Objective Orthodoxy
The most woodenly literal meaning of the word orthodoxy would be “straight teaching” since ortho is from the Greek adjective with that signification, and the latter part of the word has roots in the Latin doctrina, which is alternatively rendered teaching or doctrine. Even if one supposes a root in the Greek words doxa or dokein, the “praise” or “appearance” connotations of those words will not be far from the same mark. One usage of the verb form in the latter, Louis Berkhof surmised, was to say, “it seems to me, or, I am of the opinion, but also, I have come to the conclusion, I am certain, it is my conviction.”1
It is quite true that an entire segment of the Christian world took on that label as a banner for their Eastern Orthodoxy, but it is no less true that Roman Catholicism did the same with the word catholic, a word which Reformed theologians know very well still means “universal.”
We are selective subjectivists. When it suits our fancy or the conveniences of our argument, we will not only misuse words, but we will be content to let others co-opt them. Those who love truth the most will tolerate this very thing the least. We may exercise charity about it, but this does not demand going along with pretensions.
I am sorry to say that the Reformed share in this element of the human predicament. To cut to the chase, the instance that I am concerned about most in our day is a somewhat predictable habit among many engaged in retrieval theology. There is always a love of novelty. Oddly enough, when what is new becomes what is old, this translates into a “trad-novelty.” An unhealthy pursuit of historically remote players and teams can become a form of rebellion against our more immediate fathers because of what they supposedly kept hidden from us.
Reformed classicalism is nothing if it is not exercised in this very sourcing of the older writings. We celebrate retrieval. However, the purpose of reading old texts ought to be the same as that of reading newer texts, or having conversations about the same subject matter. We should be advancing in knowing truth. We should be moving further up and further in, to borrow from the end of Lewis’s children's adventures—further into orthodoxy. It is precisely because truth is an objective thing that it admits of degrees when it comes to our subjective relation to it.
The old books have an advantage in this respect, but the moment we forget that this is why we opened them in the first place, the advantage is lost, and we become like so many others in the rearview mirror of the history of thought. We settle in, lifeless, still chattering away, yet sinking into the fossilizing sediments of mere traditions. As one historian of theology has said: Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.2 This can be true not only about ecclesial strands but also about schools of thought.
Truth and Orthodoxy
One way to situate ourselves is to imagine a pure dogmatism (or authoritarianism) on one side and a pure rationalism (or individualism) on the other. My apologies to the reader for adding those parentheses which may have an oversimplifying effect, yet, if I may challenge the offended, those original labels—“dogmatism” and “rationalism”—are equally malleable in this or that context. They are paired as they are in order to draw thicker conceptual circles around two extreme errors.
At one extreme, “the truth” is to be assented to merely because some human being external to oneself, or group of external human beings, is perceived to be the totalizing authority on the matter; and then, at the other extreme, “the truth” is open to all, such that the reason of the individual is free from any coercion from external authority.
It should be plain that, at these extremes, the “isms” come into their own. Here authority, dogma, reason, and the individual are not the problem. Rather, in one way or another, either the method or the means become confused with the essence of truth itself. They become the object of truth. When our minds view this whole spectrum and press their mental “pause buttons,” it becomes plain enough that these are oversimplifications; and yet these oversimplifications have beguiled many.
What then is the truth about truth? Is it a mean between authoritarian dogmatism or individual rationalism? No. Recall that these extremes mistook means and methods to be the essence of the truth, which they are not, rather than being servants of its communication, which they are. In other words, they took good and necessary things and made them into what they are not. Taking these for what they are worth would not place the essence of truth on some middle point of this spectrum. Instead, it would recognize that “truth” is not a particular point on this spectrum at all. I will return shortly to the matter of having the proper philosophical stance that will make all of this second nature to the mind.
First, let us see how this plays out in our ideas of orthodoxy, or the truth of Christian belief.
