Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Sic et Non

I'm the family dishwasher. When we were packing up my tiny studio apartment (with 6,000 books) before our wedding, DW-to-be opened my kitchen cabinets and was shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that they were filled with videos of 1930s and ’40s horror movies. The connubial division of labor was decided right there: She would cook and I would clean up.

Now, I don't have the spiritual chops to fill that dishwashing time with contemplative raids on the infinite or Zen exercises in Being Here Now. So to redeem the time, I listen to paranormal podcasts, theological disquisitions, Mormon colloquia, and lectures from iTunes U—the usual stuff—on the iPod I wrested from my oldest. Last night I was listening to a podcast on "Christ and Culture" from the folks at Reformed Forum, mostly OPC Presbyterians associated with Westminster Theological Seminary. (For the record, I am far from Reformed. Some of the favorite theological loci of Calvinists give me the willies. If this Catholic has any favorites among Protestants, it has to be the Lutherans—of which more anon. But I do like to broaden my horizons, and before I started listening to these guys a few years back, I had no notion of who Herman Bavinck, Abraham Kuyper, or Cornelius Van Til were. While I can't say they've become friends, they have taken a place on my notional reading list, though I'll probably be eighty-five, Deo volente, by the time I get around to them.)

Now the point of all this, if there is one, is that that podcast was full of dichotomies—the city of God vs the city of man, saving grace vs common grace, church vs state, divine law vs natural law—reflections, for some of the participants, of the "antithesis" between God and Satan, the elect and the damned.

Then this morning I started (again—maybe this time I'll get past Irenaeus) reading The Faith of the Early Fathers by William A. Jurgens, a three-volume catena of patristic passages. The first group of passages comes from the Didache, perhaps the earliest post–New Testament Christian writing. The first sentence of the Didache reads:
There are two ways, one of life and one of death: and great is the distance between the two ways.
Most of us, I think—and for better or worse, that includes me—are wary of such stark alternatives. Our post-Hegelian mindset inclines us to look for the synthesis that overcomes antitheses by transcending them. We search for a way to "live into the tension," to take a "broader" or "higher" view, to "nuance" the choices we're confronted with. "Black-and-white thinking" is crude or simplistic or, Times forbid, "fundamentalistic." The sic et non has given place to the coincidentia oppositorum.

So sometimes it's good to be reminded (even by Calvinists) that the search for synthesis has its limits. Because, in the words of noted theologian Bob Dylan,
You’re gonna have to serve somebody.
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord,
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.