Cautions on Ressourcement

In an essay on Congar’s Tradition and Traditions in the first volume of God Without Measure, John Webster asks what a “Protestant admirer” might say about Congar’s, and Catholicism’s, project of ressourcement.

He objects to the characterization of Protestantism that is embedded in the project: “It ‘explains’ Protestantism by presenting it as part of the larger malformation of Western Christianity after the Gregorian Reform.” He admits that there is some truth to this assessment, but argues that “it ought not to be pressed in such a way as to deprive the Reformation of any insight into the permanent character of Christianity” (206).

Further, the method of ressourcement is “heavily Catholic, insofar as it tends to assume that the emphasis on ecclesial visibility . . . is normatively Christian, and thus that Protestantism is a declension into spiritualism, transcendentalism, individualism, and the like.” Webster thinks that alternative ecclesiologies that “de-emphasize’ the ecclesial ‘realization’ of the saving mystery and are more heavily invested in the church’s passivity” are excluded (206). (Here I have more sympathy with Congar than Webster does.)

Finally, ressourcement weakens any distinction between apostolic and post-apostolic. Congar doesn’t want apostolicity to be primarily backward, but Webster argues that “what it means for the church to stand beneath apostolicity as a law of its existence is that there is a proper retrospective dynamic in the church.” Thus church is “a company that looks back to the apostolic testimony set before it in Scripture and finds itself placed beneath its judgment,” and that testimony is “properly segregated,. discontinuous, intrusive in the busy processes of ecclesial invention” (207).

And this brings him, a couple of pages later, to affirming sola scriptura. He again admits to failures in Protestant theology: “For a variety of reasons, Protestant dogmatics often lost the plot . . . relocating Scripture away from soteriology into riteriology, with rather disastrous results” (209). But he doesn’t think that Congar’s effort to “fold” Scripture into the church’s life is a proper response to Protestant extrinsicism: “Scripture’s task as prophetic and apostolic witness to the divine Word can only be accomplished if it is in some sense an alien element in the church. Congar argues that Scripture is materially sufficient but formally insufficient. But without formal sufficiency, material sufficiency has no teeth.” Of course, Scripture ought not be abstracted from its presence in the church, but Webster asks the key question: “What kind of presence?” Sola scriptura properly understood “does not extract Scripture from Christian history. But it does qualify that history as one which is addressed by an intrusive voice, the voice of the one who awakens the sleepers and raises the dead” (209).

Wise words from one of Protestantism’s wisest theologians. And, though addressed to Congar and Catholicism, words to be taken to heart in all Protestant projects of ressourcement.