Of 'Dominican Calvinists' & 'Jesuit Pelagians'

Leon Podles has written many provocative articles and books in his day -- from "God Has No Daughters: Masculine Imagery in the Liturgy" (Homiletic & Pastoral Review, 1995), to The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity (Spence Publishing Company, 1999), to Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (Crossland Press, 2007).

Just yesterday, I received an email from a reader with these comments:

"Catholics most certainly are not Calvinists!" I have heard the boast made many times. And the CCC does indeed condemn the idea that God condemns anyone to Hell. In fact, it seems to suggest that damnation is a very real possibilty, but also hopefully very remote for most--or at least many--of us.

That said even with Scott Hahn and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange notwithstanding. (I'd be curious about your thoughts at some point given your Westminster experience.) Such boasting also fails to reckon with the nuance of history, since Thomism might seem closer to Calvinism than what passes for the proper understanding of the faith in many quarters.

He then referred me to this interesting little piece by Leon Podles, posted just barely over a week ago on the Touchstone Magazine blog, entitled "NYT on Calvinism" (Mere Comments, January 11, 2009):

The NYT article on the Calvinist and ultra-masculine Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church in Seattle is not too bad. Driscoll, by rejecting the prissiness of much of evangelical America, has some success in reaching rough young men with the gospel.

The theological analysis in the article uses stereotypes. Calvinists believe in total depravity - but so do Catholics. Calvin did not think that human nature was totally corrupt - because insofar as it is created by God, it is still good. Calvin knew his theology well enough not to be a Manichean. What Calvin thought was that all human powers, including reason, had been corrupted by sin, and Catholics believe that the will was weakened and the intellect was darkened by original sin.

Calvin's doctrine of predestination and the role of the human will is also misunderstood. In Jonathan Edward's explanation, Calvin (along with Thomists) thought that God was the cause of every human action - including sin, insofar as it was an action and had being. Evil is the deprivation of being, and does not exist, and is therefore not caused by God. This analysis is a necessary corollary of the belief that God is the maker of heaven and earth, of everything, including, in a sense, sinful actions, and therefore of salvation and damnation. God is the first mover of everything.

Edwards identified the dissenters from this concept of the will as Arminians and behind them the Jesuits, who both believed in the freedom of indifference. Edwards does not go further back to Occam and Scotus, but I think that their nominalism and voluntarism is the original Western source of the freedom of indifference.

During the controversy De Auxiliis, the Jesuits accused the Dominicans of Calvinism, and the Dominicans accused the Jesuits of Pelegianism. The pope resolved the matter by telling them both to stop accusing each other of heresy.

Of course Podles, writing here on the Touchstone blog, isn't taking the time to make all the nuanced distinctions between varieties of Calvinism (and there is no Calvinist equivalent of a central magisterium from which to derive irreformable official definitions of Calvinist doctrine), or between primary and secondary causes in his analysis of how God might be understood to be the cause of every human action, or between the details of each side in the Molinist controversy. Yet all told, it's not a bad thumb-nail sketch, if you ask me. It also has the virtue of popping some of the stereotype bubbles, even if it is true that most stereotypes also carry a germ of authenticity. I have often felt that for every example I could find that fit the caricatured references of G.K. Chesterton to "Calvinists" (e.g., the dour fanatic, Ian Paisley) I could find two who defied the stereotype (e.g., the ribald Mark Driscoll or the riotous Peter De Vries -- although De Vries has, I suppose, come to be regarded as a sort of black sheep, to say the least). For what it's worth, on the Catholic side, I have a colleague who may soon be publishing a severe critique of Hans Urs von Balthasar's Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"?: With a Short Discourse on Hell (Ignatius Press, 1988).

[Hat tip to J.M.]