Category: Adventures in Church History

Does the United States Need a Spanish Inquisition?

Published on by D. G. Hart28 Comments

The folks at Called to Communion generally avoid the culture wars and that is to their credit, though their apolitical posture is hardly characteristic of Roman Catholics in the United States these days. Two of the significant GOP presidential hopefuls were Roman Catholics — Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. And now another is on the Republican ticket, Paul Ryan for vice president (though whether Ryan is a “good catholic” depends on how your understand the church’s social teaching).

Other bloggers are not so circumspect about the United States and its increasing barbarism. Fr. C. John McCloskey III, writes at the Catholic Thing. He recently argued that if the United States is going to be a Christian nation it needs Roman Catholicism because Protestantism has run out of gas:

With the passage of time, homegrown American Protestant sects sprang up so profusely that they now can be counted in the thousands. Despite this variety, almost all shared a biblical moral philosophy not far removed from Catholics. The loosening of divorce laws and the propagation of the birth control pill in the Sixties, however, precipitated further retreat mere decades later by mainstream and traditional Protestant denominations on other moral fronts, including abortion, homosexual activity, and most recently same-sex marriage.

The primary reason is the lack of dogmatic authority in Protestantism and the reliance on the principle of private judgment. Leaving people to rely on only their opinions or feelings as moral guide is not enough to sustain a country that was once Christian and now is increasingly pagan.

What is the solution? Can American become Christian again? In my judgment, mainstream Protestantism is in an irreversible freefall. Don’t count on any great religious revivals. America needs witness, not enthusiasm. The United States will either become predominantly Catholic in numbers, faith, and morals or perish under the weight of its unbridled hedonism and corruption.

Notice the theme of Protestant diversity and subjectivity versus Roman Catholic unity and objectivity that Called to Communion paradigmatists also stress.

Protestants certainly deserve their share of blame for what has happened to moral conventions in the United States. The mainline churches have been particularly negligent on sexual ethics and marriage, not to mention the atonement.

But the analysis here which reflects a common trait of conservative intellectuals — to attribute rotten cultural fruit to bad religious seed — misses the elephant in the room, namely, government. Churches may promote or tolerate all sorts of moral goofiness but the state can still pass and enforce laws that proscribe conduct. The abolition of plural marriage in Utah is one example. At the same time, churches do not have the power and never have had it to enforce temporally or civilly their teachings or codes of conduct.

In the sixteenth century when Roman Catholics wanted to rid the Low Countries of Protestantism they depended on Phillip II and the Duke of Alba (Margaret of Parma wasn’t too shabby either) to implement the church’s ban on heretics. In fact, Rome’s mechanisms of inquisition generally relied up civil authorities to enforce the temporal penalties for heresy.

So if Fr. McCloskey wants a Christian United States he is going to need more than Roman Catholic priests, religious orders, and parishioners. He is also going to need a strong state. Nowhere has Christianity (or Islam for that matter) become the cohesive glue of a society or country without a government that enforces religious teaching and practice.

In which case, the real problem with the United States is the freedom granted in the Constitution. We cannot have religious uniformity and have the political framework established in the nation’s system of government.

Meanwhile, if national order requires an iron fist, would not the same go for ecclesiastical order? I have made the point before, but it may bear repeating. If the structures of Roman Catholicism yield the kind of uniformity and solidarity that Protestantism does not, then why is liberalism a problem for Roman Catholics in the United States? Churches may depend on the state to enforce their norms in the general society, but churches do have the power to enforce their teachings and rules within the household of faith.

Again, Rome suffers from this problem no more than Protestants do. Without a civil pope to call the shots, churches have to make do with the spiritual powers they have, limited though they are. And yet, if Christians — Roman Catholic and Protestant — are longing for the political equivalent of the papacy to restore decency in the United States, do they still qualify as political conservatives who — think Constitution — are supposed to be wary of the centralization of power in one person?

