Calvinist witnessing ...

[Hat tip to J.M.]

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.]

Mark Shea: the problem with Calvinism

For a very good, thoughtful discussion of the problems of Calvinism on an existential level as well as a theological level, have a look at Mark Shea's discussion on January 2, 2008.

Reformational Philosophy

The Dutch Reformed tradition in philosophy -- often called "Reformational Philosophy" (not to be confused with the "Reformed Epistemology" of Alvin Plantinga, et al., which is an independent development in the Dutch Reformed tradition of Anglo-American analytic philosophy -- has produced a wealth of societies and journals and theorists stemming from Calvinistic tradition of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck and the seminal philosophical work of Herman Dooyeweerd (pictured left) and D.H.Th. Vollenhoven (pictured right) at the Free University of Amsterdam in the last century. Philosophical societies include the Stichting voor Reformatorische Wijsbegeerte (Society for Reformational Philosophy) and the professional journal, Philosophia Reformata. Other related sites include that of The Dooyeweerd Center for Christian Philosophy (Redeemer College, Ancaster, Ontario, Canada), Studies relating to Hermann Dooyeweerd (J. Glenn Friesen, Calgary, Alberta, Canada), Herman Dooyeweerd (Steve Bishop, Bristol, UK), The Dooyeweerd Pages (Andrew Basden, Salford, UK), Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) (Philip Blosser, Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC), and numerous other links. Of recent interest is the launching of a new electronic periodical, Aspects of Reformational Philosophy, Vol. 1 (2007), No. 1. Philosophers from a Catholic background may be interested in the work on Dooyeweerd by the Jesuit, Fr. J. Marlet, Grundlinien der Kalvinistischen "Philosophie der Gesetzesidee" als Christlicher Transzendentalphilosophie (Munchen: Karl Zink, 1954), which has interesting chapters comparing Dooyeweerd with St. Thomas Aquinas.

A number of sites promote the published work of the premiere Dutch Reformed philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd. Among these one finds, for example, Steve Bishop's New Critique site, self-described as "A Guide to Dooyeweerd's New Critique of Theoretical Thought." This site offers introductory summaries not only of Herman Dooyeweerd's major philosophical work, the four-volume New Critique of Theoretical Thought (2nd ed., 1997)

• Vol 1: The Necessary Presuppositions of Philosophy
• Vol. 2: The Structures of Individuality of Temporal Reality
• Vol. 3: The General Theory of the Modal Spheres
• Vol. 4: Index of Subjects and Authors.

Bishop's "Guide" also offers an introduction to and study guide for Dooyeweerd's In the Twilight of Western Thought, a series of lectures Dooyeweerd gave at Princeton in the 1960s. A survey of Amazon links to the works of Dooyeweerd reveals that English-language translators of his works (originally in Dutch) have been busy over the last decades:

• The Christian Idea of the State, tr. John Kraay (1968)
• Christian Philosophy and the Meaning of History (Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd. Series B, Vol 1) (1997)
• Encyclopedia of Legal Science: Introduction (Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd) (2007)
• Encyclopedia of Legal Science: Historical (Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd) (2007)
• Encyclopedia of Legal Science: Systematic (Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd) (2007)
• Encyclopedia of Legal Science: Systemic (Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd) (2007)
• Essays in Legal, Social, and Political Philosophy (Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd. Series B, Vol 2) (2001)
• In the Struggle for a Christian Politics (Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd) (2007)
• Political Philosophy (Dooyeweerd, H. Selections. Ser. D, V. 1.) (2004)
• Reformation & Scholasticism in Philosophy (Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd) (2007)
• Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options (Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd Series B, Vol 3) (2003)
• Christian Theory of Social Institutions (Dooyeweerd, H. Works. V. 1.) (1986, currently unavailable)
• In the Twilight of Western Thought (1999)

Although there is not much in English by D.H.Th. Vollenhoven, Dooyeweerd's brother-in-law, one can find the following:

• Introduction to Philosophy, ed. John H. Kok and Anthony Tol (2005)
• The Idea of a Christian Philosophy, Essays in Honour of D.H.Th. Vollenhoven (includes selected and annotated bibliography of Vollenhoven by K.A. Bril) (1973)
• Vollenhoven's Problem-historical Method: Introduction and Explorations, by Kornelis A. Bril, ed. by John H. Kok (2005)

Any intellectual wading more than ankle-deep into the work of these Reformational Philosophers soon realizes that he would be a fool to ignore the wealth of theoretical insights yielded by them over the last century. Dooyeweerd is probably among the two or three greatest Christian philosophers of the twentieth century from any tradition, period. I say this as a Catholic with more than a passing acquaintance with the work of Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel, John Courtney Murray, Bernard Longergan, and Alasdair MacIntyre, not to mention Karol Wojtyla. This is a philosophical tradition, in my opinion, with which every serious thinker ought to be acquainted and conversant.