“The faith is handed down to us by the Church. We don’t get to invent it,” says the author of Theological Negotiations: Proposals in Soteriology and Anthropology. “But we do share in the task and responsibility of trying to understand it.”
Dr. Farrow: It takes me next to two very basic areas of dispute: the relation between justification and sanctification, in which Luther becomes my chief interlocutor, and the relation between “satisfaction” and punishment, a subsidiary but crucial topic that if anything is even more misunderstood today. Both of these have very significant implications for pastoral theology, as for systematic theology.
Those two chapters are followed by a pair on doxology. The first of these treats what I call “doxological Pelagianism”; that is, the tendency to rely on nature to perfect itself even in the act of worship, where the grace of God in Jesus Christ should be most evident. It will be among the most controversial chapters in the book, since it takes its cue from Protestant thinkers while contending that the problem is more exaggerated in Protestantism than in Catholicism, where it is also present.
The second is a detailed treatment of the problem of transubstantiation. Here I return to Aquinas, and to the task of rethinking some of his ideas by way of a more adequate eschatology. I expect this chapter to be controversial as well, even inside Catholicism. But both Catholics and Protestants, if they read it patiently, will perhaps find that the whole stubborn business—the very serious business—of transubstantiation appears in a fresh light.
I'd need more historical evidence before accepting his claims about nominalism:
CWR: In the Introduction, you write, “Nominalism is Western civilization’s wounded side, from which is flowing, not water and blood, but blood and fire.” Can you provide some background and context to that strong statement?
Dr. Farrow: That is said with respect to modernity’s doomed attempt to re-found Western civilization on the basis that “God” is merely a concept in the world, a way of speaking about emergent order in the world, rather than the living God, the God of the Bible who through the incarnation suffers and dies with man, who as man actually conquers death for the sake of life eternal. It was through nominalism that we learned to regard the latter as myth, as an empty vessel that could be filled with fresh content as required. But the fresh content we have poured into it has not brought progress towards perpetual peace, as the fathers of modernity hoped. It has brought moral confusion, incited hubris of every kind, and led to the sickness unto death; that is, despair. Western civilization is crumbling before our eyes, and being torn down by our own hands. We’ve decided that there’s little or nothing there worth salvaging, not even the statuary, as it turns out.