Last I checked, it is still 2012, some 236 years after the Declaration of Independence. The American Revolution has many faults, and one of them may very well be no provisions to check dangerous religious and philosophical views. At the same time, the order that the revolutionaries established granted freedoms that protect Protestants and Roman Catholics to worship, teach, and blog. Those freedoms were not readily available in places like the Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century. It may just be (all about) me, but I think I’d rather live now under Obama than then under Phillip II.

Of Paradigms, Persons, and Popes

Published on by D. G. Hart114 Comments

Another theme that comes up in the Called to Communion ecclesiology is the superiority of Rome because of — surprise — the pope. This is not some form of papal infatuation but a genuine recognition of the difficulty of interpreting the Bible. If you have no way of determining which interpretation is correct, you wind up with lots of denominations. CTCers don’t consider that when nation-states were confessional, parliaments and kings also did a good job of keeping denominations down in the single digits. Then again, CTCers seem to like authority in the abstract rather than in its hands on (or hands off as the case may be) instances.

An example of CTC logic comes from Bryan Cross in the previously discussed post about sola scriptura where he tries to answer several objections to the idea that a Roman Catholic convert is doing the same thing as a Protestant when he decides to join the correct church. He makes the distinction, repeated often at CTC, that a book is one thing, a person is another:

The problem with this dilemma (one where a person supposedly needs a series of authoritative interpreters ad infinitum to determine which interpreter is correct) is that it ignores the qualitative ontological distinction between persons and books, and so it falsely assumes that if a book needs an authoritative interpreter in order to function as an ecclesial authority, so must a living person. A book contains a monologue with respect to the reader. An author can often anticipate the thoughts and questions that might arise in the mind of the reader. But a book cannot hear the reader’s questions here and now, and answer them. A living person, however, can do so. A living person can engage in genuine dialogue with the reader, whereas a book cannot. Fr. Kimel talks about that here when he quotes Chesterton as saying that though we can put a living person in the dock, we cannot put a book in the dock. In this respect, a person can do what a book cannot; a person can correct global misunderstandings and answer comprehensive interpretive questions. A book by its very nature has a limited intrinsic potency for interpretive self-clarification; a person, on the other hand, by his very nature has, in principle, an unlimited intrinsic potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification. This unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification ensures that the hermeneutical spiral may reach its end. A book cannot speak more about itself than it does at the moment at which it is completed. A person, by contrast, remains perpetually capable of clarifying further any of his previous speech-acts.

Right away, any Protestant with a well-informed doctrine of Scripture will notice the implicit (though likely unintentional) insult done to the author of Scripture — that would be God himself — in this distinction between a mere book and a person. God is three persons and also omnipotent and omniscient. For some reason, he decided to reveal himself in the pages of holy writ, and he did not then simply stand back and let the interpreters have at it (another instance of canonical deism?). He also gave his Spirit to guide his interpreters into all truth (would Cross’ neglect of the Spirit be an instance of pneumatological deism?). So the mere book that Cross uses in this contrast is the very word of God. As Hank Kingsley might say, “hey now!”

But this contrast is complicated further by a strange notion that persons are better understood than books. To understand a person, we need to hear them speak or write. In which case, a person uses the same medium of communication as a book — language. And language, whether spoken, written, or blogged, needs to be interpreted. Yes, a person may be able to follow up and explain how an interpreter was mistaken about what was said or written. But even here the explanation may need several iterations of additional explanations. So the ontological point misses entirely the linguistic reality. The problem with books and persons is that the language of both, even in authoritative occasions — a father, the Constitution, a papal encyclical, a school district superintendent — is capable of misinterpretation or misunderstanding. This is not hypothetical given John Paul II’s apostolic letter, Ad Tuendam Fidem, along with the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s commentary on the letter (more below).

