In this post, I am going to look at the way Eugenia Constantinou differentiates between the Western phronema (mindset/worldview) of Catholicism and Protestantism and the Easter phronema of Orthodoxy. Let’s dive in…
Chapter 3: Phronema in the Western Christian Tradition
Since most of my readers are probably from the Western Christian tradition, most of what Constantinou says in this chapter shouldn’t really be new. Still, it probably will evoke responses like, “Actually, that’s right—I never thought about it that way before.” Constantinou begins by stating the obvious: Although the different branches of Christianity all share the same Scriptures, they nevertheless don’t share a true unity of the faith. The reason why “…is because that which shapes one’s theological perspective is not the Scriptures themselves but the mindset through which one reads and applies those Scriptures” (37).
This is something that isn’t really acknowledged within Protestantism, which is largely based on the concept of Sola Scriptura. Protestants believe that Scripture ALONE is the sole authority in the Christian life, but they fail to see that Scripture is not self-interpretive. Therefore, as Constantinou says, the concept of Sola Scriptura makes a “unified phronema” (mindset/worldview) impossible.
Now, what does that mean and why is that the case?
Simply put, when you read Scripture, it isn’t just handing you a pre-packaged, clearly defined worldview on a platter. Despite what some may say, it never truly is the case of, “Scripture says it, I believe it.” Some Western Christians (particularly of a more Fundamentalist strain) may say that, but in reality that just isn’t the case. In reality, anytime you are reading Scripture, you are the one interpreting it—you are already coming to the Scripture from a particular worldview, with a wide range of assumptions and views, through which you read and interpret. Therefore, the question is “How do you know you are interpreting correctly?”
The fact is, reading and studying Scripture does affect and shape your mindset and worldview, but it is wrong (as Sola Scriptura tends to imply) to think that Scripture just gives you a pre-packaged worldview that you must “believe,” because if you don’t then you’re “subverting biblical authority.” Yet, because Protestantism essentially is based on the concept of Sola Scriptura, most Western Protestants fail to see this. What they think is just a “pre-packaged biblical worldview” that they must accept often is just their own Western-shaped worldview that they are imposing on Scripture. And because they mistake the “biblical worldview” for their own assumptions, they fail to allow Scripture to actually shape their mindset and worldview.
Obviously, what I said is just in general and certainly not true for every single Western Christian across the board! But that does get to the heart of the problem with the notion of Sola Scriptura—Scripture ALONE cannot provide a unified Christian worldview/mindset. If you truly insist on Sola Scriptura, you’re going to inevitably run into problems.
Protestant Phronema About Justification
One concrete example Constantinou gives to illustrate this the Protestant emphasis on justification. In Protestantism, salvation is seen very much in legal terms: (1) You are guilty of sin, (2) The punishment for that offense is a death sentence, (3) God’s Son Jesus, though, accepts your punishment and pays the price/atones for your sins, (4) God then declares you are righteous (although, technically you really aren’t—it’s just Jesus’ righteousness). Therefore, (5) since no one is justified by works, there’s nothing you can really do to become truly Christ-like and righteous—it’s all God’s doing.
Now, given the fact that Martin Luther (and John Calvin) were both lawyers, it should come as no surprise that they described justification in legal terms. And let’s be clear, that legal description of salvation and justification really is found in Paul’s letters. The problem is that isn’t the only way salvation and justification are presented in the Bible. Yet Luther, Calvin, and as it turns out throughout most of Protestant history, that has been the only way it has been presented.
The fact is the word we translate as “justification” or “to justify” comes from the Greek word dikaiosyne, which has to do with righteousness. My professor Gordon Fee often lamented how we don’t really have a good English word to capture what the verb “to justify” really means. He suggested “to righteousize”—I liked that so much, I put that into my own translation of the New Testament! The point, though, is that when understood at “to righteousize,” what we instantly see is that “justification” has a lot more to it than God simply declaring we are righteous—it is about how God actually makes us righteous.
I’m not going to get into an in-depth discussion on the issue of justification here, but my point is that when you understand salvation/justification (righteousnessization???) solely through a legal framework, you’re going to miss a whole lot. The fact is that the language of the law court is only one of several ways the New Testament presents salvation. There is the sacrificial language of the Temple, in which the sacrifice isn’t so much a legal price to pay for sins as it is an offering that makes full reconciliation with God possible. Then there is the medical language of the hospital, in which sin is a sickness and Jesus is the Great Physician who actually restores you to spiritual health.
Therefore, a truly unified phronema when it comes to understanding salvation requires taking all of these different ways that explain salvation into account, and not just focusing on one, at the exclusion of the others.
Catholic Phronema
When it comes to Catholicism, Constantinou highlights four aspects of the Catholic phronema/mindset that differs from that of the Orthodox. The first is that of the centrality of the Pope in Rome and the conformity to official Catholic teaching and papal decrees. At the risk of sounding too simplistic, Catholics (at least, officially) believe what the Pope tells them to believe—what he says is authoritative.
The second aspect is Catholicism’s emphasis on both faith and reason as the building blocks of theology. Constantinou says this way of thinking goes back to Augustine and really came to full fruition during the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. To be clear, Orthodoxy doesn’t reject reason and intellect. What it says, though, is that when it comes to understanding God, intellect and reason can never get you there. The Catholic mindset, Constantinou says, has the view that truths about God or actual knowledge about God can be attained through the application of human deductive reasoning. Or in other words, “If one applies the correct reasoning, one will arrive at the correct theological beliefs” (45). Thus, the Catholic (and by extension Protestant as well) approach to theology is fundamentally an intellectual exercise. By contrast, Orthodoxy see theology as a fundamentally spiritual endeavor.
