Theological Immune Systems
Both/And; Either/Or - Part III
This is the third part in a series on the both/and and the either/or. You can read the first two parts here and here. I had intended for this post to compare fiction exemplifying each approach, but I realized that there isn’t really a way to do that before considering the either/or itself. So although that piece is already written, it will have to wait until I’ve got all the conceptual work done.
The either/or is a theological immune system. It seeks points of resistance in the human spirit to God’s call, then eliminates whatever it is we’ve wrongly latched onto. Although the world is not in fundamental conflict with its Maker, fallen man tends to set his loves up that way.1 “You cannot serve two masters”—“Let the dead bury the dead”—“consider yourselves dead to the power of sin and alive to God”—be “prepared to hate father and mother for my sake.” The echo of these divine words never loses its prophetic relevance.
Two domains specially belong to the either/or. Namely, sin and error. Whereas the both/and looks for ways to harmonize and bring everything into one order with the Trinity at the center and Christ linking every creature, no peace at all can be made with sin or error. This is because they are, strictly speaking, not “things” at all, but types of non-being.
To err is to assent to a statement that does not correspond to reality. Just to the extent that a false belief connects to the rest of our beliefs, and ultimately our actions, errors introduce disorder into our lives. It is impossible to reconcile with what is essentially disordered. It’s not dangerous like a poison; a poison is a thing in its own right and could have a legitimate use, perhaps even to make medicine. It can, in principle, be harmonized with our ultimate orientation to God. Error is more like being maimed; the damage inflicted is not beyond God’s ability to redeem, but the wound itself is just evil. Sin functions similarly, but in the will rather than the intellect. It means choosing to orient oneself away from God. Just like error, it can become the occasion for great goods, but remains evil in itself.
This last point is worth clarifying, because in conversation I often find a tendency to blur a wound together with its redemption. Imagine someone, because of TikTok-bred paranoia, wrongfully convinced that their spouse is cheating. They decide to suddenly leave, and years later start a new family elsewhere. The children that result from this second union will be complete and unqualified goods. That does not mean that the original suspicion is somehow retrospectively justified or made good. The error and resulting sin still took their toll, and will continue to do so until corrected. In theology, as in everything else, error and sin are always evil, even if God’s unfathomable mercy uses them to bring forth new and beautiful things. Thankfully, as in the example above, though going back and setting things right may be demanding, it won’t mean erasing the goods brought about—the new children won’t need to be exterminated!
As sin differs in consequence and severity, so too with error. Some errors will be culpable, others not. Some will produce immediate and dramatic consequences, others will unfold their disease over centuries. But, as with sin, errors left to fester will collect their due in one form or another. For this reason, there can be absolutely no quarter given to sin or error. They may need to be corrected gradually and with great care, but corrected they must be. This is why the either/or is indispensable. We say an unqualified “No!” to God’s rivals.
The either/or can also be applied in an analogous2 way to all created goods. The reason Christ and the Apostles warn us even about genuine goods like family and the body is that fallen man has a temptation to prefer God’s gifts over their Giver. This does not mean that they’re not genuine gifts. Just the opposite! Precisely because they’re so good, we’re apt to settle for them instead of following them back to their Source. Strictly speaking, the Scriptures do not warn against family or the physical body. They teach us the proper way to integrate these gifts into our lives via the careful application of the both/and. They warn us, rather, against our tendency to make blessings an accomplice to sin, which, again, must be rejected absolutely. Even as the either/or turns us away from the path that leads to destruction, so too it warns us against settling for spiritual mediocrity, stopping halfway along the path to eternal life. “Be ye perfect, even as I am perfect.”
Christianity without the either/or is on a trajectory to cultural compromise, and ultimately the death of faith in a region. There are a depressing number of examples to choose from, but one that stands out is Christianity in the Middle East. Before the spread of Islam, much of the area was Christian. Small remnants of the ancient Churches, descended from a converted Persian Empire, survive in the Melkite and Maronite Catholics, as well as the Assyrian Church of the East. Although conquered by Muslims, their society was not, on the whole, converted by the sword. It capitulated slowly, as the cultural institutions reshaped the religious intuitions and impulses of a people, gradually but unmistakably eroding the Christian influence on hearts and minds.3
Sound familiar?
Christians addicted to alarmism always seem to think Satan is on the brink of unveiling his master plan to shutter churches and throw Christians in jail just for being Christian. While the U.K. has recently been obliging this fantasy, the real threat is much, much more dangerous. We have been living under a host of secular ideologies spawned by the Enlightenment for several hundred years, and they are every bit the foreign conqueror to us that Islam was to Middle Eastern Christians. Satan has no need for the police to board up local churches; he just needs to convince Americans that religion is a private matter. No need to subvert anyone’s doctrinal orthodoxy; he can simply teach them to judge the value of those doctrines by how much they contribute to a host of “pastoral” concerns, from personal assurance of salvation to feelings of acceptance. If he can make you uncritically accept radical individualism and unfettered capitalism simply by making you afraid of communism, that will do just as well as installing a dictator. Perhaps better! The consequences of accepting the world’s assumptions are even now playing themselves out, and a sizeable number of Christians in America today would struggle to recognize that many of their cherished beliefs fit about as well with Christianity as Islam does.
Without the either/or, Christianity first welcomes another worldview into the market, then becomes its shell corporation, and is finally (sub)merged into it.
