Richard Hooker, Tradition, and the Death Penalty
Yesterday Pope Francis revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church in several places. Most notably, he basically removed the "wiggle room" found in the original version with regard to the death penalty, saying that it was "inadmissible" in at least all modern situations (whereas before, the Catechism said it was likely improper in all modern situations). This should not have come as much of a surprise--as Jack Jenkins notes in his piece, Francis more or less telegraphed that he was going to do this last year, and both Popes John Paul II and Benedict have been consistent in their opposition to capital punishment.
The merits of this move (which I support fully, for what it is worth) are less interesting to me than the meta-conversation surrounding it. Immediately, the usual suspects jumped to the fore, decrying the move as a repudiation of previous teaching, and thus a repudiation of the Magisterium of the church, and thus creating a divide by zero error that will destroy the universe much like the plot of the movie Dogma--or something like that.
Let's begin with the actual text of the revised Catechism:
Paragraph 2267. Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.
Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state.
Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.
Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”, and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.
Structurally, I would argue that paragraph sets forth the vision of tradition articulated by late 16th Century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker. Hooker insists that we begin our consideration of any matter of faith with the Scriptures. That principle is usually framed in a proto-evangelical, "Bible alone" sort of way, but I think it is more faithful to the vision of Hooker to think of this in terms of what I have called the "Franciscan hermaneutic"--the idea that the message of Jesus as set forth in the Gospels is the core of the Christian faith. This message is situated into the broader scope of Scripture, and so that Gospel message is contextualized in the prelude (i.e. the Old Testament) and postlude (i.e. the rest of the New Testament), but at the end of the day it is the Gospels that set forth our rule of faith.
But, those statements in the Gospels never have self-evident meaning or are self-executing. We must read them, understand them, interpret them, and apply them to our concrete situation. This is what Hooker calls "reason." Critically, for Hooker, reason is not a "criteria" or separate element of the faith, but a necessary and unavoidable component of faith, as it is only via reason is any other component of the faith comprehensible. So, when people apply reason to the message of the Gospel, we get a series of extrapolations and applications of that message to concrete circumstances. The collective body of those extrapolations and applications form the tradition.
Now, the tradition is entitled to substantial deference, and in the main has a proven track record that requires caution when people propose futzing around with it. But, and here is where Hooker departs from at least the implication of folks like Aquinas, reason is not a singular, static process that will give a consistent result regardless of context or circumstances. Hooker, likely influenced by the Renaissance and the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, understood that human knowledge, both individually and collectively, grows and advances. When Aquinas tells us that women are the result of a lack of full fetal development, he's simply got his facts wrong. That's just objectively not true, and thus the conclusions that Aquinas draws from those erroneous facts, that women are inferior to me, is also not true.
But, and here I would splice in some Girardian insight, there is also another factor at work. The message of the Gospel is not something that just magically transforms us in a single moment. It's more like the ocean eroding a beach--we are slowly transformed as we become conformed to Christ and stripped of our attachments to the institutions and structures that Girard calls "the Sacred" and what also could be called "Empire." This process works both on the individual dimension and in the collective dimension. As a result, if the Church is being faithful to its charge from Jesus, it should be progressively stripping itself of its attachment to the Sacred, revealing elements of itself that formerly seemed unproblematic but are now exposed as contrary to the Christian project. The Church should become more faithful to Jesus over time, not because we are somehow inherently more holy than our ancestors, but because we can stand on the shoulders of 2,000 years of the Spirit's work on us collectively.
Bringing all of this together, when we find ourselves in a situation where our understanding of the Gospel, produced as a result of our reason that incorporates all of our diverse bodies of knowledge, and enlightened by the action of the Spirit that is stripping us of our attachments to corrupt structures and habits, conflicts with the traditional understanding of a question, then the tradition must give way and our new insights must be grafted into the tradition. This, it seems to me, is precisely what those four paragraphs in the new version of the Catechism are saying--we used to say that the death penalty was OK, but our reflection on Jesus's message of human dignity and non-violence, done in light of our present situation and knowledge, shows us that we can no longer affirm the morality of the death penalty.
So, no problem. Except:
Having said that, as Grimes and O'Brien point out, this idea of a singular unchanging tradition wasn't just invented from whole cloth by Ross Douthat and his fellow travelers; it was, and in important ways still is, the Roman Catholic Church's understanding of itself and its own tradition. This narrative is far older than the last several decades, going back at least to the First Vatican Council and more likely to the Counter-Reformation. Traditionalists cling to the notion of this unchanging tradition because that's the official position of the Roman Catholic Church when it is convenient for it to be so. And post Vatican II it has been convenient to do so, in particular, any time anything about sex and gender crop up.
