It is no secret, A.B. Simpson and A.W. Tozer were drawn to an old medieval message of divine immediacy while rejecting Romanism systemically.1 Two contemporary Alliance theologians, Gordon T. Smith, and David E. Fitch continue the tradition.2 The Fourfold Gospel focuses on Christ in the believer, as His witnesses, through the power of the Holy Spirit, appropriated, to bring back the King. Simpson’s so-called slogans from a bygone era 3 points toward purpose, yet may portray a simplistic eschatology promoting individualism over ecclesiology.4
Simpson’s eschatological The Coming One and his theologically astute, The Old Faith and New Gospels: Special Addresses on Christianity and Modern Thought, highlight a Papal powershift.5 He understood the Roman Catholic Church’s (RCC) hard political power morphing into soft ecclesial power on into the future, based upon an eschatological unfolding known as historicism where Simpson framed the diversion of philosophical theology as opposed to the ‘old faith’ by trusting and obeying Christ alone.6 He understood ‘new gospels’ merging with modernisms of all types today absorbed by Rome and found throughout theologies of the west.7 In Old Faith, Simpson implies evangelicals share a common worldview with Romanism pertaining to dualism over monism,8 yet rejected such metaphysical theology that tends toward immanency as found today throughout post-modern Christianity.9 Along similar lines, Simpson uncovers the implications of atheisitc evolution, pragmatism, and socialism, alluding to a nexus as working out today denying Christ’s return.10 Ultimately, these ‘new gospels’ all miss the ‘sacred gospel’ as the fullness of Christ alone.
Are practical appropriations from Catholic spiritual practice relevant to pursue the sacred?11 David Fitch frontloads a unique version of realized eschatology with incarnational presence, based upon scattered ecumenical philosophical theological sources while maintaining the apocalyptic destination. 12 Whereas, Gordon Smith pursues contemplative spirituality, deepening a broader evangelical understanding of conversion and growth and a comfortable attitude toward Pope Francis. First of all, putting a practical pursuit aside, should these great Alliance theologians guide us with appropriations without a critical awareness of ‘nature and grace,’ 13 and medieval prescriptive metaphysics, promulgated today through a bifurcation between secular and sacred?14 In other words, can one really glean from a non-biblical theological system standing behind one’s spiritual practice? Correctly and perhaps for our correction, Simpson and Tozer anchored the ‘old faith’ in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit through biblical revelation not ecclesial practice.
This research develops three sections affirming the C&MA’s patriarchs ‘old faith’ (1) Historicism and the secular and sacred dichotomy. (2) A Brief sketch of the C&MA’s work among RCC populations. (3) His Presence analyzes Simpson and Tozer’s mystical appropriations through the medieval theologian Meister Eckhart. This so-called mystic concluded, on one hand, Thomas Aquinas’ sacred theology based on ‘being’, and Eckhart stands as the grandfather of German philosophy and its contemporary infiltration. I close with Simpson’s Holy Spirit and the Fourfold Gospel while comparing the German mystic’s concept of the vita activa within the thought of the Alliance founders.
Historicisms
Historicism as a philosophy of history holds ‘the event’ when entirely played out as progress and exalted with reason, exists in a state of hubris in evaluating the past. Simpson’s opposition to postmillennialism rejected such progress. Moreover, a version of secular historicism also parallels and aids Simpson’s historicist premillennial position and its hindsight, yet precludes an integration.15 Still, invaluable as a methodology, historicism in a philosophical sense traces a narrative’s genealogy.16 For example, the medieval period stood as the backdrop for coining the titles of the Dark Ages and Renaissance. Initiated through the 19th-century Swiss art historian and Reformed Minister son, Jakob Burckhardt, by framing a retro-critical tone, he noted that the event of Renaissance art expressed a significant shift in human cultural evolution. Wherein the new representations became scientific, realistic, individualistic, and humane.17 The visual analog progressed toward our modern sensibilities, leaving behind the superstitious mindset of the medieval dark ages; to the contrary, his conclusion overlooks an intellectually robust era and movements returning to Scripture, even traced by Simpson’s eschatological vista.18 Today, little nostalgia exists toward medieval scholastic propositional reason. Instead, a sensitive contemplative spirituality stands vulnerable to sacramentality in our so-called secular age that distorts the true sacred as Christ in the individual believer.19 Rome’s faith (tradition/scripture) and reason, operates as the ultimate syncretism, shifting the sacred collectively into ecclesiology as the incarnation’s continuation.20 Therefore, narratives and theories on how modernity arrived abound, originating out of this so-called dark age pointing toward mystery and a faulty exposition of the sacred in ecclesiology.21
In understanding today’s Catholicism, perhaps encompassing the projects of Fitch and Smith, one must go back to the challenging 19th-century intellectual streams addressed in Old Faith and Coming One where Simpson equates the Roman system as the ‘Whore of Babylon’ as described in Revelation. 17 Rome’s response to modernism, while facing Italian nationalism, and corresponding to Simpson’s own travels in Europe accentuated the tone for his messages.22 The Papacy’s entrenched response to all forms of modernity by the Vatican I Council (1869-70) rejected subjective modernity (the extremes typified by Immanuel Kant’s objective rational philosophy and Soren Kierkegaard’s subjective reaction leap of faith), through affirming Thomistic dogma with Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879), and its synthesis of ‘faith and reason’ as an alternative to modern philosophy over the ‘old faith’ by trusting Christ alone. The previous council was cleverly updated with Vatican II (1962-65), primarily through a principle document, Lumen Gentium, by embracing humanity and personhood with its ever-expanding sacred ecclesiology and a revitalized participatory Thomism at the core, that utilized philosophy.23 Thus, Vatican I prescription reaffirmed descriptive metaphysics for an encroaching modern era, whereas, Vatican II tacitly expresses prescriptive metaphysics as threads for a new sacred theological fabric, placing the human subject indirectly subordinate to the mother church, not the supremacy of Christ and His gospel. Such a subtle shift demands a historical vista and an examination of ecumenism, not in practice, but in current philosophical theology.24 So how was Simpson prescient of Vatican II?
Theological ecumenicism, among other discussions, pursues so-called ‘culprits of modernity’ similar to the findings of Burckhardt’s retro-template in coining past ages. Allowing Protestant John Milbank of the Radical Orthodox Movement and Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor to operate their respective projects outside Rome’s magisterium.25 They trace a genealogy from two ambiguous terms, the multi-defined secular and the medieval sacred unless these are synonyms for Rome’s theology of nature and grace? Therefore it is proposed that today’s theology with a new language indirectly updates nature and grace (supernatural) into today’s secular and sacred bifurcation. So, how do contemporary theologians now reassemble the secular and sacred in the spirit of Vatican II? Nobly, do not accept the secular assumption as with Milbank, or mixed without religious language, as in Taylor’s immanent frame. Here, Milbank, the theologian reads Thomas Aquinas through the nouvelle theologie’s patristic readings beyond the hard philosophical reaffirmation of the First Vatican council.26 Taylor affirms an Aristotelian institutional flourishing through immanence, appropriating the secular age for whomever. Milbank’s culprit of modernity situates within the high-scholastic era with Franciscan theologian Duns Scotus. Others condemn the Protestant Reformation, explicit in Taylor and implicit with Milbank.27 Moreover, Milbank and his learned colleagues view medieval thought as a historicism from the ancients and church fathers. With great erudition, Milbank traces how philosophical language and metaphysics control an abstract theological framework forced upon Scripture, and this is precisely the point, pointing toward these learned men's blindside.28 Therefore I contend, all humans unconverted, or converted to Christ may act secular yet indirectly worship something considered sacred, Milbank most likely would concur. A general cultural assessment includes all humanity, the unconverted alike, demonstrating the subtle nature of Christian nominalism over individual conversion, no pun intended for Milbank, who believes that high-scholastic theological nominalism destroyed the ‘Great Tradition’ explored by today’s Alliance theologians. However, against such brilliant sophistication, I affirm, both the unconverted to Christ and sadly the converted may worship something secular or natural such as self, modern science, materialism, politics, or even a so-called sacred enchanted age and tradition that eclipses the ‘old faith’.30
The explorations of Smith and Fitch understandably acknowledge the secular nomenclature and our non-religious era’s challenge to gospel witness.31 They also tend to conflate past era’s sociological and theological divisions with today, more so Fitch in his pursuit of political theology from his neo-anabaptist position, perhaps wishful thinking concerning a tradition that has manifested itself rather a-political. Both thinkers, beyond a contextual description, allow the secular assumption to subversively dictate reactions toward sacramental real presence language and perhaps oblivious to Rome’s systemic nature and grace interdependence, expressed as the Christ incarnational church interdependence and extrapolated as a mystery through presence.
Such theology is also exemplified by Gordon Smith’s univocal ecclesial assumption that ‘church’ essentially means the same thing for all, and by appropriating elements manifest, where, beyond an atomistic rejection of transubstantiation without deciphering the systemic language updated through Vatican II, prevails. Theological terms often mean two very different things between Catholics and Protestants. Sacramental realism through Great Tradition ressourcement seeks to retrieve the mysterious real presence of Christ during the celebration of the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper, surely an important reflection? Absolutely!33 Nevertheless, such a reflection demands a broader systemic awareness to biblically define which differs from Rome atomistically. Such a differentiation lacks in the work of Smith, whereas Fitch's nuance demonstrates a bold achievement.
Moreover, a contemporary Reformed scholar Hans Boersma, Smith former colleague and perhaps behind Fitch's gleaning off John Milbank, who in the grand scheme harvests such ‘Great Tradition’ theology through word and mystery, then, woven together with a medieval philosophic fabric that obscures scripture.34 Beyond scholastic metaphysics into retro-readings of the church fathers prescriptively canonized by Rome, Milbank and Boersma’s fixation upon the sacred tapestry seems naïve from descriptive evangelical philosophical approaches as tools for clarity, not construction.35 Becoming conversant with metaphysics, not just ontology, sets the tapestry for its prescriptive systemic sacramentalism.36 It should be noted, RCC clergy still commence with three years of straight Thomist metaphysics before touching theology, utilizing the Roman golden threads in weaving and providing its theology’s colorful Catholic fabric.37 The Reformers scripturally rejected the preceding medieval harvest as a prescriptive sacramental theologiae gloriae (Luther’s coinage) and for good reason, not simply because of a nominalist philosophical orientation. The German Reformer called for a recovery of the theology of the work of Christ's cross and its centrality.38
So, how must one navigate between the secular and the sacred as modern concepts for theological discourse? First, like the Reformers, this entails clarifying creation, where general revelation provides a locus for common grace.40 In the RCC, biblical creation interpreted through philosophy and metaphysics canonized nature. Here metaphysical ‘being’ exists as a convertible transcendental with one, good, true, and beauty et al. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic philosophical commitments, rejected by the Reformers, yet later affirmed metaphysics as descriptive, established Protestant scholasticism and the pursuit of doctrinal certainty manifested as denominationalism.41 Whereas the RCC magisterium’s prescription, built from natural metaphysical theology as the analogia entis (analogy of being), weaves deeper through Vatican II with the transcendental by use of analogy and participation.42 This fabric initiated as being, in a Parmenidean Platonic participatory scheme attached to Aristotelian motion and cosmology; a complex abstract yet vivid tapestry, synthesizing the Greek ‘one and the many’ with Roman natural law, virtue, and hierarchy, all in the name of the created order and expressed in its implicit preeminent ecclesiology standing as a cathedral of sophistication and glory.
Second, through special revelation in clarifying incarnation. Instead of the term nature, the Reformers intentionally emphasized creation, which per se is not fallen nor sacred, but also not natural. Humankind is fallen, and not necessarily sacred.43 Creation groans the effects of the Fall, where RCC eucharist theology implies nature as the creation and its secular elements participate in redemption along with us, all because of a fluid understanding of the incarnation having made nature sacred in creation, through the extension of the incarnation.44 Here the RCC merges its incarnational ecclesiology as the mother church infringing upon Christology.45 The incarnation continuing in the church ruptures Scriptural adverbs relating to time and space ἅπαξ (once and for all) and μᾶλλον (forevermore) that also point toward a linear and flat way of understanding not attractive to today’s evangelicals. The eucharist is, first and foremost, the holy sacrifice of the mass and exclusive for a reason.46 Rome continues to act on its own terms.
Dave Fitch recovers the original seven sacraments as proper practices with explicit meaning through his descriptive modification to contextualize church planting with presence around a meal together.47 He astutely highlights the mistake of the medieval spectator eucharist expounded by Vatican II theologian Henri De Lubac, Boersma’s major source. All well and good, however, this theological reflection may lead into an incarnational conflation of the metaphorical Body of Christ tied to ecclesiology and not eschatological manifestation by His true body where the kingdom now resides with us as believers in coming together for healing the world.
Moreover, a contemporary Reformed scholar Hans Boersma, Smith former colleague and perhaps behind Fitch's gleaning off John Milbank, who in the grand scheme harvests such ‘Great Tradition’ theology through word and mystery, then, woven together with a medieval philosophic fabric that obscures scripture.34 Beyond scholastic metaphysics into retro-readings of the church fathers prescriptively canonized by Rome, Milbank and Boersma’s fixation upon the sacred tapestry seems naïve from descriptive evangelical philosophical approaches as tools for clarity, not construction.35 Becoming conversant with metaphysics, not just ontology, sets the tapestry for its prescriptive systemic sacramentalism.36 It should be noted, RCC clergy still commence with three years of straight Thomist metaphysics before touching theology, utilizing the Roman golden threads in weaving and providing its theology’s colorful Catholic fabric.37 The Reformers scripturally rejected the preceding medieval harvest as a prescriptive sacramental theologiae gloriae (Luther’s coinage) and for good reason, not simply because of a nominalist philosophical orientation. The German Reformer called for a recovery of the theology of the work of Christ's cross and its centrality.38
So, how must one navigate between the secular and the sacred as modern concepts for theological discourse? First, like the Reformers, this entails clarifying creation, where general revelation provides a locus for common grace.40 In the RCC, biblical creation interpreted through philosophy and metaphysics canonized nature. Here metaphysical ‘being’ exists as a convertible transcendental with one, good, true, and beauty et al. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic philosophical commitments, rejected by the Reformers, yet later affirmed metaphysics as descriptive, established Protestant scholasticism and the pursuit of doctrinal certainty manifested as denominationalism.41 Whereas the RCC magisterium’s prescription, built from natural metaphysical theology as the analogia entis (analogy of being), weaves deeper through Vatican II with the transcendental by use of analogy and participation.42 This fabric initiated as being, in a Parmenidean Platonic participatory scheme attached to Aristotelian motion and cosmology; a complex abstract yet vivid tapestry, synthesizing the Greek ‘one and the many’ with Roman natural law, virtue, and hierarchy, all in the name of the created order and expressed in its implicit preeminent ecclesiology standing as a cathedral of sophistication and glory.
Second, through special revelation in clarifying incarnation. Instead of the term nature, the Reformers intentionally emphasized creation, which per se is not fallen nor sacred, but also not natural. Humankind is fallen, and not necessarily sacred.43 Creation groans the effects of the Fall, where RCC eucharist theology implies nature as the creation and its secular elements participate in redemption along with us, all because of a fluid understanding of the incarnation having made nature sacred in creation, through the extension of the incarnation.44 Here the RCC merges its incarnational ecclesiology as the mother church infringing upon Christology.45 The incarnation continuing in the church ruptures Scriptural adverbs relating to time and space ἅπαξ (once and for all) and μᾶλλον (forevermore) that also point toward a linear and flat way of understanding not attractive to today’s evangelicals. The eucharist is, first and foremost, the holy sacrifice of the mass and exclusive for a reason.46 Rome continues to act on its own terms.
Dave Fitch recovers the original seven sacraments as proper practices with explicit meaning through his descriptive modification to contextualize church planting with presence around a meal together.47 He astutely highlights the mistake of the medieval spectator eucharist expounded by Vatican II theologian Henri De Lubac, Boersma’s major source. All well and good, however, this theological reflection may lead into an incarnational conflation of the metaphorical Body of Christ tied to ecclesiology and not eschatological manifestation by His true body where the kingdom now resides with us as believers in coming together for healing the world.
The collective and individual bifurcation lurks throughout Fitch’s work. With this in mind, one must understand that mysterium, mistranslated by Jerome in the Vulgate as sacramentum throughout Ephesians eclipses the true mystery of Jesus, the gospel, now, for all nations framed within the mission of Paul as a Hillite Pharisee. Instead, this accentuated ‘deep church’ merged with incarnational mystery language informed and distorted medieval Christendom while grafting in, as a religious construction, folk rituals, and noble rites in the name of the liturgy and expresses throughout our ‘retro vista’ in terms ‘doing theology in community.’ Inflating mystery by bolstering the ‘faith as tradition’ argument where Boersma mines patristic philosophical utility with Vatican II theologians over the biblical narrative.
Throughout Fitch’s kaleidoscope of sources, he does not directly quote Hans Boersma who best articulates the ideological spirit of mystery, yet his empirical method draws upon many of the same theologians that inspire Boersma such as Milbank, De Lubac, and other authors permeating the current evangelical landscape articulating philosophical theology. Theologians standing behind a myriad of applications in deconstructing modernism and to an extent embracing the postmodern method. Fitch’s creativity leans perhaps too much on a faulty epistemology in sourcing strands of theological modernity, empirically sourced over Scripture, while criticizing our current linear individual evangelical approaches bound to modernity, and then calls this ‘flat.’50 Thus his conclusion is spot on, yet Fitch takes us on a methodological extravaganza as any theology professor should; teaching us how to cotextualize theology.
Furthermore, the current buzzword, incarnational ministry, encompasses or perhaps confuses both an individual and collective dimension and must be distinguished from the assumption that any ecclesial body representing a depository through a Christ – church interconnection, either philosophically substantiated by Rome or through all-embracing theological ecumenicism. Individual and collective realities are aptly stated in the US Alliance slogan in taking All of Jesus to all of the World. Thus ‘all of Jesus’ describes the Fourfold Gospel, not necessarily ‘His church’ in a static sense which Fitch would not hold, but his search for a better ecclesiology seems futile based on such metaphysical philosophical theology in making a case for ‘presence.’
Furthermore, the current buzzword, incarnational ministry, encompasses or perhaps confuses both an individual and collective dimension and must be distinguished from the assumption that any ecclesial body representing a depository through a Christ – church interconnection, either philosophically substantiated by Rome or through all-embracing theological ecumenicism. Individual and collective realities are aptly stated in the US Alliance slogan in taking All of Jesus to all of the World. Thus ‘all of Jesus’ describes the Fourfold Gospel, not necessarily ‘His church’ in a static sense which Fitch would not hold, but his search for a better ecclesiology seems futile based on such metaphysical philosophical theology in making a case for ‘presence.’
Jesus is the gospel and we, comprising His church, are His witnesses, empowered by the Holy Spirit! Therefore, incarnational ministry draws upon the Great Commission, not the Roman Catholic ecclesiological model of the ‘Great Tradition’ nor its usurpation diminishing the Holy Spirit’s role for the individual believer and his work in Christ’s collective called-out church. Again, Fitch’s intentions are admirable, his conclusions correct. True, we need a better collective witness, yet am ecclectic epistemological method lurks within Fitch’s sources employing philosophical construction begging for a systemic home in rejecting ‘ideology’ and ‘idealogy.’ Perhaps he views the C&MA tradition as the culprit of today's evangelicalism?
Here Rome knows better, for it could no longer sustain the Vatican I hard philosophical Thomism, without its political position. A.B. Simpson highlighted the year 1870 and Papal infallibility and foresaw its ecumenical transformation. The year after Simpson visited the so-called ‘eternal city’.
Today Rome continues to obfuscate the gospel through its sacrificial incarnational extension, including liturgy, on par with scripture. Exemplified by the Marian dogmas, which shape not only ecclesiology but distort all the atomistic doctrine evangelicals similarly recognize, even the trinity and Christ's deity, lest one wonders why the Pope was called infallible while losing his political power.51
The use of contemporary liturgical expressions after Vatican II is a case in point. Evangelicals are not a church in the eyes of Rome, just communities of faith, closer in upon the concentric dotted-lined circles that emanate from Rome’s center, including other religions with atheists on the fringes; 52 the ultimate in supercessionism. Therefore, without explicitly defining terms such as sacramental from prescriptive metaphysics, one may consent to distortions through ‘making space’ with piece-meal atomistic appropriations ‘cherry picked’ and vulnerable toward sacramental mystery mixed with a fluid incarnation in order to avoid ‘being flat.’
Today Rome continues to obfuscate the gospel through its sacrificial incarnational extension, including liturgy, on par with scripture. Exemplified by the Marian dogmas, which shape not only ecclesiology but distort all the atomistic doctrine evangelicals similarly recognize, even the trinity and Christ's deity, lest one wonders why the Pope was called infallible while losing his political power.51
The use of contemporary liturgical expressions after Vatican II is a case in point. Evangelicals are not a church in the eyes of Rome, just communities of faith, closer in upon the concentric dotted-lined circles that emanate from Rome’s center, including other religions with atheists on the fringes; 52 the ultimate in supercessionism. Therefore, without explicitly defining terms such as sacramental from prescriptive metaphysics, one may consent to distortions through ‘making space’ with piece-meal atomistic appropriations ‘cherry picked’ and vulnerable toward sacramental mystery mixed with a fluid incarnation in order to avoid ‘being flat.’
I simply add that such contextualization may drown one’s theological method into oblivion while pursuing to act as His witness and limit contextualization’s assessment: “all things to all men, in order to win some.” Otherwise, we risk the ‘ends of ecclesiology’ and not Christ alone and our individual mystical union with Him as a collective witness to all nations. The collective and individual false dichotomy is the crux of the matter concerning David Fitch’s project, yet his apocalyptic outlook reinforces the individual dimension searching for an anabaptist observance.
Gordon Smith encourages evangelicals to learn from the RCC, the intention of today’s atomistic ‘cherry picking’ approaches.54 His books are helpful in exploring the various traditions, yet he appropriates rather freely among the traditions in assuming the univocity of the same vocabulary.55 He also quotes Vatican II theologian Karl Rahner on the immutability of the RCC’s anathemas and Papal Bulls, Smith calls this “genius.”56 As he further opines, “it’s in the RCC’s DNA”, and we must get over it! Yes, while we witness Rome absorbing all its contradictions and peccadillos for the sake of unity as illustrated by Pope Francis, whom Smith seems to underestimate. Smith eventually does point out such shrewd positioning has its downside. Yes, Romanism is an absorbing universalist system, embracing elements of the gospel, yet in dire need of a Biblical reformation.
Albert B. Simpson’s eschatological historicism applies to the Papal system’s lamb-like ecclesiological transformation out of Vatican II.58 In Old Faith, he states: “In the Church of Rome the movement is typified by men like Father Tyrrell and he is nearer to the spirit of the New Theology than those Protestants who pin their faith to external standards of belief.” Yes, other good or semantically sacred things, but not the true ‘other,’ Jesus the sacred one. Simpson’s statement is remarkable contextual discernment. He understood the destination of philosophical theology and its merger from various traditions as a diversion from sound doctrine. The Jesuit George Tyrrell was excommunicated for his modernism understood as philosophical subjectivism a few years before Simpson published because of the Vatican I consensus.60 Eventually, Vatican II absorbed Tyrrell’s subjectivism, previously rejected, along with a metaphysical transcendental synthesis ‘in the name of mystery’ associated with Hans Boersma’s - sources rereading Thomas Aquinas. Boersma understandably tries to distance Tyrrell from influencing his sources. Trivial, for today Tyrrell stands vindicated throughout Vatican II.61
Simpson understood modern philosophy and medieval metaphysics, not only mutually exclusive but being as Romanism exists today, assimilated with humanity through the subjective. “as the loss of the old faith, the rejection of the Bible and the Cross; the blotting out of the line of separation between the Church and the world.” Simpson precisely calls out a faulty incarnational system and Romanism’s eschatological function as a kingdom of this world.62
David Fitch and Gordon Smith’s empirical method and scriptural basis inductively appropriate the external expression of the sacraments as a sign and means of inward grace as a real presence, through scripture and theological method.Their appropriations, to one degree or another, are familiar as Protestant sacramental expressions lest they portray the ‘Jesus only-ism’ of the C&MA as a banal? Nevertheless, the richness of the Alliance tradition speaks for itself as the patriarch’s wisdom towers in its simplicity. A.W. Tozer followed suit on Simpson’s divine immediacy with the secular and sacred dichotomy in The Pursuit of God.64
Gordon Smith encourages evangelicals to learn from the RCC, the intention of today’s atomistic ‘cherry picking’ approaches.54 His books are helpful in exploring the various traditions, yet he appropriates rather freely among the traditions in assuming the univocity of the same vocabulary.55 He also quotes Vatican II theologian Karl Rahner on the immutability of the RCC’s anathemas and Papal Bulls, Smith calls this “genius.”56 As he further opines, “it’s in the RCC’s DNA”, and we must get over it! Yes, while we witness Rome absorbing all its contradictions and peccadillos for the sake of unity as illustrated by Pope Francis, whom Smith seems to underestimate. Smith eventually does point out such shrewd positioning has its downside. Yes, Romanism is an absorbing universalist system, embracing elements of the gospel, yet in dire need of a Biblical reformation.
Albert B. Simpson’s eschatological historicism applies to the Papal system’s lamb-like ecclesiological transformation out of Vatican II.58 In Old Faith, he states: “In the Church of Rome the movement is typified by men like Father Tyrrell and he is nearer to the spirit of the New Theology than those Protestants who pin their faith to external standards of belief.” Yes, other good or semantically sacred things, but not the true ‘other,’ Jesus the sacred one. Simpson’s statement is remarkable contextual discernment. He understood the destination of philosophical theology and its merger from various traditions as a diversion from sound doctrine. The Jesuit George Tyrrell was excommunicated for his modernism understood as philosophical subjectivism a few years before Simpson published because of the Vatican I consensus.60 Eventually, Vatican II absorbed Tyrrell’s subjectivism, previously rejected, along with a metaphysical transcendental synthesis ‘in the name of mystery’ associated with Hans Boersma’s - sources rereading Thomas Aquinas. Boersma understandably tries to distance Tyrrell from influencing his sources. Trivial, for today Tyrrell stands vindicated throughout Vatican II.61
Simpson understood modern philosophy and medieval metaphysics, not only mutually exclusive but being as Romanism exists today, assimilated with humanity through the subjective. “as the loss of the old faith, the rejection of the Bible and the Cross; the blotting out of the line of separation between the Church and the world.” Simpson precisely calls out a faulty incarnational system and Romanism’s eschatological function as a kingdom of this world.62
David Fitch and Gordon Smith’s empirical method and scriptural basis inductively appropriate the external expression of the sacraments as a sign and means of inward grace as a real presence, through scripture and theological method.Their appropriations, to one degree or another, are familiar as Protestant sacramental expressions lest they portray the ‘Jesus only-ism’ of the C&MA as a banal? Nevertheless, the richness of the Alliance tradition speaks for itself as the patriarch’s wisdom towers in its simplicity. A.W. Tozer followed suit on Simpson’s divine immediacy with the secular and sacred dichotomy in The Pursuit of God.64
Tozer makes the biblical proposition ‘as bifurcated’ which points to the sacrament of the believer’s union with Christ, with no external sacramental necessity as a means for grace. ‘Jesus Only’ in the converted person through the conviction and sealing of the individual by the Holy Spirit, crisis, and potential successive fillings.65 Granted, Simpson’s Presbyterian heritage and his approval of Anglican Henry Wilson’s eucharistic service at the Gospel Tabernacle built upon ‘Jesus Only’ and grounded early Alliance’s liturgical expression. May the Alliance continue as a broad tent post-Reformation, but align itself with the old faith and the Trial of Blood or the ana-baptists! Such embrace is an Alliance core value from its inception, yet so is the sharp theological discernment proving more difficult today with the myriad of theologies and opinions absorbed by Rome, yet on its terms. The ‘old faith’ proceeds a ‘deep church’ with ‘Jesus Only,’ as typified by the early believers who proclaimed: only Jesus is Lord and to their detriment in this world as they were transfered to another.
