The Bishop of Bangor, the Right Reverend Anthony Crockett, responds to Dr Andrew Goddard's posting of his
chapter Calvin, Usury and Evangelical Moral Theology on the Fulcrum
website
(Page references, unless
otherwise indicated, are to Dr Goddard's text as produced by my printer from
the Fulcrum website, and not to the original in the festschrift
for Alister McGrath; references to footnotes are to those in the same text; AC
indicates references to my original response to Dr Goddard in Fulcrum)
I am glad that my robust (according to Ruth Gledhill) response in Fulcrum to Dr
Andrew Goddard's disparaging remarks on the Statement of the Welsh Bishops on
Civil Partnerships has succeeded, as I hoped it would, in getting him to
declare his hand on Calvin's revision of Christian teaching on usury in the
sixteenth century, and a very elegant hand it is too, as some of us already
knew. To my mind, and against Dr Goddard's suggestion to the contrary (p5),
Calvin's method is highly relevant to our current debate on same-sex
relationships, as we shall see. There is, however, reluctance on the part of
evangelicals to be consistent in the application of such argumentation,
especially to homosexuality. Dr Goddard often makes this clear, and especially
in his reference to Charles Cosgrove's use of 'the rule of purpose' (p9). However,
others will see that this is potentially as applicable to 'clear' (to use the
word Dr Goddard threw at the Welsh Bishops) traditional teaching on this
subject, as it was in the sixteenth century on usury. Whether Calvin would have
been happy to see his method so applied to this issue is another question, but
logical consistency demands that if his hermeneutic is applicable to one
ethical issue, then there would have to be over-riding reasons for it not to be
applicable to others. I have yet to see what these reasons might be.
Dr Goddard's posting on the website of his chapter Calvin, Usury and Evangelical Moral Theology has,
then, been particularly useful, for we can now see that, if Calvin's method is held up as an example of hermeneutical rectitude, then the Welsh Bishops are in good company indeed. (A less generous person than I might have wished for a made-to-measure response to my piece, answering in detail the points I raised. However, I'll happily content myself with his off-the-peg article, which at least confirms what I suggested, namely that Dr Goddard knew all along that the 'clear' teaching of both Bible and tradition has sometimes become unclear, and eventually subject to 180º change - sometimes within a few decades.)
His chapter is learned indeed,
but, for some reason, it does not put Calvin in his historical context. This is
a great pity because he was not acting in vacuo, and the century was
racked by ethical debate on this subject, as was the twentieth - contrary to Dr
Goddard's assertions (pp1-2), on the use of artificial contraception (see Lambeth
Conference decisions in 1908, 1920 and 1968 in AC). Our present age is going
through a similar debate on same-sex relationships.
My reference to Johann Eck (in
AC) was meant to show that the debate on usury had a history in the sixteenth
century, and it was not an exclusively theoretical or disinterested one. This
Calvin himself recognised, for it was driven by 'social and economic change'
(p11) - what Alister McGrath calls 'the sophisticated world of finance emerging
in great cities' (note 14). Furthermore, self-interest was not only confined to
Jacob Fugger, who footed the bill for Eck's trip to Bologna in 1515 to debate
the issue of usury. Eck was forbidden, readers will remember, from debating the
issue at all at his own University of Ingolstadt, because Bible and tradition
were consistently 'clear' as to the wickedness of the practice. When Eck - who
in Luther's view went to the bad later when he applied his logic to the sale of
indulgences - returned to Germany, having been successful in his disputatio,
he was feted as a hero. (On this, and the general background, see Professor
Lisa Jardine's fascinating renaissance study Worldly Goods, Macmillan,
1996.) Calvin wrote his letter on usury to Claude de Sachin and worked on his
exposition of the relevant biblical texts forty years later, and the arguments pro
and contra were still raging. Indeed, many, including Luther,
Zwingli and reformist Anglican divines of the period, were never persuaded by
such revisionism as Eck and Calvin were proposing.
Dr Goddard admits that Calvin was
a revisionist of the previously unchanged interpretation of the relevant
biblical material and of the consistent, 'clear' teaching of the Fathers,
Church Councils and the tradition as a whole. He says: 'Calvin is generally
well-versed in and respectful of the Church Fathers, recognising the importance
of engaging with the Christian tradition especially if one is seeking to
revise it' (p12 - my emphasis). He refers to Calvin's appeal to the
principle of equity and the Golden Rule (p10), of which Calvin said 'This
precept is applicable every time', suggesting that the dominical command can be
used to trump the demands of the law and the prophets, when Calvin wished to
revise their accepted significance. In an interesting comment, Dr Goddard says
that Calvin has not turned 'his back on Scripture and biblical authority.
