Beeson Podcast, Episode 356 Chad Raith September 05, 2017 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. I have the pleasure of talking today with a friend and an alum of Beeson Divinity School, Dr. Chad Raith. Chad is the Executive Vice President of Mission and Ethics at Mercy Health in northwest Arkansas. He brings to this job a rich background in teaching, in theology. He has an M.Div. from Beeson Divinity School. He has a Th.M. from Regent College, where he worked with Professor Hans Boersma, and a Ph.D. from Ave Maria University in Florida, where he worked with Matt Levering. So Chad, welcome to the Beeson Podcast. Chad Raith: Thank you so much for having me. Timothy George: We're honored to have you back. Now I want to begin by just asking you to tell a little bit about your coming to Christ, your call to the ministry, and why you chose Beeson of all places to do theological work. Chad Raith: Well, I was about two years before completing my Industrial and Systems Engineering degree at Georgia Tech, and it was at that time that I actually came to Christ. I was not raised in the church or with any Christian affiliation in my background. I finished engineering at Tech. But by the time I finished, my newfound faith made such an impact on me, it kind of changed my philosophy of life, my goals, my hopes. I mean it really impacted me deeply over a course of a couple years that I decided I wanted to do something that touched people more directly. At the time I struggled whether to choose between ministry or medicine. I was actually looking at Emory Medical School there in Atlanta, because I was there. And thanks to some counseling, which I always find very helpful when making these kind of decisions, never make them in your own head, but talk with others that know you, I decided that my faith was so new that I really wanted to learn more about it. And I wanted to explore it more deeply, and that led me on a journey of where to go to seminary. After talking with some people that were influential in my life, and at the time I was a youth intern at First Baptist in Atlanta, so Charles Stanley, who you know, encouraged me not to go to a denominational seminary, that is not any particular denominational seminary. I took his advice, and so I was looking really for an interdenominational seminary. I had some folks that had gone to Beeson and loved it. And so I made my way to Birmingham after checking it out. Timothy George: I remember you very well as a student at Beeson. I remember you were very active in the student body. I don't know if you were the president, but you had some roleā€¦ Chad Raith: I was, yeah. Timothy George: ... and you were very active in ministry in Birmingham. Chad Raith: I was. Timothy George: You were very concerned about what was going on in the city and with young people and your generation. So when I think about you, if you had asked me to pick out somebody in the Beeson student body that was going to become a world-class, cutting-edge scholar of Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, you would not have been that guy. Chad Raith: And I would have never thought I would be that guy. That journey really happened because while at Beeson I tasted something of the Christian faith and of this rich heritage and this rich theology that when I was done, quite frankly, I just needed more. And so I wanted to explore more, and that's what led me to a Th.M. I really wasn't sure if I wanted to go into academia. That was always a question mark for me. And in fact, preparing for this podcast I looked at an old journal of mine from Beeson days. And I had in there, "Do I get a Ph.D., or do I go into the ministry? I'm not sure." So I thought a Th.M. was a nice middle ground. It's a two-year research degree. And that led me to Regent College to be with Hans Boersma. And after those two years, through again some counseling and advice of those around me, the pastor up there at the time that I was at the church and as well as Hans and some others, they really felt I had a calling for teaching and the life of the mind and exploring academically. That's what led me to my Ph.D. and from there on. Timothy George: I do remember having a conversation with you when you were at that point of decision about Ph.D. work. And you chose to go to a Catholic school, a very fine Catholic school, Ave Maria University, which is where you really began to bore into Thomas Aquinas and brought him into conversation with John Calvin. I want to ask you about that project. But first of all, what kind of led you in that direction? Chad Raith: Well, when I was completing my Th.M. at Regent, by that point having studied under you, Dr. George, and now under Dr. Boersma, both of you very involved in ecumenical conversations, I sort of saw the handwriting on the wall for my own life. And at the time I was reading a philosopher named Alasdair MacIntyre. I was reading his text After Virtue. And what dawned on me was that if I'm going to be effective in this ecumenical conversation in the future, I felt like for myself, in conversation with my wife, that it wasn't enough for me just to read about Catholic theology or to read about Catholicism or to hear about it from afar. But I felt the only way I was really going to understand it is if I embedded myself within it, and saw it from the inside