I am going to have to assume for the sake of brevity that my reader at least desires to be orthodox and thus to believe and defend the truth as it is in Christ. Hence, I must restrict myself to those who already favor an objective approach over a subjective approach in theology. When someone says that “Truth is subjective,” what they mean is that it is all in how one looks at it. It reduces things to the person or the knower’s perspective or feelings or preferences. The individual-finite knower is called the “subject” in this context. By contrast, when we say that “Truth is objective,” what we mean is that the truth of a thing is a reference to the real nature of that thing (or object). We call all truths or realities “objects” outside of ourselves, or independent of our perspectives.
Our above extremes of dogmatism and rationalism do not correspond to objectivist and subjectivist approaches. Rather, each of those extremes believe they are the proper arbiter of objective truth—the dogmatic authority by being so rooted; the individual reason by being so free. In alternating times of instability here or oppression there, our finite minds, grasping for truth, fly to one or the other of these treasonous pseudo-servants.
Rising above these two extreme errors is the way forward in understanding the true meaning of “rule of faith” used throughout the early centuries of Christian theology, or in understanding the proper meaning of the Reformed doctrine of sola Scriptura. The early church fathers used the expression “rule of faith” before the word “orthodoxy” had really settled in to the popular consciousness. Later apologists for mere dogmatic authority have seized upon the opportunity in those authors, extracting the phrase from its context, and since there is just enough context to show that the father in question is settling a dispute over doctrine, the easy way out is taken back to mindless subjection.
In fact, the rule of faith was a synonym for the orthodox system of belief, or, in short “the Christian faith” or “Christian truth.” That the parallel appeal was made to what the churches universally believe certainly does speak to the catholic element of that truth; but that is one of its elements and not its whole.
The normative dimension of sola Scriptura is really the same. Only the source dimension is different. Because Scripture alone is the word of God, it norms tradition. Tradition norms our reading of Scripture, but it does not stand over Scripture itself. That said, to say that Scripture is the only, final authority in all matters of faith and practice is to speak of its sum or its whole counsel.3 In other words, we do not apply the ultimate authority of Scripture in ruling of disputes by presenting passages at random or without explanation. We assume that it has an objective meaning and that this is not equivalent to its perceived meaning. We notice (the dispute forces us to notice) that not all agree on its meaning.
At this point, two opposite subjectivists run away from a genuine resolution about Scripture’s meaning—the first by a biblicism that refuses any further focus than on what it intuitively the case in said passage; the second by a despotism of either the crowd or the crown, either a skeptic having “proved” the interpretive rule that “to each his own,” or the exaltation of some mere mortal to settle the matter, as if that ever could settle the matter. One thing that these flights will no longer be talking about, in any meaningful sense, is precisely the truth of the matter.
Part of the problem is that in our modern context, we are told that there are different visions of truth, different models or theories. Someone annoying enough (I would have volunteered) should have asked the theorists who came up with this rubbish to which theory of truth this theory about theories of truth belonged? That might have kept them busy enough to keep this to themselves, but alas, we have been told that truth may be conceived along the lines of correspondence, coherence, consensus, and pragmatic considerations. There are others, but these are the main four that vie for acceptance in the modern West. We may summarize them as follows:
The correspondence theory — truth is what corresponds to objective reality.
The coherence theory — truth is what is consistent with the sum of axioms and intermediate propositions in any system of explanation.
The consensus theory — truth is what a sufficient majority (often an expert class) agrees to be true.
The pragmatic theory — truth is what works in the real world.
The discerning reader may note that the first theory conceives of truth as objective in the sense described above, and the other three theories each offers one form of subjectivism or another, sometimes concealing the subjective dimension in a group that is larger, or in some way better, or for a good enough cause. In each case, what constitutes a large enough sample, or the standard of excellence in such better minds, or the worth of the cause—these all proceed on the strength of the fallacy of begging the question. At such a point, these “theories of truth” are in fact no longer talking about the truth at all. They are all elaborate exercises in avoiding the more difficult questions of discovery.
