A truth-claim regarding (for instance) the simplicity of God is “necessary” in that it is integral to the definition of Him: God would not be God were He not metaphysically simple. On a classical theist account, to be actus purus, without unrealized potentialities, is simply what it means to be God. What this means is that the claims of Protestant scholasticism in the context of “theology proper” are, in principle, likely to be uniformly applicable across time and space. If those scholastic claims are true, they are eternally true. But obviously not all claims made by Protestant scholastics are of this sort. Many claims in this tradition have to do with contingent aspects of human experience. 

Over the last few years, Protestant arguments about political theology have fallen into a familiar pattern. Debates usually go like this: one interlocutor asserts a widely-taken-for-granted proposition about democracy, racial equality, the Constitution, or some other lodestar. Immediately after, a chorus of (usually online) voices immediately pops up to criticize the historical situatedness of that ideal. You appeal to “Reformational” values, but nobody talked like you until the 20th century. If you REALLY want to take the theology of the Reformers seriously, why are you ignoring their social and political teachings against the Jews and heretics and blasphemers?

Consider, for instance, the following exchange:

X: Our constitutional tradition of religious liberty protects everyone. It’s worth defending. And it has philosophical antecedents in our American and Christian tradition.

Y: The Reformed executed Michael Servetus for denying the Trinity, and that was basically a good thing (though we can fight about whether it made prudential sense). Liberal neutrality is a lie. Nobody would have defended abstract “religious liberty” up until a few decades ago.

This is a fairly representative example of these arguments. And the basic “shape” of this argument lies behind a whole host of subsidiary clashes over “Christian nationalism,” the political philosophy of “liberalism,” gender roles, ethnic diversity, and so forth. Both sides claim to speak from within the same theological milieu, and often appeal to the same authorities, but reach radically different substantive conclusions.

The ur-question beneath all these is a question regarding Christian tradition—posed in a distinctively Protestant key—fought out among those who both claim to take their tradition seriously. Interlocutor X appeals to a form of the Protestant tradition as it has developed up to the present day; interlocutor Y wishes to re-norm that tradition by reference to older patterns and practices. I’ve explored this larger question of tradition elsewhere, and don’t intend to simply regurgitate those points here:[1] part of this contestation is simply what it means to stand within a living tradition.

What seems notable, though, is that this fight is playing out among those interested in the methodological practice of Protestant retrieval, specifically the revisiting and retranslation of primary-source texts from the era of Protestant scholasticism. Interlocutors X and Y, for the most part, are both interested in returning ad fontes—to the sources—in search of a deeper understanding of the theological-intellectual tradition to which they profess allegiance. And yet they reach very different conclusions in the course of that process.

In what follows, I want to explore a rather basic question: what do we do when we do Protestant theological retrieval? This question isn’t often posed as such. But much hinges on the answer.

***

The interest in Protestant retrieval over the last few years has been driven by a number of factors, including the desire to build out a more intellectually rigorous Protestant identity relative to the Catholic philosophical tradition. Such ressourcement efforts were intensified and accelerated by the 2015–2016 debates over the “eternal subordination of the Son” or “eternal relation of authority and submission” within the Triune life of the Godhead. Converging with this was a recovery of “classical theism”—spearheaded by James Dolezal, Matthew Barrett, and others—over against models of “social trinitarianism” or “theistic mutualism.”

The argument of such retrieval proponents was straightforward: if virtually the entirety of the Protestant tradition was agreed on certain theological claims (such as divine simplicity, or the equality of persons in the immanent Trinity) up until the last few decades, then this should count as strong evidence against a revisionist view. And this critique of prevailing trends was well taken. It did not take long for retrieval proponents to discover, for instance, how much evangelical/Protestant theology had tacitly assumed Karl Barth’s critique of classical natural theology—despite Barth’s own divergence from prior streams of Protestant thought. What should be underscored, however, is that most of these Protestant retrieval efforts were focused on a comparatively narrow band of theological topics, mostly within the domain of “theology proper.” (Richard Muller’s well-known case for the analogia entis as a principle of Reformed scholasticism comes to mind.[2])

In recent years, there has been an effort to expand the scope of this retrieval into other areas of doctrine, especially material pertaining to social and political order. And it is precisely this “expanded retrieval” that has sparked so many of today’s controversies. To take just one example, Zachary Garris—author of the recent book Honor Thy Fathers: Recovering the Anti-Feminist Theology of the Reformers—defends an “expanded retrieval” position with admirable candor:

In recent years, the Reformed world has seen a resurgence of interest in recovering the doctrinal work of these men and others from the shadows of centuries gone by. This work of retrieval often requires courage, as we modern heirs of the Reformers inevitably discover that some of what we thought to be “Reformed” proved to be theological novelty in the face of the primary sources. We often discover that 19th- and 20th-century social movements and cultural pressures have successfully smuggled their ideas into the bedrock of our thinking.[3]

Elsewhere, Garris emphasizes that while “[i]t is easy to praise a Knox or a Calvin of the history books,” if they lived in the present age “many Christians would surely reject them for being too controversial and offensive.”[4] For Garris, “follow[ing] the historic Reformed teaching on male rule in the home and its applications to the church and the civil government” simply follows from a due regard for “conservative, Reformed theology and practice.”[5] In the same vein, Stephen Wolfe—author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, which argues in similar fashion for a revival of early-modern Protestant political theory—characterizes Garris’s book as “forc[ing] us to choose between the safe retrieval of doctrine alone and the dangerous retrieval of both faith and practice.”[6]

There’s a logic to this move. Framing the question in this way implies that somewhere in the course of recent time, an “authentic” Protestant tradition was abandoned in favor of a limp modern substitute. From then on, the argument runs, the “authentic” tradition did not develop in meaningful ways, but basically withered on the vine. “Expanded retrieval” proponents tend to locate this point of departure in what Rusty Reno characterizes as the emergence of the “postwar consensus”—a post-World War II “atmosphere of opinion” in which “[w]e continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist.”[7]

And so, the battle lines are drawn. Interlocutor X and interlocutor Y understand themselves as standing within a shared theological tradition, but are fundamentally separated by their views of the contours of that tradition. The former camp wishes to retrieve historic Protestant resources to critique modern doctrinal deviations like “eternal functional subordinationism”; the latter camp asks “why not retrieve even more?” (I hope that both of these camps can recognize themselves in this framing.)

That being said, I’ll put my own cards on the table: I don’t find the “expanded retrieval” position to have much a priori force. That is to say: I don’t think there’s a good reason to grant normative priority to the Reformers’ claims about social and political order simply because they were the Reformers’ claims. Nor do I think that proponents of theological retrieval are acting inconsistently when they take this stance.

This is because it simply isn’t true that all claims asserted from within a particular intellectual tradition are of the same sort. 

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