One last curiosity of this contrast between a person and a book is that the pope technically is not a person. The papacy is an office. That distinction between person and office is important for the sake of infallibility as I understand it. A pope gets to say and do a lot of things. When he greets his butler (if he has one) in the morning, he is not speaking infallibly. He only does that when certain conditions are met and those conditions go to the heart of what the papal office is (as opposed to the person occupying the office; since not every pope becomes a saint, not every person who becomes pope has the same spiritual worth). And when an authority is more official than personal, then the capacity to explain interpretations drops and may even vanish. According to wikipedia, 265 persons have occupied the office of pope. Whether all of those persons would interpret the Bible or each other the same way is doubtful. Even more dubious is the notion that an officer overseeing the kind of bureaucracy the Vatican is would take the time to explain to sit down with the average Roman Catholic and explain infallibly how to resolve her disagreement where her priest over the correct interpretation of John 3:16. It would be like the Secretary of Health and Human Services responding to Hillsdale County’s coroner about the latest guidelines on tabulating causes of death. If the Secretary were to try to explain to all such questions, she would be on the phone 24/7.

This may explain John Paul II’s Ad Tuendam Fidem (1998), an apostolic letter designed to clarify church authority and what Roman Catholics must believe.

TO PROTECT THE FAITH of the Catholic Church against errors arising from certain members of the Christian faithful, especially from among those dedicated to the various disciplines of sacred theology, we, whose principal duty is to confirm the brethren in the faith (Lk 22:32), consider it absolutely necessary to add to the existing texts of the Code of Canon Law and the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, new norms which expressly impose the obligation of upholding truths proposed in a definitive way by the Magisterium of the Church, and which also establish related canonical sanctions.

With all the singularity of persons or officers at the top of Rome’s hierarchy, one might think a letter like this was unnecessary. But if you read the letter or Ratzinger’s commentary, you may still be scratching your head on the clarity of interpretations coming from the papal office. For instance, the commentary says a lot more about the criteria for what is authoritative than what the actual content of the faith is. From explanation number five:

5. The first paragraph states: “With firm faith, I also believe everything contained in the Word of God, whether written or handed down in Tradition, which the Church, either by a solemn judgment or by the ordinary and universal Magisterium, sets forth to be believed as divinely revealed.” The object taught in this paragraph is constituted by all those doctrines of divine and catholic faith which the Church proposes as divinely and formally revealed and, as such, as irreformable.

These doctrines are contained in the Word of God, written or handed down, and defined with a solemn judgment as divinely revealed truths either by the Roman Pontiff when he speaks ‘ex cathedra,’ or by the College of Bishops gathered in council, or infallibly proposed for belief by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.

These doctrines require the assent of theological faith by all members of the faithful. Thus, whoever obstinately places them in doubt or denies them falls under the censure of heresy, as indicated by the respective canons of the Codes of Canon Law.

To see how complicated this business of binding interpretive authority is, check out Ratzinger’s clarification number nine:

9. The Magisterium of the Church, however, teaches a doctrine to be believed as divinely revealed (first paragraph) or to be held definitively (second paragraph) with an act which is either defining or non-defining. In the case of a defining act, a truth is solemnly defined by an “ex cathedra” pronouncement by the Roman Pontiff or by the action of an ecumenical council. In the case of a non-defining act, a doctrine is taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium of the Bishops dispersed throughout the world who are in communion with the Successor of Peter. Such a doctrine can be confirmed or reaffirmed by the Roman Pontiff, even without recourse to a solemn definition, by declaring explicitly that it belongs to the teaching of the ordinary and universal Magisterium as a truth that is divinely revealed (first paragraph) or as a truth of Catholic doctrine (second paragraph). Consequently, when there has not been a judgment on a doctrine in the solemn form of a definition, but this doctrine, belonging to the inheritance of the depositum fidei, is taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium, which necessarily includes the Pope, such a doctrine is to be understood as having been set forth infallibly. The declaration of confirmation or reaffirmation by the Roman Pontiff in this case is not a new dogmatic definition, but a formal attestation of a truth already possessed and infallibly transmitted by the Church.

So what are those instances of infallibility, the doctrines that Roman Catholics must believe? You finally reach in Ratzinger’s eleventh point:

11. Examples. Without any intention of completeness or exhaustiveness, some examples of doctrines relative to the three paragraphs described above can be recalled.