The third aspect of the Catholic phronema/mindset is Catholicism’s idea of the development of doctrine. In other words, it believes that as theologians continue to use their reason and intellect, they are able to come to a fuller understanding of theological truth. Simply put, with the use of reason, new doctrines can be developed. By contrast, Orthodoxy maintains that the fullness of the truth of the Gospel has already been revealed and it is the Orthodox Church’s duty to preserve what has been handed down, not to develop new doctrines.
The two most obvious examples of this kind of thing is the Catholic teaching regarding (A) the Immaculate Conception, and (B) the Bodily Assumption of Mary. To be clear, the Immaculate Conception states that Mary was born of a virgin, because Mary was without sin, because she had to be without sin if she was to give birth to Jesus. Once that was declared Catholic dogma, it was only a matter of time until Catholic theologians reasoned that if Mary was without sin, then she wouldn’t have died…therefore she must have been bodily assumed into heaven (although Pope Pious XII stopped short of declaring she actually never died). To those two Catholic doctrines, Orthodoxy basically says, “No, neither one was part of the original Tradition that was passed down by the apostles. You guys just made that up!”
The fourth aspect of the Catholic phronema/mindset is its own legalistic mindset when it comes to a number of things. In Catholicism, one is only officially declared a “saint” after a lengthy, legal process within Catholic Canon law, whereas in Orthodoxy, every Christian is considered a “saint.” Orthodoxy doesn’t even have “Canon law.”
Another example of this legalistic mindset is seen in Catholicism’s understanding of salvation and atonement, particularly seeing sin as a debt that has to be paid (in this respect, the typical Protestant view of justification is actually taken from Catholicism’s understanding). Simply put, Catholicism’s Atonemenet theology views sin as a debt that needs to be legally resolved and thus views the Church as the legal entity by which redemption and justification are dispensed. Therefore, things like the sacraments (or certain works of penance) are seen as assisting in “paying off your sin debt,” so to speak. This, by the way led to the Catholic doctrine (remember that “development of doctrine” thing!) of Purgatory, where it was declared that Christians who had committed any sin after their baptism had to go to a place to purge away their remaining sin before they were allowed into heaven.
All of that is an extension of the Catholic mindset that sees sin both as a debt and as something that disrupts the moral order that needs to be paid off in order to restore God’s moral order.
By contrast, as Constantinou puts it, “The Orthodox think of sin not as an offense against God that demands punishment or restitution, but primarily as an illness that needs healing” (51). Sin distorts the relationship between human beings and God (and other human beings), but sin can never detract from or diminish the glory or majesty of God. God didn’t send Jesus to pay off a debt that diminished His glory (if that was the case, that would me He didn’t save us because He loved us, but because He was a megalomaniac!).
Now, obviously, Orthodoxy believes that Jesus Christ came to die for our sins and that his death was redemptive. But Orthodoxy emphasizes that the goal of all that wasn’t just to “pay off a legal debt.” Again, as Constantinou puts it, “Christ came for the life of the world, not to pay a price demanded by the Father, not because somehow the majesty of God was violated, and certainly not because of an imbalance occurred in the universe that could be corrected only by payment in blood through the death of the Son. Those are distortions and exaggerations rooted in medieval thought. Christ sacrificed Himself out of love, not out of necessity” (55).
The goal of Christ’s sacrifice, suffering, death, and resurrection is not the paying off of a debt, but rather the union of the human and the divine in Christ. That difference between the way Catholics/Protestants tend to view the atonement and the way Orthodox do is a really, really big difference. If your mindset is always on, “How is my sin debt getting paid off?” you’re going to have a lot of inner guilt and anxiety, either of the Catholic or Protestant variety. Your entire mindset tends to devolve to, “Am I really out of trouble?” By contrast, the Orthodox mindset that emphasizes God send Jesus because He loves you and wants you to be in full union with Him—well, then, you can fully appreciate what the Apostle Paul is talking about in Romans 8:31-39:
31 What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32 He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? 33 Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who RIGHTEOUSIZES. 34 Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. 35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? …37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Like I said in my previous post, I’m not saying that only Orthodox Christians get this. This mindset isn’t the sole property of Orthodoxy. There are plenty of Catholic and Protestant Christians who understand this. What I am saying is that, by and large, is that this particular understanding tends to be obscured somewhat in Catholicism and Protestantism as a whole, precisely because of a more legalistic mindset when it comes to things like salvation and justification.
In my next post, I’ll look at what Constantinou has to say about the Orthodox phronema/mindset in chapters 4-5 of her book.
I would argue that NT Wright fits your definition of “Orthodox,” even though he’s Anglican, as was Lewis. Wright has taken a lot of grief from Calvinists like John Piper and Michael Horton over his “new perspective” on Paul, in which he challenges the traditional Calvinistic definition of justification for one he believes is more robust and biblical.
Wright says that Luther and Calvin were basically looking for biblical answers to medieval Roman Catholic questions, thus has advocated reading Paul primarily through the lens of the OT and the gospels rather than primarily through the lens of Luther and Calvin, as most Protestants tend to do.
Pax.
Lee.
Yep, exactly. I would agree. I think there are “official” differences between who is Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. But I think you can tell when Christians of any branch or denomination have a truly “Orthodox” mindset–it isn’t the sole property of those who are officially Orthodox. It is the mind of Christ.