Retrieval and the Center of (Reformed) Catholicity

In their manifesto for Reformed catholicity, Mike Allen and Scott Swain pursue a distinctly Protestant way of inhabiting Christian tradition and its interpretive wisdom.[1] The project is one for which we should be grateful, since it embodies a theologically serious hope for catholicity rather than a wistful longing for unity on just any grounds. In this short reflection, I highlight but two of the many relevant features from their manifesto that merit continuing elaboration and work from those of us sympathetic to its aims. Specifically, I reflect briefly on the notion of “retrieval” and the ideal of “catholicity,” respectively.

1. Retrieval. Allen and Swain eloquently situate the project of retrieval within the architecture of classic Reformed scholastic principles. Hence, theology is communicated to us from the uncreated wisdom of the Trinity (theology’s ontological principle), through Christ and his inspired word (its external cognitive principle), and illuminated by the Holy Spirit among the society of the faithful (its internal cognitive principle). The temporally and socially mediated use of this renewed reason, tradition, is an instrument the Spirit employs to aid our apprehension of God’s written Word. It is therefore an “elicitive” principle of theology.[2]

This notion of retrieval is irreducibly theological: it rests not upon sociological and critical analyses of “traditions” as mere cultural and political artifacts, but upon the Trinity’s works of election and apocalypse.[3] And it does so without surrendering distinctly Protestant ecclesiological emphases. The redemptive and sanctifying missions of the Son and Spirit beget and animate the church’s renewed reason to operate within an eschatological space, in which the church’s hearing is not closed and finished but open to the Word’s grace and judgment. The church that hears the Word is militant, not triumphant, so her hearing remains incomplete: “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6).

All of this is helpful and important for contemporary efforts at retrieval to remember. Thankfully, Allen and Swain rightly refer to retrieval in passing as “process of remembrance.”[4] As an act of sanctified memory, retrieval has a twofold relation to forgetfulness. First, there is a culpable form of forgetting that loses sight of the primary love defining Christian obedience in relation to God and neighbor (Rev. 2:4-5; cf. Jer. 18:15). In this sense, forgetting is synonymous with disobedience. There is a way of neglecting the wisdom of Christian tradition that is an act of ingratitude and irreverence to the Lord for his works of illumination and sanctification. The opposite of this is the psalmist’s prayer: “I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your wonders of old” (Ps. 77:11). And such remembrance occurs as one generation commends God’s works to another (Ps. 145:4). Retrieval happens amidst spiritual amnesia. And part of a responsible theology of retrieval is a sober assessment of its particular exigencies: what has been forgotten and why? Future work in this respect might benefit not only from genealogical accounts of doctrinal and cultural change, but perhaps even more from attention to liturgy. We have heard that to retrieve the fourth century doctrine of the Trinity, we must recover fourth century cultures of reading Scripture. Why not also the expression of both within the liturgy? The liturgical expression of homotimia may not suffice to establish the doctrine of the homoousia between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But surely such a doctrine is incomplete without it. May some of theology’s amnesia owe to a liturgical deficiency?

Second, there is a necessary form of “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead” (Phil. 3:13). This is not a summons to some naïve belief in the inevitability of human or ecclesiastical progress. The church in the present stands in the same relation to sin and grace as the church in the past. Not everything is worth retrieving, and some things are worth forgetting—traces of unfaithful attention to God’s Word. Good doctrinal developments are as possible and real as deteriorations. The saints of ages past need us as much as we need them (Heb. 11:40). Hence, it may therefore be the case that some things must burn to expose the “charred roots” underneath the sediment.[5] Only thus can the church explore different paths amidst her journey in the present that proceed organically from the same roots. Indeed, the danger of retrieval—one that some contemporary advocates have not always successfully avoided—is that it’s possible to listen so much to the past that we fail to listen now, mistakenly forfeiting our duty to obey the living and present Word. The hearing of saints past can no more substitute for our own than can their obedience. Theological responsibility requires us to attend to the “sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Tim. 6:3), so that we may pass on “that which alone possesses originality.”[6] And that original Word confronts the church now and summons her to present acts of obedience.

2. Catholicity. What centers Reformed catholicity’s project of retrieval is God’s Word, and this is a generative source for reflecting on catholicity itself. The church’s catholicity is dependent on the catholicity of its Lord, requiring us to deduce the church’s catholicity from the mysteries of the Trinity and incarnation. And these mysteries come to us in God’s Word.

Here there is strong overlap with Roman Catholic accounts of catholicity, as Matthew Levering has shown. On matters such as the church’s pilgrim state, its dependence on Christ, and the centrality of the Word, there is much agreement between Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants.[7] The key disagreement seems to be less about the fact of the church’s quantitative and qualitative catholicity than about the manner of the church’s present participation in the Lord’s catholicity. As Levering suggests, Protestants and Catholics can pursue catholicity as equals because they are both pursuing “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23). Catholicity of any sort, Reformed included, therefore requires that we receive the Word who authors our catholicity. We will do so the more we attend to the means the Spirit employs to bring the Word to us and us to the Word.

The question facing those who would pursue the project of Reformed catholicity is therefore whether we will not simply look to the theologians of the past, but do what those same theologians did, at their best: heed the Word of God and thus have something worth handing on.

[1] Michael Allen and Scott Swain, Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Baker Academic, 2015); Scott Swain, Trinity, Revelation, and Reading: A Theological Introduction to the Bible and its Interpretation (T&T Clark, 2011); Michael Allen, The Fear of the Lord: Essays on Theological Method (T&T Clark, 2022). See also the companionable reflections on catholicity by Kevin J. Vanhoozer and Daniel J. Treier, Theology and the Mirror of Scripture: A Mere Evangelical Account (IVP Academic, 2015); Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity (Brazos Press, 2016).

[2] Allen and Swain, Reformed Catholicity, 36. In this vein, when Brad East, The Doctrine of Scripture (Cascade Books, 2021), 81, speaks of Scripture’s clarity as a “liturgical clarity,” he says something valuable and true. However, East risks confusing the orders of being and knowing when he makes Scripture’s clarity dependent on its “catholic” use.

[3] In all these respects, they take up a central occupation of the late John Webster, who was concerned throughout his career with articulating a theological, and coherently Protestant, account of tradition.

[4] Allen and Swain, Reformed Catholicity, 13.

[5] Without affirming the whole argument, see here Philipp W. Rosemann, Charred Root of Meaning: Continuity, Transgression, and the Other in Christian Tradition (Eerdmans, 2019). As Rosemann argues, not all “transgressions” of tradition are the faithful wounds of a friend. What characterizes true transgressions is the affirmation of the center and therefore limits. For Reformed catholicity, this center is (ontologically) the Holy Trinity and (cognitively) the Word interpreted with the Lord’s Prayer, the Decalogue, and the Apostles’ Creed.

[6] John Webster, “Theology and the Order of Love,” in Rationalität im Gespräch: Philosophische und Theologische Perspektiven, ed. Markus Mühling et al (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), 175-185 (181).

[7] Matthew Levering, “Catholicity and the Catholic Church: Protestant Concerns and (Roman) Catholic Perspectives,” Pro Ecclesia 32/3-4 (2023): 219-246.