Medieval Non-Proprietary Community

Outline from Bonds of Imperfection eds O'Donovan and O'Donovan (Eerdmans).

The Proprietary Subject and the Crisis of Liberal Rights

Key point:  The possession of rights is always proprietorship; all natural rights (for the West) originate in property rights (Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, 75).   This originated with Pope John XXIII (1329 AD).  He saw man as created with full lordship and ownership as possession (dominum).  His point was to discredit Fransiscan theologians who insisted on radical poverty.

This is the rights culture that would spring full-bloom in the modern world.  The problem it created was how to have community if the above take on rights is true.

Patristic Foundations of Non-Proprietary Community

• The fathers thought men should share as an imitation of God's sharing his goodness with us.

Augustine's Achievement

Augustine distinguished between two objective rights:  (a) divine right, by which all things belong to the righteous, and (b) human right, in which is the jurisdiction of earthly kings (79, quoting Epistle 93).

• Justice for Augustine is a rightly-ordered love seen in the body politic, which would mean men loving the highest and truest good, God, for God's sake.
• Therefore, the bonum commune is a sharing in a rightly-ordered love (City of God, BK 19.21).
• Because this sharing is spiritual, it is common and inclusive.  Thus we have a republic in the truest sense of the word:  res publica, public things.
• Conversely, a disordered love in the soul is the privatization of the good.
• Therefore, a disordered love will see the destruction of community.

O'Donovan comments,

It is the regulated interaction of private spheres of degenerate freedom, secured by the protection of property and enhanced by the provision of material benefits at the hands of unscrupulous tyrants (80).

Fransiscan Poverty: The Evangelical Theology of Non-Possession

• Renouncing property right means that the viator is not a self-possessor, but rather is possessed by Christ and receives his powers (85).  

Wyclif's Ecclesiological Revolution

Irony: Wyclif's reform program actually owed a great deal to Pope John XXIII's reflections.  

• Non-proprietary posession belonged not only to Adam's original state, but all the way forward to the episcopolate today: this should be seen in the church militant (88).  
• Divine lordship (dominum):  per Wyclif's predecessor, Fitzralph, God is the primary possessor and enjoyer of creation.  Therefore, his giving of creation to Adam is a communication and sharing of himself, rather than a transfer of Lordship (89).  
• For the church, for Wyclif, this is God's gift of himself as the love of Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 13).  
• Therefore, all of the "justified," who coexist with Christ's love, share (communicant) in this lordship directly from Christ.
• Therefore, just dominion involves rightly-ordered love towards these communicable goods, which in turn depends on true knowledge of them available in Christ.

Notae Bene

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Theonomy and the Steroids Effect

I wrote this at Bayou Huguenot a few years ago and I was reflecting on my own life.  But even then the article was somewhat abstract.  Since then I participated (much to my shame) in the "Level Headed Reconstructionist" group on facebook.  I don't want to be mean, and I am well aware of my own limitations (quite painfully), but these guys are the 4 year olds of theology.  They don't know how much they don't know, yet they think--due to their understanding of Van Til--that they know everything.   

One of the dangers in taking steroids while lifting weights is that despite all the gains, the level you reach is likely the highest you will ever reach.   Once you get off steroids, and even the biggest “user” won’t take them perpetually (No one does steroids, or even creatine, during the regular season for risk of dehydration), it is unlikely you will ever reach those levels naturally again.

We see something similar in theological studies.   Deciding which area to major in will determine how deep one’s theological knowledge can get.   Here was my (and many others; and for what it’s worth, throughout this post substitute any Federal Vision term in place of a theonomy term and the point is largely the same) problem in institutional learning:  I immediately jumped on how important apologetics was for the Christian life to the extent that I made apologetical concerns overwhelm theological concerns.  While I believe Greg Bahnsen died entirely orthodox, and I do not believe theonomy is a heresy (only an error), focusing on Bahnsen’s method to such an extent, both in apologetics and ethics, warped the rest of theology.   I essentially made theology proper (and soteriology and ecclesiology) subsets of apologetics/ethics, instead of the other way around.
I won’t deny:  I became very good at apologetics and ethics, but I didn’t know jack about theology outside of a basic outline of Berkhof.   Studying Reformed theology among sources, and worse, movements, who are only barely Reformed (Bahnsen excluded), limited how deep I could go in Reformed theology.

I’ll say it another way:  when I was taking covenant theology we had to read sections of Gisbertus Voetius and Cocceius in class.  I got frustrated thinking, “These guys are tying in the covenant of works with natural law.  Don’t they know how un-reformed natural law is?”  Problem was, I was wrong.  But if you read the standard theonomic (or FV; by the way, the FV fully adopts the Barthian, and now historically falsified, Calvin vs. Calvinist paradigm) historiography, there is no way to avoid such misreadings.  Even worse, said historiography fully prevents one from learning at the feet of these high Reformed masters.

By the grace of God I’ve repented of that misreading.  I spent this spring finding as many Richard Muller journal articles and taking copious notes.

Theonomy Demands Natural Law

Jus Divinum on the Mosaic Judicials .

We answer, the Laws of the Jewish Church, whether Ceremonial or Judicial, so far forth are in force, even at this day, as they were grounded upon common equity, the principles of reason and nature, and were serving to the maintenance of the Moral Law. … The Jewish Politie is only abrogated in regard of what was in it of particular right, not of common right, so far forth as there was in their Laws either a typicalness proper to their Church, or a peculiarness of respect to their state in that Land of Promise given unto them.  Whatsoever was in their Laws of Moral concernment, or general equity is still obliging …[2]

Conclusion:  Whatever else 19.4 might mean, it clearly states that the use of the judicials in today’s society presupposes some understanding and application of natural law and common sense equity.  This doesn’t mean theonomy is necessarily right or wrong.  However, it does shed some light on how American theonomists tell the narrative.   If one adds to the mix a hyper-presuppositionalism and a fear of all things Thomistic, then there is no way he or she can read the judicials in the way that the writers of the Confession intended.

Equity is a natural law concept, full stop.  The anti-scholastic theonomist of today is borrowing from Thomistic categories in order to reject Thomistic categories (the irony of this somewhat Van Tillian sentence is thick).

I will say the problem another way.  There are two hermeneutical worlds (courtesy of John Stott).

Mosaic World                                                                                               Today's Application

(How do you apply the two on issues where there isn't a clear connection between the two?)

Mosaic World ---------------------------Equity--------------------Today's Application

Here is the problem:  even if theonomy is correct on this point, equity is a generic category that doesn't necessarily include Mosaic specifics.  Equity presupposes (!) that one use analogy and accepted ideas of fairness, and it doesn't always tell you what that is.  But the Bible doesn't really give a complete list of generalities on fairness.

This is why something like Reid's Common Sense Realism is inevitable.