When I was in college, intellectually serious evangelicals tended to sort into two broad camps. The first were the “traditionalists,” who embraced systematic theology as found in such traditions as Lutherans and Reformed. The second, for lack of a better word, were the “progressives” or “postliberals,” who viewed such methodological theologizing as not only intellectually indefensible, but impersonal, abstract, and spiritually dead. These progressives sometimes articulated theories originating in the thought of Swiss theologian Karl Barth; other times, they were students of narrative theologians such as Hans Frei and George Lindbeck.
Reading the recently published “Why I Am Protestant” by Methodist seminary professor Beth Felker Jones, I think I know what camp she falls in. Though Jones seeks to place herself squarely within historic Protestantism, she is unreservedly a proponent of a modern theology that is suspicious of propositional truth claims when it comes to Christ and Scripture. As I perceived (albeit inchoately) as a Protestant seminarian, although such an approach reflects an understandable attempt to circumvent various dilemmas created by a propositional Protestantism, this alternative approach creates new ones that are just as problematic.
One of the most jarring qualities to Jones’s book is the multitude of unsubstantiated assertions, some of which a Catholic might generally agree with, others not. “The doctrines of the Trinity (Council of Nicaea) and of the person of Christ (Council of Chalcedon) are the best readings of Scripture we have,” she writes. That might be true, but why, and why are other ecumenical councils not of the same theological caliber? “If we are no longer worshiping the true God, we are no longer Christian.” Sure, but how do we know if we are worshiping the true God or not? She will not allow herself to “define any part of the catholic church . . . out of being catholic,” yet who but her is deciding what constitutes “the catholic church” in the first place?
Often I found myself scratching my head trying to interpret Jones’s assertions. “Any so-called Christianity that is not good news is simply not Christian.” Is there a “bad news” imposter Christianity, and if so, what is it? What does it mean that “God loves context and diversity”? And though I appreciate the value of informal prose, some of Jones’s language is casual to the point of vapid frivolity. “Good: I keep saying it. Good, good, good.” “Being a Christian is really, really, very, very, super hard.” Profound stuff, this.
Yet there is an underlying narrative here that relies on a prominent modern Protestant school of thought. “We don’t claim to know God first through intellect or experience. We know God because God acts to make Godself known.”
Now, that might sound like gobbledygook—after all, how else do we know things except through our intellects? But there is an intended meaning here. “Knowledge is less proposition and more relationship,” Jones says elsewhere. Granted, the claim that knowledge is less proposition and more relationship is itself a proposition, but Jones’s intention is to foreground the person of Christ, rather than impersonal propositional truth claims. “What we meet clearly in Scripture is not a series of factual statements; we meet a person, Jesus Christ, the only Son of the Father, one with us and one with God in the Spirit.” This is the heart of Jones’s brand of Protestant theology.
Unfortunately for Jones, new problems arise. For starters, though Catholics (and presumably most Protestants) would agree that Christianity is foundationally about communion with God, our knowledge of God is not merely an unutterable transcendent, mystical experience that defies all human abilities to define and categorize it. Rather, our knowledge of God is communicated to us through propositional truth claims that are found in Scripture, tradition, and the ecumenical councils Jones praises. Without those propositional truth claims, it becomes impossible to understand or articulate communion with Christ (however beautiful and inspiring) as anything other than a personal, subjective experience that has as much rhetorical purchase as Buddhist Nirvana or the ecstasy induced by psychotropic drugs.
Moreover, because any human speech intended to be comprehensible must by default be propositional, Jones can’t help but constantly make propositional truth claims about God and Christianity. “Where God gives gifts to the church—especially Word and sacrament—and where the Spirit of God works, there I must recognize the one catholic church.” “The church is the church by grace and not by institutional structures.” These are propositional truth claims—and, frankly, not good ones, not only because determining the location of Word, sacrament, and the Spirit of God requires objective criteria, but also because the two claims are contradictory. For even if the church “is the church by grace,” who defines and communicates Word and Sacrament but an institutional structure?
Much of Jones’s argumentation falls into similar traps, presenting theological choices as “either/or” when they can be “both/and.” Jones hypothesizes: “If forced to a choice between the church and the Scriptures, I’m going to choose Scripture, in which I trust as the Word of the God, for us, from outside us.” But the Catholic chooses not between church and Scripture, but between his individual interpretation of the Bible (which would effectively make him a magisterium unto himself) and its interpretation by a divinely approved authority, the Magisterium. Thus, for the Catholic, in choosing the (Catholic) church, he also chooses Scripture.
That was certainly the opinion of St. Augustine, whom Jones attempts to claim as her theological champion on various subjects. That great bishop of Hippo famously declared, “I would not believe in the gospel myself if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so” (“Against the Letter of Mani Called ‘The Foundation’”).
Perhaps the best attempt at an argument in Why I am Protestant is Jones’s rehashing of one presented by such Protestant scholars as Peter Leithart, Kenneth Collins, and Jerry Walls—namely, that she is “too Catholic” to be Catholic, because “the whole church just is the catholic church” rather than just Rome. Yet that claim is premised upon someone defining (inescapably by propositions!) what constitutes “the whole church” and what, even if it pretends to be part of the whole church, is not. And that definition would necessarily be based on some criteria, which in Jones’s case come down to her personal interpretation of Scripture.
Propositional claims about Christ and his Church, it would appear, are unavoidable. Solid argumentation about them, sadly, is not.