Rather, he has let Scripture shape his thinking at the level of moral and
theological principles....'(p10). This is exactly the kind of reasoning the Welsh
Bishops see in some of those whom they had in mind, when they spoke of people
who read the Scriptures with integrity. Dr Goddard also refers to Calvin's
'rethinking (in a way we now accept without thinking) the tradition's
long-standing ban on usury...' He goes on - somewhat timorously - to say that
this 'should remind us that within this context such a form of moral
argumentation and appeal to Scripture* may have a certain place and level of
validity within evangelical moral reasoning and revision of tradition'
(p10 - my emphasis again).
Despite its regrettable lack of
historical context, which would have shown how revolutionary Eck and Calvin
were in this respect, Dr Goddard's scholarly piece makes clear Calvin's own
tensions - ambivalence, even - about his position. First, Calvin asserts that
'no scriptural passage...totally bans all usury' (p8). But we read too: 'Calvin
is quite frank about the strength of opposition to usury, speaking in his
letter of "the Holy Spirit's anger against usurers" displayed in prophets and
psalms, and even acknowledging that "the Holy Spirit...advises all holy men, who
praise and fear God, to abstain from usury" ' (p9). Calvin even considers
that it would be desirable 'if usurers were chased from every country' (p12).
Nevertheless, despite statements such as these, which doubtless indicate
Calvin's understanding of the weight of a millennium and a half of biblical exposition
and teaching to the contrary, and also his concern over the consequences of
usury on the poor, he still maintains that 'we need not conclude that all usury
is forbidden' (p9). But how is he able to take this view, and can we apply his
method the issue of same-sex relationships?
Dr Goddard admits that Calvin sees that in his day 'social and economic change (my emphasis) has made
the issue of usury less not more like the phenomenon Scripture condemns and that as a result there needs to be change in the church's moral tradition' (p11). He concedes that Calvin reconceptualises - should that not be redefines? - 'the economic phenomenon' under discussion (p12). This is tendentious stuff indeed - reconceptualising the subject under review because of changes in society,' social and economic change' as a reason for abolishing 'clear' teaching, unchanged for fifteen hundred years; Calvin seeing 'his current situation to be different from that of the biblical writers' (p11). And I thought that the argument from zeitgeist, for that is what it is, was deemed by evangelicals to be a profoundly dodgy one and always and without exception to be trumped by what Robert Cagnon calls 'the revelatory authority of Scripture'.
Dr Goddard claims that Calvin 'will not simply dismiss (Scripture's) moral teaching on the grounds of his more enlightened understanding of the phenomenon about which it speaks' (p11). But am I right to detect here a paradox at least, or a downright dissonance even, between this last statement of Dr Goddard's, on the one hand, and, on the other, Calvin's 'reconceptualising' of the phenomenon, and his twin references to, first, 'the uniqueness of his current situation over against that of the biblical writers', and, then his emphasis on the importance of 'social and economic change' in his argumentation? My puzzlement increases when I read that Dr Goddard quotes with approval Guenther H Haas's words: 'It is the principle of equity that allows Calvin to analyse the social and economic realities of his day, that transcends a rigid biblical literalism...Equity allows Calvin to read the Bible with new eyes' (note 36 - my emphasis). Was it not exactly this of kind of argumentation that the Welsh Bishops perceived in some of those to whom they referred, who read the Scriptures with integrity? It is to be hoped that liberals and conservatives alike can join together in Calvin's exaltation of the principle of equity and the Golden Rule above all others, for 'this precept is applicable every time' and 'our determination must be derived from no where other than...the declaration of Christ, on which hang the law and the prophets' (p10).
In this context, it is such a
pity that Dr Goddard descends to scathing mode, in referring to 'the spectre of
liberal, consequentialist, situationist ethics rear(ing) its ugly head' (p10).
Some of us who are neither liberals not situationists would want to argue that
it a one-eyed and deeply flawed moral theory which does not give great weight
to consequences in assessing the moral worth of actions and perpetrators.
