The Metaphysics of Faith

Part 6, A Juridical Faith

In the last post I turned to talk about the implications of our metaphysical loss in modernity. Specifically, with a loss of a participatory metaphysics our vision of “existence” has become reductively materialistic. Having lost the analogy of being, modern Christians tend to envision God as an object and then experience faith crises when it becomes clear that science cannot locate or detect this object. As I pointed out, this faith crisis isn’t being caused by Biblical illiteracy but is, rather, due to a shift in our metaphysical assumptions. The glitch in the background. The poor soil in the new pot. Such are the metaphors I’ve used.

In this post, let me turn to another effect of our metaphysical loss, how Protestantism became a juridical faith.

Again, due to the participatory metaphysics that held sway for the first millennium of the church, salvation was understood as theosis and divine union. This vision of mystical return emphasized sanctification, purification, and divinization. In modern Protestantism, these are foreign notions as salvation is primarily understood in juridical terms. Biblically speaking, there was a soteriological pivot away from sanctification toward justification. And with that pivot a loss of the contemplative, mystical, and monastic traditions. This evacuated Protestantism of any robust vision of spiritual formation, a loss many evangelicals have tried to remedy, from Richard Foster and Dallas Willard a generation ago, to John Mark Comer today. Still, as I’ve described before, in many sectors of evangelicalism this retrieval faces both resistance and indifference. Many evangelicals find conversations about contemplative prayer or spiritual disciplines to be exotic and “too Catholic.”

The reasons for this soteriological shift, from theosis toward a juridical vision of justification, are many. But one of the most important ones is what we’ve been talking about, the loss of a metaphysical vision of participation. Again, the Neoplatonic vision of “return” to the One influenced the patristic vision of theosis and divinization. The mystical and contemplative tradition of Christianity worked within this metaphysical paradigm. Spiritual practices, contemplation, ascesis, monastic discipline, and sacramental rites purified the soul and brought it into union with God, the soul becoming more and more Godlike. The famous three stages of this spiritual journey--the Purgative Way, the Illuminative Way, and the Unitive Way--concisely summarize the entire tradition. Purgation, illumination, union. A very Neoplatonic vision.

Protestantism lost touch with this soteriology, largely because it lost the metaphysical framework that animated it. And again, to keep repeating the point, so much of this is and was happening off the pages of Scripture. As any skeptical evangelical will point out to you, there’s not a lot of Biblical warrant for much of what we find in the contemplative and monastic traditions. Lent isn’t in the Bible. Nor is living in the desert like a hermit. Which is precisely why so many evangelicals are skeptical of these traditions. The monastic and contemplative practices made sense primarily because of the participatory vision of salvation at work in the background. The justification for these practices and rituals, which allowed you to walk the purgative, illuminative, unitive path, was primarily metaphysical and not Biblical. Thus, when you lose those metaphysical assumptions--salvation as participation--you struggle to justify spiritual disciplines and contemplative practices wholly on Biblical grounds.

To be sure, there many evangelicals who love and embrace this recovery of the contemplative and monastic traditions. But this evangelical appropriation can be thin, pietistic, and performative. And much of this is due to a lingering metaphysical impoverishment, trying to adopt practices that only make sense within a certain metaphysical framework. The practices get adopted--we learn to walk a labyrinth, say breath prayers, and celebrate Advent--but the adoption is superficial. It’s all fun and interesting, freshens things up a bit, but the underlying soteriological metaphysics haven’t been changed. Simply put, any recovery of the contemplative and monastic traditions cannot simply be a recovery of “practices” and “disciplines.” The recovery has to be metaphysical as well. You need to recover an entire worldview and not just a new prayer technique.

So, back to how the Protestant soteriological vision became juridical.

By juridical I mean the soteriological shift from theosis to penal substitutionary atonement. When you lose a participatory metaphysics what happens to your vision of salvation? Well, you lose a robust vision of sanctification. You begin to emphasize justification. To be clear, those substitutionary images of atonement are in Scripture. Critics of penal substitutionary atonement, and I find this a bit of a head-scratcher, routinely fail to appreciate how mercy, grace, pardon, and forgiveness are integral to the gospel. The issue is one of emphasis. Due to their metaphysical assumptions and the Neoplatonic influences, the church fathers emphasized salvation as sanctification and divine union. Lose those assumptions and you begin to emphasize justification over sanctification. And that’s what happened with Protestantism, a soteriological turn from theosis toward a juridical vision of salvation.

Another reason for this development, I think, is that you really don’t need much of a metaphysics to espouse a juridical vision of salvation. All you need, by way of metaphysics, is the belief in God. Here’s all the metaphysics you need:

1. God exists.

2. God forgives you.

I’m being a wee bit facetious here, but not much. A juridical faith is perfectly suited for the thinned out metaphysics of modernity. Which might work okay for a bare bones soteriology, just enough to create an altar call sermon, but it evacuates the metaphysical imagination of Protestantism. Where, for example, is the celestial hierarchy assumed by Pseudo-Dionysius and Thomas Aquinas? Where has the sacramental ontology gone? Where is the analogy of being?

As we know, due to its metaphysical impoverishment, this juridical vision of faith is thin and fragile. Which is precisely why you see the Richard Fosters, Dallas Willards, and John Mark Comers trying to recover the spiritual practices and disciplines of the tradition. And I wholly agree. May their tribe increase.

But without a deeper metaphysical recovery I fear this is lipstick on a pig.