Calvin's Salvation in Writing: a Confessional Academic Theology

Calvin’s Salvation in Writing: A Confessional Academic Theology Studies in Reformed Theology Editor-in-chief Eddy Van der Borght (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Editorial Board Abraham van de Beek (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Martien Brinkman (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Dirk van Keulen (Theological University, Kampen) Daniel Migliore (Princeton Theological Seminary) Richard Mouw (Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena) Emanuel Gerrit Singgih (Duta Wacana Christian University, Yogjakarta) Pieter Vos (Protestant Theological University, Amsterdam) Conrad Wethmar (University of Pretoria) VOLUME 29 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/srt Calvin’s Salvation in Writing A Confessional Academic Theology By William A. Wright LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: “Portrait of Calvin writing,” by Ary Scheffer, 1858, MN703. Courtesy of the musées de Noyon. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wright, William A. (Associate Professor) Calvin’s salvation in writing : a confessional academic theology / by William A. Wright. pages cm. -- (Studies in Reformed theology, ISSN 1571-4799 ; VOLUME 29) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-29223-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Calvin, Jean, 1509-1564. 2. Theology--Methodology. 3. Derrida, Jacques. 4. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. 5. Salvation--Christianity--History of doctrines--16th century. I. Title. BX9418.W75 2015 230’.42--dc23 2015007321 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1571–4799 isbn 978-90-04-29223-9 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-29232-1 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Preface: “Beginnings” vii Acknowledgments xiii 1 Theography: A Program for an Architectonically Delimited Theological Writing 1 2 Looking for Coherence in Calvin’s Soteriology 43 3 The Inseparably Different Architectonics of Hegel and Derrida 88 4 Salvation Determined Solely by Justification: “God’s Mercy Alone and Christ’s Merit” 143 5 Transitions from Justification to Sanctification: Identity, Essential Différance, and Absolute Relation 187 6 The Interfusion of Sanctification and Justification 258 7 A Summary Useful and Superfluous 309 Bibliography 319 Index 330 Preface: “Beginnings” Academic Beginnings “This book began as a dissertation.” While true, this way of beginning is gener- ally an admission of shame, leavened by a hope in redemption: “Nonetheless, thanks to guidance in revision, it is now suitable for a broader audience.” Beginning from a dissertation is regarded as a deficit to be made up for in a book. A dissertation, after all, is not published. It has no wider audience, and so cannot enter into a general circulation by which it would have an “effect.” In the eyes of the world, then, the academic-bound nature of a dissertation condemns it to untruth, or what is the same thing, irrelevancy. The dissertation is only the start of a quest for professional power—a ProQuest—by which alone writing achieves a good. Yet such assumptions condemn more than just the dissertation; they would also condemn much of the inherently minute, abstruse, and exploratory research done in the academy. Perhaps the shame directed towards dissertations should be the occasion for some soul searching about just what the academy is for. • • • • • Whatever else one might say about it, mine was an unabashed dissertation.1 I sought to take advantage of the academic nature of a dissertation—that very leaden quality that feels to most like a millstone of obscurity. Inspired in part by Heidegger’s phenomenology, I decided to interrogate that which is nearest: what is an academic text? In Heidegger’s phenomenology, paying attention to something taken for granted, rather than passing on to something more alluring, becomes an occasion for an unveiling of truth. We busy ourselves with the most evidently grand pursuits, only to miss the supporting structures that are more real: time, language, being.2 The academic text appeared to me to be the nearest phenomenon, so near as to be invisible. Indeed, as a kind of unadul- terated academic text with little hope of being more, a dissertation affords one 1 William A. Wright, Saving Difference: The Dialectical-differential Structure of Calvin’s Soteriology. [Ph.D. in Theology] dissertation, University of Chicago. Ann Arbor: ProQuest/umi, 2006. 2 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), esp. 42: “What is ontically nearest and familiar (i.e. our day-to-day lives) is ontologically the farthest, unrecognized and constantly overlooked in its ontological (i.e. existential) significance.” viii preface the opportunity to attend closely to the text’s own self-constitution. I felt this self-reflexive task in writing theology to be so important as to merit the intro- duction in chapter one of a neologism; and so theology that is critically and strategically self-aware of how it is shaped by the prerogatives of academic writing I will call “theography.” The academic text hides itself, as Heidegger might say, for reasons not only phenomenological but also ideological. A quite different inspiration for my self-reflexivity, both positively and negatively, comes from contextual theology and the specific forms it takes in liberation, feminist, and postcolonial theology. I consider some examples in chapter one, but the influence runs much deeper. One lesson I take from this broad movement is that the authorial convention of blithely writing from nowhere comes naturally only to those for whom empowerment is taken for granted, those for whom the “universal perspective” is an ideological cover for the fact that the voice of others is being neutralized and so excluded—and not only the now-classical subaltern others, but even, if less urgently, ordinary Christians cut off from academic discourse. Yet to take up the mantle of speaking from and to various contexts, and, even more prophetically, of transformative liberation, all while performing the quite aloof work of writing academic texts, carries a challenge and perhaps a danger: a species of bad faith may lurk behind the attempt to write a book birthed in the academy with the benign but benighted wish that it already is, or at least shall be, something more. In this way one underestimates how much the academy has shaped one’s thoughts, and even more, one’s text and its possibili- ties. Ironically, this bad faith shares the same disdain for the academy that leads us to see the dissertation as a mere shadow of a book. And indeed, behind it all is a belief in power-as-such without which nothing is true. Present but mostly tacit in my project is the question whether this belief is consistent with the Christian faith. By no means do I wish to simply answer in the negative—that to the contrary, only truth for its own sake could be true. Such is the faith of the avowed academic Brahmin—and confessed, it seems, by the motto on my dissertation’s imprimatur: “Crescat scientia vita excolatur.” Rather, my inspiration from liberation and postcolonial scholars resulted in a fundamental commitment. I thoroughly believe in the necessity to be critically aware of context; for me, this includes being aware of what it means to have the academy as one’s nearest context, in all its social, political, and identity-forming dimensions. The necessity stems from the tendency of the academy to be self-perpetuating and to guard its prerogatives to power. While the tendency can be to the good, in the name of justice and critical thinking it must be exposed and resisted from within. Resisting by pretending one is not within, on the contrary, is naïve <UN> preface ix and dangerous—bearing in mind that academic books are only ever “dangerous” in mostly harmless ways. Therefore the best way to begin with integrity is to confess one’s academic identity, and in confessing, become aware. Confessing, exposing, and resisting are postures I believe optimal to responsi- bly producing theology in a self-reflexive academic text—that is, to producing responsible theography. • • • • • This book began as a dissertation. It sought to take its being a dissertation seriously; and if a dissertation may be considered the purest instantiation of academic textuality, then the nature of academic texts must be at issue. It required self-reflexivity, but not self-obsession or naval gazing: mine was not a dissertation about dissertations, although my efforts would be aided by more scholarship on the history and sociology of academic texts. A dissertation about dissertations could hardly challenge and subvert the self-enclosure of the academic text. Rather, the topic was and remains something far different: Calvin’s soteriology, and specifically, his logically perplexing insistence that salvation comes solely by grace and yet demands active transformation. There is no easy and obvious segue from Calvin to introducing critical reflexivity into academic texts. (The imaginative reader might intuit that the academy embodies works-righteousness like few other communities.) But one may ask how a dissertation, while remaining so very academic, can say something true of the Christian life in all its concrete richness.

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