out. Alasdair MacIntyre has an analogy of a chess game where you can tell someone about chess and you can explain to them everything about chess, but until they actually play the game they really don't understand the inner logic of what's going on in chess. So my wife and I moved down to Naples, Florida. And little did I know that I was the first Protestant they had ever had in the Ph.D. program, and only Protestant they've ever had in the Ph.D. program. Timothy George: So you ruined it for everybody else. Chad Raith: I became the poster boy of everything Protestant, though. It doesn't matter if the question was Calvin, Bonhoeffer, Barth, if they were Protestant I needed to know that I had to have a response to it. But it was a generous community. One thing that was interesting is that they were quite secure in their own Catholicism, but that security actually bred an openness to dialogue and to hear and explore. And so we felt very received. And over long conversations over dinner, late at night, I learned a lot about the inner workings of Catholicism from the Catholic frame of mind. And that's helped me kind of translate between Protestant and Catholic where we use, you know, sometimes different terminology to talk about the same thing. One example I use is, if I were to walk into a group of Protestant pastors and talk about what we do at Mercy Health, which is a Catholic health care organization, I say every morning before we go out and do our business we pray the Our Father together, no one would have a clue what I'm talking about. Because they are like, "What's an Our Father?" But all that is is the Lord's Prayer. That's what we use in Protestant language. We call it the Lord's Prayer. But it's the little things like that that's an example of a translation opportunity, I think, between the two. Timothy George: Great. Now I want to ask you about your dissertation, which became a book published by Oxford University Press called Aquinas and Calvin on Romans: God's Justification and Our Participation. Now there are five really big words. I'm not including "God's" in there either. If you go Aquinas, Calvin, Romans, justification, and participation. There's a lot of weight in each of those words. So what was the genesis of that project? And what were you really trying to do? Chad Raith: Yeah. It felt weighty doing the project. Here I am dealing with giants of the faith--Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin--with a giant text of the Bible, which is the book of Romans, and giant theological topics like justification and participation. So I'm just a glutton for punishment. I'm not exactly sure. But I was so hungry to really get into what truly unites and divides us as Protestants and Catholics that I wasn't satisfied with surface-level explanations. And just for me, I needed to go deep. I just needed to really explore thickly the conversation historically, too. Because I came to appreciate, especially being at Beeson, that we have a history here that we're working within. Well, John Calvin was a natural fit for me. I learned a lot about Calvin at Beeson, as well as under Dr. Boersma, himself Reformed, at Regent. New to me was Thomas Aquinas. But Ave Maria is very deeply rooted in Aquinas, and I came across him very deeply while being at Ave Maria. So this seemed like natural conversation partners because people sometimes think Thomas Aquinas is the Catholic guy and John Calvin is the Protestant guy. Now the latter is a little more true given the historical kind of dimensions of the Reformation. But what I wanted to explore is just how similar or different is the thought processes of someone like a Thomas Aquinas and a John Calvin on a very hot book of the Bible, ecumenically speaking, which is the book of Romans. So I kind of threw it all together. The two other words that came out, justification and participation, are the two concepts that I found to be key points of similarity and tension between the two and how they went about interpreting Romans. Timothy George: Say how Thomas and Calvin are similar and different on justification. Chad Raith: Well, one of the more immediate differences that comes up very frequently in ecumenical dialogue is for Thomas Aquinas justification has to do with being transformed into a just person. Justification and sanctification are not distinct terms and distinct categories quite like they are for someone like- Timothy George: So a concept of infused grace, something like that. Chad Raith: Right. Well, the notion of infused grace would still be, I think, this is something I argue in the text is Calvin is actually very participatory. Very deeply, God's life in us and through us- Timothy George: Union with Christ. Chad Raith: Union with Christ. It's very deep. But when it comes to how we conceive of what makes us stand right before God, what gives us peace with God, the fundamental reality for Calvin is going to be a covering or a clothing of Christ's righteousness, which doesn't decrease or increase depending on how holy you are. But it's yours by faith, and you have it fully. You're 100 percent justified by having Christ's own perfect justness. Aquinas believed that we through grace participate also in Christ's justness but by being transformed into that justness through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. So