There is a very good reason that the so-called correspondence theory of truth was simply the way that philosophers and theologians thought about truth before the modern era. They still had their heads screwed on straight. They knew that the purpose of minds was for getting outside of them. It was for thinking about reality, and the purpose of speech was for talking about the same. They would have accepted no substitute, and they would have recognized any proposed substitutes as a desperate attempt by someone peddling an error to change the subject.
This is wholly in keeping with what the greatest Christian theologians have said about truth.
Augustine wrote that, “Reasoning does not create the truth but discovers it.”4 Such a statement distinguishes an exalted place for reason from rationalism, which begins to conflate one’s reason with Reason per se.
Anselm applied this objective view of truth to distinguish between reason’s proposing of truth and the truth itself. He said that,
something is true only by participating in the truth, and therefore the truth of the true is in the true itself, but the thing stated is not in the true statement. Hence it should not be called its truth, but the cause of its truth … I only know that when it signifies that what is is, then truth is in it and it is true.5
The same objective sense of truth was also applied to systems of truth—that is, larger sets of propositions. Reason integrates these and reflects upon them, but neither the reason of a single mind nor that of a group of minds are the same thing as that system—much less are they the same thing as the Truth itself to which such systems may approximate to greater or lesser degrees.
Among the Reformed, Franciscus Junius wrote A Treatise on True Theology (1594) sketching out, among other things, some ways to tell whether a theological system is basically true or false, and, when there is error, from whence it arises. Francis Turretin does much the same in the early going of his Institutes of Elenctic Theology (1679-85).
Well into modernity, Herman Bavinck could still maintain that, “Truth is agreement between thought and reality.”6 If one studies it out, one will find the same also held by modern Reformed luminaries such as Edwards, the Hodges, Dabney, Shedd, Warfield, and Kuyper.
Finally, what is true of any one truth will be true of a set, and that includes the vast set of theological truths which we call orthodoxy. The orthodox are not orthodoxy, which is one reason that one may become more or less orthodox precisely by (and only by) conforming more of what they think to more of what is really the case.
Two Warring Conceptions of Orthodoxy
We could call one orthodoxy by theologian-consensus and the other orthodoxy by truth-correspondence. These are admittedly clunky labels. For the sake of easy expression, let us simply call them consensus orthodoxy and objective orthodoxy. Whether we like it or not, consensus becomes one more form of subjectivism the moment that it is recast, independent its appropriate servant role. We recognize the false humility in postmodernism’s replacement of “metanarratives” that stand over all with deconstructions that expose the culture-bound, power-exerting means and ends of belief. They do this without bothering to mention that this is only an alternative metanarrative. If such is true, then it is true of all belief-formation, including the deconstructionist’s superficial rot that he commends for your belief.
We can see this easily enough: “There are no truths that stand over all—er, except for that one (Do make an exception for me right now, of course!).” Very well, we can spot the contradiction. But I wonder if we can recognize another common thread. Our debunker belongs to a class, though he may pretend to fly solo; and just so, our exalted classes who wear the black robes of the cloister or the white robes of the laboratory each cultivate a priestcraft in which the rules no longer apply.
Each discipline must have its distinct method, yet to speak of “consensus” may either refer to the latest summary of scholarship, or else to a fine excuse to insulate the “scholarship” from objective scrutiny. It may be just one more narrative as to why the rules do not apply. Of course it takes the form of a kind of intimidation: “You wouldn’t understand!” This is a very fine way to define one’s account as one that is above having to give an account.
There are similarities and dissimilarities between the ideas of theology-by-consensus and science-by-consensus. The dissimilarities may easily distract us. For example, the subject matter of theology and the subject matter of science differ in a way that privileges a theological consensus. Consensus science more directly opposes the way that science is supposed to operate (hypotheses, testing, etc.) than the way consensus theology would seem to oppose the nature of theology. Theologians are not supposed to be constantly at work in a laboratory with such an expanding field of newfound anomalies. After all, we are not to put God to the test; nor is the number of angels that really can dance on the head of a pin quantifiable by repeated experimentation.