Before Jackob Burckhardt’s Dark Ages and Renaissance, 18th-century thinkers Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried Herder called out human progress. Their critique of historicism arose in opposition to the early modern era with its universal application of reason. Moreover, Vico and Herder’s cultural relativism emphasized the unique and particular over the universal and the unpredictable over the predictable.66 In awaiting His imminent return, we are called to worship, watch, and comfort one another while doing the Lord’s work. The incarnation is the fulcrum of linear history and its high point. Therefore, utilizing the secular event historicism must emphasize Jesus Christ, the particular and the Holy Spirit’s work as a predictable – unpredictable in and through the metaphorical body of Christ. The universal is a philosophical language that promotes a particular theology built from the ‘sacred’ Great Tradition, missing the unpredictable and amazing grace of the sacred One’s gospel and stands as a stanger ‘outside the door’ of contemporary theology.
Eschatology and ecclesiology are merely systematic constructions making sense of the apocalyptic Judaism of the biblical text, accentuated by today’s studies on second temple Judaism that uncover the Hillite Pharisaism of Jesus of Nazareth sent to the world through Paul and his alignment with Gamaliel over Shammuti zealotry. Lest we lose ourselves in contextualization, which functions exegetically to witness for the gospel to all nations, not ethnocentrism and ecclesiatical ends. Contextualization contains no formulaic method like the theological syncretism of Rome. Today such synthesizing continues updating itself with language like the secular and sacred under its ecclesial authority rather than through direct mediation of Christ and His gospel. Simpson and Tozer’s method deduces from a systemic awareness toward their atomistic appropriations in discerning the apocalyptic gospel as Christ received and His final coming. The Holy Spirit, for the believer of whatever confession follows the event and presents us with the legitimate historicism of belief inextricably bound together as faith and reason. Applying through Smith and Fitch’s work as well, exemplary, even for a denomination filled with contextualizing missionaries and enriched with global perspectives, ultimately depending on individuals, and their participation in Christ’s Holy Spirit for the sake of the body, because of each person’s union with Him.
History
In just over a century, the C&MA has taken root in many nominal and practicing Roman Catholic contexts. We think of Latin America, The Middle East, Francophone South-East Asia & Africa, and the Philippines but also North America. One of A.B. Simpson’s early disciples was the Italian American Evangelist Michele Nardi. Who preached and passed into glory back in his homeland before Simpson compiled Nardi’s story, demonstrating how the founder admired the immigrants present from the onset of the Alliance movement.67
Gloria Torres participated in the amazing numerical growth of the Lince, Peruvian Alliance church. As a youth, she was part of a small congregation, before the Holy Spirit uniquely moved.68 Established by North American missionaries, yet an Argentine pastor Alfredo Smith emerged as the catalyst for the movement named Lima al Encuentro Con Dios (LED).69 However, LED could not replicate such exact church plants in surrounding countries through the same approach nor with the same pastor/leader. Holy Spirit movments are unique and particular. Out of that movement, Gloria responded to the call and received further training at the Alliance Bible Institute in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1976. Where Gordon Smith’s parents were her teachers. Marty from Cleveland, Ohio, highlights the amazing numerical growth of Grace Church, where a quarter to a third of the members come from a nominal Catholic background.70 Gloria and Marty married in 1988, after meeting on board a ship, belonging to a para-church organization called Operation Mobilization founded by George Verwer, who sought to replicate Simpson’s movement for missions and Tozer’s prophetic call to a deeper life.
In 2010, Gloria and Marty were asked by the Peruvian Alliance to assume a church planting project that began in Rome and Milan. While working with Latin Americans, Italians, and refugees and passing the church on in 2018, during those seven years, Marty studied philosophy in two different Pontifical Universities with the privilege to directly work with a Dominican monk named Walter Senner, an expert on Meister Eckhart. From 2016 on, Marty participated in the Reformanda Initiative, processing the privilege of studying in Rome,71 where, as a couple, they moved into different worlds and developed close friendships with RCC clergy from all over the globe. Also meeting former evangelicals who crossed the Tiber and had opportunities to witness and dialogs with clergy and polemics with lay students and former evangelicals.72 Now they continue serving in Milan among all diaspor peoples and Italians. Putting intellectual assessments aside, while in Rome, Gloria and Marty’s church members, who had come out of the RCC, modeled how the C&MA has impacted the RCC, not through theological polemics, but by their transformed lives amid their struggles as immigrants in admirable simplicity. There were no systemic and atomistic theological analyses nor 'cherry-picking' appropriations of Catholic practice, they were integrating the real person, Jesus Christ, and how Scripture and the Holy Spirit taught them about Him.
His Presence
The medieval theologian preacher Meister Eckhart channels the practical Catholic and Protestant Puritan mystical authors that A.B. Simpson and A.W. Tozer read.73 Eckhart formulated a unity theology, exclusively pinning God’s presence in the now and such ‘divine immediacy’ presents a ‘ripe cherry’ in description by philosophy, traced by the Puritians and holiness movements through our union with Christ.74 Copied into the vernacular through sermons that fueled so-called mystical movements up and down the Rhine river before the Reformation, Eckhart was on to something, but let caution prevail.75 A quote traces Eckhart’s thought to Simpson by the Pietist Gerhard Tersteegen who wrote of abandonment, a term out of Eckhart’s monastic life he coined in German explained to his audiences.76
So what is wrong with the appeal of Eckhart? Such a question demands a deeper dive into an unfamilar era. Let us begin… Johannes Eckhart von Hochheim, Magister Theologiae, with two Parisian university appointments like his brother Thomas Aquinas a couple generations earlier brought the medieval metaphysical symmetry of nature and grace and Romanism’s ecclesiastical opportunity to its philosophical conclusion through the full force of scholastic vocabulary. Thomas’ teachings stand, by his canonization in 1323, whereas, Eckhart’s ideas fell condemned by a Papal Bull in 1329, both ex-cathedra from the same John XXII.77 The so-called mystical Eckhart serves as an indirect forerunner of the Reformation through the extension of his ideas by his Dominican disciples, as found in an influential book called Theologica Germanica re-published by Martin Luther.78 However, Eckhart’s commentaries on scripture and specific works discovered over the last 150 years in Latin reveal something much more logical.79 Walter Senner OP repeatedly stated to me as his student: “Eckhart could have been cleared in his trial if he merely held to Dionysian participation.”80 Astounding, if we are to think of Eckhart exclusively as a mystic in the traditional apophatic (negative theological) tradition which provides a major attraction for the sacramental in Hans Boersma’s argument.81
A German reformer? Nein! But his thought significantly helped destabilize medieval Christendom, proving guilty as among various culprits of modernity. The Meister’s metaphysical prescription is human nothingness in God — the univocal intellectus through a relation as accident between a transcendental justice as substance in informing the immanent ‘just man’ in becoming. Eckhart examines homo iustus as a concrete entity but nothing in himself as this individual. As being just, this individual has no value, no sense, and is nothing. Derived from an ontic relation with an abstract substance as transcendent justice and then only is the just man justice itself. God’s incarnation signifies not only a moral example but a metaphysical necessity. Eckhart’s theory of transcendentals did not fashion esse-being as the symmetrical centerpiece in developing nature perfected by grace like Thomas said.82
Indisputable about being, nature, and grace, scholastic terms he idiosyncratically shaped in explaining the gospel. Eckhart’s principium, rendered beginning, as in Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1; redefining the term as a principle, rather than restating linear time and space.86 His sermons and commentaries often quote Augustine’s Confessions: inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.87
Aristotelian motion needing a fixed point, here Eckhart affirms a terminus ad quem. And for this idealized revival preacher, he spoke about God and his spark in the soul as in potentiality, but did not preach the cross, perhaps because of the spectator eucharist?
The Meister was the ultimate propositional ‘theo-centrist,’ no better world existed than the result of preaching divine immediacy and its reception. The cosmos ‘is what it is’ because ‘God is in it’ by ‘who He is’ as the Almighty. Eckhart commented on scripture through the metaphysical discussions of his era, illustrated with allegory and subtle re-interpretations of authorities before him, sourcing his famous sermons. He articulated no moral philosophy like Thomas. Human actions within a theocentric unified system combined with virtue, exhibiting no Christology nor explicating sin nature. Therefore, Eckhart’s anthropology was also at the center of the censure of 1329.88 An indictment not only of the Dominican’s eternal Aristotelian framework but the ethical implications as privation, drawn out of Aristotle through Origen, disregarding Augustine’s Pauline affirmation.89 Perhaps this point toward a more Judaic worldview theologically which affirms elements of Paul’s mission to the nations which for Eckhart was default as a Dominican Roman Catholic.
Moreover, his theory of esse-being, the first thesis of his propositional work posited, God is Being,90 by defying pantheism through scholastic distinctions. He differs between absolute being and determinate being. Is this similar to omnipresence and manifest presence, that Tozer describes?91 Obviously, because Tozer read Eckhart's sermons.92 For Eckhart, the concrete mode of the transcendentals shows creation’s dependence on God and the human capacity to understand this and that existence, by not allowing the participatory dimension like Thomas’s use of the transcendentals making up Romanism’s sacramental system.
Anticipating virtually all discussion in contemporary philosophy and non-religious spirituality, Eckhart is the source of 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger’s originality in regards to existence esse- being and immanence. Two active societies meet annually in his name while practically propagated by popular author Eckhart Tolle and self help type new age philosophy.101 However, in the discipline of philosophy, the hermeneutical problem of metaphysics and its rejection still focuses on language and relation.102 Ironically, only relation (one of Aristotle’s Categories) remains in philosophical discussion.103 Heidegger’s immanent ontological ‘turn’ resorted to language, where the search for transcendence utilized poetry in explaining Dasein (human being) through immanent reification. Namely, the logic of metaphysics was found dead on the road to the city of esse - being, yet the second result, the theory of differentiation out of ‘relation’ by Heidegger’s French disciples ironically demonstrates the adequacy of language.
Besides ethical nihilism, surfacing as relativism today, and the ‘Great Tradition’s’ metaphysical articulations admired by Hans Boersma and elucidated from John Milbank to David Bentley Hart,104 this century-long experiment into linguistic hermeneutics and relation remains stuck on immanence seeking the transcendent, the sacred. Whereas, Thomas’s symmetrical nature and grace theologies serve Rome, transposing old theological articulations such as nature and grace into the secular and the sacred.
Conclusion
The Fourfold Gospel serves as a means to motivate the C&MA as a movement.105 Here, the Apostle’s Creed dovetails the Great Commission, the Ascension and Pentecost. “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His Kingdom will have no end.” The Ascension ratifies the Fourfold gospel, Pentecost sets its course and the Apostles Creed reminds us of our community.
16 Schürmann: Broken Hegemonies.
17 Burckhardt: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/10/jacob-burckhardt-civilization-renaissance-italy
18 Simpson: The Coming One, pp.32-3: “[…] Next, in the Mustard Seed we see the rapid growth of this mingled system covering the earth with its extensive shade and lodging the fowls of heaven. Is not this most promising? Let us not be too sure. The fowls of the air who lodge in the branches have already a bad reputation from the first parable, as the destructive and mischievous intruders who picked up the good seed, and they would seem to be here the same ill brood of evil emissaries who find shelter in the great, proud, worldly and unhallowed Church of the age of Constantine and today. This is made much plainer when we come to the fourth parable, the Leaven, which is God’s uniform symbol of corruption; and when the woman is added to the picture it becomes a significant and unmistakable emblem of the great apostasy which sprang up in the sixth and seventh centuries and speedily permeated the whole Church with the leaven of the Papacy and all its kindred corruptions. But was there no residue of the good left of all the apostolic sowing? Yes, the Hid Treasure and the Pearl represent the two sides of the elements of good in contrast with the two symbols of evil. The Treasure represents the pure and Scriptural elements surviving in the Church in the individuals-the many; the Pearl in their unity, as the one small, yet pure and heavenly jewel of the Lord amid the encompassing corruption. <The previous statements by Simpson is an application of descriptive metaphysics of the ‘one and the many’ which is also part of the theological projects of both Smith and Fitch in recovering ecclesiology.> Both find their historical fulfillment in the faithful few who have ever existed in even the darkest ages of medieval corruption; the Albigenses and Paulicians, the Hussites and Moravians, the Waldenses and Vaudois, the Wycliffites and Huguenots, the Reformers and Covenanters, and the pure and true ones who have before and since dared to be faithful to God and His holy Word. There has ever been a little flock, of which He says: ‘They shall be mine in the day when I make up My jewels.’ There are some who identify the Treasure with Israel, and the Pearl with the Church, the Bride of the Lamb. But this does not affect the dispensational bearing of the parables.”
19 Wax: “Three Definitions of the Secular.” See- https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/3-definitions-of-secular-and-why-they-matter-for-our-mission/ <Not that I disagree with Trevin Wax nor the phenomenal Charles Taylor, but in positing another definition in light of Vatican II as misappropriated by pragmatic yet sentimental evangelicals in not properly understanding Rome and its sacramentalism as provoked by the secular. Another Gospel Coalition review shows evangelicals still have much work to do on this attraction to sacramentalism.> Ortlund, Gavin: “You Can Learn from Medieval Christians,” The Gospel Coalition, 2016. Armstrong, Chris R.: Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis, Grand Rapids, 2016. <A gentile and cautious critique of this book is found here:> “Armstrong faults modern Christianity for what he calls ‘immediatism,’ by which he means essentially three qualities of modern thought: (1) our penchant for novelty (‘chronological snobbery’); (2) our desire for immediate results (‘pressurized pragmatism’); and (3) our simplistic view of knowledge as mediated directly by perception (he calls this ‘Common Sense epistemology,’ drawing a correlation with 18th–century Scottish Common Sense Realism) (7–8). <This shows the pervasive nature of Kantian subjectivism in theology for Kant thought he produced the ultimate synthesis, but it was simply empiricism.> But Armstrong goes on to articulate another aspect of modern ‘immediatism’—that is, modern Christians’ perceived bias against various forms of churchly mediation (for example, liturgical expressions, priestly intercession and leadership, a robust view of the sacraments, utilizing art in worship, and so on). In contrast to our modern ‘immediatism,’ Armstrong emphasizes medieval “sacramentalism”—the idea that “the outward and visible can convey the inward and spiritual” (144). He believes that, in contrast to the barren, mechanistic, modern view of the universe, the medieval had a holistic approach to life and the material world that perceived God’s glory infused throughout creation. Even food, sex, and emotion can be appreciated as components of our spiritual existence before God (25–28). Modern Christians, because we’ve lost our focus on Christ’s humanity, have lost a sense of our own humanity—our work, our culture-making, our suffering, and our dignity as God’s image-bearers (e.g., 233).” See - https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/medieval-wisdom-for-modern-christians/
<In the above review Chris Armstrong utilizes the great Oxford don as a proxy through Lewis’s accessibility by his writings for Christians making sense of faith. Certainly, Lewis has provided a clear guide in crucial areas of Christian apologetics and the moral argument for God, yet perhaps counterproductive in the pursuit of theological imagination. Where, Lewis the medievalist, provides a familiar voice to help explore ‘his world.’ A world that was channeled through a familiar sci-fi style with his Chronicles of Narnia. Chris Armstrong’s work puts us face to face with modernity’s problems infecting shallow evangelicalism, but he does not offer a solution that the Reformers already did not deeply discuss and one that we should continue to develop out of the correct understanding of human sin and the application in identifying common grace through general revelation. Armstrong falls into what could be termed a ‘sacramental historicism’ conflated with an anachronistic conceptualized ‘nature’ as possessing the secular where C.S. Lewis the medievalist is co-opted as ‘a theologian’. Lewis’ ‘gravitas’ also emerges as a major point of Hans Boersma’s argument of the sacra-mentalization of nature.>
20 This expansion of the secular and sacred out of nature and grace draws upon Francis Schaeffer who applied broad brush strokes upon nature/grace, faith/reason, and posited these as proceeding to faulty societal conclusions. I believe Schaeffer’s conclusion was correct, however, as an apologist, he was disregarded by those in the academy involved in the intricacies of the debates, as his method was not acceptable for the philosophic discipline. Of course, Schaeffer was a unique evangelist seeking to present the faith intellectually, and this is not everyone’s need. Basically, Thomas Aquinas stands as Schaeffer’s ‘culprit of modernity.’ On unity with Catholics on moral stances, Francis Shaeffer used co-belligerency over ecumenicism, perhaps this is a better way of looking at commonalities, still, culture wars are not Christ’s church’s mission. David Fitch’s 2019 work provides help for evangelicals to deconstruct such stances providing greater clarity, certainly better than Schaeffer’s son Frank, who senses guilt in helping his father start ‘the Christian Right’ in the USA and is at no loss of words through his exposé of his parents in various books published over the last years.
For an academic vindication of Francis Schaeffer’s nature/grace toward secularism posit. See Hankey: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaBr4jtJv2PY04tBKQ
21 Gillespie: <Gillespie is correct that there are ‘theological origins to modernity,’ although a good historian, he is not a theologian.> “Gillespie describes God as a power, but not much a grace-giver. Grace, as theologians know, or should know, does not violate ‘second causes.’ […] Gillespie contends that secularization is simply a mask covering up deeper theological concerns that just won’t go away.” see http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/review/the-theological-origins-of-modernity
22 Simpson: The Coming One, p. 54: “Another feature in the visions of the Apocalypse is the relation of the nations to the great apostasy of Rome. They are represented in the first period of her career as sustaining this ecclesiastical system represented by the Woman on the scarlet colored beast, and united with her in unholy alliance; but later we see them hating her, ravaging her and resenting fiercely her long and arrogant dominancy over them. This also has been strangely true during the past ten centuries and is being literally fulfilled in Europe today in such Roman Catholic countries as Italy, France and Portugal.” pp.198-200: “[…] When we speak of the coming of our Lord as imminent, we do not mean the fulfillment of all the successive prophecies which reach on to His glorious Epiphany. There may be much to be accomplished before that day shall arrive, […]”
see Pyles: Missionary Eschatology
Coming One, p. 54. “The spirit of evil that rules in the powers of earth is to send forth a deluge of unhallowed influences, represented in the Apocalypse by three unclean spirits like frogs, which shall go forth to possess the minds and hearts of the kings and peoples of earth.”
< The following letter from Bertie to his Maggie from Rome in 1871. > “I have been spending the Sabbath in Rome, but oh there is no Sabbath here. It is the capital of the Roman Catholic world, but it is the most ungodly, Sabbath-breaking, worldly looking place I have ever seen, and there is more vice and lawlessness and brigandage in Rome today than in all the rest of Italy. As I look at the sad spectacle - the busy streets, the open shops, the crowds of laborers, the busy cafes, the profane and ribald mobs, the empty churches, and the very priests playing ball with the boys as I saw them tonight in the public park, I ask myself the question - Is this all Roman Catholicism has done for the world and for Rome? Thank God, its day is past. Like the floor of St. Peters which I walked over this morning and admired its grandeur and its incomparable marble mosaics but heard as I passed on the hollow sound that reminded me that I was treading on a hollow thing - full of graves below-of dead men’s bones and all corruption. So, the Church of Rome is grand but false and hollow, a glorious show, a gilded, sculptured painted magnificent shell. Here people ask for bread and she gives them in her magnificent Cathedral a ‘stone;’ and now disgusted and hardened they don’t even ask at all. But thank God her day is done - Pius IX is now virtually a prisoner in the Vatican, and Englishmen and Frenchmen are likely to be mobbed in the streets of Rome because of the suspicion that they have been Zouaves in the army of the Pope. Once I dare not have written as I do tonight, or I might have been a prisoner tomorrow-my letter searched and my rashness punished. But now this day is over, and Rome is free, and the greater danger is in seeming to be a possible former supporter of the Holy Father. I spent a thrilled Sabbath. I was not in time for the English Church in the morning but attended it at 5 and thought that the same hour (11 at home) you were all assembled at home. I read a good deal. My mind naturally turned to the story of Paul’s journey to Rome and I read the last chapters of Acts and the Epistle to the Romans. I thought much of you all and had some pleasant times of quiet devotion. I read and sang with a great comfort the 56th Psalm, and Ps. 110, 112, 113, 115-v.10 to 14. O these continental Sabbaths are welcome and blessed to me as a green oasis in a burning desert. I hope you are all well and happy. I can only hope for I know but little of you, but I leave you with all confidence on a Father’s bosom. I trust to receive another letter from you ere I leave Rome, perhaps on Tuesday.””
23 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2016/10/129-roman-catholic-theology-after-vatican-ii-an-interview/
24 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2019/05/vf162/: “Not Away From Thomism but Deeper into It.”
25 Banzhaf: Charles Taylor and Language, http://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/introduction-charles-taylor-is-canadian.html
26 Kerr: “A Different World: Neo-Scholasticism and its Discontents”
27 Gregory: The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge, 2012.
Milbank: 500, https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/opth.2018.4.issue-1/opth-2018-0045/opth-2018-0045.pdf
28 Milbank: Beyond Secular Order, <Milbank argues that ‘historicism cannot straightforwardly be considered as something specifically modern.’ Christianity is its breeding ground. For a critical review of Milbank’s project through the Jesuit Henri de Lubac, see > Otten, Willemien: ‘Review of The Suspended Middle. Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural,’ […] Whether De Lubac’s Surnaturel really ranks with Heidegger’s Being and Time and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations remains to be seen and more generally points to Milbank’s tendency to overstate his case. While that may be excused as a matter of temperament, where the book’s thesis really falls flat in lacking scholarly proof, revealing at the same time a more structural flaw in Radical Orthodoxy, is in giving us a subtraction narrative (as in the logic of double negation or the non-Cajetan Aquinas, but also in the non-Humani Generis ‘Surnaturel’) rather than conducting a constructive analysis in historical theology. Precisely at this point, it seems a wide gulf separates De Lubac from Milbank, which can only be bridged when a more careful historical study of the various theologians and periods mentioned – the importance of the early Middle Ages comes especially to mind as the period linking Augustine and Aquinas – will be seriously undertaken.”
29 Van De Walle: Jesus IS the Gospel, p. 3:
30 Augustine: City of God, Book 14.28
31 The downstream application of Taylor in confronting secularization is a real issue for many Christian leaders. Therefore, proper contextualization demands knowledge. Gordon Smith helps ministers ask deep questions on leadership and resourcing from the whole Christian tradition: https://www.catalystresources.org/formation-for-ministry-in-a-secular-age-1-the-situation-we-find-ourselves-in/a
Smith: Transforming Conversion, pp. 115-125 illustrates Gordon Smith’s atomistic approach and systemic blind-side. It also shows that doing theology retrospectively conflates with sociological phenomena. His deconstruction using Charles Taylor in dealing with William James seems valid. James was a contemporary of A.B. Simpson and mentioned extensively in Old Faith. Where Simpson is addressing James’ anti-materialism, as ‘individually religious’ representing pseudo-spirituality or mysticism. Granted, Taylor is criticizing James from an anti-institutional religious perspective, certainly legitimate. However, Smith, perhaps, has found the ‘secular age’ convincing.
32 Allison: Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment <Allison’s text follows the RCC’s Catechism in an atomist manner and analyzes with systemic insight based upon nature & grace, and the Christ - church interdependence.> here Kindle location 835-1400.