for Aquinas you can become more justified or less justified, which is a totally foreign concept in the Protestant way of thinking. Timothy George: Though if we said sanctified, that works a little better for Protestants, right? Chad Raith: Exactly. And that was a major difference I discovered between Calvin and Aquinas when they interpreted Romans. Oftentimes, Calvin would employ a distinction between justification and sanctification to interpret Paul. That just wasn't there for Aquinas. There is no distinct places, such as like Romans 3, this is not justification, whereas Romans 6 is talking about sanctification, that's Calvin. Calvin will think Romans 1 through 3 is really about justification, and like 6 through 8, that's going to be about sanctification. Aquinas interprets the whole thing as a more continuous spectrum of justification and its various components. And that's going to lead to just diverse interpretations and applications and the way in which we conceive of what it means to participate in God's salvation. Timothy George: Let me throw another big word at you that's also from the book of Romans, predestination, 9-11. There, maybe my own sense is, you find greater continuity between Aquinas and Calvin because they were both such astute students of St. Augustine. Do you agree with that? Chad Raith: That's correct, yes. I do agree with that. Sometimes I find this especially within Catholic circles, quite frankly, when I hear Calvin and Aquinas talked about when it comes to predestination. They tend to think of Calvin advocating a more active role when it comes to God's reprobation than is found in Aquinas, that they think Aquinas has a much more robust place for permission that Calvin rejects actually very explicitly the doctrine of permission. However, what I've discovered, again this is one of those issues you have to appreciate, that Aquinas and Calvin lived 300 years apart. And in that 300-year time period, you get a lot of development within Scotus' thought, Ockham, Biel's thought. Calvin is not reacting to and working within a Thomistic framework primarily for his polemics. So when he rejects permissive will, he's not rejecting a definition of it that Thomas Aquinas holds to. He rejects a definition that the nominalists held to when it comes to permission. So it gets really complicated. And in fact, I found that when it comes to providence, the notion of God's providence, Aquinas is very clear, those whom God predestined will make it to heaven, just like Calvin. Very little difference there. Timothy George: Yeah. Now, this work, this deep textured, thick work as you just called it on Aquinas and Calvin and Romans and justification, have led you to be very interested in ecumenism, and where you were studying, as you were saying, Ave Maria, you studied at a Catholic school. And you and another recent alum David Nelson are the authors of a book, Ecumenism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Maybe you can say a little bit about that book. And then the wider question of ecumenism and why is that something a Protestant, evangelical should be interested in? Chad Raith: Well, the book itself came out of a mutual love for the church that Dave and I have, both having been formed deeply in our appreciation both of ecumenism and the church through Beeson and our time there. Timothy George: We should say Dave is a Lutheran theologian. Chad Raith: Yes, he is, working right now for Baker Academic. So we met, became really good friends at Beeson. So that's almost 16 years ago now. We've remained kind of theological friends the whole time in our conversation and dialogue with one another. And in 2011, we decided that there needed to be a text written that updated the conversation around ecumenism. So ecumenism, as you well know, is an ever-changing reality, at least you hope so. If it's being effective, then we're not the same as we were 10 years ago. Hopefully things are different. So there is at the time of writing this, and still, not a good introductory text to the ecumenical dialogue, the modern ecumenical dialogue. Especially one that updates it to the present time and one that explicitly includes the contributions of evangelical ecumenism. I found through the researching this text, and Dave would agree with this as well, that the story of modern ecumenism is simply unintelligible without the evangelical contribution. And that comes out in the book. So we hope this becomes a textbook that can be used in classrooms, that can be an introductory text for anyone that is interested because it gives a good introductory overview of the ecumenical movement historically and the key issues that the ecumenical movement faces in terms of today and in terms of going forward. Timothy George: Who's the publisher? Chad Raith: Continuum Press. So it's part of a guide for their Perplexed series. Timothy George: Yeah, yeah. So Ecumenism: A Guide for the Perplexed by David Nelson and Chad Raith from Continuum. So check it out. I think you'll find it very helpful and very interesting. Now I want to shift a little bit to a shift in your life because for a number of years you have been in academia, as you've said. You were a professor of religion and philosophy at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, where you and I were last together, I think, at a conference