Contrary to the pearl-clutching from conservatives like Douthat, the track record of Pope Francis provides essentially no support for the idea that he is interested in applying the rationale used in the death penalty context to birth control, women's ordination, LGBT issues, and the like. But conservatives are, of course, completely correct that there is no reason in principle that the same process could not be used in those contexts. But all of that is to say in another way that the future is undetermined, at least on this side of eternity. For what it is worth, I think that the conservatives are probably right that, eventually, the Roman Catholic Church will change its position on the contested gender and sexuality questions, because I believe the current positions to be founded primarily on erroneous factual predicates that will become increasingly impossible to seriously defend. But in any event, there is not that much anyone can do about it one way or the other, especially in a church where all decision-making is ultimately in the hands of one person, and that one person is almost surely Not You.
I said this last night on Twitter as something of a joke, but upon further reflection it is basically true:
The notion pushed pre-Vatican II that the Roman Catholic Church of 1950 was the same as the one in 1550 or 1050 or 350 does not stand up to rigorous historical scrutiny. But at least it is facially plausible if you don't dig into the history, especially if you shake your keys and say "development of doctrine" a la Newman (which is another post). But it's just not plausible post-Vatican II. Not unless you want to reduce the message of Jesus to "non-contraceptive PIV sex only," in which case you no longer have the Gospel, but a fertility cult.
If anything positive comes out of this (other than, of course, what's left of the moral force of the Roman Catholic Church applied to the abolition of the death penalty--though I am deeply skeptical of this manifesting itself in the United States), it will be the opening of a space for a more honest conversation within Roman Catholic circles about the nature of tradition, without the constant reference to comforting fictions. I think that would be a good thing, not just for Roman Catholicism, but for all Christian traditions and denominations, especially those that take seriously the idea of tradition in the first place. It would be enormously valuable for all sides to have a good-faith, clear eyed conversation partner in Rome. But, to get to that omelet, some eggs need to be broken.
The merits of this move (which I support fully, for what it is worth) are less interesting to me than the meta-conversation surrounding it. Immediately, the usual suspects jumped to the fore, decrying the move as a repudiation of previous teaching, and thus a repudiation of the Magisterium of the church, and thus creating a divide by zero error that will destroy the universe much like the plot of the movie Dogma--or something like that.
Let's begin with the actual text of the revised Catechism:
Paragraph 2267. Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.
Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state.
Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.
Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”, and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.
Structurally, I would argue that paragraph sets forth the vision of tradition articulated by late 16th Century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker. Hooker insists that we begin our consideration of any matter of faith with the Scriptures. That principle is usually framed in a proto-evangelical, "Bible alone" sort of way, but I think it is more faithful to the vision of Hooker to think of this in terms of what I have called the "Franciscan hermaneutic"--the idea that the message of Jesus as set forth in the Gospels is the core of the Christian faith. This message is situated into the broader scope of Scripture, and so that Gospel message is contextualized in the prelude (i.e. the Old Testament) and postlude (i.e. the rest of the New Testament), but at the end of the day it is the Gospels that set forth our rule of faith.
But, those statements in the Gospels never have self-evident meaning or are self-executing. We must read them, understand them, interpret them, and apply them to our concrete situation. This is what Hooker calls "reason." Critically, for Hooker, reason is not a "criteria" or separate element of the faith, but a necessary and unavoidable component of faith, as it is only via reason is any other component of the faith comprehensible. So, when people apply reason to the message of the Gospel, we get a series of extrapolations and applications of that message to concrete circumstances. The collective body of those extrapolations and applications form the tradition.
Now, the tradition is entitled to substantial deference, and in the main has a proven track record that requires caution when people propose futzing around with it. But, and here is where Hooker departs from at least the implication of folks like Aquinas, reason is not a singular, static process that will give a consistent result regardless of context or circumstances. Hooker, likely influenced by the Renaissance and the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, understood that human knowledge, both individually and collectively, grows and advances. When Aquinas tells us that women are the result of a lack of full fetal development, he's simply got his facts wrong. That's just objectively not true, and thus the conclusions that Aquinas draws from those erroneous facts, that women are inferior to me, is also not true.
But, and here I would splice in some Girardian insight, there is also another factor at work. The message of the Gospel is not something that just magically transforms us in a single moment. It's more like the ocean eroding a beach--we are slowly transformed as we become conformed to Christ and stripped of our attachments to the institutions and structures that Girard calls "the Sacred" and what also could be called "Empire." This process works both on the individual dimension and in the collective dimension. As a result, if the Church is being faithful to its charge from Jesus, it should be progressively stripping itself of its attachment to the Sacred, revealing elements of itself that formerly seemed unproblematic but are now exposed as contrary to the Christian project. The Church should become more faithful to Jesus over time, not because we are somehow inherently more holy than our ancestors, but because we can stand on the shoulders of 2,000 years of the Spirit's work on us collectively.