33 Op. Cited, Kindle location 5058-5684.
34 Boersma: Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, Grand Rapids, 2011, is the abridged popular version out of Boersma’s academic work Nouvelle Théologie & Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery, 2010: <Why have I singled out Boersma? He stands as an indirect influence, perhaps being a former colleague of Gordon Smith at Regent and through the influence of John Milbank and James K.A. Smith as interlocutors for David Fitch. I do not mean to imply any ‘guilt by association,’ however, it is important to read what Boersma writes himself. He is or was a Reformed evangelical demonstrating the point of departure as he has applied his methodology through many works: Heaven on Earth? Theological Interpretation in Ecumenical Dialogue, with Matthew Levering, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013; Embodiment and Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa: An Anagogical Approach, Oxford, 2013; Eucharistic Participation: The Reconfiguration of Time and Space, Regent College Publishing, 2013; Sacramental Preaching: Sermons on the Hidden Presence of Christ, Grand Rapids, 2016; The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering Oxford, 2015; <out of over 40 authors no-where does Boersma’s editorial direction treat. Jerome’s mistranslation of mysterion as Sacramentum in Ephesians.> Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church, Grand Rapids, 2017. Boersma displays great zeal for the RCC from a historical ideological theological attraction over his own tradition. Boersma’s work on sacramental ontology shows little if any critical analysis. Therefore, it is important to present some extended text, for one to read it for themselves.> Boersma states, here pp. 21-25: “ [...] Before going any further into this discussion, I think it is necessary to define some of my terms. What do I mean by ‘sacramental ontology,’ and by the ‘Platonist-Christian synthesis’ on which it relies? I devote this first chapter to answering this question - or, at least, to providing the basic contours of an answer. The argument of part I of this book is that until the late Middle Ages (say, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), people looked at the world as a mystery. The word ‘mystery’ did not have quite the same connotations that it has for us today. Certainly, it did not refer to a puzzling issue who’s secret one can uncover by means of clever investigation. Our understanding of ‘mystery novels,’ for example, carries that kind of connotation. For the patristic and medieval mindset, the word ‘mystery’ meant something slightly - but significantly - different. ‘Mystery’ referred to realities behind the appearances that one could observe by means of the senses. That is to say, though our hands, eyes, ears, nose, and tongue are able to access reality, they cannot fully grasp this reality. They cannot comprehend it. The reason for this basic incomprehensibility of the universe was that the world was, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins famously put it, ‘charged with the grandeur of God.’ Even the most basic created realities ties that we observe as human beings carry an extra dimension, as it were. The created world cannot be reduced to measurable, manageable dimensions. Up to this point, my explanation is probably relatively uncontroversial. Most of us, when we think about the ability of the senses to comprehend reality, realize that they are inadequate to the task. And I suspect that we generally recognize that the reason for this does not lie mainly in faulty hearing, poor vision, or worn-out taste buds, but in the fact that reality truly is mysterious. It carries a dimension that we are unable to fully express. But let me take the next step, and I suspect that in doing so, I may encounter some naysayers. Throughout the Great Tradition, when people spoke of the mysterious quality of the created order, what they meant was that this created order - along with all other temporary and provisional gifts of God - was a sacrament. This sacrament was the sign of a mystery that, though present in the created order, nonetheless far transcended human comprehension. The sacramental character of reality was the reason it so often appeared mysterious and beyond human comprehension. So, when I speak of my desire to recover a ‘sacramental ontology’ in this book, I am speaking of an ontology (an understanding of reality) that is sacramental in character. The perhaps controversial, but nonetheless important, point that I want to make is that the mysterious character of all created reality lies in its sacramental nature. In fact, we would not go wrong by simply equating mystery and sacrament. What, then, is so distinct about the sacramental ontology that characterized much of the history of the church? Perhaps the best way to explain this is to distinguish between symbols and sacraments. A road sign with the silhouette of a deer symbolizes the presence of deer in the area, and its purpose is to induce drivers to slow down. Drivers will not be so foolish as to veer away from the road sign for fear of hitting the deer that is symbolized on the road sign. The reason is obvious: the symbol of the deer and the deer in the woods are two completely separate rate realities. The former is a sign referring to the latter, but in no way do the two co-inhere. It is not as though the road sign carries a mysterious quality, participating somehow in the stags that roam the forests. In diagram i, symbol X and reality Y merely have an external or nominal relationship. The distance between the two makes clear that there is no real connection between them. Things are different with sacraments. Unlike mere symbols, sacraments actually participate in the mysterious reality to which they point. Sacrament X and reality Y co-inhere: the sacrament participates in the reality to which it points. In his essay ‘Transposition,’ C. S. Lewis makes this same point when he distinguishes between symbolism and sacramentalism. The relationship between speech and writing, Lewis argues, ‘is one of symbolism. The written characters exist solely for the eye, the spoken words solely for the ear. There is a complete discontinuity between them. They are not like one another, nor does the one cause the other to be.’ By contrast, when we look at how a picture represents the visible world, we find a rather different kind of relationship. Lewis explains: Pictures are part of the visible world themselves and represent it only by being part of it. Their visibility has the same source as it. The suns and lamps in pictures seem to shine only because real suns or lamps shine on them; that is, they seem to shine a great deal because they really shine a little in reflecting their archetypes. The sunlight in a picture is therefore not related to real sunlight simply as written words are to be spoken. It is a sign, but also something thing more than a sign because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name the relation I should call it not symbolical but sacramental. For Lewis, a sacramental relationship implies real presence. This understanding standing of sacramentality is part of a long lineage. According to the sacramental ontology of much of the Christian tradition, the created order was more than an external or nominal symbol. Instead, it was a sign (signum) that pointed to and participated in a greater reality (res). It seems to me that the shape of the cosmic tapestry is one in which earthly signs and heavenly realities are intimately woven together, so much so that we cannot have the former without the latter. Later on, I will need to say more about what this reality is in which our sacramental world participates. For now, it is enough to observe that the reason for the mysterious character of the world - on the understanding of the Great Tradition, at least - is that it participates in some greater reality, from which it derives its being and its value. Hence, instead of speaking of a sacramental ontology, we may also speak of a participatory ontology. Of course, any theist position assumes a relationship between God and this world. And many evangelicals will, in addition, agree that this link between God and the world takes on a covenantal shape. God makes covenants both with the created world as a whole (Gen. 9:8-17; Jer. 33.19-26) and with human beings (Gen. 15:1-21; 17:1-27; Exod. 24:1-18; 2 Sam. 7:1-17; Jer. 31:31-33; Heb. 8:1-13). There is, I believe, a great deal of value in highlighting this covenantal relationship. But the insistence on a sacramental link between God and the world goes well beyond the mere insistence that God has created the world and by creating it has declared it to be good. It also goes beyond positing an agreed-on (covenantal) relationship between two completely separate beings. A sacramental ontology insists that not only does the created world point to God as its source and “point of reference,” but that it also subsists or participates in God. A participatory or sacramental ontology will look to passages such as Acts 17:28 (‘For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, we are his offspring’), and will conclude that our being participates in the being of God. Such an outlook on reality will turn to Colossians 1:17 (‘He [Christ] is before all things, and in him, all things hold together’), and will argue that the truth, goodness, and beauty of all created things is grounded in Christ, the eternal Logos of God. In other words, because creation is a sharing in the being of God, our connection with God is a participatory, or real, connection - not just an external, or nominal, connection. Few people have expressed this distinction better than C. S. Lewis has: ‘We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.’ We do not want merely a nominal relationship; we desire a participatory relationship. In fact, a sacramental ontology maintains that the former is possible only because of the latter: a genuinely covenantal bond is possible only because the covenanting partners are not separate or fragmented individuals. The real connection that God has graciously posited between himself and the created order forms the underlying ontological basis that makes it possible for a covenant relationship to flourish.”<Perhaps this is a bit simplistic but saying the ‘creation was good’ is simply that, it’s a good production. What does Boersma mean with the participatory relationship? Boersma is really begging the question about a distinction from pantheism.>
De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2018/09/153-a-few-remarks-on-the-evangelical-fascination-with-the-sacramental-tapestry-a-book-review-of-hans-boersmas-two-volumes-on-the-topic/
35 Boersma: Nouvelle Théologie & Sacramental Ontology: “My interpretation of nouvelle théologie as the recovery of a sacramental ontology implies that, in some sense, its theology was indeed new—at least against the backdrop of the movement’s immediate historical context. As a result, I have resisted the temptation to locate nouvelle théologie, historically, between the Modernist Crisis of the early twentieth century and the theological pluralism of the post-Second Vatican Council period. The Modernist Crisis, with its turn to historical-critical exegesis (Alfred Loisy) and to subjective human experience (George Tyrrell), had caused great upheaval within Catholicism during the last decade of the twentieth century. As a result, the ecclesiastical climate between 1907 and 1960 made it difficult for history and experience to function as theologically meaningful categories. The condemnation of Modernism ensured that theologians were careful not to give the impression that they were returning to the ‘historicism’ and ‘subjectivism’ of the Modernist movement.” <This statement implicates the whole matter, ‘not give the impression’, means that such assumptions of the nouvelle théologie were those of the earlier modernists. In terms of Neo-Platonism’s influence on Augustine, this is obvious. Yet, Augustine and the patristic era is as far removed from each other as our era looking back upon the scholastics. The western classical tradition with its sources evidently is a greater argument than scripture for Boersma. The modern epistemological pursuit for ontology is noble and a crucial reflection, but here is where modern philosophy represented as degrees of the ‘Kantian wall’ between the ‘noumena and phenomena’ as opposed to prescriptive metaphysics representing two poles where there is no happy medium. Boersma's theological motive of ressourcement stands vulnerable to historiographical idealism, as a reaction against the retro-vista type of historicism in producing, again, its own historicism over the simplicity of ‘the holy’ (sacramental) revealed in creation which is His creation as the text of scripture records. To resolve ontology and incarnation, as a believer, one must look no further than the reality of creation and its agent, Jesus. First coming in space and time, not to mention OT manifestations as incarnation attributed to the Son or the angel of the LORD. Boersma faces the problem of epistemological method in’ doing theology’ in a post-Kantian era simply by presenting ‘ontology’ in such a manner >
36 Corzzon, Raul: Theory and History of Ontology (Kindle Locations 646-651). <modern ontology has had a distorting effect on reading medieval metaphysics as its tone is an empirical epistemology, whereas epistemology was integrated into metaphysics before the modern era, but Thomist empiricism emerged as the majority report.> (Kindle Locations 669-674) [...] “Ontology is intimately related to metaphysics, the theory of ultimate categories of things. [...] Now insofar as metaphysics is the study of the nature and existence of broad categories of things, ontology is a branch of metaphysics by logical courtesy. It deals, paradoxically, with the nature and existence of the ‘category’ of undifferentiated being. But strictly speaking, ontology is transcategorial. Of course, if we say, ‘To be is to be material,’ we do equate the study of being with the study of matter. But the equation is transcategorial in its very elimination of all categories other than matter. Of course, some ontologists admit different kinds or degrees of being. But even if every metaphysical category is also a kind of being and vice versa, so that the words ‘metaphysics’ and ‘ontology’ are coextensive, those words are still not synonymous.“
Aersten: The Case of Thomas Aquinas: <most Protestant evangelical critiques read Aquinas through Etienne Gilson> “In Gilson’s works there is a manifest tension between the idea of ‘Christian Philosophy’ and historical reality.”
37 All Pontifical Universities have a faculty of philosophy and theology as separate schools.
38 Kilcrease: Lutheran Theology and the Metaphysical Question, Theologiae Crucis blog.
39 Calvin: John. Institutes of the Christian Religion (Kindle Locations 756-760): “Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
40 See Conradie, Ernst M. (ed.): Creation and Salvation: A companion of recent theological movements. v. 2, (Studies in Religion and Environment v. 6) Münster, 2012; Bavinck Herman: “Common Grace” Trsl. R.C. van Leeuwen, Calvin Theological Journal, vol. 24, 1989, pp. 38-61 — ”The Catholicity of Christianity and Church” Trsl. John Bolt ), Calvin Theological Journal, vol. 27, 1992, pp. 220-251. — Reformed Dogmatics, Vol.1: Prolegomena, Vol. 2: God and Creation, Vol. 3: Sin and Salvation in Christ, Vol. 4: Holy Spirit, Church and Creation, Grand Rapids 2003-2008.
41 See Payton: Getting the Reformation Wrong, p. 190. David Fitch refers to the current new Calvinist movement as ‘neo-Reformed’ perhaps a more accurate label would be ‘neo-scholastically Reformed.’
42 Fabro: here p. 426. <Thomas’s conception of first philosophy has made it clear that his metaphysics has its center >“[...] no longer, as up to now a certain tradition of Aristotelian predominance has accustomed us to think, in a treatise on substance and the categories, but on one concerning the transcendentals.”
43 Romans 8:18-27
44 See Boersma endnote #35.
45 John 1:1–18; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Colossians 1:15–20; and Hebrews 1:1–4. Jesus as divine agent of creation comes from early church liturgical sources.
46 De Chirico: The Blurring of Time, p. 41. “The argument which will be suggested here, [..] is that Roman Catholicism operated a fundamental breach of the boundary between hapax and mallon in its understanding of the Church as a prolongation of the Incarnation. This breach subsequently caused a series of further incursions, above all in the doctrines of the Eucharist and revelation.” http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2016/04/123-the-blurring-of-time-distinctions-in-roman-catholicism/
47 Fitch: Faithful Presence.
48 Fitch: The End of Evangelicalism? p. 155-56. “From this account of “the threefold body,” de Lubac asks a question to Catholics that can just as easily be asked of evangelicals regarding their belief and practice of the church: Have we become a society of individuals bound together by a form of spectating? Whether it be an evangelical megachurch gospel presentation or a large evangelical gathering to hear the preacher, it could be argued that evangelicals have been caught up in the same spectating of which de Lubac speaks. We too thereby become invisible in the world. In these large events, enhanced with video and “podcast” technologies, the church becomes defined as the meeting of the invisible, which then defines our engagement with society in the same manner. We are forced to engage society by rallying the individuals who gather together on Sunday around a Christian ideal for society. They then are sent out as a voluntarist workforce for this Christian ideal in the world. This makes possible the making of a Master-Signifier out of our engagement with society (“the Christian nation”). For de Lubac, it is at the Eucharistic table where such an invisible church can (and should) be resisted. Here believers are conjoined into the visible body of Christ under the Lordship of the Risen Christ. Here the social reality of His body takes shape as we practice the forgiveness, reconciliation, and mutual sharing of a new justice in Christ’s reign. Here we become the justice of God as opposed to individuals who campaign for it as a slogan in the world. It becomes more difficult to make a Master-Signifier out of God’s work in the world because this work is “us.” But does this visible body engage society? In terms of Christ’s Kingdom, does de Lubac’s threefold body domesticate God’s work in the Eucharist so that the Kingdom can only happen here via the Eucharistic community?”
49 Martos: Deconstructing Sacramental Theology and Reconstructing Catholic Ritual, p. 54: “[...] and Latin versions of the New Testament sometimes translated the Greek Mysterion as sacramentum. <footnote 85 follows> This is especially true of Ephesians 5:32, which speaks about the relationship between Christ and the church. Ambrose cites this verse in An Explanation of the Prophet David to the Emperor Theodosius, 5.23; Commentary on Psalm 37, 27.2; Commentary on Luke’s Gospel 4.826; Widows, 15.89. Tertullian and Cyprian also cite this text, which indicates that this verse read Sacramentum hoc magnum est in Latin versions of the NT even before Jerome’s translation. See also Eph 1:9 and 3:3, and Col 1:27, where mysterion is translated as sacramentum in the Vulgate.”
50 Boersma: Sacred Tapestry, pp. 105-6: “Should an evangelical approach to sacramentality not begin with Scripture rather than with the church? I appreciate that objection, and I am deeply sympathetic with the high regard for Scripture that the question implies. But the careful reader of part 1 of this book will not be surprised by my choice. As we have seen, one of the problems that Yves Congar observed about the late Middle Ages was the separation between Scripture and church. Whether the option was for Scripture (evangelicals) or for the church (Catholics) - for Congar the resolution was wrong in either case. Moreover, I hope to make clear in chapter 7 that it has been within the church that the authority of the canon has been recognized historically. Therefore, it is inconceivable to regard Scripture as somehow separate from the church, with the interpretation of the Bible left to individual believers or scholars. The Bible is, first and foremost, the church’s book. Consequently, Scripture itself, throughout its pages, points us to the church as the living embodiment of the truth. The church, not Scripture, is ‘the pillar and foundation of the truth’ (1 Tim. 3:15). Of course, we should in no way neglect the centrality of Scripture, or its ability to sit in judgment on errors in the church. Scripture, after all, is ‘God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16). We should in no way try to set up the one Epistle to Timothy against the other. Nonetheless, Scripture serves as the sacramental means to build the church; the church is not the sacramental means to build Scripture. Thus, an authentically evangelical view should begin with the church as the primary object of evangelical ressourcement.” <Borsma’s ecclesial univocity, allows the RCC its preeminence in representing his concept of church and scripture unity in reading and producing authority.>
Fitch: Flat Epistemology, https://marginalchristianity.blogspot.com/2020/10/theological-journal-october-12-flat.html
51 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/tag/mariology/
52 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/?s=evangelicals
53 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2018/02/146-younger-evangelicals-fascinated-roman-catholicism/
54 Smith: https://youtu.be/iGSRMCtVw2M?t=2212
55 Smith: Transforming Conversion, <see chapter 8 “The Sacramental Dimension of Conversion” pp.139-156. Here the example of baptism which Smith views atomistically rather than its ultimate systemic use, for baptism holds a different definition for the RCC and Protestants. See Gregg Allison: Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment. Allison follows the RCC catechism and Baptism. The extended title of Smith’s work: Rethinking the Language and Contours of Christian Initiation, reveals a Vatican II train of thought and approach, still, Smith has a valid pursuit exploring the whole Christian tradition and providing the evangelical tradition a broader understanding.
56 Smith: https://youtu.be/iGSRMCtVw2M?t=6448
57 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2014/09/89-is-unity-like-a-sphere-or-a-polyhedron/
Pritchard & De Chirico: http://evangelicalfocus.com/blogs/1000/What_do_you_think_about_Pope_Francis_
Smith: https://youtu.be/iGSRMCtVw2M?t=6498 <Smith claims that Vatican II through the work of Karl Rahner was a reformation of the Catholic church in the previous clip. I disagree.>
58 Simpson: Coming One, pp. 77 – 105, <Chapter 5 the Great Apostacy, The little horn of Daniel 7:20-26 on the fourth beast and its unique nature is not only political, but Simpson also elaborates from Daniel, Paul, and John in the Apocalypse, the central theme for the Papacy in deception as the work of Satan. The mystery of Babylon Rev.17:5; > Old Faith, p. 93 “it is described later in the same chapter, under a second image, as ‘another beast <with> two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon’ (Rev. 13:11). This denotes another side of the Papacy, namely, its ecclesiastical and spiritual organization. The first beast represents its political and temporal power; the second is ecclesiastical. It is really two systems.”
59 Simpson: Old Faith, pp.123-126, <Father Tyrell is mentioned at the bottom of p.124>, “[…] we have already seen this worldwide current, not only among the nominal followers of the New Theology but among the Protestant churches and especially the Church of Rome in connection with that powerful revolt and reaction that has come to be known as Modernism and which has enrolled under its banner the most gifted and efficient minds of the Roman Catholic Church in all countries. […] <quoting Dr. Newman Smythe> […] In this faith in God’s manifestation of Himself in human experience progressive Catholics are certainly in the same stream that has vivified and renewed our whole modern theology.”
Maher: pp. 26-35, <George Tyrrell was excommunicated in 1907 and died in 1909. According to Sawin: Simpson’s Old Faith published in 1911 are messages from the same year. In the scholarly reflective works on Father Tyrrell by Maher and David Wells, He is portrayed in a manner that Hans Boersma misses capturing..>
Wells: The Prophetic Theology of George Tyrrell, Introduction: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaBzEYg1gmcNkobkXQ
60 Wells: pp. 32-42.
61 Boersma: in nouvelle theologie pp. 18-21; here p. 20: “Undoubtedly, there is overlap between Modernism and nouvelle théologie. Both reacted against neo-Thomist theology with its conceptualist understanding of Christian doctrine, its rational apologetic, its logical view of doctrinal development, and its juridical, perhaps even authoritarian ecclesiology. Most importantly, both wanted theology to take subjective experience much more seriously than scholastic theology had been willing to do. It would be erroneous, however, to look to Modernism as one of the main precursors to nouvelle théologie. The fundamental difference between Modernism and nouvelle théologie lay precisely in the latter’s sacramental ontology. Despite their strong disagreement with neo-Thomism, Loisy’s view of history and Tyrrell’s approach to theology presupposed the same gap between nature and the supernatural on which the manualist tradition insisted. Loisy considered history and theology as separate from one another, while Tyrrell divided human discourse and divine revelation. Both Modernist scholars evinced the modern incapacity to reach beyond the natural horizons. In terms of history (biblical exegesis) as well as human discourse (theology), nouvelle théologie took a much bolder approach because of its sacramental reintegration of nature and the supernatural. Rather than focusing on historical-critical exegesis, nouvelle théologie presented a plea for a ressourcement of pre-modern spiritual interpretation, a method that had been based on the conviction that historical appearances contained spiritual, eternal realities. And, rather than collapsing revelation into mystical experience, nouvelle théologie saw doctrinal statements as sacramentally (or analogically) conveying the divine truth that infinitely surpassed human language. The Modernists were largely uninterested in ressourcement; by contrast, ressourcement of the Tradition was indispensable for nouvelle théologie, since this allowed for the recovery of sacramental ontology and thus for the reconnection of theology and life. <Sacramental reintegration of ‘nature and the supernatural.’ Boerma’s appeal to patristic authority and mystery is an interpretation of a distant era through theologians that were certainly grappling with faith and reason and modern subjective assumptions, this is the case of Karl Rahner. Let me put it this way, if the Dominicans looked down upon Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy, what Boersma is proposing would produce a similar reaction. Metaphysics is just that, a totality and prescription, that is not available for ‘cherry picking’ according to the magisterium of the RCC. >
62 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2005/07/the-dignity-of-the-human-person-towards-an-evangelical-reading-of-the-theology-of-personhood-of-vatican-ii/
Simpson: Coming One, pp. 189-90: “These include not only the development of the great Apostasies which we have already described but of conditions or declension in the Christian Church, which the Lord said should mark the time of the end. What do we see today, both in the pulpit and the pew? The loss of the old faith, the rejection of the Bible and the Cross; the blotting out of the line of separation between the Church and the world; the spirit of liberalism in the pulpit and the professor’s chair, and the spirit of worldliness and self-indulgence in the membership of most of our churches; the declining membership of the Protestant churches of Great Britain, and the stationary, or almost stationary condition in most of the churches of America; the growth of the liquor traffic in spite of the modern temperance crusade, to the awful extent of an increase of five gallons per head to every man, woman and child in the United States in the past five years. These are but some of the emphatic lines which church history is writing: today in fulfillment of the Master’s solemn warning: “When the Son of Man cometh shall He find faith on the earth?”
63 Banzhaf: https://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/before-virtue-its-just-story-murdoch.html
64 Tozer: The Pursuit of God, p.106.
65 Van De Walle: Jesus IS the Gospel, p. 10
66 Reynolds: p.275. http://abuss.narod.ru/Biblio/eng/reynolds.htm See Nash: The Meaning of History <Ronald Nash critiques Herder's relativism and conflates the ethical types of relativism with cultural types that are legitimate. Herder’s ethical relativism did provide a base for later social science empirical evidence of cultural difference which shows gospel ubiquity through special revelation identified as God’s sovereignty in sending gospel witness and revival, notwithstanding the human dimension as God works through secondary causes and human freedom which is behind Simpson’s interpretation or Matthew 24:14 Needless to say, Herder provided an important nuance of the relativism of culture.>
67 Jones: A.B., The Unlikely Founder of a Global Movement, p. 251, In David Jones’ annotated bibliography A.B. Simpson’s compilation of Michele Nardi biography is presented
68 Mandujuano: Timeless, “The legacy of the Church in Peru would be incomplete without mention of the work in Lima. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a small group of believers began to gather in the house of a missionary. Soon, this faithful group formed what is known today as the Lince (a district in Lima) Alliance Church. It experienced significant growth toward the end of 1973, when a 15-month evangelistic campaign began. By the end of 1975, attendance had climbed to more than 1,000. Today the Lince Alliance Church has a membership of 5,000, and its members have helped to plant many other churches throughout Lima. There are now nearly 70 Alliance congregations in this ongoing church growth effort. In 1955 the Alliance in Peru celebrated its first Concilio, with 979 attendees representing 44 fellowships. Today The Christian and Missionary Alliance in Peru is a mature church with nearly 300 fellowships and an inclusive membership of more than 120,000.” https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaByP00LagLwtV_gGQ
69 Simpson: Missionary Messages, p. 5: “ But it is a crisis as well as a call. The open doors may suddenly close. The awakened mind of the East calling for bread may be cheated with a serpent and a stone. Western culture is not usually Christian, and if we do not give them Christ, they will soon be found accepting our agnosticism, higher criticism, and cold materialism. The students of Argentine today have almost universally repudiated Romanism which they have tried and found wanting. But they have not accepted Christ.” <reading between the lines, Simpson focuses on particular nations as a call to prayer. A century later it is amazing to see the results in Latin America.>
70 Thank you Pastor Gregg Carrick of Grace Church in Middleburg Heights, Ohio USA for this estimate as Gregg has developed a curriculum for outreach to Roman Catholics used actively in their ministry. https://gracecma.org/staff/
71 The Reformanda Initiative: http://evangelicalfocus.com/europe/4550/In_Rome_evangelical_leaders_reflected_on_Roman_Catholicism
72 Catholic clergy are trained in ecumenical sensitivities, so the Act 1:8 witnesses apply. However, lay students and evangelical ‘Tiber crossers’ provide a much more polemical engagement.
73 Glass: Mysticism in Simpson, In chapter 3 Glass states: “Simpson believed that many holiness leaders were becoming more enthralled with holy living than with knowing Christ” <An Eckhartian monastic critique documented in his earliest discussions to his brothers, Talks of Instruction. > Glass quotes Simpson from “The Epistles to the Galatians and Ephesians, 86. Simpson’s words here reflected from a mystical perspective what seems quite similar to Egan’s definition of mysticism in An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, xxiii, as quoted above: ‘Mysticism in the strict sense involves an experience of God that is somehow direct, immediate, intuitive, and beyond the normal workings of the senses and intellect. The mystic is absolutely certain of God’s presence and speaks about a particular type of spiritual sensation.’” <Augustine’s influence as Glass rightly documents with the doctrine of Union with Christ and the Patristic tradition presents a certain epistemology that the Protestant tradition recovered over the RCC’s empiricism that focuses on the medieval intellect. To use the modern terms rationalism over empiricism demands the awareness of Augustine’s Platonic appropriations over Aristotle in terms of ideas in the mind of God and innate knowledge which humans are born with, cognitive equipment. The central epistemological debate in the high scholastic era between the Franciscans and Dominicans concerned the intellect and the will. Eckhart within the German Dominicans significantly differs from Thomas and provided the ultimate synthesis as an intellectus (mind) based approach providing mysticism its rational dimension missing from Glass's work on Simpson.>
74 Aersten: Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought, here p. 681: “Meister Eckhart offers a kind of a synthesis between ontology and henology. For him ‘one’ is a transcendental property of being, but at the same time a notion that adopts some features of the henological one (see ch. 8.2.3). ‘One is what is first determinated’ (primum determinatum). Because it adds a negation to ‘being.’ Eckhart interprets this negation as the negation of negation, of which the result is that ‘one’ signifies an affirmation and something positive, namely the ‘purity’ and ‘fullness’ of being. Since the ‘one’ is determined in this sense, the one (and not being, which is completely indeterminate) is ‘the first that is productive’ (primum productive), the first principle of every emanation. Unum has more prominent place in Eckhart than in earlier accounts of the transcendentals due to its primordiality”.
75 Senner: Meister Eckhart’s life, p.33-6: “Based on three documents and on a few references in ‘Schwesternbücher’ (legends of sisters), it has become an opinio communis that Meister Eckhart would have been vicar of the master of the Dominican order with a special task of pastoral care for sisters and Beguines from ca. 1314 to 1322. […]. Some of Eckhart’s sermons can be considered as recognizing the existence of the “sect of the free spirit.” However, the speculation is not justified to see in him an inquisitor who persecuted such people. For this, he would have needed a commission given not by the Dominican master general, but by the local bishop.