that you were organizing, I was speaking at, looking at Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical perspectives on the Gospel of John. So you were thick into the academic world. But you've gone through a shift in recent months. Tell us a little bit now. You're the executive vice president of mission and ethics at Mercy Health in northwest Arkansas. What is that? Chad Raith: Well, Mercy Health is a Christian, Catholic, Sisters of Mercy, that's kind of the three buckets that they describe themselves, Catholic health care organization. And Mercy takes their Christian commitments so deeply that they have a vice president position dedicated to mission and ethics. If I were to talk about the position at 20,000 feet, I would basically say that I'm there, as well as other vice presidents of mission in other parts of Mercy, are present at the executive level to ensure our decisions strategically that are being made as a health care institution are consistent with who we are as a Christian health care institution. Kind of on the ground level, there are many dynamics to health care, as we all know, in America today. Many struggles, many tensions that we face. And so we want to ensure that whatever we do going forward, we remain true to who we are as a Christian health care organization. There's things we do because of that. And there's things we don't do because of that. But we want to ensure that we actually, and this is the mission of Mercy, to bring to life the healing ministry of Jesus through compassionate care and exceptional service. And I'm there to just be a part of the conversation to ensure that happens. Timothy George: So if you can answer this question, what would an organization like the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, how would they inform the work of Mercy Health in making decisions about bioethics and whatever it is that you're facing, the frontlines today. Chad Raith: Yes. Well, we have what's known as the ethical and religious directives of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops. Right now we're in the fifth edition, so it's an ongoing, evolving, just like health care is itself. But it provides what you may think of as the parameters of what we do as a health care organization. And what the directives are trying to get at, what the do's and the don'ts that are in the directives are trying to get at, is we want to ensure that the kind of health care we provide is bringing to life the healing ministry of Jesus and just isn't performing procedures and doing medicine. There are certain things that if we did them ... And to give you an example in the directives, abortion. The idea is that if we perform this, it would be hard to recognize it as the healing ministry of Jesus. And so that's one of the things we don't do as part of Mercy. We also, in our community, do about five to six million dollars of charity care. This is to the poor, the underinsured, and the uninsured. We do do this because it is consistent with what we think of with the healing ministry of Jesus. So that's some of the ways in which we're informed by these directives and by the Catholic Conference of Bishops. Timothy George: So it seems to me that this new position that you've just recently taken, although it's not something you might have predicted for yourself five or six years ago- Chad Raith: No. Timothy George: ... nonetheless, builds on how God has shaped your life in these various studies you've done and teaching you've done so that you can actually put into practice the theology you've been teaching and writing over the years. Chad Raith: Very much so. Whether it is doing the translation between Catholicism and Protestantism because Mercy is an official ministry of the Catholic church as a health care organization. But it is so in a largely Protestant part of the country. And I get to be a part of that translation between the two. Because as we know, especially it's come out with our conversation here with Evangelicals and Catholics Together, when it comes to certain health care issues, Protestants and Catholics really should get onboard with one another and be united in our common cause of bringing to life the healing ministry of Jesus. It also allows me at a very real level with people dying every day in the hospital or being healed in a certain way in the hospital or facing very, very difficult decisions in life, this theological training and this background in Catholic moral theology that I got at Ave Maria enables me to kind of approach these with the kind of distinctions and categories and kind of framework that you need when you're trying to engage complex life decisions, which is what we deal with on a daily basis in a hospital and in our clinics. Timothy George: Well, I wish you every blessing as you undertake this new work. Chad Raith: Well, thank you. Timothy George: We're very proud of you at Beeson. Chad Raith: Thank you. Chad Raith: Very proud to be a Beeson alumni, so ... Timothy George: Thank you so much. My guest today on the Beeson Podcast has been Dr. Chad Raith. And we thank you for this conversation, Chad. Chad Raith: Thank you, Dr. George. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website: beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work. And we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.