The Sword and the Cup

How does a Christian know when to denounce a doctrine as heresy and when to hold an open mind and talk things out? When should a Christian refuse to worship with someone holding different beliefs, and when should we agree to disagree? Jesus normally squared off with the Pharisees, but He welcomed the Pharisee Nicodemus into a theological discussion. Paul says the Lord will requite Alexander the coppersmith for his deeds, and yet two verses later, he prays that the desertion of his fair-weather friends not be charged against them. When to show judgment and when mercy? When to bare the sword and when to offer the cup? I have a tentative explanation for Jesus’ differing approaches, but I don’t need to share it here, partly because I think there is no one clear-cut answer – that handling these dilemmas correctly depends not on a rule but on an ongoing relationship with living Wisdom. I will say that it has seemed clear to me from the time I was a teenager and first started to think of such things that Americans tend to err on the side of separation much too often. (I also think Americans excessively tend to make these decisions individually rather than in the body of the Church as a whole, but that’s a slightly different story.)

Augustine also made these distinctions and usually seems to have been comfortable with his decision either way. He clearly considered Pelagians outside the pale of orthodox Christianity and devoted several books to refuting them. I chose the metaphors of sword and cup to represent the two options, but doesn’t Augustine actually employ both? While he draws with the sword tip a sharp line between Catholicism and Pelagianism, doesn’t he also drink together with his foes in sharing so many words with them? After all, he doesn’t recommend the literal sword for dissenters as many later purported Christians would do, so the separation isn’t so wide as to be unbridgeable.

In the three short works I read this month, Augustine presents examples of both strategies, and they both struck me as particularly wise. In Predestination of the Saints and The Gift of Perseverance (which he considered the two parts of a longer, unnamed whole), the Bishop teaches that God is the source of both the beginning of faith and the end of faith. He proves his point both through Scripture (an appeal to authority) and argument (an appeal to reason), and sometimes uses a homey form of reasoning that could be called an appeal to experience: if you don’t think God is responsible for the beginning of another person’s faith, then why do you pray to Him to bring about the salvation of others? I found his variety of strategies and his understanding of the psychology of his readers impressive, reassuring, and convincing.

In his early treatise On Faith and the Creed, when Augustine reaches the topic of the Holy Spirit, he says that Bible scholars have not yet agreed on what relation the Holy Spirit has to the other two Persons of the Trinity. We know He is a Person, he says, and that He is not begotten from either the Father or the Son (so He is not the brother of the Word, and He is not the Holy Grandson of the Father). He is not a second Beginning: all comes from the Father. But then how is He related? Is He the Love between the Father and Son or something different?  He makes no mention of either breathing or procession. I appreciated Augustine not taking a stand on this one but acknowledging that Bible scholars can reach different tentative conclusions.

Now, the Church split in 1054 supposedly over this very question of the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the other Persons. By that time, procession was generally considered the name of the bond, but does He proceed from the Father only, as the Eastern Church insisted, or from both the Father and the Son, as the Western, Latin Church declared? I recite the western form of the creed, professing that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, but I maintain confidence that my eternal salvation won’t depend on getting that one right. One thing I know: if anyone tries to tell me that “The” Church “always” believed one way on this issue, they are mistaken. Augustine says the scholars hadn’t yet agreed. Apparently they still don’t.