Harrington: Dangerous Mystic, p.299: “Over the course of the fourteenth century, the movement is later known as Rhineland mysticism gradually gave way to a new form of lay apostolic piety known as the Modern Devotion. Like the beguines, small groups of laypeople, together with some clerics, established houses that cultivated a deeper spiritual life, through communal prayer and Bible reading. Also known as Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, these intentional communities along the Rhine represented a powerful merger of the active and contemplative ideals. Many of the Modern Devotion’s insights and practices were conveyed in the most popular book of the later Middle Ages —, published anonymously in the early fifteenth century. The mysticism of the movement, however, had been thoroughly domesticated and purged of any controversial Eckhartian ideas, further contributing to the master’s eventual disappearance as a spiritual authority.”
76 Snyder: p.231-2. Eckhart’s Talks of Instruction and Augustine’s Confessions <mentioned as read by A.W. Tozer in his bio..>
77 Caputo: Heidegger and Aquinas, pp. 274-5: “Heidegger does not have a merely causal relationship to Meister Eckhart, neither does Meister Eckhart have a merely passing relationship to St. Thomas. Eckhart’s work consists in no small part in driving the Thomistic theses (which he was committed to defend by reason of the professorial post which he held) to their mystical extreme, radicalizing them, pressing them so tightly as to make them yield their mystical sense.”
Eckhart: LW V: p.597, 2–17;
Pope John Paul II, himself a philosopher, spoke approvingly of Eckhart’s central teachings. However, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was more cautious, warning of the “danger . . . of syncretism.”
John Paul II’s remarks and Cardinal Ratzinger’s can be found respectively at:
http://www.eckhartsociety.org/eckhart/eckhart-man
http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/cdfmed.htm
78 Oberman: The Harvest of Medieval Theology, pp. 335-40.
79 Flasch: Meister Eckhart, Philosopher of Christianity, <This robust philosopher emphasis by Flasch is contested by current historical-critical scholars of Eckhart such as Walter Senner. Senner who is a meticulous medieval historian, demonstrates a fair-minded German Dominican brother toward Eckhart, believing the condemnation of Eckhart as unjustified by political alignments and that the use of philosophy was part of any rational argument. Concerning the metaphysical question, this is certainly presupposed. It is clear that Eckhart worked as a theologian who was peculiar within the scholastic context. Medieval philosophy is as characteristically theological as natural theology. With the possible exceptions of Islamic thinkers such as Avicenna and Averroes and the faculty of arts at the University of Paris subject to the 1277 condemnations, most medieval thinkers did not consider themselves philosophers at all: for them, the philosophers were the ancient pagan writers such as Plato and Aristotle. The 1277 condemnations provide the trajectory for Eckhart’s thought to a lesser extent according to Flasch but strongly with French medieval historian Alain de Libera upon the evolution of intellectus. Still, the theological method used logical techniques of the ancient philosophers to address difficult points of doctrine. Eckhart’s use was much more pronounced by his diversity of autorotate not uncommon in the day. This highlights an important aspect of historical theology, often insufficiently addressed from the vista of modernity. Flasch proposes a choice between ‘mystic’ and ‘scholastic,’ where he stresses the spirit of the University of Paris profoundly shaped Eckhart, this is an important observation. It could be argued that Eckhart was an early prototype of a Philosopher of Religion focused on the embryonic scientific stage of an era in its understanding of cosmology and he tried to reconcile this toward his university context apologetically because of the Aristotelian revolution. Albert the Great and Eckhart’s direct mentor, Dietrich of Freiberg (who was notably anti-Thomas), are sources for this. Without stretching Eckhart yet onto another interpretation, this continues a strong research direction.>
80 Banzhaf: Meister Eckhart’s Parisian Quaestio IX p. 71. https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaBXZQX80napZTWvNA
81 Boersma: p. 121-131.
82 Banzhaf: https://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/the-life-imperfect-blessed-consists-in.html
83 Eckhart: Prologus in opus propositionum, n° 4, in: LW I, pp. 167.9 – 168.5, n° 9, in: LW I, pp. 170.14 – 171.5.
84 Flasch: pp. 245-6.
85 Van De Walle: "How High of a Christian Life?" Comparisons with Eastern Orthodoxy and Eckhart abound.
86 Banzhaf: Could God Create A Better World?: p. 11-14: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaBW40H5-sNWElx0CA
87 Our hearts are restless until we find ourselves in you Oh Lord!
88 Sturlese Opus Tripartitum, pp.129-131. “Without directly implicating Thomas, it is clear the Meister’s target was his Dominican frater’s moral theology, […] Eckhart in this regard brought forward a comprehensive original contribution by 1303, which had at its center a new metaphysical theology (Deus est intelligere), an emerging anthropology (intelligere est incredible), and a radical approach to ethics (the humility of the homo divinus).”
89 Connally: Living without the Why, <see also Connally’s presentation on Eckhart’s view of human sin found here, also a good summary of Eckhart just from the Q&A> CSI Garden of Eden: Meister Eckhart on the ‘Primal Crime’: See- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aaNodnSBKI
90 Eckhart: n° 1, in: LW I, p. 166.1-3; n° 19‒22, in: LW I, pp.177‒179.9-3:
91 Tozer: The Pursuit of God, p.34.
92 Snyder: p.159.
93 Master Eckhart: Parisian questions and prologues, Transl. Armand Maurer: Maurer in his introduction, states, here p. 13: “Eckhart defends the position that in God existence and knowing are identical in reality and perhaps in our thought about them (ratione). […] Verbally at least this contradicts < Thomas De Aquino >, who wrote in his Summa: ‘In God to be and to know are one and the same thing, differing only in our manner of understanding them (secundum intelligentiae rationem). see Eckhart: Quaestiones Parisienses, Quaestio I, n° 1‒12, in: LW V, pp. 37‒48.
94 Paladino: Esse alterius ad alterum et alteri: La dottrina della relazione di Meister Eckhart, Paladino is using modern philosophical categories with the subject and object. Eckhart’s relation does not mean from the modern subject, God is totally ‘subject, realtion works from the Godhead (the hidden) and into the revealed (Deus trinus). Eckhart’s scholastic vocabulary is important to follow here in terms such as form and matter, substance and accident which he extrapolated to the Godhead over the revealed triune God of scripture.
95 Hackett and Hart Weed: p. 228:
96 Banzhaf: Meister Eckhart’s Parisian Quaestio IX p. 71
97 Tozer: Faith Beyond Reason, pp.129-135: <Tozer in the chapter titled “The Spiritual or Secular Tight Rope” favors Mary in the midst of a message from John 6 and the Feeding of the 5000.>
98 Knauf:https://lifeisthismoment.com/2016/05/21/being-at-home-in-two-worlds-meister-eckhart-on-mary-and-martha-and-the-integration-of-the-active-and-contemplative-life/“The interplay of opposites in Eckhart’s thought manifests as a dialectical method within the ancient logical tradition and altogether different from the Hegelian model, although G.W.F Hegel certainly learned from Eckhart’s sermons.”
99 Eckhart: DW I, Sermon 2, pp. 21‒45; DW III, Sermon 86, pp. 472‒503. — see Vinzent: pp. 204‒205:
100 <Simpson and Tozer’s Augustinian Epistemology: The older Alliance sensibilities appropriated a discerning imaginative style that highlights a peculiar Augustinian epistemological stream. This stream disseminated in Quaker-quietist and Wesleyan-holiness traditions, notwithstanding successive expression in Pentecostal streams. Moreover, this Augustinian lineage has a particular Calvinist trajectory through Common Sense Realism (CSR) from the 18th-century philosopher Thomas Reid whom Immanuel Kant disregarded. CSR was the epistemology taught at Knox College, Simpson’s alma mater. According to the info provided by Methodist theologian Dale Coulter:, I propose Simpson’s mystical Augustinian epistemological approach could very well resemble as articulated in the work of Ronald H. Nash, a unique semi-Reformed type of apology initiated within the discipline of analytic philosophy like Alvin Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology following an inductive method. “Nash located himself in a Platonic-Augustinian stream of rationalism, which was the very stream that provided the background to Christian mysticism. His desire to carve out a space between neo-orthodoxy and experientialists like Schleiermacher blinded him to the shared Augustinian framework with Holiness Pentecostals.” <This is generally true, but Nash, my former and esteemed curmudgeon professor, would certainly not like to be found in the same sentence with the aforementioned German theologians unless he is arguing against them. https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/06/evangelical-presuppositionalism
The point here is that Nash’s doctoral thesis: The Light of the Mind. St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge, sources elements traced in Simpson and Tozer. Nash claims that with Augustine, the mind or the intellect provides truth to perception. It does not abstract reality from ‘perception’ as Thomas Aquinas Aristotelian method which influenced the eventual Dominican position of the empirical method over the Franciscan Augustinian informing the epistemology of the Reformers. This is one side of the mystical coin of Simpson and Tozer that was provided by Scripture’s revelation. Yet it becomes more evident for Tozer and Simpson that a ‘faith and reason’ bifurcation was impossible. Needless to say, the Alliance patriarchs never came close to such articulation and conceptual formulation. This remains a strong research direction.
Glass: <Clyde Glass has aptly explained the affective, emotive experiential side of Simpson’s understanding of the doctrine of our Union with Christ, one side of the Augustinian epistemological coin. The other is the pre-modern rationalism documented by Nash. Common Sense Realism philosophy provided this connection and a method, notwithstanding Immanuel Kant's belittling of it, that took a subordinate place in Simpson’s belief ‘faith and reason’ merism, yet was engaged throughout Simpson's work.> Glass states in Ch 1. “Although Simpson did not engage in extended philosophical presentations or hold to this philosophy with the passion of the Princetonians, his own philosophical perspectives were closest to Common Sense Realism. […] Although Simpson was discouraged from following the teachings of German philosophy at Knox, under Caven’s guidance he was encouraged to be open to other new elements in theology. Caven believed that “theology should be a progressive science.” By this, he did not mean that the creedal truths of the faith would be changed, but that new truth would be discovered through more enlightened study and experience of Scripture. Caven expressed, ‘Theology is the same now that it has been in every age of the Christian era, so far as its great truths are concerned, but continually changing by the growth of new truths, which in increasing knowledge of the Bible has furnished.’ Under Caven’s presentations of a developing theology, therefore, Simpson was prompted towards new understandings and experiences of biblical truth. […] Scottish philosophy argued that each person had a ‘moral sense’ comparable in many ways to the physical senses. <so did Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant> These senses provided a ‘common sense for each person, a sense shared among humanity. The average person, according to this philosophy, was able to grasp the real world through the responsible use of this sensory information. Metaphysics was rejected as too speculative, while the empirical principles of scientific investigation were applied to all disciplines. Those who held to Common Sense perspectives viewed the Bible ultimately as a book of facts that could be objectively ordered, and the gospel as fundamentally propositional. Induction, logic, and reason were, therefore, primary tools in determining the teaching of Scripture. The existence of God and reliability of revelation could both be shown through the use of empirical study, reason, and common sense.’ <Glass has highlighted the moderate empiricism of the modern scientific age, yet an Augustinian epistemology would provide ‘innate ideas’ to ones’ vocabulary as shown in the following quote from Simpson.>
Simpson: Old Faith, p. 60 <states the following about theological modernism and its rejection of the authority of the Bible> “ ‘Never mind what the Bible says if you are in search for truth, but trust the voice of God within you,’ This teaching of the New Theology is the apostolic succession of Higher Criticism. Its first effort is to get rid of the authority of the Bible. Understand, there is no objection to the Bible of manifold literature from which we can gather whatever light and comfort we choose to accept. But remember it has no authority for our conscience or our conduct. It is wholly subordinate to our own reason and innate ideas.” <Here the term ‘innate ideas’ is key in understanding Simpson’s Augustinian epistemology, even though he applies it to the higher critic.>.
101 In England: https://www.eckhartsociety.org/ In Germany: http://www.meister-eckhart-gesellschaft.de/ Eckhart is the most inclusive theologian and mystic for religious and atheist alike, his thought crosses boundaries like no other and is articulated in popular spirituality expressions.
102 Banzhaf: https://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/introduction-charles-taylor-is-canadian.html
103 Farrell: How Theology Shaped 20th Century Philosophy.
104 Hart: (Kindle Locations 3472-3489)
105 Smith: Conversion and Sanctification in the Christian & Missionary Alliance, 1992: “The Christian & Missionary Alliance is often viewed as having two distinctives: the deeper life and missions. But it is more accurate to affirm that the C&MA is radically Christ-centred, and the denomination is a tradition that understands Christ as one who by His Spirit enables us to know His life and empowers us to be His servants.”<Smith’s work on Christ our Savior and Christ our Sanctifier in the Alliance has been expanded in his IVP book Beginning Well and is well worth the read.>
106 Van De Walle: Saving the Gospel, p. 6.
107 Van De Walle: Fourfold Gospel, A.T Pierson’s threefold office of Christ, p. 170.
108 The Church replaces Israel, where Israel is only understood as spiritual.
109 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/fr/2014/10/91-ecumenism-in-all-directions-pope-francis-and-the-unity-of-the-church/
110 Pritchard:http://evangelicalfocus.com/blogs/198/A_Global_Vision_of_the_Gospel_Part_1_of_4_The_Power_of_a_BirdsEye_View
111 Banzhaf: https://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/the-globalization-of-christian-nation.html
Bibliographie
Primary Sources
Eckhart (Meister): Die lateinischen Werke, Ernst Benz, Karl Christ, Bruno Decker, Heribert Fisher, Bernhard Geyer, Joseph Koch, Ernst Seeberg, Loris Sturlese, Konrad Weiß, and Albert Zimmermann, vols I–V, Stuttgart,1936–2012 (=LW).
_____: Band I, 1: (I) Prologi in Opus Tripartitum, Expositio Libri Genesis et libri Exodi secundum recensionem Cod. Amplon. Fol. 181 [E]. (II) Prologi in Opus Tripartitum et Expositio Libri Genesis secundum Codd. Cusani 21 et Treverensis 72/1056 [CT] (III) Liber Parabolarum Genesis, ed. Konrad Weiß 1936–1964; reprint, 1968.
_____: Band I, 2: (I) Prologi in Opus Tripartitum, Expositio Libri Genesis secundum recensionem Cod. Oxoniensis Bodleiani Laud misc. 222 [L], 1987–2007. (II) Liber Parabolarum Genesis, editio altera ed. Loris Sturlese; (III) Quaestiones Parisienses: Supplementum, Fasc. 6–9, 2012.
_____: Band II: (I) Expositio Libri Exodi, (II) eds. Albert Zimmermann & Loris Sturlese; Sermones et Lectiones super Ecclesiastici cap. 24, (III), Expositio Libri Sapientiae, (IV) Expositio Cant. 1, 6, eds. Heribert Fisher, Joseph Koch & Konrad Weiß, 1992.
_____: Band III: Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem. eds. Karl Christ & Joseph Koch, 1936
_____: Band IV: Magistri Echardi Sermones, eds. Ernst Benz, Bruno Decker, Joseph Koch 1987.
_____: Band V: (I) Collatio in Libros Sententiarum, ed. Josef Quint (II) Quaestiones Parisienses, (III) Sermo die b. Augustini Parisius habitus, (IV) Tractatus super Oratione Dominica, (V) Sermo Paschalis a. 1294, Parisius habita, (VI) Acta et regesta vitam magistri Echardi illustranda, (VII) Processus contra magistrum Echardum, (VIII) Mag. Echardi Responsio ad articulos sibi impositos de scriptis et dictis suis, ed. Loris Sturlese, 1963–2000.
_____: Die deutschen Werke, edited by Josef Quint and Georg Steer, vols I–V, Stuttgart, 1936–2007 (=DW).
_____: Parisian questions and prologues, transl. Armand Maurer, Toronto, 1974.
_____: The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, transl., Maurice, O’ C., Walsche, New York, 2009.
_____: Meister Eckhart Essential Sermons, Treatises, and Defense, transl. Edmund Colledge, ed. Bernard McGinn, Mahwah, (The Classics of Western Spirituality), 1981.
_____: Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, transl. Edmund Colledge, ed. Bernard McGinn, Mahwah, (The Classics of Western Spirituality), 1986.
Fitch, David E.: The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and other Modern Maladies, Grand Rapids, 2005
_____: The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission, Towards an Evangelical Political Theology, Eugene, 2011.
_____: Faithful Presence: Seven Disciplines preparing the Church for Mission, Downers Grove, 2016.
_____: The Church of Us vs. Them: Freedom from Faith That Feeds on Making Enemies, Grand Rapids, 2019.
Simpson, Albert B.: The Old Faith and the New Gospels: Special Addresses on Christianity and Modern Thought, New York, 1911.
_____: The Coming One, New York, 1912.
Smith, Gordon T.: Beginning Well: Christian conversion & authentic transformation, Downers Grove, 2001.
_____: Evangelical, Sacramental and Pentecostal: Why the Church should be all Three, Downers Grove, 2017.
_____: Called to Be Saints: An Invitation To Christian Maturity, Downers Grove, 2014.
_____: Transforming Conversion: Rethinking the Language and Contours of Christian Initiation, Grand Rapids, 2010.
_____: A Holy Meal: The Lord’s Supper in the Life of the Church, Grand Rapids, 2005.
Edited by Smith, Gordon T.: The Lord’s Super: Five Views, Downers Grove, 2005.
_____: Conversion and Sanctification in the Christian & Missionary Alliance, paper, 1992
_____: http://www.gordontsmith.com/video-archive/
_____: https://ecumenism.net/2015/05/gordon-smith-what-can-evangelicals-learn-from-catholics.htm
Tozer, A.W.: The Pursuit of God, Abbottsford, WI, (1948) republished 2019
_____: Faith Beyond Reason: Exploring the Realm Where Things As Possible Only With God, Camp Hill, 1997.
Secondary Sources
Aersten, Jan: Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought: From Philip the Chancellor (CA. 1225) to Francisco Suarez, Leiden (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 107). 2012.
________: Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas, Leiden (Studien Und Texte Zur Geistesgeschichte Des Mittelalters, 52) 1996.
Allison, Gregg R.: Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment, Wheaton, 2014.
Banzhaf, Martin L.: The Globalization of the Christian Nation, Global Shift and Collective Individualism: The Christian Self in the Global Age, 2009.
________: Before Bliss: St. Thomas’ Imperfect Happiness, Global Shift and Collective Individualism: The Christian Self in the Global Age, 2012.
________: Before Virtue: it’s just a story - Murdoch, Hauerwas and Macintyre, Global Shift and Collective Individualism: The Christian Self in the Global Age, 2013.
________: A Shifting Secular Self: Charles Taylor and Language, Global Shift and Collective Individualism: The Christian Self in the Global Age, 2014.
________: Meister Eckhart: Could God Create a Better World? Pontifical University of St. Thomas Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Urbe, Roma, a paper in honor of Rev. Prof. Dr. phil. Walter Senner OP, 2017.
________: Meister Eckhart’s Parisian Quaestio IX: Is rational difference prior to real difference? Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Urbe, Roma, Thesis Moderated by Rev. Prof. Dr. phil. Walter Senner OP, 2017.
________: Out Of The ‘So-called’ Dark Ages: The Participative Metaphysics Behind Nature And Grace. Paper for the Rome Leaders and Scholars Network of the Reformanda Inititive, 2018.
Boersma, Hans: Nouvelle Théologie & Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery, Oxford, 2010.
________: Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacred Tapestry, Kindle edition. 2011.
Burckhardt, Jakob: Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy) (English translation, by S. G. C. Middlemore, in 2 vols., London, 1878.
Caputo, John D.: Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay in Overcoming Metaphysics, New York, 1982.
Chon, Joseph Joon-Hong: Albert B. Simpson’s Theology of Evangelism, (The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary PhD Dissertation), 2003
Connolly, John M.: Living Without Why: Meister Eckhart’s Critique of the Medieval Concept of Will, Oxford, 2014.
Coulter: Dale M.: Ronald H. Nash’s Evangelicalism, First Things, 2014.
De Chirico, Leonardo: Evangelical Theological Perspectives on Post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, Bern, 2003.
_____: The Blurring of Time distinctions in Roman Catholicism, Themelios, 29/2
_____: The Vatican Files, http://vaticanfiles.org/?lang=en, blog 1999-2019
Fabro, Cornelius: “The Transcendentality of Ens -Esse and the Ground of Metaphysics.” International Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1966): pp. 389-427.
Farrell, Frank B.: How Theology Shaped 20th Century Philosophy, Cambridge, 2019.
Flasch, Kurt: Meister Eckhart, Philosopher of Christianity, (Translators: Anne Schindel and Aaron Vanides), New Haven 2015.
Glass, Clyde McLean, Mysticism and contemplation in the life and teaching of Albert Benjamin Simpson, (Marquette University Doctoral Dissertation) 1997.
Gillespie, Michael A.: The Theological Origins of Modernity, Chicago, 2008.
Hackett, Jeremiah and Hart Weed, Jennifer: From Aquinas to Eckhart on Creation, Creature, and Analogy in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah Hackett, Leiden 2013 (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 500–1800, 36).
Hankey, Wayne: Aquinas at the Origins of Secular Humanism? Sources and Innovation in Summa theologiae I, Question 1, Article 1, Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2007): pp. 17–40
Harrington, Joel F.: Dangerous Mystic: Meister Eckhart’s Path to the God Within, New York, 2018.
Hart, David Bentley: The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, Grand Rapids, 2003
Jones, David P.: A.B.: The Unlikely Founder of a Global Movement, Colorado Springs, 2019.
Kerr, Fergus: “A Different World: Neoscholasticism and its Discontents”, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 8/2, pp 128-148.
Kilcrease, Jack: Lutheran Theology and the Metaphysical question, Theologia Crucis blog, 2014.
Knauf, Christopher M.: Being at Home in Two Worlds: Meister Eckhart on Mary and Martha and the Integration of the Active and Contemplative Life, Life in This Moment Blog, 2016.
Mandujuano, Israel: Timeless: The C&MA Church of Peru, Alliance Life, 2008
Maher, Anthony: The Theology of Witness: A Critical Exposition of George Tyrrell’s Pastoral Theology (In carceribus denuo adsumus), Thesis, Australian Catholic University, 2011.
Martos, Joseph: Deconstructing Sacramental Theology and Reconstructing Catholic Ritual, Eugene, 2015.
Milbank, John: Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Malden, 2nd ed, 2006.
______: Beyond Secular Order, Malden, 2013
______: Reformation 500: Any Cause for Celebration? Open Theology 2018; 4: pp.607–629.
Moran, Dermot: Meister Eckhart in 20th-century Philosophy, in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah Hackett, Leiden 2013, (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 500 –1800, 36), pp. 669‒698.
Nash, Ronald H.: The Meaning of History, Nashville, 1998.
______: The Word of God and The Mind of Man, Grand Rapids, 1982.
______: The Light of the Mind, St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge, Lexington, 1969.
Oberman, Heiko: The Harvest of Medieval Theology, Grand Rapids, 3rd edition, 1983.
Otten, Willemien: ‘Review of The Suspended Middle. Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural,’ Ars Disputandi 8 (2008), 124–125.
Paladini, Chiara: Esse alterius ad alterum et alteri: La dottrina della relazione di Meister Eckhart, Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie, 63, 2016, pp. 458‒482.
Payton, James R.: Getting the Reformation Wrong, Downers Grove, 2010.
Pritchard, Greg & De Chirico, Leonardo: What do you think of Pope Francis?, Evangelical Focus, 2015.
______: A Global Vision of the Gospel: The Power of a Bird’s-Eye View (I), Evangelical Focus, 2015.
Pyles, Franklin A.: The Missionary Eschatology of A.B. Simpson, From Birth of a Vision, ed by David F. Hartzfeld Charles Neinkirchen (His Dominion Supplement No. 1), pp. 29-47.
Reynolds, Andrew: “What is Historicism?” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science; Oct 99, Vol. 13 Issue 3, pp. 275-287.
Sawin, J.S.: An Introduction to the Writings of Albert Benjamin Simpson, 1983.
Schürmann, Reiner: Broken Hegemonies, transl. Reginald Lilly, Bloomington, 2003.
Senner, Walter: Meister Eckhart’s life, training, career, and trial, in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah Hackett, Leiden 2013, (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 50–1800, 36), pp. 7–84.
Smith, David, J,: Albert Benjamin Simpson: An Integrated Spirituality with Christ as the Centre, AWF Resources, 1998.
Snyder, James L.: In Pursuit of God, Camp Hill, PA, 1991.
Sturlese, Loris: Homo divinus. Philosophische Projekte in Deutschland zwischen Meister Eckhart und Heinrich Seuse, Stuttgart, 2007.
_____: The origins of the Opus Tripartitum in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah Hackett, Leiden 2013, (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 500–1800, 36)
Taylor, Charles: A Secular Age, Cambridge, 2007.
Van De Walle, Bernie A.: The Heart of the Gospel: A. B. Simpson, the Fourfold Gospel, and Late Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Theology (Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 106), Eugene, 2009.
_____: “How High of a Christian Life? A. B. Simpson and the Classic Doctrine of Theosis.” Wesleyan Theological Journal 43.2 (Fall 2008) 136–53.
_____: Jesus IS the Gospel, Part 1 Lecture given at regional AWF Symposiums in 2018-19.
_____: Saving the Gospel, Part 2 Lecture given at regional AWF Symposiums in 2018-19.
Vinzent, Markus: The Art of Detachment, Leuven 2011.
Wax, Trevin: 3 Definitions of “Secular” and Why They Matter for Our Mission, Gospel Coalition, 2014.
Wells, David F.: The Prophetic Theology of George Tyrrell, (America Academy of Religion, Studies in Religion 22), 1981.
Before Jackob Burckhardt’s Dark Ages and Renaissance, 18th-century thinkers Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried Herder called out human progress. Their critique of historicism arose in opposition to the early modern era with its universal application of reason. Moreover, Vico and Herder’s cultural relativism emphasized the unique and particular over the universal and the unpredictable over the predictable.66 In awaiting His imminent return, we are called to worship, watch, and comfort one another while doing the Lord’s work. The incarnation is the fulcrum of linear history and its high point. Therefore, utilizing the secular event historicism must emphasize Jesus Christ, the particular and the Holy Spirit’s work as a predictable – unpredictable in and through the metaphorical body of Christ. The universal is a philosophical language that promotes a particular theology built from the ‘sacred’ Great Tradition, missing the unpredictable and amazing grace of the sacred One’s gospel and stands as a stanger ‘outside the door’ of contemporary theology.
Eschatology and ecclesiology are merely systematic constructions making sense of the apocalyptic Judaism of the biblical text, accentuated by today’s studies on second temple Judaism that uncover the Hillite Pharisaism of Jesus of Nazareth sent to the world through Paul and his alignment with Gamaliel over Shammuti zealotry. Lest we lose ourselves in contextualization, which functions exegetically to witness for the gospel to all nations, not ethnocentrism and ecclesiatical ends. Contextualization contains no formulaic method like the theological syncretism of Rome. Today such synthesizing continues updating itself with language like the secular and sacred under its ecclesial authority rather than through direct mediation of Christ and His gospel. Simpson and Tozer’s method deduces from a systemic awareness toward their atomistic appropriations in discerning the apocalyptic gospel as Christ received and His final coming. The Holy Spirit, for the believer of whatever confession follows the event and presents us with the legitimate historicism of belief inextricably bound together as faith and reason. Applying through Smith and Fitch’s work as well, exemplary, even for a denomination filled with contextualizing missionaries and enriched with global perspectives, ultimately depending on individuals, and their participation in Christ’s Holy Spirit for the sake of the body, because of each person’s union with Him.