It is the virtue of both the material sciences and that queen of all sciences to know reality; yet the subject matter of theology is necessary truth and the subject matter of science is contingent truth, or “facts,” if you prefer. More than that, the very nature of special revelation implies greater unpacking of a truth once revealed to the saints, whereas the nature of the scientific method and the field of general revelation implies greater development. It is not that there is nothing fundamental in science and nothing innovative in theology. It is rather that these are not the dominant notes of the two respective disciplines.
Now because of such dissimilarities, we may miss how theology-by-consensus would suffer under a similar repression of truth as a science-by-consensus. It is not difficult to conceive.
If “The Science” functions to stifle that next step in the scientific method, then perhaps appeals to “The Orthodox” or “The Rule of Faith” or even “the Bible says” can function against theological method. There is a place for church discipline when it comes to those spreading what the church regards to be erroneous doctrine, but let us not confuse that act of censure, necessary though it might be in its own context, with actual theology. Where the mind’s deeper look into God’s truth has been obscured, there theology has been abandoned.
Such consensus roadblocks and red herrings may be many, but I will focus on two: namely, elitism and ecumenicalism. Needless to say, this adds to our map of problematic positions. These two are not the same as our aforementioned dogmatism and rationalism. Here the two errors are not positioning themselves as arbiters of objective truth. In fact, they look down upon the whole notion. The elitist “knows” that things are always more complicated than all that; the ecumenicalist is “concerned,” at least at first, that so many others are not being given a voice. Now give them each an inch and they will take a foot of expertise or inclusion. Give them all you have and you will find soon enough that a very different orthodoxy is what they had in mind from the start. The dispassionate and disenfranchised routines were just that—elitism and ecumenicalism are epistemological sucker-punches to the naive. These are distractions from defending truth as it is. Elitism inflates a consensus of expertise in the relevant field. Ecumenicalism inflates a consensus of genuine faith and legitimate Christian identity. To say so is not to oppose scholarship or church unity. It is to recognize that neither of these things are the essence of truth.
The Two Conceptions Applied to Reformed Orthodoxy
The label “Reformed orthodoxy” was dusted off to our generation by Richard Muller. At the height of the era producing such orthodox theology, Francis Turretin would often use the expression “the orthodox” to refer to that group of theologians who took what he regarded to be the correct position. First he would clear away the false views, sometimes at the extreme on a spectrum in which the orthodox took the opposite end; other times at two opposite extremes in between which the orthodox took the mean. In every case, the implication was clear to the honest and observant reader: The “orthodox” meant the representatives of the correct position, that is, those who had gotten nearest to the truth of the matter. Today’s historical theologian is very nervous about such talk.
I do not disagree with the Reformed fathers who assembled at Dort or Westminster for extending charity to advocates of a form of hypothetical universalism (e.g., Davenant, Ussher, et al) or to opponents of antinomianism who would eventually recast the biblical covenants and causal language concerning justification in order to swing the pendulum to neonomianism (e.g., Richard Baxter). However, even the greatest of men cannot anticipate every weak point in the fences they set up. In retrospect, we should not read back into their charity any confusion about their precision.
The fact that many Reformed theologians of the latter half of the seventeenth century wrote to take issue with the system championed by Baxter tells us at least three things: (1) lacking fuller prescience, they did not exhaustively address this view at Westminster as it had not yet exploded in England; (2) the fact that Baxter wrote to clarify himself more than five times implies that he perceived many who objected; (3) the fact that Baxter wrote to show how his view aligned with the Confession implies that its conformity to those Standards was a live issue.