Bringing all of this together, when we find ourselves in a situation where our understanding of the Gospel, produced as a result of our reason that incorporates all of our diverse bodies of knowledge, and enlightened by the action of the Spirit that is stripping us of our attachments to corrupt structures and habits, conflicts with the traditional understanding of a question, then the tradition must give way and our new insights must be grafted into the tradition. This, it seems to me, is precisely what those four paragraphs in the new version of the Catechism are saying--we used to say that the death penalty was OK, but our reflection on Jesus's message of human dignity and non-violence, done in light of our present situation and knowledge, shows us that we can no longer affirm the morality of the death penalty.
So, no problem. Except:
If Catholics are having crises of faith over today's change in teaching maybe it's bc bishops spent the last several decades building both their authority & authentic Catholicity on the demonstrably false notion that church teaching doesn't change.— Dr. Katie Grimes (@KatieMGrimes) August 3, 2018
See, the thing about the process that Hooker describes is that it is not simply prescriptive--this is how you should approach the interplay between Scripture, tradition, and our current situation. It's equally descriptive--this is how it actually works in practice, and has worked throughout the history of Christianity. The core problem with Roman Catholic traditionalism (and eastern Orthodox traditionalism, too) is that it is predicated on something that simply isn't true--the idea that there is some singular, unchanging body of tradition that exists apart from the interplay of people in their current context. The sort of thing that happened yesterday has happened countless times throughout the long history of the Christian church.WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED that decades of refusing to teach about the development and hermeneutics of doctrine, opting instead for ahistorical & triumphalist “our Church is right bc it never changes” rhetoric, would leave some Catholics unprepared for theological development?— Bridget O’Brien (@bemob215) August 3, 2018
Having said that, as Grimes and O'Brien point out, this idea of a singular unchanging tradition wasn't just invented from whole cloth by Ross Douthat and his fellow travelers; it was, and in important ways still is, the Roman Catholic Church's understanding of itself and its own tradition. This narrative is far older than the last several decades, going back at least to the First Vatican Council and more likely to the Counter-Reformation. Traditionalists cling to the notion of this unchanging tradition because that's the official position of the Roman Catholic Church when it is convenient for it to be so. And post Vatican II it has been convenient to do so, in particular, any time anything about sex and gender crop up.
Contrary to the pearl-clutching from conservatives like Douthat, the track record of Pope Francis provides essentially no support for the idea that he is interested in applying the rationale used in the death penalty context to birth control, women's ordination, LGBT issues, and the like. But conservatives are, of course, completely correct that there is no reason in principle that the same process could not be used in those contexts. But all of that is to say in another way that the future is undetermined, at least on this side of eternity. For what it is worth, I think that the conservatives are probably right that, eventually, the Roman Catholic Church will change its position on the contested gender and sexuality questions, because I believe the current positions to be founded primarily on erroneous factual predicates that will become increasingly impossible to seriously defend. But in any event, there is not that much anyone can do about it one way or the other, especially in a church where all decision-making is ultimately in the hands of one person, and that one person is almost surely Not You.
I said this last night on Twitter as something of a joke, but upon further reflection it is basically true:
The only coherent move in that direction is to be a sedevacanist. Go big or go home.— Michael Boyle (@mboyle78) August 3, 2018
The notion pushed pre-Vatican II that the Roman Catholic Church of 1950 was the same as the one in 1550 or 1050 or 350 does not stand up to rigorous historical scrutiny. But at least it is facially plausible if you don't dig into the history, especially if you shake your keys and say "development of doctrine" a la Newman (which is another post). But it's just not plausible post-Vatican II. Not unless you want to reduce the message of Jesus to "non-contraceptive PIV sex only," in which case you no longer have the Gospel, but a fertility cult.
If anything positive comes out of this (other than, of course, what's left of the moral force of the Roman Catholic Church applied to the abolition of the death penalty--though I am deeply skeptical of this manifesting itself in the United States), it will be the opening of a space for a more honest conversation within Roman Catholic circles about the nature of tradition, without the constant reference to comforting fictions. I think that would be a good thing, not just for Roman Catholicism, but for all Christian traditions and denominations, especially those that take seriously the idea of tradition in the first place. It would be enormously valuable for all sides to have a good-faith, clear eyed conversation partner in Rome. But, to get to that omelet, some eggs need to be broken.
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