History
In just over a century, the C&MA has taken root in many nominal and practicing Roman Catholic contexts. We think of Latin America, The Middle East, Francophone South-East Asia & Africa, and the Philippines but also North America. One of A.B. Simpson’s early disciples was the Italian American Evangelist Michele Nardi. Who preached and passed into glory back in his homeland before Simpson compiled Nardi’s story, demonstrating how the founder admired the immigrants present from the onset of the Alliance movement.67
Gloria Torres participated in the amazing numerical growth of the Lince, Peruvian Alliance church. As a youth, she was part of a small congregation, before the Holy Spirit uniquely moved.68 Established by North American missionaries, yet an Argentine pastor Alfredo Smith emerged as the catalyst for the movement named Lima al Encuentro Con Dios (LED).69 However, LED could not replicate such exact church plants in surrounding countries through the same approach nor with the same pastor/leader. Holy Spirit movments are unique and particular. Out of that movement, Gloria responded to the call and received further training at the Alliance Bible Institute in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1976. Where Gordon Smith’s parents were her teachers. Marty from Cleveland, Ohio, highlights the amazing numerical growth of Grace Church, where a quarter to a third of the members come from a nominal Catholic background.70 Gloria and Marty married in 1988, after meeting on board a ship, belonging to a para-church organization called Operation Mobilization founded by George Verwer, who sought to replicate Simpson’s movement for missions and Tozer’s prophetic call to a deeper life.
In 2010, Gloria and Marty were asked by the Peruvian Alliance to assume a church planting project that began in Rome and Milan. While working with Latin Americans, Italians, and refugees and passing the church on in 2018, during those seven years, Marty studied philosophy in two different Pontifical Universities with the privilege to directly work with a Dominican monk named Walter Senner, an expert on Meister Eckhart. From 2016 on, Marty participated in the Reformanda Initiative, processing the privilege of studying in Rome,71 where, as a couple, they moved into different worlds and developed close friendships with RCC clergy from all over the globe. Also meeting former evangelicals who crossed the Tiber and had opportunities to witness and dialogs with clergy and polemics with lay students and former evangelicals.72 Now they continue serving in Milan among all diaspor peoples and Italians. Putting intellectual assessments aside, while in Rome, Gloria and Marty’s church members, who had come out of the RCC, modeled how the C&MA has impacted the RCC, not through theological polemics, but by their transformed lives amid their struggles as immigrants in admirable simplicity. There were no systemic and atomistic theological analyses nor 'cherry-picking' appropriations of Catholic practice, they were integrating the real person, Jesus Christ, and how Scripture and the Holy Spirit taught them about Him.
His Presence
The medieval theologian preacher Meister Eckhart channels the practical Catholic and Protestant Puritan mystical authors that A.B. Simpson and A.W. Tozer read.73 Eckhart formulated a unity theology, exclusively pinning God’s presence in the now and such ‘divine immediacy’ presents a ‘ripe cherry’ in description by philosophy, traced by the Puritians and holiness movements through our union with Christ.74 Copied into the vernacular through sermons that fueled so-called mystical movements up and down the Rhine river before the Reformation, Eckhart was on to something, but let caution prevail.75 A quote traces Eckhart’s thought to Simpson by the Pietist Gerhard Tersteegen who wrote of abandonment, a term out of Eckhart’s monastic life he coined in German explained to his audiences.76
So what is wrong with the appeal of Eckhart? Such a question demands a deeper dive into an unfamilar era. Let us begin… Johannes Eckhart von Hochheim, Magister Theologiae, with two Parisian university appointments like his brother Thomas Aquinas a couple generations earlier brought the medieval metaphysical symmetry of nature and grace and Romanism’s ecclesiastical opportunity to its philosophical conclusion through the full force of scholastic vocabulary. Thomas’ teachings stand, by his canonization in 1323, whereas, Eckhart’s ideas fell condemned by a Papal Bull in 1329, both ex-cathedra from the same John XXII.77 The so-called mystical Eckhart serves as an indirect forerunner of the Reformation through the extension of his ideas by his Dominican disciples, as found in an influential book called Theologica Germanica re-published by Martin Luther.78 However, Eckhart’s commentaries on scripture and specific works discovered over the last 150 years in Latin reveal something much more logical.79 Walter Senner OP repeatedly stated to me as his student: “Eckhart could have been cleared in his trial if he merely held to Dionysian participation.”80 Astounding, if we are to think of Eckhart exclusively as a mystic in the traditional apophatic (negative theological) tradition which provides a major attraction for the sacramental in Hans Boersma’s argument.81
A German reformer? Nein! But his thought significantly helped destabilize medieval Christendom, proving guilty as among various culprits of modernity. The Meister’s metaphysical prescription is human nothingness in God — the univocal intellectus through a relation as accident between a transcendental justice as substance in informing the immanent ‘just man’ in becoming. Eckhart examines homo iustus as a concrete entity but nothing in himself as this individual. As being just, this individual has no value, no sense, and is nothing. Derived from an ontic relation with an abstract substance as transcendent justice and then only is the just man justice itself. God’s incarnation signifies not only a moral example but a metaphysical necessity. Eckhart’s theory of transcendentals did not fashion esse-being as the symmetrical centerpiece in developing nature perfected by grace like Thomas said.82
Such immediatism with selected transcendentals of being, oneness, truth, goodness, wisdom, and beauty does not pertain to other ens-entities in creation.83 Eckhart preached the divine first instance of the incarnation, based out of eternity, providing the just man as God’s son, with the privileges of the only begotten Son. Divinization or theosis, now!84 Justification? Sanctification? Union with Christ? — not biblically but perhaps as a metaphysical revival preacher, yet with little preaching of the Cross of Christ which was of course present continually through the Eucharist.
Indisputable about being, nature, and grace, scholastic terms he idiosyncratically shaped in explaining the gospel. Eckhart’s principium, rendered beginning, as in Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1; redefining the term as a principle, rather than restating linear time and space.86 His sermons and commentaries often quote Augustine’s Confessions: inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.87
Aristotelian motion needing a fixed point, here Eckhart affirms a terminus ad quem. And for this idealized revival preacher, he spoke about God and his spark in the soul as in potentiality, but did not preach the cross, perhaps because of the spectator eucharist?
The Meister was the ultimate propositional ‘theo-centrist,’ no better world existed than the result of preaching divine immediacy and its reception. The cosmos ‘is what it is’ because ‘God is in it’ by ‘who He is’ as the Almighty. Eckhart commented on scripture through the metaphysical discussions of his era, illustrated with allegory and subtle re-interpretations of authorities before him, sourcing his famous sermons. He articulated no moral philosophy like Thomas. Human actions within a theocentric unified system combined with virtue, exhibiting no Christology nor explicating sin nature. Therefore, Eckhart’s anthropology was also at the center of the censure of 1329.88 An indictment not only of the Dominican’s eternal Aristotelian framework but the ethical implications as privation, drawn out of Aristotle through Origen, disregarding Augustine’s Pauline affirmation.89 Perhaps this point toward a more Judaic worldview theologically which affirms elements of Paul’s mission to the nations which for Eckhart was default as a Dominican Roman Catholic.
Moreover, his theory of esse-being, the first thesis of his propositional work posited, God is Being,90 by defying pantheism through scholastic distinctions. He differs between absolute being and determinate being. Is this similar to omnipresence and manifest presence, that Tozer describes?91 Obviously, because Tozer read Eckhart's sermons.92 For Eckhart, the concrete mode of the transcendentals shows creation’s dependence on God and the human capacity to understand this and that existence, by not allowing the participatory dimension like Thomas’s use of the transcendentals making up Romanism’s sacramental system.
Again, Eckhart’s thought destabilizes the symmetry of participation woven throughout nature and grace. In his bombshell Parisian quaestio I, Eckhart takes God beyond esse – being, utilizing the λόγος of John 1.93 Nothing new in church history, but as manifest divine power expressed in creation relationally as unilateral toward mankind, by being the Other as ultimate substance.94 Only God is eternal and dissimilar, yes, but absolutely Other, different and beyond, sacred.95 Again, such immediatism with selected transcendentals of being, oneness, truth, goodness, wisdom, and beauty does not pertain to other ens-entities in creation like Thomas’ analogia entis. Creation is no-thing nor contains anything considered sacred in the work of Eckhart, yet only God fills it.96
Eckhart’s famous sermon on Mary and Martha describes A.B. Simpon and A.W. Tozer’s union with Christ, the ultimate, beyond the secular and sacred dichotomy as shown from The Pursuit of God. Tozer and Simpson’s contemplative practice resonates within the C&MA through reading Catholic sources.97 Nevertheless, both the patriarchs practiced His presence by reading mystical authors and understood the tension of the vita contemplativa and vita activa. Thomas Aquinas states that the contemplative life comes first: “Mary has chosen the better part.” So did Tozer and Simpson. The active life follows the contemplation. However, Eckhart spun this Bethany visit toward the vita activa keeping both unified in the eternal now. Such a posit provoked the collective medieval mind and furnished the modern individual, so chalk him up as another culprit. Sermon 86 is a tedious reading where Eckhart’s digressions reveal his subversive point: only God satisfies human beings both through sense and intellectual satisfaction. Both are divine gifts, not equal. Yet the sensual pleasures of comfort, joy, and contentment elude God’s real friends. Like ‘the stressed’ Martha was called upon, we can rise resolutely above such emotional responses. Among the ups and downs of life as Eckhart wants his hearers to connect with either the sense or intellect/mind represented by one of the sisters, preferably Martha living contently in a tumultuous world.99 Whatever the moment calls for in time through sense and the intellect, she is equally at home in the circle of eternity. Martha is already there, living in time, embodied and active, by seeing God without a need for a vision into His being or essence which is built up as the ultimate Roman Catholic afterlife experience, the beatific vision. Simpson’s rational mysticism aligns and perhaps already partook; his knowledge and action merge with the affections out from the mystical Pauline Augustinian tradition. Here, the head and the hand function from the heart as connected to the Master.100
Eckhart’s famous sermon on Mary and Martha describes A.B. Simpon and A.W. Tozer’s union with Christ, the ultimate, beyond the secular and sacred dichotomy as shown from The Pursuit of God. Tozer and Simpson’s contemplative practice resonates within the C&MA through reading Catholic sources.97 Nevertheless, both the patriarchs practiced His presence by reading mystical authors and understood the tension of the vita contemplativa and vita activa. Thomas Aquinas states that the contemplative life comes first: “Mary has chosen the better part.” So did Tozer and Simpson. The active life follows the contemplation. However, Eckhart spun this Bethany visit toward the vita activa keeping both unified in the eternal now. Such a posit provoked the collective medieval mind and furnished the modern individual, so chalk him up as another culprit. Sermon 86 is a tedious reading where Eckhart’s digressions reveal his subversive point: only God satisfies human beings both through sense and intellectual satisfaction. Both are divine gifts, not equal. Yet the sensual pleasures of comfort, joy, and contentment elude God’s real friends. Like ‘the stressed’ Martha was called upon, we can rise resolutely above such emotional responses. Among the ups and downs of life as Eckhart wants his hearers to connect with either the sense or intellect/mind represented by one of the sisters, preferably Martha living contently in a tumultuous world.99 Whatever the moment calls for in time through sense and the intellect, she is equally at home in the circle of eternity. Martha is already there, living in time, embodied and active, by seeing God without a need for a vision into His being or essence which is built up as the ultimate Roman Catholic afterlife experience, the beatific vision. Simpson’s rational mysticism aligns and perhaps already partook; his knowledge and action merge with the affections out from the mystical Pauline Augustinian tradition. Here, the head and the hand function from the heart as connected to the Master.100
Anticipating virtually all discussion in contemporary philosophy and non-religious spirituality, Eckhart is the source of 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger’s originality in regards to existence esse- being and immanence. Two active societies meet annually in his name while practically propagated by popular author Eckhart Tolle and self help type new age philosophy.101 However, in the discipline of philosophy, the hermeneutical problem of metaphysics and its rejection still focuses on language and relation.102 Ironically, only relation (one of Aristotle’s Categories) remains in philosophical discussion.103 Heidegger’s immanent ontological ‘turn’ resorted to language, where the search for transcendence utilized poetry in explaining Dasein (human being) through immanent reification. Namely, the logic of metaphysics was found dead on the road to the city of esse - being, yet the second result, the theory of differentiation out of ‘relation’ by Heidegger’s French disciples ironically demonstrates the adequacy of language.
Besides ethical nihilism, surfacing as relativism today, and the ‘Great Tradition’s’ metaphysical articulations admired by Hans Boersma and elucidated from John Milbank to David Bentley Hart,104 this century-long experiment into linguistic hermeneutics and relation remains stuck on immanence seeking the transcendent, the sacred. Whereas, Thomas’s symmetrical nature and grace theologies serve Rome, transposing old theological articulations such as nature and grace into the secular and the sacred.
Conclusion
The Fourfold Gospel serves as a means to motivate the C&MA as a movement.105 Here, the Apostle’s Creed dovetails the Great Commission, the Ascension and Pentecost. “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His Kingdom will have no end.” The Ascension ratifies the Fourfold gospel, Pentecost sets its course and the Apostles Creed reminds us of our community.
Another ancient designation appropriated by the early church historian Eusebius and expanded by John Calvin called the munus triplex; Jesus Christ: Prophet, Priest, and King (Threefold office), serves the ἅπαξ (once and for all), and perhaps all else that ails us including our erroneous individualism. Moreover, the Threefold office is not a Christology, just like the merism of Simpson’s Fourfold Gospel, affirms, Jesus is the gospel and based upon the person of Christ as a fulfillment of the Old Testament’s offices, found in Him, the sacred anointed One of Israel.
Furthermore the Fourfold Gospel points to a theology of incarnational practice for a purpose and a future yet realized.106 I propose, Simpson’s Fourfold Gospel allows the Spirit to move, like no other, over philosophical theology, perhaps building from the Threefold’s use in A.T. Pierson’s eschatology, signifying this current age situated between Christ’s priestly and kingly role in a linear sense, yet not in a absolutist manner, as these offices are eternal.107 Simpson acted for such an age of the Holy Spirit, and understood the incarnation as the ultimate historicism where now the eternal Son in the Flesh sits at the right hand of the Father, having promised someone better. So, “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” speaks of the third person of the Trinity, revealing Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and teaching us justice, now, and in expectation of a consummated reality when or how he will reign on earth and we with him. Nothing else in all of creations has greater individual impications, that ‘right now counts forever’ in terms of kingdom living to bring back the King.
In conclusion, Roman Catholicism portrays the legitimacy of sophisticated syntheses from reason & faith, nature & grace, and the secular & the sacred, with its formidable historical presence superseding linear time. Such a synthesis distorts distinctions upon incarnation while chronologically updating its sacramentalism within so-called human evolution and perceived progess.109 Therefore, an attentive eschatological historicism over the rational comprehends events within society and theological error by empirically identifying the gospel’s proclamation, obscurity, and alteration within prescriptive contexts in the name of religion not describing the Christ of the scripture. Theologically, Church history points back toward the first 500 or more years to articulate Christology whic tell us something more human than divine. Soteriology having a much longer trajectory, through and from the Reformation era until today and continues its elusive articulation, unless its all about Jesus and the individual, yet not split from the covenatal community. Such problems are within the Western Tradition. So the old faith and good ecclesiastical practice? Christ exalting descriptions fill the whole Christian tradition, true, however, look around and let the advancement of the gospel globally speak.110 111
A.B. Simpson at the end of Old Faith:
“Let us tell them of Calvary and the cleansing blood, and it will be as mighty as the old chieftain of Greenland found it when the missionary stopped preaching philosophy and told them the story of redeeming love. Tell them of a living Christ, the Holy Ghost, and the miracle of conversion, and the Holy Ghost will make it true in the hearts of the hearers. Tell them of the personal coming of the Lord Jesus, and their hearts will answer to that divine message and bow to the King of kings and Lord of lords. Beloved, the foundations are being destroyed. What shall the righteous do? Let them fly to the breaches, let them become the repairers of the waste places, the restorers of paths to dwell in. Let them stand in the Old paths and the good way. Let them be the wise master builders whose work will stand when the wood, hay, and stubble of all our modernism shall drift away in the flames of a dissolving world.”
ENDNOTES
1 Jones: A.B., The Unlikely Founder of a Global Movement, p. 60: Simpson, A.B. The Alliance Weekly, Vol. XLVI, No. 25, September 16, 1916, p. 395. See David J. Smith: Albert Benjamin Simpson: An Integrated Spirituality with Christ as the Centre. http://awf.world/consult/david-j-smith-albert-benjamin-simpson-an-integrated-spirituality-with-christ-as-the-centre/ <In the section on the ‘Contemplative Stream’ and from the beginning of Smith’s excellent synopsis of ‘Christ at the Centre’ the use of Vatican II Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner and other Catholic sources throughout the endnotes demonstrate the need for an accurate rendering of Simpson’s mysticism from a philosophical ‘descriptive’ analysis, the same applies to Clyde Glass’s dissertation on Simpson’s mysticism which focuses on the affective. The major theme of this paper: RCC’s systemic ‘prescriptive metaphysical’ reality demonstrates a ‘blind-side’ in utilizing Catholic sources, popularly sourced with ‘spiritual life’ messages that quote Catholic authors on contemplative prayer, moreover in the academic arena with contemporary theologians. I use ‘prescriptive’ over a valid ‘descriptive’ approach whereas the RCC holds metaphysics prescriptively also known as natural theology. Navigating through the depth of the RCC demands a systemic approach to provide context upon the contemplative tradition which both Simpson and Tozer drew upon while guarding against its practical implications (contemplative subjectivism) over the practical application (being His witnesses). This tension, as noted in both Simpson and Tozer does have a metaphysical description in Eckhart. David Smith’s conclusion on Simpson and Tozer's old medieval message’ stands as the solution. “The center for experiencing authentic contemplative aspect uses of the Christian life and leading him into evangelical activism was, for Simpson, the Christ of the Bible and Christ alone.”
2 <The systemic and atomistic framework for analysis comes from Dutch Reformed theologian and Vatican II observer Gerrit C. Berkhouwer as documented by> De Chirico: Evangelical Theological Perspectives, p.45: “[…] According to Berkhouwer, to focus on the struggle with Roman Catholicism essentially means being concerned with fundamental questions entailing the structure of Rome in its entirety, and its basic religious motive. Though aware of the danger of analytical superficiality and unwarranted schematization of complex theological data. Berkhouwer is strongly convinced that atomistic or fragmentary insights on Roman Catholicism would inevitably miss the point of the controversy which caused the Reformation and still legitimates the huge gulf that separates the two traditions.”
3 Van De Walle: Jesus IS the Gospel, pp. 2-3 on Revivalism. <the theological reaction toward the 19th-century era of Revivalism is often conflated with its sociological manifestation and successive societal impact informing the reactions against its individualism.>
4 Perhaps both C&MA theologians are misunderstood concerning their expertise and interaction with Catholic sources? Both thinker’s scriptural and ecumenical ressourcement has a broad reach outside the Alliance. Moreover, both serve as academics with Gordon Smith having a distinguished career through Regent University and currently as President of Ambrose University in Canada. Whereas David Fitch teaches at Northern Seminary near Chicago, USA, and ministers as an active missional church planting movement leader. Smith having studied with the Jesuits has interacted with Catholics for a long time as his many books attest in selectively drawing upon spirituality from the whole Christian tradition, wisely holding his theological positions from the Reformation on. David Fitch as an eclectic thinker strongly rejects Rome’s political Constantianism as sourced from his Anabaptist convictions in trying to resolve and provide solutions to the starkly divided evangelical generational and political landscape in the USA. Therefore, academia’s empirical method through the social sciences provides a certain tension noted in the work of these two exemplary Alliance theologians.
5 Simpson: Old Faith, pp. 62; 104-5; 133 <It would be fair to say that Romanism comprised of its parts: the Papacy and magisterium, thus comprising a systemic entity, nevertheless, Simpson had no problem mincing words on this…> The Coming One, pp. 91: “Its judgment is to come from two sources. The first is ‘the spirit of His mouth.’ Surely this denotes the Word of God, and truly this is the weapon with which he has been destroying Rome since the liberation of the Bible by Wickliffe five hundred years ago. There is a fine old cartoon in one of Wickliffe’s Bibles. A little fire has broken out in the midst of a company of cardinals and priests. It is burning inside the covers of a Bible. It is spreading rapidly. They all gather round it and try to blow it out. There is His Holiness blowing till his cheeks are bursting, and scores of puffing priests and bishops. But the more they blow the more it burns, until at least they are compelled to fly to escape its consuming flame. So has the Bible been consuming Rome, and with a true instinct Rome has dreaded and suppressed the Bible.[…]
6 Coming One, p.93: “[…] it is described later in the same chapter, under a second image, as ‘another beast <with> two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon’ (Rev. 13:11). This denotes another side of the Papacy, namely, its ecclesiastical and spiritual organization. The first beast represents its political and temporal power; the second its ecclesiastical. It is really two systems. It is both a church and a state; or rather, it was until 1870. It had a political existence as real as France and Germany, and much more pretentious. And it had an ecclesiastical system quite independent of its political government, which was able to go on even if that were suspended, as it has been going on since 1870. Now, this is the system represented by the two-horned lamb, with dragon tongue — innocent-looking as a lamb but speaking the devil’s words in its bulls and decretals, its indulgences, interdicts, and anathemas.” <Simpson’s historicism seems quite sure yet was cautious even with his trip to Europe in 1871, as he accepted, watched and expected a further unfolding, along the same lines concerning the return of the political Israel and the further extension of political Islam.>
7 Old Faith, pp.123: “[…] we have already seen this world-wide current, not only among the nominal followers of the New Theology, but among the Protestant churches and especially the Church of Rome in connection with that powerful revolt and reaction that has come to be known as Modernism and which has enrolled under its banner the most gifted and efficient minds of the Roman Catholic Church in all countries. […]
8 Old Faith, pp. 23-4; pp.144-45: Simpson's concept of God’ and as a theologian watching the ‘Hegelian spirit’ morph viewing history unfolding in a processive dialectic of Absolute Spirit. Today, Open Theism implicitly utilizes this tradition, but it is full of philosophical categories taken to logical conclusions, a rejection of God’s decrees expressed in time and anthropological extrapolations of ‘free will.’ Perhaps this is why Simpson did not jump on some apologetic method, because he would rather exegete scripture, believe it, argue cogently from it and passionately preach it. He did not argue from nontheistic presuppositions or inductively search for philosophic utility.
9 Ibid. Now in following the logical conclusion from the previous endnote with ‘the concept of the dwelling place of God’ through transcendence and immanence, which will also operate with the dialectic to a paradox
10 Ibid. Therefore, secularism or humanism built on the nexus, so evangelical apologetics now have their philosophical-theological ‘worldview.' But Karl Barth just gave us Jesus, yet A.B. Simpson beat him to it before all these theological ideologies converged in the early 20th century with Hegelian Geist and Heideggerian Dasein.
11 Fitch: Faithful Presence, p. 65: “Around this table, space for the kingdom is opened up. God’s kingly rule over the whole world meets his incarnational presence in this particular time and space. Our selfishness is revealed. Our grasping for control loosens. People’s lives are disrupted. If we tend to his presence here, we inevitably will forgive, reconcile, and open ourselves to renewal and healing. His rule takes on flesh among us. As we submit Him, Christ’s presence peacefully reorders us into the ways of His kingdom.”
12 Smith: Conversion and Sanctification: http://awf.world/consult/gordon-t-smith-conversion-and-sanctification-in-the-christian-and-missionary-alliance/ “while also acknowledging that Simpson was neither a good exegete nor a good theologian. He was a preacher, prophet, and leader. We can affirm his strengths and recognize that he was a product of his age. He was a giant in the religious movements of the late 19th century. But he also had some glaring weaknesses, notably those that we find so difficult to accept like weak biblical exegesis and poor theological method. Yet, it is possible to develop a theology of sanctification and of Christian experience in general, that reflects careful attention to Scripture while also affirming the insights of the heritage.”
13 Banzhaf: Before Bliss: St. Thomas’ Imperfect Happiness, http://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/the-life-imperfect-blessed-consists-in.html
See also my: Out of the ‘So-called’ Dark Ages: The Participative Metaphysics Behind Nature and Grace. This paper expressed the culmination of my studies on Eckhart and Thomas in Rome and provided a seed plot for this paper. For text and endnotes: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaBVCWMOiWIHOeji-g
14 De Chirico: Post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, p. 219: “Nature and grace are two fundamental categories in all <Roman Catholic> theological discourse. [...] in the Western tradition, reality in the widest possible sense has been accounted for first philosophically then theologically in terms of ‘nature.’” https://www.reformandainitiative.org/resources/nature-and-grace-in-roman-catholicism-part-1
Wells: <David Wells’ work is the definitive study from an evangelical perspective on the excommunicated Father George Tyrrell mentioned by A.B. Simpson in Old Faith and his eventual vindication referring to Vatican II documents. Hans Boersma’s Sacramental Ontology does not include Wells’ work in his bibliography. As Wells states on p. 39: > “[…] the axis of the Council’s eschatology lies horizontally, although in certain places of some of the old ideas were endorsed. But it does not seem clear that the Council endorsed the progressives’ idea, later extended by Schillebeeckx and Baum, that secular life encases the reality of God and may even facilitate a fresh encounter with Him. The old antithesis between the sacred and the secular, God and the world, is strangely absent from the documents. The two spheres of reality are far more closely integrated than they were in traditional thought. The goals of eschatological hope, therefore, are considered ‘beyond’ rather than ‘above.’ Heaven is not an ethereal sphere outside of time but will be realized as a climax to the historical process. […] A thorough-going secular theology or process theology is not to be found in the Council documents. But there are some hints, underdeveloped as they are, which point in this direction. Some of the ideas of Tyrrell also pointed in this direction. His rejection of Scholasticism with its Hellenization of the doctrine of God finds echo at Vatican II. A dynamic, as opposed to static, view of God, the creative process, and history is to be found both in Tyrrell and in the conciliar teachings. A new view of the relationship of the natural to the supernatural is another point of similarity, as it is in the wide-ranging application of sacramentality. In so far as this identity pertains, it is possible to argue that the Council has reiterated some aspects of Modernist theology.”