It certainly begs the question to argue that this was all resolved by Baxter having fought and won in those disputes. I suggest that such a victory ought to also be defined in an objective sense. Its orthodoxy cannot be decided merely by an appeal to a consensus of the sixteenth century (because of anachronism), nor of the seventeenth (because of begging the aforementioned question), nor of the present (because, to repeat, that is only another way to avoid the doing of theology).
On the flip side, if the present Reformed who are sure that Baxterianism is out of step with the Confession would like to make their point, they are going to have to drop the winsome routine that characterizes the theological writing of our day. Polemical theology is clarifying. If you will not write about Baxterianism the way that someone as recent as R. C. Sproul wrote about Pelagianism, then you will leave your reader exactly where the other side more manfully wants to bring him. You will have no one to blame but yourself.
When one finally does get down to the reading, how do we read?
The piecemeal fashion in which one cannot help but read the words of earlier authors is not license for conceptual minimization.
Famous examples in the thought of Calvin alone would abound: e.g., whether he held to two covenants or one, or whether he believed in something like limited atonement, or in the imputed active obedience of Christ, or an unqualified congregationalism, or a universal preference against instruments in worship or artistic expressions in sacred matters, or in the duty of the lesser magistrate to resist tyranny.
At one extreme, we could force him into taking a position that is anachronistic to his context. At the other extreme, we can engage in such a nominalist retrieval that the words or concepts are never able to mean at least enough to be logically consistent with a later, more developed idea. I have written about this nominalist historiography elsewhere in contradistinction to what I call “realist retrieval.”
It is a convenient polemical trick to enlist the undeveloped or isolated views of earlier theologians on the side of later antagonists to those who have heretofore been placed in the lineage of the earlier theologian. At best, one can show a draw in the earlier theologian. The question of which later, more developed view the earlier underdeveloped view fits better with is lost in the shuffle.
To apply this to Calvin, it simply does not follow that because he did not rule on whether Turretin was correct about active obedience, or whether Owen was correct about particular redemption, that therefore what he did say does not fit better in their systems than in the system of their antagonists.
In order to judge on that question, one must rise above the particulars of said theologians to some more transcendent criteria. In short, in order to be a theologian worthy of the name, one must eventually rise above a nominalistic and subjective consensus to a realistic and objective consideration of the things in themselves.
To cite a recent example, in my undergraduate theology class we covered Turretin on the necessity of Christ’s satisfaction. Once setting aside the Socinian view as wholly unorthodox, he then distinguished between the view of Augustine and other earlier Reformers as holding that it was not absolutely necessary, but only contingently so, some even using the language of fitting. Turretin then proceeded to summarize the view he took as follows: “This is the common opinion of the orthodox (which we follow).”7
A negative reaction followed. The gist of it was that x amount of the Reformed of the seventeenth century held the second view and they were orthodox. This is consensus orthodoxy in a nutshell. It lacks the categories to speak of getting nearer to or further from orthodoxy. Instead, it treats “orthodoxy” as a kind of place outside of which one is either a non-Christian or a second class Christian. On an academic level, it views with suspicion any objective orthodoxy talk as a means of marginalizing outside viewpoints. But there is at least a virtue in recognizing that this line between the inside and outside is a necessary corollary of believing that doctrine shapes life, and that right doctrine makes proper boundaries between false teachers and the flock.
There is also the role of openness in our method. I mean the true kind of openness: that readiness to hear how one’s interlocutor is using their terms, the genuineness to declare one’s own, that broad attention to multiple relations, perhaps formerly ignored, and that willingness to bear the burden of clarity for that which one insists is so important.
Some Closing Applications to the Rush to Qualify Baxter’s Orthodoxy
If one were to ask a Calvinist what they mean by their use of the term, not many respondents would demand that their audience will have to read the whole of the Institutes, let alone all of the commentaries and shorter treatises. Yet if we ask today’s Baxterian what they mean by their use of the term, we are informed that we must read the Breviate on the Doctrine of Justification. That makes sense because it was toward the end of his life and he was clarifying views that were matters of misunderstanding. If after reading, we still take exception to those views, we are told that we must read the End of All Doctrinal Controversies since, well, that name says it all; but then also we must read his Confessions because we are still not sure how his views can be wholly reconciled to the Westminster Standards. In due time, having read those, we are told that we cannot understand if we do not “do the reading,” which comes to mean to read the whole. If we are still not persuaded, we are told that we cannot understand at all—that Baxter worked under the unique curse of being most blessed among intellects, that none can understand him, either in his own age or in the ages to come.