Indeed, this was something which Calvin well understood, as when he discusses
the consequences of usury on the poor - in fact, his argument against the
wickedness of usury and usurers in biblical times appears to be in that respect
a consequentialist one (see p9). Furthermore, his moral justification
for revision was that times had changed and in his day usury need not have such
consequences. For myself, I do not believe that bankers and capitalists intend
to oppress 'billions who - contrary to the consistent teaching of the Bible -
are consigned to a life of grinding, absolute poverty because of the usurious
workings of the capitalist system' (AC). However, they are morally culpable in
not seeing the consequences of their practices, not least in terms of third
world debt. Moreover, the extent of the pervasiveness of this immorality is
that Dr Goddard (as I originally suggested) and I too, and all who have a
pension plan or even a bank account (with a non-Muslim bank) are deeply complicit
in this. In other words, we all have an interest in approving of Calvin's
revisionism - and that means that none of us can claim to be 'aloof from the
concrete reality they are addressing' (p5).
But enough of usury. I should
perhaps desist from mentioning at length the other issue I raised with Dr
Goddard, namely artificial contraception - which in relation to the Scriptures
has often been linked with the sin of Onan, but Dr Goddard does touch on it in
his article. I confess to be taken aback at the way in which evangelical
writers appear to accept artificial birth control without, apparently, batting
an eyelid. I am glad to see that Dr Goddard and I agree on the unpleasantness
of Robert Cagnon's tone (note 58). After expounding at great length the notion
of παρα φυσιν (against nature) in
Scripture and classical literature, even he shies away from condemning
contraception, when his argument would seem to entail a rejection of the
practice. On this, he glibly says, 'each of the...arguments contains elements
that contemporary assessments of sexuality would find unacceptable' (see
R Cagnon, The Bible and Homosexuality, p181, and notice the argument
from zeitgeist again). Similarly, Dr Goddard is far too casual in his
attitude to this matter. He says: 'We have seen the widespread privatisation of
decisions about contraception and the acceptance of most forms of artificial
birth control without any great disagreement, or, indeed, argument' because,
apart from Roman Catholics, 'for most people there is no real issue here' (p2).
Now, unless this is a similar throwaway to Dr Goddard's comment on our
unthinking acceptance of usury these days, this is an historical faux pas. It
takes no notice of the twentieth century context, including the Lambeth
discussions especially of 1908 and 1920 (see AC) and the negative views of
many church leaders, such as Bishop Gore - for all of whom this issue was very
real indeed.
The Welsh Bishops, to get back to
my original paper, tried in their statements on homosexuality and civil
partnerships to indicate their perception of where Christians who read the
Bible with integrity are, like Calvin in his day. Some of the views they
mentioned are undoubtedly revisionist, in terms of the biblical and traditional
material - as revisionist, but not more so, as Calvin's in relation to usury -
and on the same grounds, namely the principle of equity and the
application of the Golden Rule 'on which hang the law and the prophets'. The
Bishops might have taken the trouble to produce 'a form of moral argumentation
and an appeal to Scripture', to say nothing of tradition, social change and the
'way in which our current situation is different from that of the biblical
writers'. But those arguments are already much in the public domain. The
Bishops appreciated the need, felt by some, to reconceptualise
the phenomenon of homosexuality (cf
Calvin's identical argument on p12), and now Dr Goddard, in posting his paper
on the Fulcrum website, has done them the favour of reproducing that
argumentation for all to see, and to make up their minds. The Bishops will
welcome his willingness to apply Calvin's method based on equity and the Golden
Rule, for like Calvin, they do not want to 'turn (their) back on Scripture.
Rather (they want to) let Scripture shape (their) thinking at the level of
moral and theological principles' (p10).
Perhaps Dr Goddard would agree
that it would have been better if he had applied his analysis of Calvin's
hermeneutical method to our Statements, before he reached for his pen. Then his
precipitate response and unhelpful tone might have been avoided. But all's well
that ends well. We should be glad that his lucid presentation of Calvin's
rationale for his revision of the consistent, unwavering, 'clear' biblical and traditional
veto on usury is now in the public domain. I should like to suggest that we
should all apply it consistently and conscientiously to the issue of same-sex
relationships, refusing to confuse the issue with that of promiscuity, as
Gagnon - he of the unpleasant tone - does. Instead of condemnation, we should
admit that when homosexual people talk of permanent, loving, same-sex
relationships, they are speaking of something which 'is in fact significantly
different in practice from Scriptural concerns and so cannot simply be subsumed
in the standard moral descriptions and condemnations', as Dr Goddard himself
recognises could be the case (p12). Who knows, we might even consent to listen
'to homosexual people, welcoming them into our homes and sitting down to eat
with them', as Stephen Fowl (p6) recommends.
+Anthony Bangor
Ty'r Esgob'
Bangor
* ie the principle of equity in application of the Golden Rule
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum