The Moral Judgment of Retrieval
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.”
Last week, in the wake of John Ehrett’s article, and to move the conversation forward, the Davenant Institute hosted a podcast discussion amongst Ehrett, Steven Wedgeworth, and me on the article. Ehrett’s article has evoked responses ranging from praise to loathing. I was (and am) on the latter part of the spectrum.
Just as Ehrett’s essay itself did not arise out of a vacuum, so the responses themselves indicate that latent within contemporary Protestantism there is profound disagreement over how and what ought to be retrieved from our ecclesial forefathers. Ehrett himself observes this: “Interlocutors X and Y, for the most part, are both interested in returning ad fontes—to the sources—in search of a deeper understanding of the theological-intellectual tradition to which they profess allegiance. And yet they reach very different conclusions in the course of that process.” These “very different conclusions” to which Ehrett refers are inevitable given that Protestants do not agree on a “a whole host of subsidiary” issues, which he rightly identifies as “‘Christian nationalism,’ the political philosophy of ‘liberalism,’ gender roles, [and] ethnic diversity.” No one should be shocked, then, when some retrieve from our tradition ideas which support one side or another!
One of my main criticisms of Ehrett’s article, as I noted on the podcast, was that it is essentially a red herring. Ehrett identifies the reason for this divide among evangelicals as being methodological in nature. However, he obscures the most obvious cause of the disagreement: Disagreement over what is true or what is helpful.
Everyone believes in retrieval. Even the most progressive academics—those who obsess about our patriarchal, racist ancestors—insist on retrieving minority and queer voices in history. As the latter, linked article puts it, “we can confront here how the figures discussed throughout this article push against our own expectations of gender identity in the early Christian and medieval world, rubbing against our own anachronistic notions of a binary gender construct.” Accordingly, this author thinks that retrieving “trans-history” is helpful.
Generally, we retrieve sources for two reasons. Either what is retrieved is deemed to be good and true (convertible terms) or helpful. Presumably, the reason the Davenant Institute republishes Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is because they think it is either good or helpful for the church. The reason I might retrieve John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in the classroom—even though I think much of it is untrue—is because I think it is helpful or instructive to be read in school.
I make this observation because Ehrett and others who criticize the broad retrieval of various early modern sources do not often make explicit that which, it seems to me, must be implicit in their criticism: they do not want certain sources retrieved because they do not think that such sources are either good or helpful—an unspoken but controlling value judgment.
My criticism is not that they do not have this right to think that. If you think that Junius’ political theology or Luther’s writing on the Jews is bad and unhelpful, then it is foolish to want to retrieve them. But we should not be coy. At the bottom of this whole debate is a difference over what people think to be true or helpful.
In an attempt to be helpful, I want to make some other observations about Ehrett’s article and this retrieval debate. First, a strong impetus of those who argue for the thicker-sort of retrieval has to do with the Overton window. Many positions—whether theological, political, or social—which our forefathers were willing to express are simply not acceptable nowadays. Let me illustrate by way of a true story.
Every year I teach New Testament to high-school students. Inevitably, we encounter Paul’s rather jarring language about Cretans in Titus 1:12–13. One year, I had a student who sincerely and boldly asked, “How is this not racist?” Other students agreed with him. These students were Christians; they believed that Scripture was divine and that Paul was divinely inspired. However, they grew up in a world in which it is intolerable to make a negative generalization or stereotype about a people group. In response to the student, after noting some linguistic infelicities in his question, I tried to use this text as a way of moving my students’ Overton window. No doubt, one of the most helpful uses of retrieval is precisely its ability to force us to re-imagine what is or could be possible, what is or could be acceptable. For example, we need not think that burning heretics is prudent or effective today to appreciate the fact that our Christian forefathers often did in their own day. By retrieving such writings, our Overton window moves. Which is to say, our imaginations expand.
A second complaint with Ehrett’s article is his description of the thick-retrievalists. For example, Ehrett claims that folk like Zach Garris and Stephen Wolfe retrieve the early modern Reformed on political and social issues “simply because they were the Reformers’ claims.” No. The appeal to these earlier theologians is usually couched in a much broader assumption—namely, that many of the principles our Reformed forefathers taught were jus gentium and natural law. Even pagans, and the broad swath of Christians previous to the Reformation, consistently taught these principles. Ehrett also claims that these authors, in their retrieval project, are willfully (and deceptively?) downplaying their real political and social aims: “appeals to ‘prudence’ function as discursive mechanisms that occlude more than illuminate: they allow the speaker’s actual policy commitments—what they would really do if given power—to remain perpetually opaque.” I take this to mean that even though Wolfe may actually want to round-up heretics and burn them (as our forefathers did), when his critics press him on whether that is what he actually wants, he cries: “prudence.” Had Ehrett done some of the listening, he would have realized, however, that Wolfe often appeals to prudence in political philosophy on the basis of the early modern Reformed tradition. (Listen to Wolfe here distinguishing between principle and prudence.) What is he trying to hide? He defends toleration, for example, on the basis of our tradition. He explicitly claims he does not want to simply regurgitate Genevan political theology at the level of prudence. Perhaps Ehrett simply thinks that Wolfe and Garris actually believe that the modern world is just like the early modern one. However, it is more likely that the former and latter simply disagree on both the principial and prudential levels. It is easy to claim that your interlocutors are living in a pipe dream; it is much harder to argue that your interlocutors’ principles are wrong.
As should be clear, I do not claim that Ehrett is arguing that we should not do the work of retrieval. Indeed, like him, I think we should retrieve from our tradition that which is good and helpful and leave the rest to the dustbins of history. The real debate is not whether we should retrieve, but what ought to be retrieved, and what is good and truly helpful. We must be willing to lay our cards on the table and provide substantive arguments. We cannot simply dismiss our tradition on the basis that we do not live in precisely their context. We must continue to identify and distinguish between timeless political, social, and theological principles—which do, in fact, exist, as our forefathers taught—and their contingent applications. When we disagree, we must make real arguments. And we must not conceal the moral judgments inevitably in play and drive much of our debates. If someone thinks elements of early modern political thought are bad, just say so. Make explicit too the sources of and influences on the production of this moral assessment. Do not hide behind mundane observations of context, circumstance, and contingencies—these are distractions.
All of this is, in part, an expression of why I retrieve the sources and teach them at the Davenant Institute. May we continue to return ad fontes bonos et utiles.
Image: St. Dominic de Guzman and the Albigensians, Pedro Berruguete (1450-1504). Wikimedia Commons.