The either/or carries its own risk, though. A risk that is, in the long term, almost as dangerous as not employing it at all: it can become an autoimmune disorder. It can turn against things that are properly Christian if the individual or community in question doesn’t see the connection between a particular doctrine or practice and the rest of Christianity. When the either/or reigns supreme, everything, even what manifestly stems from devotion to Christ, is eyed with suspicion.4 This is how you get John Calvin raging against Christmas hundreds of years before Italian Evangelicals would launch a self-described “War on Christmas,”5 Seventh-Day Adventists claiming that meeting on Sunday mornings is the Mark of the Beast,6 and William Lane Craig denying multiple Ecumenical Councils. Because these denunciations can come with all the fervor and force of a prophet decrying idolatry, it will paint even genuine developments of Christian doctrine and practice as compromises. The iconoclast always enjoys the perception of righteous austerity. If this course is followed to its logical ends, Christians will hack Christianity to bits trying to find the acorn inside the oak tree.
Even if the both/and is brought in as a secondary principle, putting the either/or in the driver’s seat causes all sorts of unnecessary collisions. The history of Christianity, and especially Protestantism, is littered with the wreckage. I try to avoid drive-by polemics, so please accept these examples as merely gesturing to larger debates. Let us examine how just one mistake, say, assuming competition between creature and creator, can generate a host of bad conclusions, including:
-Christ must be either God or man. (Nicea, Chalcedon)
-Mary must be either the mother of Christ or the mother of God. (Ephesus)
-Christ must have either a divine will or a human will. (Constantinople III)
-We must pay attention either to God or created things. (Nicea II)
-Salvation is either the work of man or the work of God. (Orange, Trent)
-The Bible is either a human text or has a divine Author.
-The Church is either a human institution or a divine institution.
-One can honor either Mary and the saints or God.
Applying the either/or just to the relationship between creature and creator breeds a host of problems. Applying it to other areas of Christian thought will generate just as many. If you want to test yourself to see how much you’ve inculcated the either/or, observe your reaction to the following statements:
The Exorcist teaches great spiritual truths.
The halo used in Christian iconography was developed out of images of Sol Invictus, the Roman god of conquest.
Lots of pagan religions had the concept of a god who dies and rises again.
Marx has insightful critiques of capitalism.
If you found yourself recoiling at some or all of these, you probably favor the either/or. Here’s Bishop Barron talking about how The Exorcist is effectively pro-Christian propaganda, a Christian historian on the use of iconography under Constantine, C.S. Lewis on “good dreams” among the pagans, and as for Marx, he is clearly descriptively right about how people tend to turn one another into tools under capitalism. If you find yourself reaching instinctively for, “But communism bad!” I agree, yet “communism bad” doesn’t imply that Marx isn’t right about some of capitalism’s problems. The point is precisely that the either/or sets us up to miss the diamond in the rough, the kernel in the husk. It may even lead us to discard whole stacks of diamonds carefully gathered for us by a thousand generations. Not every theological error comes down to putting the either/or before the both/and, but a lot of them do.
So my practical advice. When you’re exploring Catholicism, if you experience a knee-jerk reaction against something, ask yourself: “Does this come down to an either/or? What would a both/and look like here?” I suspect it will reveal a world hidden inside of what first appeared to be a drab wardrobe.
The risks of the either/or duly noted, still, someone has to wield the doctrinal sword, ruling on what accords and conflicts with the Gospel. Who would you trust with the task, knowing you are essentially putting your soul in their hands, not to mention those of your children and neighbors? I won’t belabor the point beyond observing that this is the sort of thing one might expect Christ to have foreseen, and perhaps even provided for.
In the second installment, we were introduced to the both/and. Now, having looked at the either/or, we are ready for the big event. Seeing that neither is sufficient on its own, the next installment will propose a way to coordinate and synthesize the two. From there, we’ll be ready to put them to use examining points of conflict between Catholics and Protestants.
Actually, this last is somewhat debatable. There is a Lutheran tradition (probably inherited from the Theologia Germanica), running through Kierkegaard, Nygrin, and Reinhold Niebuhr, that thinks of all self-interest as inherently sinful. This is why Reinhold Niebuhr feels he doesn’t need the Fall in his system to explain human sin. Well, sort of—that’s an oversimplification. I just wanted to flag that this statement is not without some controversy.
This is a term of art in Catholic theology. It just means that there is some kind of parallel between two concepts, even if they’re still quite different. It’s the sense in which we can say a trumpet, a student, the future, and a lamp are all “bright.” It’s not pure equivocation; there is something shared between each use, but some are closer together than others.
I owe nearly everything I know about Islam and Christianity in the ancient Middle East to Shane Patrick, a friend studying at Oxford and recipient of the prestigious Barry Scholarship. He pointed out to me that the long period of transition from a Christian Middle East to an Islamic one provides one of the only historical precedents for our own situation, where a Christian culture is completely displaced, and Christians need to deal with challenges that never arose in a Christian society.
The Reformers practiced a "hermeneutic of suspicion” on the Church long before the “Masters of Suspicion” and their progeny.
From the article:
“We drive out of our places of worship all the traditions of the tree, the Nativity scene, the figure of Santa Claus, Jesus as a child, and every other popular tradition,” Trovarelli said.
For the Italian Christians who identify as born again, rejecting Christmas is a way to distinguish them from Catholics. They assert their identity through opposition to the status quo.”
Emphasis added.
If differentiating themselves from Catholics seems like a bad reason to reject “Jesus as a child,” you may be surprised to learn that this exact same attitude determined much of early Protestantism.
To their credit, they do correctly recognize that Sunday observance of the Lord’s Day is tied up with the Catholic Church and living Tradition.
This is wonderfully clear - and challenging in a world that leaves the question of the truth far too open for an "informed decision". Starting from perhaps an atypical position, I am both both/and and either/or. I look forward to being persuaded. My latest thing is a (perhaps naive, perhaps jaded take) on permanent doubt - perhaps you might consider taking a look?