15 Pyles: Missionary Eschatology, http://awf.world/consult/franklin-pyles-the-missionary-eschatology-of-a-b-simpson/
King, Paul L.: Alliance Foundations: Alliance Theology and 3-tier hermeneutic essentials, distinctives, open questions. (forthcoming) p. 57 in preliminary mini-book.
Furthermore the Fourfold Gospel points to a theology of incarnational practice for a purpose and a future yet realized.106 I propose, Simpson’s Fourfold Gospel allows the Spirit to move, like no other, over philosophical theology, perhaps building from the Threefold’s use in A.T. Pierson’s eschatology, signifying this current age situated between Christ’s priestly and kingly role in a linear sense, yet not in a absolutist manner, as these offices are eternal.107 Simpson acted for such an age of the Holy Spirit, and understood the incarnation as the ultimate historicism where now the eternal Son in the Flesh sits at the right hand of the Father, having promised someone better. So, “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” speaks of the third person of the Trinity, revealing Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and teaching us justice, now, and in expectation of a consummated reality when or how he will reign on earth and we with him. Nothing else in all of creations has greater individual impications, that ‘right now counts forever’ in terms of kingdom living to bring back the King.
In conclusion, Roman Catholicism portrays the legitimacy of sophisticated syntheses from reason & faith, nature & grace, and the secular & the sacred, with its formidable historical presence superseding linear time. Such a synthesis distorts distinctions upon incarnation while chronologically updating its sacramentalism within so-called human evolution and perceived progess.109 Therefore, an attentive eschatological historicism over the rational comprehends events within society and theological error by empirically identifying the gospel’s proclamation, obscurity, and alteration within prescriptive contexts in the name of religion not describing the Christ of the scripture. Theologically, Church history points back toward the first 500 or more years to articulate Christology whic tell us something more human than divine. Soteriology having a much longer trajectory, through and from the Reformation era until today and continues its elusive articulation, unless its all about Jesus and the individual, yet not split from the covenatal community. Such problems are within the Western Tradition. So the old faith and good ecclesiastical practice? Christ exalting descriptions fill the whole Christian tradition, true, however, look around and let the advancement of the gospel globally speak.110 111
A.B. Simpson at the end of Old Faith:
“Let us tell them of Calvary and the cleansing blood, and it will be as mighty as the old chieftain of Greenland found it when the missionary stopped preaching philosophy and told them the story of redeeming love. Tell them of a living Christ, the Holy Ghost, and the miracle of conversion, and the Holy Ghost will make it true in the hearts of the hearers. Tell them of the personal coming of the Lord Jesus, and their hearts will answer to that divine message and bow to the King of kings and Lord of lords. Beloved, the foundations are being destroyed. What shall the righteous do? Let them fly to the breaches, let them become the repairers of the waste places, the restorers of paths to dwell in. Let them stand in the Old paths and the good way. Let them be the wise master builders whose work will stand when the wood, hay, and stubble of all our modernism shall drift away in the flames of a dissolving world.”
ENDNOTES
1 Jones: A.B., The Unlikely Founder of a Global Movement, p. 60: Simpson, A.B. The Alliance Weekly, Vol. XLVI, No. 25, September 16, 1916, p. 395. See David J. Smith: Albert Benjamin Simpson: An Integrated Spirituality with Christ as the Centre. http://awf.world/consult/david-j-smith-albert-benjamin-simpson-an-integrated-spirituality-with-christ-as-the-centre/ <In the section on the ‘Contemplative Stream’ and from the beginning of Smith’s excellent synopsis of ‘Christ at the Centre’ the use of Vatican II Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner and other Catholic sources throughout the endnotes demonstrate the need for an accurate rendering of Simpson’s mysticism from a philosophical ‘descriptive’ analysis, the same applies to Clyde Glass’s dissertation on Simpson’s mysticism which focuses on the affective. The major theme of this paper: RCC’s systemic ‘prescriptive metaphysical’ reality demonstrates a ‘blind-side’ in utilizing Catholic sources, popularly sourced with ‘spiritual life’ messages that quote Catholic authors on contemplative prayer, moreover in the academic arena with contemporary theologians. I use ‘prescriptive’ over a valid ‘descriptive’ approach whereas the RCC holds metaphysics prescriptively also known as natural theology. Navigating through the depth of the RCC demands a systemic approach to provide context upon the contemplative tradition which both Simpson and Tozer drew upon while guarding against its practical implications (contemplative subjectivism) over the practical application (being His witnesses). This tension, as noted in both Simpson and Tozer does have a metaphysical description in Eckhart. David Smith’s conclusion on Simpson and Tozer's old medieval message’ stands as the solution. “The center for experiencing authentic contemplative aspect uses of the Christian life and leading him into evangelical activism was, for Simpson, the Christ of the Bible and Christ alone.”
2 <The systemic and atomistic framework for analysis comes from Dutch Reformed theologian and Vatican II observer Gerrit C. Berkhouwer as documented by> De Chirico: Evangelical Theological Perspectives, p.45: “[…] According to Berkhouwer, to focus on the struggle with Roman Catholicism essentially means being concerned with fundamental questions entailing the structure of Rome in its entirety, and its basic religious motive. Though aware of the danger of analytical superficiality and unwarranted schematization of complex theological data. Berkhouwer is strongly convinced that atomistic or fragmentary insights on Roman Catholicism would inevitably miss the point of the controversy which caused the Reformation and still legitimates the huge gulf that separates the two traditions.”
3 Van De Walle: Jesus IS the Gospel, pp. 2-3 on Revivalism. <the theological reaction toward the 19th-century era of Revivalism is often conflated with its sociological manifestation and successive societal impact informing the reactions against its individualism.>
4 Perhaps both C&MA theologians are misunderstood concerning their expertise and interaction with Catholic sources? Both thinker’s scriptural and ecumenical ressourcement has a broad reach outside the Alliance. Moreover, both serve as academics with Gordon Smith having a distinguished career through Regent University and currently as President of Ambrose University in Canada. Whereas David Fitch teaches at Northern Seminary near Chicago, USA, and ministers as an active missional church planting movement leader. Smith having studied with the Jesuits has interacted with Catholics for a long time as his many books attest in selectively drawing upon spirituality from the whole Christian tradition, wisely holding his theological positions from the Reformation on. David Fitch as an eclectic thinker strongly rejects Rome’s political Constantianism as sourced from his Anabaptist convictions in trying to resolve and provide solutions to the starkly divided evangelical generational and political landscape in the USA. Therefore, academia’s empirical method through the social sciences provides a certain tension noted in the work of these two exemplary Alliance theologians.
5 Simpson: Old Faith, pp. 62; 104-5; 133 <It would be fair to say that Romanism comprised of its parts: the Papacy and magisterium, thus comprising a systemic entity, nevertheless, Simpson had no problem mincing words on this…> The Coming One, pp. 91: “Its judgment is to come from two sources. The first is ‘the spirit of His mouth.’ Surely this denotes the Word of God, and truly this is the weapon with which he has been destroying Rome since the liberation of the Bible by Wickliffe five hundred years ago. There is a fine old cartoon in one of Wickliffe’s Bibles. A little fire has broken out in the midst of a company of cardinals and priests. It is burning inside the covers of a Bible. It is spreading rapidly. They all gather round it and try to blow it out. There is His Holiness blowing till his cheeks are bursting, and scores of puffing priests and bishops. But the more they blow the more it burns, until at least they are compelled to fly to escape its consuming flame. So has the Bible been consuming Rome, and with a true instinct Rome has dreaded and suppressed the Bible.[…]
6 Coming One, p.93: “[…] it is described later in the same chapter, under a second image, as ‘another beast <with> two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon’ (Rev. 13:11). This denotes another side of the Papacy, namely, its ecclesiastical and spiritual organization. The first beast represents its political and temporal power; the second its ecclesiastical. It is really two systems. It is both a church and a state; or rather, it was until 1870. It had a political existence as real as France and Germany, and much more pretentious. And it had an ecclesiastical system quite independent of its political government, which was able to go on even if that were suspended, as it has been going on since 1870. Now, this is the system represented by the two-horned lamb, with dragon tongue — innocent-looking as a lamb but speaking the devil’s words in its bulls and decretals, its indulgences, interdicts, and anathemas.” <Simpson’s historicism seems quite sure yet was cautious even with his trip to Europe in 1871, as he accepted, watched and expected a further unfolding, along the same lines concerning the return of the political Israel and the further extension of political Islam.>
7 Old Faith, pp.123: “[…] we have already seen this world-wide current, not only among the nominal followers of the New Theology, but among the Protestant churches and especially the Church of Rome in connection with that powerful revolt and reaction that has come to be known as Modernism and which has enrolled under its banner the most gifted and efficient minds of the Roman Catholic Church in all countries. […]
8 Old Faith, pp. 23-4; pp.144-45: Simpson's concept of God’ and as a theologian watching the ‘Hegelian spirit’ morph viewing history unfolding in a processive dialectic of Absolute Spirit. Today, Open Theism implicitly utilizes this tradition, but it is full of philosophical categories taken to logical conclusions, a rejection of God’s decrees expressed in time and anthropological extrapolations of ‘free will.’ Perhaps this is why Simpson did not jump on some apologetic method, because he would rather exegete scripture, believe it, argue cogently from it and passionately preach it. He did not argue from nontheistic presuppositions or inductively search for philosophic utility.
9 Ibid. Now in following the logical conclusion from the previous endnote with ‘the concept of the dwelling place of God’ through transcendence and immanence, which will also operate with the dialectic to a paradox
10 Ibid. Therefore, secularism or humanism built on the nexus, so evangelical apologetics now have their philosophical-theological ‘worldview.' But Karl Barth just gave us Jesus, yet A.B. Simpson beat him to it before all these theological ideologies converged in the early 20th century with Hegelian Geist and Heideggerian Dasein.
11 Fitch: Faithful Presence, p. 65: “Around this table, space for the kingdom is opened up. God’s kingly rule over the whole world meets his incarnational presence in this particular time and space. Our selfishness is revealed. Our grasping for control loosens. People’s lives are disrupted. If we tend to his presence here, we inevitably will forgive, reconcile, and open ourselves to renewal and healing. His rule takes on flesh among us. As we submit Him, Christ’s presence peacefully reorders us into the ways of His kingdom.”
12 Smith: Conversion and Sanctification: http://awf.world/consult/gordon-t-smith-conversion-and-sanctification-in-the-christian-and-missionary-alliance/ “while also acknowledging that Simpson was neither a good exegete nor a good theologian. He was a preacher, prophet, and leader. We can affirm his strengths and recognize that he was a product of his age. He was a giant in the religious movements of the late 19th century. But he also had some glaring weaknesses, notably those that we find so difficult to accept like weak biblical exegesis and poor theological method. Yet, it is possible to develop a theology of sanctification and of Christian experience in general, that reflects careful attention to Scripture while also affirming the insights of the heritage.”
13 Banzhaf: Before Bliss: St. Thomas’ Imperfect Happiness, http://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/the-life-imperfect-blessed-consists-in.html
See also my: Out of the ‘So-called’ Dark Ages: The Participative Metaphysics Behind Nature and Grace. This paper expressed the culmination of my studies on Eckhart and Thomas in Rome and provided a seed plot for this paper. For text and endnotes: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaBVCWMOiWIHOeji-g
14 De Chirico: Post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, p. 219: “Nature and grace are two fundamental categories in all <Roman Catholic> theological discourse. [...] in the Western tradition, reality in the widest possible sense has been accounted for first philosophically then theologically in terms of ‘nature.’” https://www.reformandainitiative.org/resources/nature-and-grace-in-roman-catholicism-part-1
Wells: <David Wells’ work is the definitive study from an evangelical perspective on the excommunicated Father George Tyrrell mentioned by A.B. Simpson in Old Faith and his eventual vindication referring to Vatican II documents. Hans Boersma’s Sacramental Ontology does not include Wells’ work in his bibliography. As Wells states on p. 39: > “[…] the axis of the Council’s eschatology lies horizontally, although in certain places of some of the old ideas were endorsed. But it does not seem clear that the Council endorsed the progressives’ idea, later extended by Schillebeeckx and Baum, that secular life encases the reality of God and may even facilitate a fresh encounter with Him. The old antithesis between the sacred and the secular, God and the world, is strangely absent from the documents. The two spheres of reality are far more closely integrated than they were in traditional thought. The goals of eschatological hope, therefore, are considered ‘beyond’ rather than ‘above.’ Heaven is not an ethereal sphere outside of time but will be realized as a climax to the historical process. […] A thorough-going secular theology or process theology is not to be found in the Council documents. But there are some hints, underdeveloped as they are, which point in this direction. Some of the ideas of Tyrrell also pointed in this direction. His rejection of Scholasticism with its Hellenization of the doctrine of God finds echo at Vatican II. A dynamic, as opposed to static, view of God, the creative process, and history is to be found both in Tyrrell and in the conciliar teachings. A new view of the relationship of the natural to the supernatural is another point of similarity, as it is in the wide-ranging application of sacramentality. In so far as this identity pertains, it is possible to argue that the Council has reiterated some aspects of Modernist theology.”
15 Pyles: Missionary Eschatology, http://awf.world/consult/franklin-pyles-the-missionary-eschatology-of-a-b-simpson/
King, Paul L.: Alliance Foundations: Alliance Theology and 3-tier hermeneutic essentials, distinctives, open questions. (forthcoming) p. 57 in preliminary mini-book.
16 Schürmann: Broken Hegemonies.
17 Burckhardt: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/10/jacob-burckhardt-civilization-renaissance-italy
18 Simpson: The Coming One, pp.32-3: “[…] Next, in the Mustard Seed we see the rapid growth of this mingled system covering the earth with its extensive shade and lodging the fowls of heaven. Is not this most promising? Let us not be too sure. The fowls of the air who lodge in the branches have already a bad reputation from the first parable, as the destructive and mischievous intruders who picked up the good seed, and they would seem to be here the same ill brood of evil emissaries who find shelter in the great, proud, worldly and unhallowed Church of the age of Constantine and today. This is made much plainer when we come to the fourth parable, the Leaven, which is God’s uniform symbol of corruption; and when the woman is added to the picture it becomes a significant and unmistakable emblem of the great apostasy which sprang up in the sixth and seventh centuries and speedily permeated the whole Church with the leaven of the Papacy and all its kindred corruptions. But was there no residue of the good left of all the apostolic sowing? Yes, the Hid Treasure and the Pearl represent the two sides of the elements of good in contrast with the two symbols of evil. The Treasure represents the pure and Scriptural elements surviving in the Church in the individuals-the many; the Pearl in their unity, as the one small, yet pure and heavenly jewel of the Lord amid the encompassing corruption. <The previous statements by Simpson is an application of descriptive metaphysics of the ‘one and the many’ which is also part of the theological projects of both Smith and Fitch in recovering ecclesiology.> Both find their historical fulfillment in the faithful few who have ever existed in even the darkest ages of medieval corruption; the Albigenses and Paulicians, the Hussites and Moravians, the Waldenses and Vaudois, the Wycliffites and Huguenots, the Reformers and Covenanters, and the pure and true ones who have before and since dared to be faithful to God and His holy Word. There has ever been a little flock, of which He says: ‘They shall be mine in the day when I make up My jewels.’ There are some who identify the Treasure with Israel, and the Pearl with the Church, the Bride of the Lamb. But this does not affect the dispensational bearing of the parables.”
19 Wax: “Three Definitions of the Secular.” See- https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/3-definitions-of-secular-and-why-they-matter-for-our-mission/ <Not that I disagree with Trevin Wax nor the phenomenal Charles Taylor, but in positing another definition in light of Vatican II as misappropriated by pragmatic yet sentimental evangelicals in not properly understanding Rome and its sacramentalism as provoked by the secular. Another Gospel Coalition review shows evangelicals still have much work to do on this attraction to sacramentalism.> Ortlund, Gavin: “You Can Learn from Medieval Christians,” The Gospel Coalition, 2016. Armstrong, Chris R.: Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis, Grand Rapids, 2016. <A gentile and cautious critique of this book is found here:> “Armstrong faults modern Christianity for what he calls ‘immediatism,’ by which he means essentially three qualities of modern thought: (1) our penchant for novelty (‘chronological snobbery’); (2) our desire for immediate results (‘pressurized pragmatism’); and (3) our simplistic view of knowledge as mediated directly by perception (he calls this ‘Common Sense epistemology,’ drawing a correlation with 18th–century Scottish Common Sense Realism) (7–8). <This shows the pervasive nature of Kantian subjectivism in theology for Kant thought he produced the ultimate synthesis, but it was simply empiricism.> But Armstrong goes on to articulate another aspect of modern ‘immediatism’—that is, modern Christians’ perceived bias against various forms of churchly mediation (for example, liturgical expressions, priestly intercession and leadership, a robust view of the sacraments, utilizing art in worship, and so on). In contrast to our modern ‘immediatism,’ Armstrong emphasizes medieval “sacramentalism”—the idea that “the outward and visible can convey the inward and spiritual” (144). He believes that, in contrast to the barren, mechanistic, modern view of the universe, the medieval had a holistic approach to life and the material world that perceived God’s glory infused throughout creation. Even food, sex, and emotion can be appreciated as components of our spiritual existence before God (25–28). Modern Christians, because we’ve lost our focus on Christ’s humanity, have lost a sense of our own humanity—our work, our culture-making, our suffering, and our dignity as God’s image-bearers (e.g., 233).” See - https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/medieval-wisdom-for-modern-christians/
<In the above review Chris Armstrong utilizes the great Oxford don as a proxy through Lewis’s accessibility by his writings for Christians making sense of faith. Certainly, Lewis has provided a clear guide in crucial areas of Christian apologetics and the moral argument for God, yet perhaps counterproductive in the pursuit of theological imagination. Where, Lewis the medievalist, provides a familiar voice to help explore ‘his world.’ A world that was channeled through a familiar sci-fi style with his Chronicles of Narnia. Chris Armstrong’s work puts us face to face with modernity’s problems infecting shallow evangelicalism, but he does not offer a solution that the Reformers already did not deeply discuss and one that we should continue to develop out of the correct understanding of human sin and the application in identifying common grace through general revelation. Armstrong falls into what could be termed a ‘sacramental historicism’ conflated with an anachronistic conceptualized ‘nature’ as possessing the secular where C.S. Lewis the medievalist is co-opted as ‘a theologian’. Lewis’ ‘gravitas’ also emerges as a major point of Hans Boersma’s argument of the sacra-mentalization of nature.>
20 This expansion of the secular and sacred out of nature and grace draws upon Francis Schaeffer who applied broad brush strokes upon nature/grace, faith/reason, and posited these as proceeding to faulty societal conclusions. I believe Schaeffer’s conclusion was correct, however, as an apologist, he was disregarded by those in the academy involved in the intricacies of the debates, as his method was not acceptable for the philosophic discipline. Of course, Schaeffer was a unique evangelist seeking to present the faith intellectually, and this is not everyone’s need. Basically, Thomas Aquinas stands as Schaeffer’s ‘culprit of modernity.’ On unity with Catholics on moral stances, Francis Shaeffer used co-belligerency over ecumenicism, perhaps this is a better way of looking at commonalities, still, culture wars are not Christ’s church’s mission. David Fitch’s 2019 work provides help for evangelicals to deconstruct such stances providing greater clarity, certainly better than Schaeffer’s son Frank, who senses guilt in helping his father start ‘the Christian Right’ in the USA and is at no loss of words through his exposé of his parents in various books published over the last years.
For an academic vindication of Francis Schaeffer’s nature/grace toward secularism posit. See Hankey: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaBr4jtJv2PY04tBKQ
21 Gillespie: <Gillespie is correct that there are ‘theological origins to modernity,’ although a good historian, he is not a theologian.> “Gillespie describes God as a power, but not much a grace-giver. Grace, as theologians know, or should know, does not violate ‘second causes.’ […] Gillespie contends that secularization is simply a mask covering up deeper theological concerns that just won’t go away.” see http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/review/the-theological-origins-of-modernity
22 Simpson: The Coming One, p. 54: “Another feature in the visions of the Apocalypse is the relation of the nations to the great apostasy of Rome. They are represented in the first period of her career as sustaining this ecclesiastical system represented by the Woman on the scarlet colored beast, and united with her in unholy alliance; but later we see them hating her, ravaging her and resenting fiercely her long and arrogant dominancy over them. This also has been strangely true during the past ten centuries and is being literally fulfilled in Europe today in such Roman Catholic countries as Italy, France and Portugal.” pp.198-200: “[…] When we speak of the coming of our Lord as imminent, we do not mean the fulfillment of all the successive prophecies which reach on to His glorious Epiphany. There may be much to be accomplished before that day shall arrive, […]”
see Pyles: Missionary Eschatology
Coming One, p. 54. “The spirit of evil that rules in the powers of earth is to send forth a deluge of unhallowed influences, represented in the Apocalypse by three unclean spirits like frogs, which shall go forth to possess the minds and hearts of the kings and peoples of earth.”
< The following letter from Bertie to his Maggie from Rome in 1871. > “I have been spending the Sabbath in Rome, but oh there is no Sabbath here. It is the capital of the Roman Catholic world, but it is the most ungodly, Sabbath-breaking, worldly looking place I have ever seen, and there is more vice and lawlessness and brigandage in Rome today than in all the rest of Italy. As I look at the sad spectacle - the busy streets, the open shops, the crowds of laborers, the busy cafes, the profane and ribald mobs, the empty churches, and the very priests playing ball with the boys as I saw them tonight in the public park, I ask myself the question - Is this all Roman Catholicism has done for the world and for Rome? Thank God, its day is past. Like the floor of St. Peters which I walked over this morning and admired its grandeur and its incomparable marble mosaics but heard as I passed on the hollow sound that reminded me that I was treading on a hollow thing - full of graves below-of dead men’s bones and all corruption. So, the Church of Rome is grand but false and hollow, a glorious show, a gilded, sculptured painted magnificent shell. Here people ask for bread and she gives them in her magnificent Cathedral a ‘stone;’ and now disgusted and hardened they don’t even ask at all. But thank God her day is done - Pius IX is now virtually a prisoner in the Vatican, and Englishmen and Frenchmen are likely to be mobbed in the streets of Rome because of the suspicion that they have been Zouaves in the army of the Pope. Once I dare not have written as I do tonight, or I might have been a prisoner tomorrow-my letter searched and my rashness punished. But now this day is over, and Rome is free, and the greater danger is in seeming to be a possible former supporter of the Holy Father. I spent a thrilled Sabbath. I was not in time for the English Church in the morning but attended it at 5 and thought that the same hour (11 at home) you were all assembled at home. I read a good deal. My mind naturally turned to the story of Paul’s journey to Rome and I read the last chapters of Acts and the Epistle to the Romans. I thought much of you all and had some pleasant times of quiet devotion. I read and sang with a great comfort the 56th Psalm, and Ps. 110, 112, 113, 115-v.10 to 14. O these continental Sabbaths are welcome and blessed to me as a green oasis in a burning desert. I hope you are all well and happy. I can only hope for I know but little of you, but I leave you with all confidence on a Father’s bosom. I trust to receive another letter from you ere I leave Rome, perhaps on Tuesday.””
23 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2016/10/129-roman-catholic-theology-after-vatican-ii-an-interview/
24 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2019/05/vf162/: “Not Away From Thomism but Deeper into It.”
25 Banzhaf: Charles Taylor and Language, http://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/introduction-charles-taylor-is-canadian.html
26 Kerr: “A Different World: Neo-Scholasticism and its Discontents”
27 Gregory: The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge, 2012.
Milbank: 500, https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/opth.2018.4.issue-1/opth-2018-0045/opth-2018-0045.pdf
28 Milbank: Beyond Secular Order, <Milbank argues that ‘historicism cannot straightforwardly be considered as something specifically modern.’ Christianity is its breeding ground. For a critical review of Milbank’s project through the Jesuit Henri de Lubac, see > Otten, Willemien: ‘Review of The Suspended Middle. Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural,’ […] Whether De Lubac’s Surnaturel really ranks with Heidegger’s Being and Time and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations remains to be seen and more generally points to Milbank’s tendency to overstate his case. While that may be excused as a matter of temperament, where the book’s thesis really falls flat in lacking scholarly proof, revealing at the same time a more structural flaw in Radical Orthodoxy, is in giving us a subtraction narrative (as in the logic of double negation or the non-Cajetan Aquinas, but also in the non-Humani Generis ‘Surnaturel’) rather than conducting a constructive analysis in historical theology. Precisely at this point, it seems a wide gulf separates De Lubac from Milbank, which can only be bridged when a more careful historical study of the various theologians and periods mentioned – the importance of the early Middle Ages comes especially to mind as the period linking Augustine and Aquinas – will be seriously undertaken.”
29 Van De Walle: Jesus IS the Gospel, p. 3:
30 Augustine: City of God, Book 14.28
31 The downstream application of Taylor in confronting secularization is a real issue for many Christian leaders. Therefore, proper contextualization demands knowledge. Gordon Smith helps ministers ask deep questions on leadership and resourcing from the whole Christian tradition: https://www.catalystresources.org/formation-for-ministry-in-a-secular-age-1-the-situation-we-find-ourselves-in/a
Smith: Transforming Conversion, pp. 115-125 illustrates Gordon Smith’s atomistic approach and systemic blind-side. It also shows that doing theology retrospectively conflates with sociological phenomena. His deconstruction using Charles Taylor in dealing with William James seems valid. James was a contemporary of A.B. Simpson and mentioned extensively in Old Faith. Where Simpson is addressing James’ anti-materialism, as ‘individually religious’ representing pseudo-spirituality or mysticism. Granted, Taylor is criticizing James from an anti-institutional religious perspective, certainly legitimate. However, Smith, perhaps, has found the ‘secular age’ convincing.
32 Allison: Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment <Allison’s text follows the RCC’s Catechism in an atomist manner and analyzes with systemic insight based upon nature & grace, and the Christ - church interdependence.> here Kindle location 835-1400.
33 Op. Cited, Kindle location 5058-5684.
34 Boersma: Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, Grand Rapids, 2011, is the abridged popular version out of Boersma’s academic work Nouvelle Théologie & Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery, 2010: <Why have I singled out Boersma? He stands as an indirect influence, perhaps being a former colleague of Gordon Smith at Regent and through the influence of John Milbank and James K.A. Smith as interlocutors for David Fitch. I do not mean to imply any ‘guilt by association,’ however, it is important to read what Boersma writes himself. He is or was a Reformed evangelical demonstrating the point of departure as he has applied his methodology through many works: Heaven on Earth? Theological Interpretation in Ecumenical Dialogue, with Matthew Levering, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013; Embodiment and Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa: An Anagogical Approach, Oxford, 2013; Eucharistic Participation: The Reconfiguration of Time and Space, Regent College Publishing, 2013; Sacramental Preaching: Sermons on the Hidden Presence of Christ, Grand Rapids, 2016; The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering Oxford, 2015; <out of over 40 authors no-where does Boersma’s editorial direction treat. Jerome’s mistranslation of mysterion as Sacramentum in Ephesians.> Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church, Grand Rapids, 2017. Boersma displays great zeal for the RCC from a historical ideological theological attraction over his own tradition. Boersma’s work on sacramental ontology shows little if any critical analysis. Therefore, it is important to present some extended text, for one to read it for themselves.> Boersma states, here pp. 21-25: “ [...] Before going any further into this discussion, I think it is necessary to define some of my terms. What do I mean by ‘sacramental ontology,’ and by the ‘Platonist-Christian synthesis’ on which it relies? I devote this first chapter to answering this question - or, at least, to providing the basic contours of an answer. The argument of part I of this book is that until the late Middle Ages (say, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), people looked at the world as a mystery. The word ‘mystery’ did not have quite the same connotations that it has for us today. Certainly, it did not refer to a puzzling issue who’s secret one can uncover by means of clever investigation. Our understanding of ‘mystery novels,’ for example, carries that kind of connotation. For the patristic and medieval mindset, the word ‘mystery’ meant something slightly - but significantly - different. ‘Mystery’ referred to realities behind the appearances that one could observe by means of the senses. That is to say, though our hands, eyes, ears, nose, and tongue are able to access reality, they cannot fully grasp this reality. They cannot comprehend it. The reason for this basic incomprehensibility of the universe was that the world was, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins famously put it, ‘charged with the grandeur of God.’ Even the most basic created realities ties that we observe as human beings carry an extra dimension, as it were. The created world cannot be reduced to measurable, manageable dimensions. Up to this point, my explanation is probably relatively uncontroversial. Most of us, when we think about the ability of the senses to comprehend reality, realize that they are inadequate to the task. And I suspect that we generally recognize that the reason for this does not lie mainly in faulty hearing, poor vision, or worn-out taste buds, but in the fact that reality truly is mysterious. It carries a dimension that we are unable to fully express. But let me take the next step, and I suspect that in doing so, I may encounter some naysayers. Throughout the Great Tradition, when people spoke of the mysterious quality of the created order, what they meant was that this created order - along with all other temporary and provisional gifts of God - was a sacrament. This sacrament was the sign of a mystery that, though present in the created order, nonetheless far transcended human comprehension. The sacramental character of reality was the reason it so often appeared mysterious and beyond human comprehension. So, when I speak of my desire to recover a ‘sacramental ontology’ in this book, I am speaking of an ontology (an understanding of reality) that is sacramental in character. The perhaps controversial, but nonetheless important, point that I want to make is that the mysterious character of all created reality lies in its sacramental nature. In fact, we would not go wrong by simply equating mystery and sacrament. What, then, is so distinct about the sacramental ontology that characterized much of the history of the church? Perhaps the best way to explain this is to distinguish between symbols and sacraments. A road sign with the silhouette of a deer symbolizes the presence of deer in the area, and its purpose is to induce drivers to slow down. Drivers will not be so foolish as to veer away from the road sign for fear of hitting the deer that is symbolized on the road sign. The reason is obvious: the symbol of the deer and the deer in the woods are two completely separate rate realities. The former is a sign referring to the latter, but in no way do the two co-inhere. It is not as though the road sign carries a mysterious quality, participating somehow in the stags that roam the forests. In diagram i, symbol X and reality Y merely have an external or nominal relationship. The distance between the two makes clear that there is no real connection between them. Things are different with sacraments. Unlike mere symbols, sacraments actually participate in the mysterious reality to which they point. Sacrament X and reality Y co-inhere: the sacrament participates in the reality to which it points. In his essay ‘Transposition,’ C. S. Lewis makes this same point when he distinguishes between symbolism and sacramentalism. The relationship between speech and writing, Lewis argues, ‘is one of symbolism. The written characters exist solely for the eye, the spoken words solely for the ear. There is a complete discontinuity between them. They are not like one another, nor does the one cause the other to be.’ By contrast, when we look at how a picture represents the visible world, we find a rather different kind of relationship. Lewis explains: Pictures are part of the visible world themselves and represent it only by being part of it. Their visibility has the same source as it. The suns and lamps in pictures seem to shine only because real suns or lamps shine on them; that is, they seem to shine a great deal because they really shine a little in reflecting their archetypes. The sunlight in a picture is therefore not related to real sunlight simply as written words are to be spoken. It is a sign, but also something thing more than a sign because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name the relation I should call it not symbolical but sacramental. For Lewis, a sacramental relationship implies real presence. This understanding standing of sacramentality is part of a long lineage. According to the sacramental ontology of much of the Christian tradition, the created order was more than an external or nominal symbol. Instead, it was a sign (signum) that pointed to and participated in a greater reality (res). It seems to me that the shape of the cosmic tapestry is one in which earthly signs and heavenly realities are intimately woven together, so much so that we cannot have the former without the latter. Later on, I will need to say more about what this reality is in which our sacramental world participates. For now, it is enough to observe that the reason for the mysterious character of the world - on the understanding of the Great Tradition, at least - is that it participates in some greater reality, from which it derives its being and its value. Hence, instead of speaking of a sacramental ontology, we may also speak of a participatory ontology. Of course, any theist position assumes a relationship between God and this world. And many evangelicals will, in addition, agree that this link between God and the world takes on a covenantal shape. God makes covenants both with the created world as a whole (Gen. 9:8-17; Jer. 33.19-26) and with human beings (Gen. 15:1-21; 17:1-27; Exod. 24:1-18; 2 Sam. 7:1-17; Jer. 31:31-33; Heb. 8:1-13). There is, I believe, a great deal of value in highlighting this covenantal relationship. But the insistence on a sacramental link between God and the world goes well beyond the mere insistence that God has created the world and by creating it has declared it to be good. It also goes beyond positing an agreed-on (covenantal) relationship between two completely separate beings. A sacramental ontology insists that not only does the created world point to God as its source and “point of reference,” but that it also subsists or participates in God. A participatory or sacramental ontology will look to passages such as Acts 17:28 (‘For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, we are his offspring’), and will conclude that our being participates in the being of God. Such an outlook on reality will turn to Colossians 1:17 (‘He [Christ] is before all things, and in him, all things hold together’), and will argue that the truth, goodness, and beauty of all created things is grounded in Christ, the eternal Logos of God. In other words, because creation is a sharing in the being of God, our connection with God is a participatory, or real, connection - not just an external, or nominal, connection. Few people have expressed this distinction better than C. S. Lewis has: ‘We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.’ We do not want merely a nominal relationship; we desire a participatory relationship. In fact, a sacramental ontology maintains that the former is possible only because of the latter: a genuinely covenantal bond is possible only because the covenanting partners are not separate or fragmented individuals. The real connection that God has graciously posited between himself and the created order forms the underlying ontological basis that makes it possible for a covenant relationship to flourish.”<Perhaps this is a bit simplistic but saying the ‘creation was good’ is simply that, it’s a good production. What does Boersma mean with the participatory relationship? Boersma is really begging the question about a distinction from pantheism.>
De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2018/09/153-a-few-remarks-on-the-evangelical-fascination-with-the-sacramental-tapestry-a-book-review-of-hans-boersmas-two-volumes-on-the-topic/
35 Boersma: Nouvelle Théologie & Sacramental Ontology: “My interpretation of nouvelle théologie as the recovery of a sacramental ontology implies that, in some sense, its theology was indeed new—at least against the backdrop of the movement’s immediate historical context. As a result, I have resisted the temptation to locate nouvelle théologie, historically, between the Modernist Crisis of the early twentieth century and the theological pluralism of the post-Second Vatican Council period. The Modernist Crisis, with its turn to historical-critical exegesis (Alfred Loisy) and to subjective human experience (George Tyrrell), had caused great upheaval within Catholicism during the last decade of the twentieth century. As a result, the ecclesiastical climate between 1907 and 1960 made it difficult for history and experience to function as theologically meaningful categories. The condemnation of Modernism ensured that theologians were careful not to give the impression that they were returning to the ‘historicism’ and ‘subjectivism’ of the Modernist movement.” <This statement implicates the whole matter, ‘not give the impression’, means that such assumptions of the nouvelle théologie were those of the earlier modernists. In terms of Neo-Platonism’s influence on Augustine, this is obvious. Yet, Augustine and the patristic era is as far removed from each other as our era looking back upon the scholastics. The western classical tradition with its sources evidently is a greater argument than scripture for Boersma. The modern epistemological pursuit for ontology is noble and a crucial reflection, but here is where modern philosophy represented as degrees of the ‘Kantian wall’ between the ‘noumena and phenomena’ as opposed to prescriptive metaphysics representing two poles where there is no happy medium. Boersma's theological motive of ressourcement stands vulnerable to historiographical idealism, as a reaction against the retro-vista type of historicism in producing, again, its own historicism over the simplicity of ‘the holy’ (sacramental) revealed in creation which is His creation as the text of scripture records. To resolve ontology and incarnation, as a believer, one must look no further than the reality of creation and its agent, Jesus. First coming in space and time, not to mention OT manifestations as incarnation attributed to the Son or the angel of the LORD. Boersma faces the problem of epistemological method in’ doing theology’ in a post-Kantian era simply by presenting ‘ontology’ in such a manner >
36 Corzzon, Raul: Theory and History of Ontology (Kindle Locations 646-651). <modern ontology has had a distorting effect on reading medieval metaphysics as its tone is an empirical epistemology, whereas epistemology was integrated into metaphysics before the modern era, but Thomist empiricism emerged as the majority report.> (Kindle Locations 669-674) [...] “Ontology is intimately related to metaphysics, the theory of ultimate categories of things. [...] Now insofar as metaphysics is the study of the nature and existence of broad categories of things, ontology is a branch of metaphysics by logical courtesy. It deals, paradoxically, with the nature and existence of the ‘category’ of undifferentiated being. But strictly speaking, ontology is transcategorial. Of course, if we say, ‘To be is to be material,’ we do equate the study of being with the study of matter. But the equation is transcategorial in its very elimination of all categories other than matter. Of course, some ontologists admit different kinds or degrees of being. But even if every metaphysical category is also a kind of being and vice versa, so that the words ‘metaphysics’ and ‘ontology’ are coextensive, those words are still not synonymous.“
Aersten: The Case of Thomas Aquinas: <most Protestant evangelical critiques read Aquinas through Etienne Gilson> “In Gilson’s works there is a manifest tension between the idea of ‘Christian Philosophy’ and historical reality.”
37 All Pontifical Universities have a faculty of philosophy and theology as separate schools.
38 Kilcrease: Lutheran Theology and the Metaphysical Question, Theologiae Crucis blog.
39 Calvin: John. Institutes of the Christian Religion (Kindle Locations 756-760): “Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
40 See Conradie, Ernst M. (ed.): Creation and Salvation: A companion of recent theological movements. v. 2, (Studies in Religion and Environment v. 6) Münster, 2012; Bavinck Herman: “Common Grace” Trsl. R.C. van Leeuwen, Calvin Theological Journal, vol. 24, 1989, pp. 38-61 — ”The Catholicity of Christianity and Church” Trsl. John Bolt ), Calvin Theological Journal, vol. 27, 1992, pp. 220-251. — Reformed Dogmatics, Vol.1: Prolegomena, Vol. 2: God and Creation, Vol. 3: Sin and Salvation in Christ, Vol. 4: Holy Spirit, Church and Creation, Grand Rapids 2003-2008.
41 See Payton: Getting the Reformation Wrong, p. 190. David Fitch refers to the current new Calvinist movement as ‘neo-Reformed’ perhaps a more accurate label would be ‘neo-scholastically Reformed.’
42 Fabro: here p. 426. <Thomas’s conception of first philosophy has made it clear that his metaphysics has its center >“[...] no longer, as up to now a certain tradition of Aristotelian predominance has accustomed us to think, in a treatise on substance and the categories, but on one concerning the transcendentals.”
43 Romans 8:18-27
44 See Boersma endnote #35.
45 John 1:1–18; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Colossians 1:15–20; and Hebrews 1:1–4. Jesus as divine agent of creation comes from early church liturgical sources.
46 De Chirico: The Blurring of Time, p. 41. “The argument which will be suggested here, [..] is that Roman Catholicism operated a fundamental breach of the boundary between hapax and mallon in its understanding of the Church as a prolongation of the Incarnation. This breach subsequently caused a series of further incursions, above all in the doctrines of the Eucharist and revelation.” http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2016/04/123-the-blurring-of-time-distinctions-in-roman-catholicism/
47 Fitch: Faithful Presence.
48 Fitch: The End of Evangelicalism? p. 155-56. “From this account of “the threefold body,” de Lubac asks a question to Catholics that can just as easily be asked of evangelicals regarding their belief and practice of the church: Have we become a society of individuals bound together by a form of spectating? Whether it be an evangelical megachurch gospel presentation or a large evangelical gathering to hear the preacher, it could be argued that evangelicals have been caught up in the same spectating of which de Lubac speaks. We too thereby become invisible in the world. In these large events, enhanced with video and “podcast” technologies, the church becomes defined as the meeting of the invisible, which then defines our engagement with society in the same manner. We are forced to engage society by rallying the individuals who gather together on Sunday around a Christian ideal for society. They then are sent out as a voluntarist workforce for this Christian ideal in the world. This makes possible the making of a Master-Signifier out of our engagement with society (“the Christian nation”). For de Lubac, it is at the Eucharistic table where such an invisible church can (and should) be resisted. Here believers are conjoined into the visible body of Christ under the Lordship of the Risen Christ. Here the social reality of His body takes shape as we practice the forgiveness, reconciliation, and mutual sharing of a new justice in Christ’s reign. Here we become the justice of God as opposed to individuals who campaign for it as a slogan in the world. It becomes more difficult to make a Master-Signifier out of God’s work in the world because this work is “us.” But does this visible body engage society? In terms of Christ’s Kingdom, does de Lubac’s threefold body domesticate God’s work in the Eucharist so that the Kingdom can only happen here via the Eucharistic community?”
49 Martos: Deconstructing Sacramental Theology and Reconstructing Catholic Ritual, p. 54: “[...] and Latin versions of the New Testament sometimes translated the Greek Mysterion as sacramentum. <footnote 85 follows> This is especially true of Ephesians 5:32, which speaks about the relationship between Christ and the church. Ambrose cites this verse in An Explanation of the Prophet David to the Emperor Theodosius, 5.23; Commentary on Psalm 37, 27.2; Commentary on Luke’s Gospel 4.826; Widows, 15.89. Tertullian and Cyprian also cite this text, which indicates that this verse read Sacramentum hoc magnum est in Latin versions of the NT even before Jerome’s translation. See also Eph 1:9 and 3:3, and Col 1:27, where mysterion is translated as sacramentum in the Vulgate.”
50 Boersma: Sacred Tapestry, pp. 105-6: “Should an evangelical approach to sacramentality not begin with Scripture rather than with the church? I appreciate that objection, and I am deeply sympathetic with the high regard for Scripture that the question implies. But the careful reader of part 1 of this book will not be surprised by my choice. As we have seen, one of the problems that Yves Congar observed about the late Middle Ages was the separation between Scripture and church. Whether the option was for Scripture (evangelicals) or for the church (Catholics) - for Congar the resolution was wrong in either case. Moreover, I hope to make clear in chapter 7 that it has been within the church that the authority of the canon has been recognized historically. Therefore, it is inconceivable to regard Scripture as somehow separate from the church, with the interpretation of the Bible left to individual believers or scholars. The Bible is, first and foremost, the church’s book. Consequently, Scripture itself, throughout its pages, points us to the church as the living embodiment of the truth. The church, not Scripture, is ‘the pillar and foundation of the truth’ (1 Tim. 3:15). Of course, we should in no way neglect the centrality of Scripture, or its ability to sit in judgment on errors in the church. Scripture, after all, is ‘God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16). We should in no way try to set up the one Epistle to Timothy against the other. Nonetheless, Scripture serves as the sacramental means to build the church; the church is not the sacramental means to build Scripture. Thus, an authentically evangelical view should begin with the church as the primary object of evangelical ressourcement.” <Borsma’s ecclesial univocity, allows the RCC its preeminence in representing his concept of church and scripture unity in reading and producing authority.>
Fitch: Flat Epistemology, https://marginalchristianity.blogspot.com/2020/10/theological-journal-october-12-flat.html
51 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/tag/mariology/
52 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/?s=evangelicals
53 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2018/02/146-younger-evangelicals-fascinated-roman-catholicism/
54 Smith: https://youtu.be/iGSRMCtVw2M?t=2212
55 Smith: Transforming Conversion, <see chapter 8 “The Sacramental Dimension of Conversion” pp.139-156. Here the example of baptism which Smith views atomistically rather than its ultimate systemic use, for baptism holds a different definition for the RCC and Protestants. See Gregg Allison: Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment. Allison follows the RCC catechism and Baptism. The extended title of Smith’s work: Rethinking the Language and Contours of Christian Initiation, reveals a Vatican II train of thought and approach, still, Smith has a valid pursuit exploring the whole Christian tradition and providing the evangelical tradition a broader understanding.
56 Smith: https://youtu.be/iGSRMCtVw2M?t=6448
57 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2014/09/89-is-unity-like-a-sphere-or-a-polyhedron/
Pritchard & De Chirico: http://evangelicalfocus.com/blogs/1000/What_do_you_think_about_Pope_Francis_
Smith: https://youtu.be/iGSRMCtVw2M?t=6498 <Smith claims that Vatican II through the work of Karl Rahner was a reformation of the Catholic church in the previous clip. I disagree.>
58 Simpson: Coming One, pp. 77 – 105, <Chapter 5 the Great Apostacy, The little horn of Daniel 7:20-26 on the fourth beast and its unique nature is not only political, but Simpson also elaborates from Daniel, Paul, and John in the Apocalypse, the central theme for the Papacy in deception as the work of Satan. The mystery of Babylon Rev.17:5; > Old Faith, p. 93 “it is described later in the same chapter, under a second image, as ‘another beast <with> two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon’ (Rev. 13:11). This denotes another side of the Papacy, namely, its ecclesiastical and spiritual organization. The first beast represents its political and temporal power; the second is ecclesiastical. It is really two systems.”
59 Simpson: Old Faith, pp.123-126, <Father Tyrell is mentioned at the bottom of p.124>, “[…] we have already seen this worldwide current, not only among the nominal followers of the New Theology but among the Protestant churches and especially the Church of Rome in connection with that powerful revolt and reaction that has come to be known as Modernism and which has enrolled under its banner the most gifted and efficient minds of the Roman Catholic Church in all countries. […] <quoting Dr. Newman Smythe> […] In this faith in God’s manifestation of Himself in human experience progressive Catholics are certainly in the same stream that has vivified and renewed our whole modern theology.”
Maher: pp. 26-35, <George Tyrrell was excommunicated in 1907 and died in 1909. According to Sawin: Simpson’s Old Faith published in 1911 are messages from the same year. In the scholarly reflective works on Father Tyrrell by Maher and David Wells, He is portrayed in a manner that Hans Boersma misses capturing..>
Wells: The Prophetic Theology of George Tyrrell, Introduction: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaBzEYg1gmcNkobkXQ
60 Wells: pp. 32-42.
61 Boersma: in nouvelle theologie pp. 18-21; here p. 20: “Undoubtedly, there is overlap between Modernism and nouvelle théologie. Both reacted against neo-Thomist theology with its conceptualist understanding of Christian doctrine, its rational apologetic, its logical view of doctrinal development, and its juridical, perhaps even authoritarian ecclesiology. Most importantly, both wanted theology to take subjective experience much more seriously than scholastic theology had been willing to do. It would be erroneous, however, to look to Modernism as one of the main precursors to nouvelle théologie. The fundamental difference between Modernism and nouvelle théologie lay precisely in the latter’s sacramental ontology. Despite their strong disagreement with neo-Thomism, Loisy’s view of history and Tyrrell’s approach to theology presupposed the same gap between nature and the supernatural on which the manualist tradition insisted. Loisy considered history and theology as separate from one another, while Tyrrell divided human discourse and divine revelation. Both Modernist scholars evinced the modern incapacity to reach beyond the natural horizons. In terms of history (biblical exegesis) as well as human discourse (theology), nouvelle théologie took a much bolder approach because of its sacramental reintegration of nature and the supernatural. Rather than focusing on historical-critical exegesis, nouvelle théologie presented a plea for a ressourcement of pre-modern spiritual interpretation, a method that had been based on the conviction that historical appearances contained spiritual, eternal realities. And, rather than collapsing revelation into mystical experience, nouvelle théologie saw doctrinal statements as sacramentally (or analogically) conveying the divine truth that infinitely surpassed human language. The Modernists were largely uninterested in ressourcement; by contrast, ressourcement of the Tradition was indispensable for nouvelle théologie, since this allowed for the recovery of sacramental ontology and thus for the reconnection of theology and life. <Sacramental reintegration of ‘nature and the supernatural.’ Boerma’s appeal to patristic authority and mystery is an interpretation of a distant era through theologians that were certainly grappling with faith and reason and modern subjective assumptions, this is the case of Karl Rahner. Let me put it this way, if the Dominicans looked down upon Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy, what Boersma is proposing would produce a similar reaction. Metaphysics is just that, a totality and prescription, that is not available for ‘cherry picking’ according to the magisterium of the RCC. >
62 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/en/2005/07/the-dignity-of-the-human-person-towards-an-evangelical-reading-of-the-theology-of-personhood-of-vatican-ii/
Simpson: Coming One, pp. 189-90: “These include not only the development of the great Apostasies which we have already described but of conditions or declension in the Christian Church, which the Lord said should mark the time of the end. What do we see today, both in the pulpit and the pew? The loss of the old faith, the rejection of the Bible and the Cross; the blotting out of the line of separation between the Church and the world; the spirit of liberalism in the pulpit and the professor’s chair, and the spirit of worldliness and self-indulgence in the membership of most of our churches; the declining membership of the Protestant churches of Great Britain, and the stationary, or almost stationary condition in most of the churches of America; the growth of the liquor traffic in spite of the modern temperance crusade, to the awful extent of an increase of five gallons per head to every man, woman and child in the United States in the past five years. These are but some of the emphatic lines which church history is writing: today in fulfillment of the Master’s solemn warning: “When the Son of Man cometh shall He find faith on the earth?”
63 Banzhaf: https://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/before-virtue-its-just-story-murdoch.html
64 Tozer: The Pursuit of God, p.106.
65 Van De Walle: Jesus IS the Gospel, p. 10
66 Reynolds: p.275. http://abuss.narod.ru/Biblio/eng/reynolds.htm See Nash: The Meaning of History <Ronald Nash critiques Herder's relativism and conflates the ethical types of relativism with cultural types that are legitimate. Herder’s ethical relativism did provide a base for later social science empirical evidence of cultural difference which shows gospel ubiquity through special revelation identified as God’s sovereignty in sending gospel witness and revival, notwithstanding the human dimension as God works through secondary causes and human freedom which is behind Simpson’s interpretation or Matthew 24:14 Needless to say, Herder provided an important nuance of the relativism of culture.>
67 Jones: A.B., The Unlikely Founder of a Global Movement, p. 251, In David Jones’ annotated bibliography A.B. Simpson’s compilation of Michele Nardi biography is presented
68 Mandujuano: Timeless, “The legacy of the Church in Peru would be incomplete without mention of the work in Lima. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a small group of believers began to gather in the house of a missionary. Soon, this faithful group formed what is known today as the Lince (a district in Lima) Alliance Church. It experienced significant growth toward the end of 1973, when a 15-month evangelistic campaign began. By the end of 1975, attendance had climbed to more than 1,000. Today the Lince Alliance Church has a membership of 5,000, and its members have helped to plant many other churches throughout Lima. There are now nearly 70 Alliance congregations in this ongoing church growth effort. In 1955 the Alliance in Peru celebrated its first Concilio, with 979 attendees representing 44 fellowships. Today The Christian and Missionary Alliance in Peru is a mature church with nearly 300 fellowships and an inclusive membership of more than 120,000.” https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaByP00LagLwtV_gGQ
69 Simpson: Missionary Messages, p. 5: “ But it is a crisis as well as a call. The open doors may suddenly close. The awakened mind of the East calling for bread may be cheated with a serpent and a stone. Western culture is not usually Christian, and if we do not give them Christ, they will soon be found accepting our agnosticism, higher criticism, and cold materialism. The students of Argentine today have almost universally repudiated Romanism which they have tried and found wanting. But they have not accepted Christ.” <reading between the lines, Simpson focuses on particular nations as a call to prayer. A century later it is amazing to see the results in Latin America.>
70 Thank you Pastor Gregg Carrick of Grace Church in Middleburg Heights, Ohio USA for this estimate as Gregg has developed a curriculum for outreach to Roman Catholics used actively in their ministry. https://gracecma.org/staff/
71 The Reformanda Initiative: http://evangelicalfocus.com/europe/4550/In_Rome_evangelical_leaders_reflected_on_Roman_Catholicism
72 Catholic clergy are trained in ecumenical sensitivities, so the Act 1:8 witnesses apply. However, lay students and evangelical ‘Tiber crossers’ provide a much more polemical engagement.
73 Glass: Mysticism in Simpson, In chapter 3 Glass states: “Simpson believed that many holiness leaders were becoming more enthralled with holy living than with knowing Christ” <An Eckhartian monastic critique documented in his earliest discussions to his brothers, Talks of Instruction. > Glass quotes Simpson from “The Epistles to the Galatians and Ephesians, 86. Simpson’s words here reflected from a mystical perspective what seems quite similar to Egan’s definition of mysticism in An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, xxiii, as quoted above: ‘Mysticism in the strict sense involves an experience of God that is somehow direct, immediate, intuitive, and beyond the normal workings of the senses and intellect. The mystic is absolutely certain of God’s presence and speaks about a particular type of spiritual sensation.’” <Augustine’s influence as Glass rightly documents with the doctrine of Union with Christ and the Patristic tradition presents a certain epistemology that the Protestant tradition recovered over the RCC’s empiricism that focuses on the medieval intellect. To use the modern terms rationalism over empiricism demands the awareness of Augustine’s Platonic appropriations over Aristotle in terms of ideas in the mind of God and innate knowledge which humans are born with, cognitive equipment. The central epistemological debate in the high scholastic era between the Franciscans and Dominicans concerned the intellect and the will. Eckhart within the German Dominicans significantly differs from Thomas and provided the ultimate synthesis as an intellectus (mind) based approach providing mysticism its rational dimension missing from Glass's work on Simpson.>
74 Aersten: Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought, here p. 681: “Meister Eckhart offers a kind of a synthesis between ontology and henology. For him ‘one’ is a transcendental property of being, but at the same time a notion that adopts some features of the henological one (see ch. 8.2.3). ‘One is what is first determinated’ (primum determinatum). Because it adds a negation to ‘being.’ Eckhart interprets this negation as the negation of negation, of which the result is that ‘one’ signifies an affirmation and something positive, namely the ‘purity’ and ‘fullness’ of being. Since the ‘one’ is determined in this sense, the one (and not being, which is completely indeterminate) is ‘the first that is productive’ (primum productive), the first principle of every emanation. Unum has more prominent place in Eckhart than in earlier accounts of the transcendentals due to its primordiality”.
