Todd Billings on Reformed Catholicism

In a recent article, J. Todd Billings (“Catholic and Reformed: Rediscovering a Tradition,” Pro Ecclesia 23.2 [2014]: 132-46) argues that the church can escape its cultural captivity by pursuing a biblical, Christ-centered renewal along the line of retrieval of its Catholic-Reformed tradition.

According to Billings, the mainstream church is culturally enthralled to what some sociologists call a “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (MTD). This “god” is what I would call a kind of Jerry Maguire God who wants to “Help me help you.” He wants people to be good and the goal of life is to feel good about oneself. This “god” is mostly distant but lets good people go to heaven when they die. What is more, Billings reject some models that attempt to get beyond this kind of thing. Billings rejects the “primitivist” approach of Brian McLaren, Alan Hirsch, and N.T. Wright who want to read against the grain of tradition and get back to the Bible. The primitivist agenda ends up with a correlationist approach of answering cultural questions with answers that allegedly show that the Bible, when properly understood, has relevant answers. Yet this primitivist/correlationist approach tends to bypass a whole sway of exegetical and theological traditions. The problem is, Billings states, “Rather than seeing the paradigm for biblical interpretation in the celebration of word and sacrament – as part of a communal journey by the Spirit towards conformity to Jesus Christ – it reduces interpretation to individual historical judgments in which our pressings questions set the agenda.” So rather than start with the world’s socio-political problems and jump over history to read the Bible, a more enriching approach would be to retrieve a catholic-reformed agenda for reading Scripture.

Billings to proceeds to give several examples of folks like William Perkins and John Hesselink who endeavoured move towards a Catholic, Evangelical, and Reformed reading of Scripture as a source of renewal (modern versions would include Kevin Vanhoozer, James K. A. Smith, and Michael Allen). Billings also contrasts the approach of Willow Creek Church in Chicago with City Church of San Francisco noting that the latter has been more effective in creating a church culture that is “seeker-comprehensive” without dumbing down on its theological heritage in the catholic-reformed tradition. Which shows that rediscovering tradition is not just a scholarly task, but a congregational one too.

Its a very interesting piece about being a “Reformational Catholic” as some would call it. I’m broadly sympathetic. I’ve tried to teach my students that tradition is simply what the church has learned from reading Scripture. Tradition is a tool for reading Scripture. However, in push back, I do think it is responsible to often read tradition in light of Scripture and to adjust tradition according to the witness of Scripture when necessary.

Billings article is definitely worth reading.

Peter Leithart offers his own reflections on Billings’ article at First Things.