To the truths of the first paragraph belong the articles of faith of the Creed, the various Christological dogmas and Marian dogmas; the doctrine of the institution of the sacraments by Christ and their efficacy with regard to grace; the doctrine of the real and substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the sacrificial nature of the eucharistic celebration; the foundation of the Church by the will of Christ; the doctrine on the primacy and infallibility of the Roman Pontiff; the doctrine on the existence of original sin; the doctrine on the immortality of the spiritual soul and on the immediate recompense after death; the absence of error in the inspired sacred texts; the doctrine on the grave immorality of direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being.

And even here the requirements are not altogether clear since there may be a lot more to be believed.

For all CTC’s confidence in the explanatory powers of a single person, it looks again like their exaltation of Roman Catholicism over Protestantism is more hype than substance.

Canonical Deism

Published on by D. G. Hart181 Comments

Further discussion of Protestant conversions to Rome and Jason Stellman’s views over at Green Baggins have set me thinking about a curious feature of the Called To Communion paradigm (how do you like them apples?). Jason is trying to give a biblical account for Bryan Cross’ understanding of agape and he has challenged Reformed Protestants to show where Calvinism’s idea of imputation is found in the gospels or Christ’s own teaching. His point is that if Paul’s teaching on justification were so basic, you’d expect to see it in the accounts of Christ’s teaching and ministry.

My counter to this is that if Paul’s teaching is consistent with Christ’s, then Paul’s views of justification may very well be what he learned from Christ. Doctrinal development being what it is, you surely wouldn’t want to imply that Paul was making this stuff up. Jason says he’s not positing a red-letter edition of the Bible, or Jesus against Paul, but the tensions are there in his view. He can read Jesus through the lens of Paul or he can read Paul through the lens of Jesus. (Or you try to harmonize.)

Either way, this discussion has made me wonder if CTCers are guilty of their own form of deism. According to Cross’ idea of ecclesiastical deism, Protestants have no way to explain convincingly how the true church popped up after 1,000 years. So to counter the Protestant and Mormon view of church history, he doubles down and insists that the church was there all along. And to do this, CTCers put great emphasis on the early church fathers as a body of teaching that reflects what the apostles handed down to the church from Christ. Hence the continuity, authority, and infallibility of Rome’s teaching in the CTC paradigm.

But there is a gap here that is quite startling when you think about it. Consider three important Roman Catholics beliefs, the primacy of Peter, the status of the virgin Mary, and the authority of the papacy. You may be able to find biblical support for these in the gospels. But where do you find in Acts or the epistles a stress upon Peter, belief in the import of Mary, or signs of the bishop of Rome? The New Testament after the gospels is virtually silent on these matters.

So how do CTCer’s account for the gap between Christ and the Early Church Fathers? Do they suffer from a deism of their own? Did the Early Church Fathers all of a sudden pop up with the teachings found in the gospels after the New Testament epistle writers neglected them? Of course, CTCers will deny any gap exists. But two can play this game.

Liberal Christianity Makes A Come Back

Published on by D. G. Hart40 Comments

Maybe not. Ross Douthat’s reflections on what ails the mainline churches in the United States (though a bit stale now) generated a round of responses about the nature and viability of the Protestant mainline. I plan to return to this discussion, particularly in relation to a parallel one among historians about ecumenical Protestants. But for now I draw attention to the response to Douthat by Diana Butler.

On the one hand, the New York Times columnist cannot but help connect the dots between liberal Protestants’ capitulation to sexual promiscuity and declining church membership. Case in point, The Episcopal Church (no longer the ECUSA and be sure to capitalize the definite article):

. . . instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

Butler counters:

. . . liberal churches are not the only ones declining. It is true that progressive religious bodies started to decline in the 1960s. However, conservative denominations are now experiencing the same. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention, one of America’s most conservative churches, has for a dozen years struggled with membership loss and overall erosion in programming, staffing, and budgets. Many smaller conservative denominations, such as the Missouri Synod Lutherans, are under pressure by loss. The Roman Catholic Church, a body that has moved in markedly conservative directions and of which Mr. Douthat is a member, is straining as members leave in droves. By 2008, one in ten Americans considered him- or herself a former Roman Catholic. On the surface, Catholic membership numbers seem steady. But this is a function of Catholic immigration from Latin America. If one factors out immigrants, American Catholicism matches the membership decline of any liberal Protestant denomination. Decline is not exclusive to the Episcopal Church, nor to liberal denominations–it is a reality facing the whole of American Christianity.

