rigorous Protestant identity relative to the Catholic philosophical tradition.” Such a little brother syndrome is a deforming vision for retrieval. It was the “thick” retrieval, on display at The Calvinist International, that initially carried the debate in Trinitarian discourse around questions of “subordination” in evangelical theology. The practitioners eager to revise 20th-century evangelical Trinitarianism were the same practitioners revising two kingdom theology, complementarian discourse, and other issues in the social and political order. The scope of retrieval, as I’ve said, was always expansive into other areas of doctrine and life. 

The “spark” for this current controversy is not expansion but preoccupation with social control and future direction. Zachary Garris did not invent expansive Protestant retrieval nor was he the initial point of disruption, although it can, I think, rightly be said to have begun in some embarrassment about Christian Nationalism within “thick” Protestant retrieval itself. Many can resist this impulse, but some simply cannot. Oddly, “thin” retrievalists, some of whom were participants in “thick” retrieval” are now rewriting retrieval history and introducing safetyism and gatekeeping into retrieval. The consequence is an unavoidably narrowing and deforming agenda for retrieval. 

The false framing and historical rewrite have the effect of propaganda. It’s why I have referred to this scandal as Reformed 1984. “Thick” retrieval never was positioned in a discussion about “the postwar consensus.” The initial target was bad 19th-20th century scholarship and liberal Protestantism, among other likely suspects. It was hardly controversial to say that “somewhere in the course of recent time, an “authentic” Protestant tradition was abandoned in favor of a limp modern substitute.” Obviously. But it is a testimony to the success of many friends that others can now come along and, having enjoyed the fruits of victory, doubt there were battles. Protestant retrieval was always already retrieving historic resources, critiquing modern deviations, and retrieving “even more.” 

“Thin” retrieval is myopically focused on arguments and normativity and has missed entirely the end of Protestant retrieval. You see this in its overriding concern for “maturity, under modernity” and its framing in modern ideological embarrassments. This turn in retrieval substitutes “seeing through their eyes” with ends that are blatantly modern political liberalism. So we rightly name this approach “Protestant retrieval at the end of history.” 

Against this perspective, “thick” Protestant retrieval is not mainly concerned with “the Protestant tradition as it has developed up to the present day” or re-norming “that tradition by reference to older patterns and practices.” We do not stand within a “living tradition” to endlessly contest irrelevant minutiae as archivists curating history to hang in a museum. We do not even stand in a living tradition. These concerns miss, sadly, the value of contingent experience and the marginalia of history in favor of a so-called “maturity” that arrives at predetermined modernist conclusions.

We reject this fundamentally rationalist liberal critique of illiberalism and other ways of seeing. The contingency and time-boundedness of the past is itself particularly worthy for our lingering and searching. Because retrieval is not “data-mining”, “argumentative ammunition”, or “a quest” for a useful argument to use against our theological or political enemies. In setting down these thoughts on retrieval my concern precisely is to reject that vision as well as the establishment of a “quasi magisterial sort of authority”, whether in the sources or in institutions. But retrieval is not a theology and its value is not primarily theological. Its value is not merely bound up in your spiritual devotion.

So, I insist, there has been an end of recent Protestant retrieval in its first iteration. Ehrett’s essay marks the first opportunity to observe its passing in a public setting. I forcefully reject the rewriting of its history and methodologies. If these new proposals are received, the death of Protestant retrieval is already upon us. I have also detected propaganda in the redirection of retrieval for this new stage in ways that betray the Protestant retrieval project to its core. If this is the path in front of us, there is no path behind us, because you cannot have gotten to here from there. You can only think that Protestant retrieval was “a narrow band of theological topics mostly within the domain of theology proper” if you were absent during the heyday of 21st century Reformed irenicism. It’s obviously false. 

This essay proposes a new direction for Protestant retrieval. One that is also true to its beginnings. Protestant retrieval must remain a movement that sees through the eyes of our Protestant fathers. We recognize now that there are more than three. Seeing through the eyes of another is a hard labor of love. We do not do this merely to accumulate arguments or display development. We do not do this as only an exercise in spirituality. We do this to honor the rights of our spiritual and generational ancestors. Not to build as they built, or to build what they built, but for a new beginning of magisterial protestantism. The modern ideologies are dead. Liberalism is exhausted. What comes next can only be born from burying deep and expansive roots in the past, everywhere and anywhere there’s a nourishing deposit of contingent experiences and time-bound thought. 

For this new direction, Protestant retrieval must wrestle with new techniques in translation and new models of alt-collegia to assume a prominent place among the periphery outside of “end of history” liberalism and its cooptation of retrievalist programs. To repurpose Michael Millerman, such an accelerated retrieval agenda is also, necessarily, “a philosophy of debris and a common impulse toward everything that was discarded, toppled and humiliated during the construction of a postmodern society, everything that was rejected, that was marginalized, that was kicked out of the center, that was canceled, erased, all of that suddenly becomes fair game and a matter of interest.” Protestant retrieval becomes even more a “retrieval from the margins” as it rediscovers its own recent past and applies new techniques to ancient wisdom. The goal in this new iteration of retrieval is not “maturity, under modernity” but to see with fresh eyes by lingering on possible but discarded futures.

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