75 Senner: Meister Eckhart’s life, p.33-6: “Based on three documents and on a few references in ‘Schwesternbücher’ (legends of sisters), it has become an opinio communis that Meister Eckhart would have been vicar of the master of the Dominican order with a special task of pastoral care for sisters and Beguines from ca. 1314 to 1322. […]. Some of Eckhart’s sermons can be considered as recognizing the existence of the “sect of the free spirit.” However, the speculation is not justified to see in him an inquisitor who persecuted such people. For this, he would have needed a commission given not by the Dominican master general, but by the local bishop.
Harrington: Dangerous Mystic, p.299: “Over the course of the fourteenth century, the movement is later known as Rhineland mysticism gradually gave way to a new form of lay apostolic piety known as the Modern Devotion. Like the beguines, small groups of laypeople, together with some clerics, established houses that cultivated a deeper spiritual life, through communal prayer and Bible reading. Also known as Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, these intentional communities along the Rhine represented a powerful merger of the active and contemplative ideals. Many of the Modern Devotion’s insights and practices were conveyed in the most popular book of the later Middle Ages —, published anonymously in the early fifteenth century. The mysticism of the movement, however, had been thoroughly domesticated and purged of any controversial Eckhartian ideas, further contributing to the master’s eventual disappearance as a spiritual authority.”
76 Snyder: p.231-2. Eckhart’s Talks of Instruction and Augustine’s Confessions <mentioned as read by A.W. Tozer in his bio..>
77 Caputo: Heidegger and Aquinas, pp. 274-5: “Heidegger does not have a merely causal relationship to Meister Eckhart, neither does Meister Eckhart have a merely passing relationship to St. Thomas. Eckhart’s work consists in no small part in driving the Thomistic theses (which he was committed to defend by reason of the professorial post which he held) to their mystical extreme, radicalizing them, pressing them so tightly as to make them yield their mystical sense.”
Eckhart: LW V: p.597, 2–17;
Pope John Paul II, himself a philosopher, spoke approvingly of Eckhart’s central teachings. However, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was more cautious, warning of the “danger . . . of syncretism.”
John Paul II’s remarks and Cardinal Ratzinger’s can be found respectively at:
http://www.eckhartsociety.org/eckhart/eckhart-man
http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/cdfmed.htm
78 Oberman: The Harvest of Medieval Theology, pp. 335-40.
79 Flasch: Meister Eckhart, Philosopher of Christianity, <This robust philosopher emphasis by Flasch is contested by current historical-critical scholars of Eckhart such as Walter Senner. Senner who is a meticulous medieval historian, demonstrates a fair-minded German Dominican brother toward Eckhart, believing the condemnation of Eckhart as unjustified by political alignments and that the use of philosophy was part of any rational argument. Concerning the metaphysical question, this is certainly presupposed. It is clear that Eckhart worked as a theologian who was peculiar within the scholastic context. Medieval philosophy is as characteristically theological as natural theology. With the possible exceptions of Islamic thinkers such as Avicenna and Averroes and the faculty of arts at the University of Paris subject to the 1277 condemnations, most medieval thinkers did not consider themselves philosophers at all: for them, the philosophers were the ancient pagan writers such as Plato and Aristotle. The 1277 condemnations provide the trajectory for Eckhart’s thought to a lesser extent according to Flasch but strongly with French medieval historian Alain de Libera upon the evolution of intellectus. Still, the theological method used logical techniques of the ancient philosophers to address difficult points of doctrine. Eckhart’s use was much more pronounced by his diversity of autorotate not uncommon in the day. This highlights an important aspect of historical theology, often insufficiently addressed from the vista of modernity. Flasch proposes a choice between ‘mystic’ and ‘scholastic,’ where he stresses the spirit of the University of Paris profoundly shaped Eckhart, this is an important observation. It could be argued that Eckhart was an early prototype of a Philosopher of Religion focused on the embryonic scientific stage of an era in its understanding of cosmology and he tried to reconcile this toward his university context apologetically because of the Aristotelian revolution. Albert the Great and Eckhart’s direct mentor, Dietrich of Freiberg (who was notably anti-Thomas), are sources for this. Without stretching Eckhart yet onto another interpretation, this continues a strong research direction.>
80 Banzhaf: Meister Eckhart’s Parisian Quaestio IX p. 71. https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaBXZQX80napZTWvNA
81 Boersma: p. 121-131.
82 Banzhaf: https://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/the-life-imperfect-blessed-consists-in.html
83 Eckhart: Prologus in opus propositionum, n° 4, in: LW I, pp. 167.9 – 168.5, n° 9, in: LW I, pp. 170.14 – 171.5.
84 Flasch: pp. 245-6.
85 Van De Walle: "How High of a Christian Life?" Comparisons with Eastern Orthodoxy and Eckhart abound.
86 Banzhaf: Could God Create A Better World?: p. 11-14: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AqTzp1QRuNTDgaBW40H5-sNWElx0CA
87 Our hearts are restless until we find ourselves in you Oh Lord!
88 Sturlese Opus Tripartitum, pp.129-131. “Without directly implicating Thomas, it is clear the Meister’s target was his Dominican frater’s moral theology, […] Eckhart in this regard brought forward a comprehensive original contribution by 1303, which had at its center a new metaphysical theology (Deus est intelligere), an emerging anthropology (intelligere est incredible), and a radical approach to ethics (the humility of the homo divinus).”
89 Connally: Living without the Why, <see also Connally’s presentation on Eckhart’s view of human sin found here, also a good summary of Eckhart just from the Q&A> CSI Garden of Eden: Meister Eckhart on the ‘Primal Crime’: See- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aaNodnSBKI
90 Eckhart: n° 1, in: LW I, p. 166.1-3; n° 19‒22, in: LW I, pp.177‒179.9-3:
91 Tozer: The Pursuit of God, p.34.
92 Snyder: p.159.
93 Master Eckhart: Parisian questions and prologues, Transl. Armand Maurer: Maurer in his introduction, states, here p. 13: “Eckhart defends the position that in God existence and knowing are identical in reality and perhaps in our thought about them (ratione). […] Verbally at least this contradicts < Thomas De Aquino >, who wrote in his Summa: ‘In God to be and to know are one and the same thing, differing only in our manner of understanding them (secundum intelligentiae rationem). see Eckhart: Quaestiones Parisienses, Quaestio I, n° 1‒12, in: LW V, pp. 37‒48.
94 Paladino: Esse alterius ad alterum et alteri: La dottrina della relazione di Meister Eckhart, Paladino is using modern philosophical categories with the subject and object. Eckhart’s relation does not mean from the modern subject, God is totally ‘subject, realtion works from the Godhead (the hidden) and into the revealed (Deus trinus). Eckhart’s scholastic vocabulary is important to follow here in terms such as form and matter, substance and accident which he extrapolated to the Godhead over the revealed triune God of scripture.
95 Hackett and Hart Weed: p. 228:
96 Banzhaf: Meister Eckhart’s Parisian Quaestio IX p. 71
97 Tozer: Faith Beyond Reason, pp.129-135: <Tozer in the chapter titled “The Spiritual or Secular Tight Rope” favors Mary in the midst of a message from John 6 and the Feeding of the 5000.>
98 Knauf:https://lifeisthismoment.com/2016/05/21/being-at-home-in-two-worlds-meister-eckhart-on-mary-and-martha-and-the-integration-of-the-active-and-contemplative-life/“The interplay of opposites in Eckhart’s thought manifests as a dialectical method within the ancient logical tradition and altogether different from the Hegelian model, although G.W.F Hegel certainly learned from Eckhart’s sermons.”
99 Eckhart: DW I, Sermon 2, pp. 21‒45; DW III, Sermon 86, pp. 472‒503. — see Vinzent: pp. 204‒205:
100 <Simpson and Tozer’s Augustinian Epistemology: The older Alliance sensibilities appropriated a discerning imaginative style that highlights a peculiar Augustinian epistemological stream. This stream disseminated in Quaker-quietist and Wesleyan-holiness traditions, notwithstanding successive expression in Pentecostal streams. Moreover, this Augustinian lineage has a particular Calvinist trajectory through Common Sense Realism (CSR) from the 18th-century philosopher Thomas Reid whom Immanuel Kant disregarded. CSR was the epistemology taught at Knox College, Simpson’s alma mater. According to the info provided by Methodist theologian Dale Coulter:, I propose Simpson’s mystical Augustinian epistemological approach could very well resemble as articulated in the work of Ronald H. Nash, a unique semi-Reformed type of apology initiated within the discipline of analytic philosophy like Alvin Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology following an inductive method. “Nash located himself in a Platonic-Augustinian stream of rationalism, which was the very stream that provided the background to Christian mysticism. His desire to carve out a space between neo-orthodoxy and experientialists like Schleiermacher blinded him to the shared Augustinian framework with Holiness Pentecostals.” <This is generally true, but Nash, my former and esteemed curmudgeon professor, would certainly not like to be found in the same sentence with the aforementioned German theologians unless he is arguing against them. https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/06/evangelical-presuppositionalism
The point here is that Nash’s doctoral thesis: The Light of the Mind. St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge, sources elements traced in Simpson and Tozer. Nash claims that with Augustine, the mind or the intellect provides truth to perception. It does not abstract reality from ‘perception’ as Thomas Aquinas Aristotelian method which influenced the eventual Dominican position of the empirical method over the Franciscan Augustinian informing the epistemology of the Reformers. This is one side of the mystical coin of Simpson and Tozer that was provided by Scripture’s revelation. Yet it becomes more evident for Tozer and Simpson that a ‘faith and reason’ bifurcation was impossible. Needless to say, the Alliance patriarchs never came close to such articulation and conceptual formulation. This remains a strong research direction.
Glass: <Clyde Glass has aptly explained the affective, emotive experiential side of Simpson’s understanding of the doctrine of our Union with Christ, one side of the Augustinian epistemological coin. The other is the pre-modern rationalism documented by Nash. Common Sense Realism philosophy provided this connection and a method, notwithstanding Immanuel Kant's belittling of it, that took a subordinate place in Simpson’s belief ‘faith and reason’ merism, yet was engaged throughout Simpson's work.> Glass states in Ch 1. “Although Simpson did not engage in extended philosophical presentations or hold to this philosophy with the passion of the Princetonians, his own philosophical perspectives were closest to Common Sense Realism. […] Although Simpson was discouraged from following the teachings of German philosophy at Knox, under Caven’s guidance he was encouraged to be open to other new elements in theology. Caven believed that “theology should be a progressive science.” By this, he did not mean that the creedal truths of the faith would be changed, but that new truth would be discovered through more enlightened study and experience of Scripture. Caven expressed, ‘Theology is the same now that it has been in every age of the Christian era, so far as its great truths are concerned, but continually changing by the growth of new truths, which in increasing knowledge of the Bible has furnished.’ Under Caven’s presentations of a developing theology, therefore, Simpson was prompted towards new understandings and experiences of biblical truth. […] Scottish philosophy argued that each person had a ‘moral sense’ comparable in many ways to the physical senses. <so did Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant> These senses provided a ‘common sense for each person, a sense shared among humanity. The average person, according to this philosophy, was able to grasp the real world through the responsible use of this sensory information. Metaphysics was rejected as too speculative, while the empirical principles of scientific investigation were applied to all disciplines. Those who held to Common Sense perspectives viewed the Bible ultimately as a book of facts that could be objectively ordered, and the gospel as fundamentally propositional. Induction, logic, and reason were, therefore, primary tools in determining the teaching of Scripture. The existence of God and reliability of revelation could both be shown through the use of empirical study, reason, and common sense.’ <Glass has highlighted the moderate empiricism of the modern scientific age, yet an Augustinian epistemology would provide ‘innate ideas’ to ones’ vocabulary as shown in the following quote from Simpson.>
Simpson: Old Faith, p. 60 <states the following about theological modernism and its rejection of the authority of the Bible> “ ‘Never mind what the Bible says if you are in search for truth, but trust the voice of God within you,’ This teaching of the New Theology is the apostolic succession of Higher Criticism. Its first effort is to get rid of the authority of the Bible. Understand, there is no objection to the Bible of manifold literature from which we can gather whatever light and comfort we choose to accept. But remember it has no authority for our conscience or our conduct. It is wholly subordinate to our own reason and innate ideas.” <Here the term ‘innate ideas’ is key in understanding Simpson’s Augustinian epistemology, even though he applies it to the higher critic.>.
101 In England: https://www.eckhartsociety.org/ In Germany: http://www.meister-eckhart-gesellschaft.de/ Eckhart is the most inclusive theologian and mystic for religious and atheist alike, his thought crosses boundaries like no other and is articulated in popular spirituality expressions.
102 Banzhaf: https://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/introduction-charles-taylor-is-canadian.html
103 Farrell: How Theology Shaped 20th Century Philosophy.
104 Hart: (Kindle Locations 3472-3489)
105 Smith: Conversion and Sanctification in the Christian & Missionary Alliance, 1992: “The Christian & Missionary Alliance is often viewed as having two distinctives: the deeper life and missions. But it is more accurate to affirm that the C&MA is radically Christ-centred, and the denomination is a tradition that understands Christ as one who by His Spirit enables us to know His life and empowers us to be His servants.”<Smith’s work on Christ our Savior and Christ our Sanctifier in the Alliance has been expanded in his IVP book Beginning Well and is well worth the read.>
106 Van De Walle: Saving the Gospel, p. 6.
107 Van De Walle: Fourfold Gospel, A.T Pierson’s threefold office of Christ, p. 170.
108 The Church replaces Israel, where Israel is only understood as spiritual.
109 De Chirico: http://vaticanfiles.org/fr/2014/10/91-ecumenism-in-all-directions-pope-francis-and-the-unity-of-the-church/
110 Pritchard:http://evangelicalfocus.com/blogs/198/A_Global_Vision_of_the_Gospel_Part_1_of_4_The_Power_of_a_BirdsEye_View
111 Banzhaf: https://globalsouthadvance.blogspot.com/p/the-globalization-of-christian-nation.html
Bibliographie
Primary Sources
Eckhart (Meister): Die lateinischen Werke, Ernst Benz, Karl Christ, Bruno Decker, Heribert Fisher, Bernhard Geyer, Joseph Koch, Ernst Seeberg, Loris Sturlese, Konrad Weiß, and Albert Zimmermann, vols I–V, Stuttgart,1936–2012 (=LW).
_____: Band I, 1: (I) Prologi in Opus Tripartitum, Expositio Libri Genesis et libri Exodi secundum recensionem Cod. Amplon. Fol. 181 [E]. (II) Prologi in Opus Tripartitum et Expositio Libri Genesis secundum Codd. Cusani 21 et Treverensis 72/1056 [CT] (III) Liber Parabolarum Genesis, ed. Konrad Weiß 1936–1964; reprint, 1968.
_____: Band I, 2: (I) Prologi in Opus Tripartitum, Expositio Libri Genesis secundum recensionem Cod. Oxoniensis Bodleiani Laud misc. 222 [L], 1987–2007. (II) Liber Parabolarum Genesis, editio altera ed. Loris Sturlese; (III) Quaestiones Parisienses: Supplementum, Fasc. 6–9, 2012.
_____: Band II: (I) Expositio Libri Exodi, (II) eds. Albert Zimmermann & Loris Sturlese; Sermones et Lectiones super Ecclesiastici cap. 24, (III), Expositio Libri Sapientiae, (IV) Expositio Cant. 1, 6, eds. Heribert Fisher, Joseph Koch & Konrad Weiß, 1992.
_____: Band III: Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem. eds. Karl Christ & Joseph Koch, 1936
_____: Band IV: Magistri Echardi Sermones, eds. Ernst Benz, Bruno Decker, Joseph Koch 1987.
_____: Band V: (I) Collatio in Libros Sententiarum, ed. Josef Quint (II) Quaestiones Parisienses, (III) Sermo die b. Augustini Parisius habitus, (IV) Tractatus super Oratione Dominica, (V) Sermo Paschalis a. 1294, Parisius habita, (VI) Acta et regesta vitam magistri Echardi illustranda, (VII) Processus contra magistrum Echardum, (VIII) Mag. Echardi Responsio ad articulos sibi impositos de scriptis et dictis suis, ed. Loris Sturlese, 1963–2000.
_____: Die deutschen Werke, edited by Josef Quint and Georg Steer, vols I–V, Stuttgart, 1936–2007 (=DW).
_____: Parisian questions and prologues, transl. Armand Maurer, Toronto, 1974.
_____: The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, transl., Maurice, O’ C., Walsche, New York, 2009.
_____: Meister Eckhart Essential Sermons, Treatises, and Defense, transl. Edmund Colledge, ed. Bernard McGinn, Mahwah, (The Classics of Western Spirituality), 1981.
_____: Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, transl. Edmund Colledge, ed. Bernard McGinn, Mahwah, (The Classics of Western Spirituality), 1986.
Fitch, David E.: The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and other Modern Maladies, Grand Rapids, 2005
_____: The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission, Towards an Evangelical Political Theology, Eugene, 2011.
_____: Faithful Presence: Seven Disciplines preparing the Church for Mission, Downers Grove, 2016.
_____: The Church of Us vs. Them: Freedom from Faith That Feeds on Making Enemies, Grand Rapids, 2019.
Simpson, Albert B.: The Old Faith and the New Gospels: Special Addresses on Christianity and Modern Thought, New York, 1911.
_____: The Coming One, New York, 1912.
Smith, Gordon T.: Beginning Well: Christian conversion & authentic transformation, Downers Grove, 2001.
_____: Evangelical, Sacramental and Pentecostal: Why the Church should be all Three, Downers Grove, 2017.
_____: Called to Be Saints: An Invitation To Christian Maturity, Downers Grove, 2014.
_____: Transforming Conversion: Rethinking the Language and Contours of Christian Initiation, Grand Rapids, 2010.
_____: A Holy Meal: The Lord’s Supper in the Life of the Church, Grand Rapids, 2005.
Edited by Smith, Gordon T.: The Lord’s Super: Five Views, Downers Grove, 2005.
_____: Conversion and Sanctification in the Christian & Missionary Alliance, paper, 1992
_____: http://www.gordontsmith.com/video-archive/
_____: https://ecumenism.net/2015/05/gordon-smith-what-can-evangelicals-learn-from-catholics.htm
Tozer, A.W.: The Pursuit of God, Abbottsford, WI, (1948) republished 2019
_____: Faith Beyond Reason: Exploring the Realm Where Things As Possible Only With God, Camp Hill, 1997.
Secondary Sources
Aersten, Jan: Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought: From Philip the Chancellor (CA. 1225) to Francisco Suarez, Leiden (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 107). 2012.
________: Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas, Leiden (Studien Und Texte Zur Geistesgeschichte Des Mittelalters, 52) 1996.
Allison, Gregg R.: Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment, Wheaton, 2014.
Banzhaf, Martin L.: The Globalization of the Christian Nation, Global Shift and Collective Individualism: The Christian Self in the Global Age, 2009.
________: Before Bliss: St. Thomas’ Imperfect Happiness, Global Shift and Collective Individualism: The Christian Self in the Global Age, 2012.
________: Before Virtue: it’s just a story - Murdoch, Hauerwas and Macintyre, Global Shift and Collective Individualism: The Christian Self in the Global Age, 2013.
________: A Shifting Secular Self: Charles Taylor and Language, Global Shift and Collective Individualism: The Christian Self in the Global Age, 2014.
________: Meister Eckhart: Could God Create a Better World? Pontifical University of St. Thomas Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Urbe, Roma, a paper in honor of Rev. Prof. Dr. phil. Walter Senner OP, 2017.
________: Meister Eckhart’s Parisian Quaestio IX: Is rational difference prior to real difference? Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Urbe, Roma, Thesis Moderated by Rev. Prof. Dr. phil. Walter Senner OP, 2017.
________: Out Of The ‘So-called’ Dark Ages: The Participative Metaphysics Behind Nature And Grace. Paper for the Rome Leaders and Scholars Network of the Reformanda Inititive, 2018.
Boersma, Hans: Nouvelle Théologie & Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery, Oxford, 2010.
________: Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacred Tapestry, Kindle edition. 2011.
Burckhardt, Jakob: Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy) (English translation, by S. G. C. Middlemore, in 2 vols., London, 1878.
Caputo, John D.: Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay in Overcoming Metaphysics, New York, 1982.
Chon, Joseph Joon-Hong: Albert B. Simpson’s Theology of Evangelism, (The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary PhD Dissertation), 2003
Connolly, John M.: Living Without Why: Meister Eckhart’s Critique of the Medieval Concept of Will, Oxford, 2014.
Coulter: Dale M.: Ronald H. Nash’s Evangelicalism, First Things, 2014.
De Chirico, Leonardo: Evangelical Theological Perspectives on Post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, Bern, 2003.
_____: The Blurring of Time distinctions in Roman Catholicism, Themelios, 29/2
_____: The Vatican Files, http://vaticanfiles.org/?lang=en, blog 1999-2019
Fabro, Cornelius: “The Transcendentality of Ens -Esse and the Ground of Metaphysics.” International Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1966): pp. 389-427.
Farrell, Frank B.: How Theology Shaped 20th Century Philosophy, Cambridge, 2019.
Flasch, Kurt: Meister Eckhart, Philosopher of Christianity, (Translators: Anne Schindel and Aaron Vanides), New Haven 2015.
Glass, Clyde McLean, Mysticism and contemplation in the life and teaching of Albert Benjamin Simpson, (Marquette University Doctoral Dissertation) 1997.
Gillespie, Michael A.: The Theological Origins of Modernity, Chicago, 2008.
Hackett, Jeremiah and Hart Weed, Jennifer: From Aquinas to Eckhart on Creation, Creature, and Analogy in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah Hackett, Leiden 2013 (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 500–1800, 36).
Hankey, Wayne: Aquinas at the Origins of Secular Humanism? Sources and Innovation in Summa theologiae I, Question 1, Article 1, Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2007): pp. 17–40
Harrington, Joel F.: Dangerous Mystic: Meister Eckhart’s Path to the God Within, New York, 2018.
Hart, David Bentley: The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, Grand Rapids, 2003
Jones, David P.: A.B.: The Unlikely Founder of a Global Movement, Colorado Springs, 2019.
Kerr, Fergus: “A Different World: Neoscholasticism and its Discontents”, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 8/2, pp 128-148.
Kilcrease, Jack: Lutheran Theology and the Metaphysical question, Theologia Crucis blog, 2014.
Knauf, Christopher M.: Being at Home in Two Worlds: Meister Eckhart on Mary and Martha and the Integration of the Active and Contemplative Life, Life in This Moment Blog, 2016.
Mandujuano, Israel: Timeless: The C&MA Church of Peru, Alliance Life, 2008
Maher, Anthony: The Theology of Witness: A Critical Exposition of George Tyrrell’s Pastoral Theology (In carceribus denuo adsumus), Thesis, Australian Catholic University, 2011.
Martos, Joseph: Deconstructing Sacramental Theology and Reconstructing Catholic Ritual, Eugene, 2015.
Milbank, John: Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Malden, 2nd ed, 2006.
______: Beyond Secular Order, Malden, 2013
______: Reformation 500: Any Cause for Celebration? Open Theology 2018; 4: pp.607–629.
Moran, Dermot: Meister Eckhart in 20th-century Philosophy, in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah Hackett, Leiden 2013, (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 500 –1800, 36), pp. 669‒698.
Nash, Ronald H.: The Meaning of History, Nashville, 1998.
______: The Word of God and The Mind of Man, Grand Rapids, 1982.
______: The Light of the Mind, St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge, Lexington, 1969.
Oberman, Heiko: The Harvest of Medieval Theology, Grand Rapids, 3rd edition, 1983.
Otten, Willemien: ‘Review of The Suspended Middle. Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural,’ Ars Disputandi 8 (2008), 124–125.
Paladini, Chiara: Esse alterius ad alterum et alteri: La dottrina della relazione di Meister Eckhart, Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie, 63, 2016, pp. 458‒482.
Payton, James R.: Getting the Reformation Wrong, Downers Grove, 2010.
Pritchard, Greg & De Chirico, Leonardo: What do you think of Pope Francis?, Evangelical Focus, 2015.
______: A Global Vision of the Gospel: The Power of a Bird’s-Eye View (I), Evangelical Focus, 2015.
Pyles, Franklin A.: The Missionary Eschatology of A.B. Simpson, From Birth of a Vision, ed by David F. Hartzfeld Charles Neinkirchen (His Dominion Supplement No. 1), pp. 29-47.
Reynolds, Andrew: “What is Historicism?” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science; Oct 99, Vol. 13 Issue 3, pp. 275-287.
Sawin, J.S.: An Introduction to the Writings of Albert Benjamin Simpson, 1983.
Schürmann, Reiner: Broken Hegemonies, transl. Reginald Lilly, Bloomington, 2003.
Senner, Walter: Meister Eckhart’s life, training, career, and trial, in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah Hackett, Leiden 2013, (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 50–1800, 36), pp. 7–84.
Smith, David, J,: Albert Benjamin Simpson: An Integrated Spirituality with Christ as the Centre, AWF Resources, 1998.
Snyder, James L.: In Pursuit of God, Camp Hill, PA, 1991.
Sturlese, Loris: Homo divinus. Philosophische Projekte in Deutschland zwischen Meister Eckhart und Heinrich Seuse, Stuttgart, 2007.
_____: The origins of the Opus Tripartitum in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah Hackett, Leiden 2013, (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 500–1800, 36)
Taylor, Charles: A Secular Age, Cambridge, 2007.
Van De Walle, Bernie A.: The Heart of the Gospel: A. B. Simpson, the Fourfold Gospel, and Late Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Theology (Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 106), Eugene, 2009.
_____: “How High of a Christian Life? A. B. Simpson and the Classic Doctrine of Theosis.” Wesleyan Theological Journal 43.2 (Fall 2008) 136–53.
_____: Jesus IS the Gospel, Part 1 Lecture given at regional AWF Symposiums in 2018-19.
_____: Saving the Gospel, Part 2 Lecture given at regional AWF Symposiums in 2018-19.
Vinzent, Markus: The Art of Detachment, Leuven 2011.
Wax, Trevin: 3 Definitions of “Secular” and Why They Matter for Our Mission, Gospel Coalition, 2014.
Wells, David F.: The Prophetic Theology of George Tyrrell, (America Academy of Religion, Studies in Religion 22), 1981.