As much as this looks like a “well-your-glass-is-half-empty-too” retort, Butler goes on to suggest that liberal churches are healthier for having experienced decline earlier than conservatives. She also believes that given the mainline’s ordeal, liberal Christians are discovering resources that constitute them as the site of unexpected spiritual vigor among Protestants (talk about counter-intuitive):

Unexpectedly, liberal Christianity is–in some congregations at least–undergoing renewal. A grass-roots affair to be sure, sputtering along in local churches, prompted by good pastors doing hard work and theologians mostly unknown to the larger culture. Some local congregations are growing, having seriously re-engaged practices of theological reflection, hospitality, prayer, worship, doing justice, and Christian formation. . . . There is more than a little historical irony in this. A quiet renewal is occurring, but the denominational structures have yet to adjust their institutions to the recovery of practical wisdom that is remaking local congregations. And the media continues to fixate on big pastors and big churches with conservative followings as the center-point of American religion, ignoring the passion and goodness of the old liberal tradition that is once again finding its heart. Yet, the accepted story of conservative growth and liberal decline is a twentieth century tale, at odds with what the surveys, data, and best research says what is happening now.

To back up this contention, Butler cites a study by the erstwhile pulse-taker of the Protestant mainline — the Cooperative Congregational Studies Partnership and Professor of Religion and Society at Hartford Seminary. According to the press release linked in Butler’s post:

Innovative Worship: The surge in contemporary worship continued, to more than 40 percent of congregations that always or often use electric guitars or drums in their worship in 2010. Also, both innovative and contemporary worship are catalysts of spiritual vitality.

Religion Goes Electronic: A third of congregations reported that their use of modern technology grew more than 10 percent. The more a congregation uses technology, the more open it is to change.

Racial/Ethnic Congregations: There has been a dramatic increase in racial/ethnic congregations, many for immigrant groups. In 2010, three in ten congregations reported that more than 50 percent of their members were members of minority groups, up from two in ten in 2000. One clear impact of the increase in minority congregations is that they inject a strong dose of growth and vitality into American religious life.

“Congregation is More Than Worship”: Despite the overall erosion in congregational vitality and size from 2000 to 2010, there has been a slight increase in member-oriented and mission-oriented programming.

Financial Health: The number of congregations with excellent financial health declined from 31 percent in 2000 to 14 percent in 2010. Eighty percent of congregations reported that the recent recession negatively affected their finances.

Congregational Conflict: Almost two of every three congregations experienced conflict in 2010. In a third of the congregations, the conflict was serious enough that members left or withheld contributions, or a leader left. Conflict is corrosive – it leads to attendance decline and financial stress.

Demographic Details: The average percentage of participants over 65 has increased at the same time as the average percentage of 18-34 year olds has declined. Racial/ethnic congregations buck this trend, with significantly higher proportions of young adults among their participants than white congregations. Among historically white congregations, the membership of the typical Oldline Protestant congregation is much older than that of Evangelical Protestant congregations. For 75 percent of Oldline Protestant congregations, less than 10 percent are young adult. This aging of congregations is significant because as congregations age, their capacity for change erodes.

Interfaith Engagement: A little more than one in ten congregations surveyed in 2010 indicated they had shared worship across faith traditions in the past year, 13.9 percent in 2010 versus 6.8 percent in 2000. A special report on congregations’ interfaith engagement is available at http://www.faithcommunitiestoday.org.

The Electoral Process: There has been a reversal between Oldline and Evangelical Protestantism in political action, through voter registration or education programs, in the past decade. While the use of the political process declined from 2000 to 2010 among Oldline Protestant Congregations, to 11.9 percent, it surged among Evangelical Protestant congregations, to 25.8 percent. The Black church also continues to use the political process, with 55 percent saying they offer voter education or registration campaigns.