I do not say that because it is a pet peeve. I say it because it plainly functions as a stumbling block for both sides in such a conversation. Our younger Baxterians today are quite right that when older ministers or seminarians dismiss them, it will only drive them further away and it will not commend the older man’s view. Yet the constant rhetorical, “Have you considered?” to the older man ought to be tempered by the same humility.
It is always a good practice when one is half the age, and sometimes a third of the age, of one’s audience, to consider reframing any question that starts with “Have you considered?” It is more likely than one might realize that someone who has lived more than twice as long as someone else has had that same amount of time to do that very considering and more besides.
Where they may not have read the specific dozen books you just have, they have read a hundred you have not. Those may be relevant to the discussion in ways you have not yet fathomed.
Moreover, none of the words and ideas exist in a vacuum. None of the words that matter most sprung into existence in those few pages, no matter how profoundly they may be used. The younger reader ought to at least consider whether they have sufficient background in the words in their original, and whether that profound author or group of adjacent authors, have themselves read their interlocutors with sufficient charity. They may have points to make against some authors that do not apply to others. The points that they do—and especially those that resemble caricatures that have given us a bad taste in our contemporaries—may so captivate our newfound self-liberation campaign, that we are unaware how resistant we are to hearing the crucial refutations in respondents of that day, whether those more plainly taking the opposite position, such as Owen, Turretin, and Witsius, or others who the newer Baxterians may see as allies, such as Burgess, Charnock, or Henry.
If one is at least willing to concede capable minds existed on the other side, the other anti-objective track may be taken. An objective orthodoxy may finally be resisted not on a fundamentally different view of truth, but with that other note Baxter was known for, namely his “Reformed catholic” or “mere Christianity” emphasis. Along these lines, talk of a broad orthodoxy is wrongheaded simply because it would exclude all those able minds on the other side. This was a point Baxter himself made in his Confession, that,
if this Confession was intended for a Test to all that should enter into, or exercise the Ministry, I hope it was never the mind of that Reverend Assembly to have shut out such men as Bishop Ussher, Davenant, Hall, Dr. Preston, Dr. Salughton, Mr. William Fenner, Dr. Ward, and many more excellent English Divines, as ever this Church enjoyed.8
Let us leave aside the question as to their exclusion, whatever that might mean. If orthodoxy is indeed objective in the sense that I maintain, then this implies that one can get nearer to it and further from it. Moreover, one can be more orthodox in one area and less orthodox in another.
If one can be more or less healthy in body, nearer to New York or further from it, have more a memory of the sermon from yesterday or less, then why exactly may the same not be true of “right teaching,” if indeed that is what orthodoxy means? There are many anxieties changing the subject here. My point is not that those things do not matter for anything. It is only that those things and this thing are not the same thing.
In all of this, it is the thing itself that matters.
_______________________________________
1. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 18.
2. Jeroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (Yale University Press, 1984)
3. Psalm 119:160; Acts 20:27.
4. Augustine, Of True Religion, 73. LCC Vol. 6, 263.
5. Anselm of Canterbury, On Truth, 9 in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 163.
6. Herman Bavinck, The Certainty of Faith (St Catherines, Ontario: Paideia Press, 1980), 19.
7. Turretin, Institutes, II.14.10.4.
8. Richard Baxter, Confession of His Faith: Especially Concerning the Interest of Repentance and Sincere Obedience to Christ in Our Justification & Salvation, III.5.1 (London: 1655), 21.