Church Attendance: The average weekend worship attendance at a typical congregation declined from 2000 to 2010. Median weekend worship attendance at the typical congregation dropped from 130 to 108 during the past decade. More than one in four American congregations had fewer than 50 in worship in 2010.

Spiritual Vitality: Fewer congregations report high spiritual vitality – from 42.8 percent in 2000 to 28.4 percent in 2010. This decline in spiritual vitality is true across the board – including denominational family, race and ethnicity, region and size. Among the trends that negatively impact spiritual vitality are decreasing financial health, shrinking worship attendance, aging membership and high levels of conflict. One unexpected finding is that spiritual vitality rises considerably higher at the liberal end of the theological continuum than the very conservative end.

I am no sociologist, so I don’t have credentials to crunch the data responsibly. But how do you look at the figures on finances, controversy, church attendance, membership, and vitality and then conclude that liberal Christianity is making a comeback? I understand Butler’s need to cheer lead for her peeps. But the director of Hartford’s Center, David Roozen, cannot summon up the positivity that Butler taps. Even his conclusion, “Despite bursts of innovation, pockets of vitality and interesting forays into greater civic participation, American congregations enter the second decade of the twenty-first century a bit less healthy than at the turn of the century,” sounds like a reach.

Called To Communion Hype and Roman Catholic Reality

Published on by D. G. Hart366 Comments

Bryan Cross’ response to Nick Batzig on the Reformed view of imputation has kicked up a little dust over at Green Baggins and for good reason, though I plan to go in a direction different from many of the Protestant complaints. Cross contends that Roman Catholics understand justification through the lens of agape while Reformed Protestants use a list paradigm:

From a Catholic point of view, as I explained in “Why John Calvin did not Recognize the Distinction Between Mortal and Venial Sin,” there are two different paradigms here regarding what it means to keep the law. Call one the list paradigm, and call the other the agape paradigm. In the list paradigm, perfect law-keeping is conceived as keeping a list of God given precepts. According to this paradigm, perfect law-keeping requires perfectly and perpetually keeping (and not in any way violating) every single precept in the list. In the New Covenant, we are given more gifts for growing progressively in our ability to keep the law, but nevertheless, nobody in this life keeps the list perfectly. All fall short of God’s perfect standard of righteousness. That’s the paradigm through which Batzig views God’s requirement of righteousness for salvation.

In the agape paradigm, by contrast, agape is the fulfillment of the law. Agape is not merely some power or force or energy by which one is enabled better to keep the list of rules, either perfectly or imperfectly. Rather, agape is what the law has pointed to all along. To have agape in one’s soul is to have the perfect righteousness to which the list of precepts point. Righteousness conceived as keeping a list of externally written precepts is conceptually a shadow of the true righteousness which consists of agape infused into the soul. This infusion of agape is the law written on the heart. But the writing of the law on the heart should not be conceived as merely memorizing the list of precepts, or being more highly motivated to keep the list of precepts. To conceive of agape as merely a force or good motivation that helps us better (but imperfectly, in this life) keep the list of rules, is still to be in the list paradigm. The writing of the law on the heart provides in itself the very fulfillment of the law — that perfection to which the external law always pointed. To have agape is already to have fulfilled the telos of the law, a telos that is expressed in our words, deeds, and actions because they are all ordered to a supernatural end unless we commit a mortal sin. The typical Protestant objection to the Catholic understanding of justification by the infusion of agape is “Who perfectly loves God? No one.” But this objection presupposes the list paradigm.

This is rich given the recent news out of the Vatican that Rome has added to the Church’s list of deadly sins. (Look for the words list and agape.)

After 1,500 years the Vatican has brought the seven deadly sins up to date by adding seven new ones for the age of globalization. The list, published yesterday in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, came as the Pope deplored the “decreasing sense of sin” in today’s “secularized world” and the falling numbers of Roman Catholics going to confession.

The new deadly sins include polluting, genetic engineering, being obscenely rich, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice.

So the communion that originally gave us a list of sins is adding to the list. Agape indeed.

And to underscore the point — which is that Bryan Cross has remarkable intellectual gifts that have little purchase in reality — consider that the little, old (not ancient, of course) Orthodox Presbyterian Church, with all of its alleged list mentality, resisted mightily producing lists of sins. One occasion came in 1950 when the church, through a study committee of the General Assembly, concluded that belonging to the Free Masons was a sin. But contrary to some in the church who wanted a constitutional amendment to list Masonry as a sin, the committee opposed the composition of lists of sin:

Although it is unwarranted to condemn all cataloguing of sins by the church, history shows that it ma easily be carried so far as to become fraught with undesirable consequences. This danger becomes especially great when the church in its official book of discipline seeks to enumerate the precise sins which render their doers subject to ecclesiastical censures. . . .

It is obviously impossible for the church to draw up a complete catalogue of sins. Any list is certain to be a partial one. The almost unavoidable result will be that the members of the church will receive an unbalanced view of the Christian life. For example, let us suppose that a church catalogues as offenses certain types of worldliness, as gambling, the performance or viewing of immoral or sacrilegious theatricals, and many forms of
modern dancing. The danger is far from imaginary that the psychological effect of such partial cataloguing will be that other forms of worldliness, which in the sight of God are no less reprehensible, such as the love of money, the telling of salacious jokes by toastmasters and other speakers at banquets, the display of wealth in a palatial dwelling, and the stressing of the numerical rather than the spiritual growth of a church, to name no more, will be condoned and even overlooked. In another respect too the cataloguing of sins is liable to result in an unbalanced conception of the Christian life. It may easily impart the impression that Christian living is essentially negative rather than positive. Church members will be led to stress the separated life at the expense of the consecrated life. Very plainly put, they will conclude that merely not to do this and that and a third thing is the essence of Christian living and is proof of the Christianity of him who abstains from these things. (1950 GA Minutes, 26)

In case you didn’t notice, the church allegedly characterized by the agape paradigm makes lists of sins. And one of the churches that you might expect to draw up a list of sins, given its supposed reliance on the list paradigm, has tried not to make lists.

In which case, I am not sure what Bryan Cross’ point is other than to show the inadequacies of Protestants always in the peace of Christ.

Postscript:

The Baltimore Catechism on sin:
52. Q. What is actual sin? A. Actual sin is any willful thought, word, deed or omission contrary to the law of God.

The Shorter Catechism on sin:
14. Q. What is sin? A. Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.

We print, realists decide.

Understanding Papal Infallibility

Published on by D. G. Hart46 Comments

On the one hand, we have the abstract, textbook definitions of papal infallibility when applied to papal assertions about, for example, the ordination of men only:

Does this statement meet all five criteria of Papal Infallibility, as defined by the First and Second Vatican Councils?

Vatican I:

1. “the Roman Pontiff”
2. “speaks ex cathedra” (“that is, when in the discharge of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, and by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority….”)
3. “he defines”
4. “that a doctrine concerning faith or morals”
5. “must be held by the whole Church” [Pastor Aeternus, chap. 4.]

Vatican II:

1. “the Roman Pontiff”
2. “in virtue of his office, when as the supreme shepherd and teacher of all the faithful, who confirms his brethren in their faith (cf. Lk 22:32),”
3. “by a definitive act, he proclaims”
4. “a doctrine of faith or morals” (“And this infallibility…in defining doctrine of faith and morals, extends as far as the deposit of revelation extends”)
5. “in accordance with revelation itself, which all are obliged to abide by and be in conformity with” [Lumen Gentium, n. 25, paragraph 3.] . . .

All five criteria for Papal Infallibility are met by the declaration on priestly ordination found in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. Therefore, the declaration falls under Papal Infallibility and is, without doubt, the Infallible Teaching of Christ. This teaching on priestly ordination is an example of the use of the first charism of the Sacred Magisterium: Papal Infallibility.

Moreover, at this point in time, the same teaching is also infallible under the ordinary and universal Magisterium. So the infallibility of the teaching should not be a matter of dispute among the faithful.

Whosoever obstinately denies or obstinately doubts this infallible teaching commits the sin of heresy.

This is good because we know where we stand.

On the other hand, there is the politics of the Roman Catholic Church:

Debate over the reach of infallibility has swirled ever since the First Vatican Council in the 19th century, and has become steadily more intense since the early 1980s.

Vatican I formally defined papal infallibility in 1870, and most experts say it has been clearly invoked only with two dogmas, both about Mary: the Immaculate Conception in 1854, and the Assumption in 1950. In that light, some theologians and rank-and-file believers argue that on other contentious matters that have never been formally proclaimed as infallible, such as the ordination of women, contraception and homosexuality, dissent remains legitimate.

Other voices in the church, however, insist that a tight focus on rare public proclamations downplays the role of the church’s “ordinary and universal magisterium,” meaning things that have been taught consistently across time. Such teachings are effectively infallible, according to this understanding, even if no pope has ever formally declared them as such, and thus Catholics are bound to accept them.

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, a leading advocate of this more expansive view of infallibility was Cardinal Ratzinger, today Pope Benedict XVI.

In the 1980s, these clashing views were at the heart of an exchange between Ratzinger and Fr. Charles Curran, an American moral theologian fired in 1987 by The Catholic University of America in Washington after a lengthy investigation by Ratzinger’s office. In back-and-forth correspondence with Ratzinger, Curran defended a right of dissent from what he called “authoritative non-infallible hierarchical teaching.”

Ratzinger responded that such a restricted view of the church’s teaching authority derives from the Protestant Reformation, and it leads to the conclusion that Catholics are obligated only to accept a few core dogmatic principles — the Trinity, for example, or the resurrection of the body — while everything else is debatable. In fact, Ratzinger said, the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) used the phrase the “secondary object of infallibility” to refer to a wide range of teachings on faith and morals that are intrinsically connected to divine revelation, and therefore infallible. . . .

American Jesuit Fr. John Coleman called it a form of “papal fundamentalism.” The Catholic Theological Society of America endorsed a 5,000-word study that concluded “there are serious doubts” about whether the teaching is infallible, and called for “further study, discussion and prayer.” The Canon Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland likewise concluded in 1996 that the teaching on women priests was not infallible.

In December 1996, the then-secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Bishop Tarcisio Bertone, published an article in L’Osservatore Romano in which he asserted that certain papal teachings should be considered infallible, even in the absence of a formal statement. Bertone mentioned three such documents: Veritatis Splendor, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and Evangelium Vitae.

Bertone is today a cardinal and the Vatican’s secretary of state.
In January 1997, the doctrinal congregation published a collection of documents supporting its reasoning on women’s ordination. In a press conference, Ratzinger addressed the question of whether Catholics who believe that women should be priests are heretics. Technically, he said, the term “heresy” refers to denial of a revealed truth such as the Incarnation or the Resurrection. The ban on women priests, he said, is a doctrinal conclusion derived from revelation, and as such those who deny it are not literally heretics. They do, however, “support erroneous doctrine that is incompatible with the faith” and exclude themselves from communion with the church.

In his 1998 commentary on Ad Tuendam Fidem, Ratzinger argued that a host of teachings are infallible because they’re joined to the revealed truths of the faith, either by a historical relationship or by a logical connection.

Examples of doctrines connected by historical necessity, according to the Ratzinger commentary, include: the legitimacy of the election of a given pope; the acts of an ecumenical council; the canonizations of saints; the declaration of Pope Leo XIII in the papal bull Apostolicae Curae on the invalidity of Anglican ordinations. Examples of doctrines connected by logical necessity include: the doctrine that priestly ordination is reserved only to men; the doctrine on the illicitness of euthanasia; the teaching on the illicitness of prostitution; the teaching on the illicitness of fornication.

(Notice how little teaching about the work of Jesus Christ is considered to be infallible.)

What are Protestants to think? Heck, what are Roman Catholics to believe? But for a doctrine, nay, a reality, that is supposed to produce such certainty, it sure looks like Roman Catholics stumble over it the way that Protestants fail to agree on what their Bibles teach.

Teachers without Principals (not without principles)

Published on by D. G. Hart132 Comments

On this matter of contrasting Protestant and Roman Catholic paradigms of authority, I like Jeremy Tate’s analogy of a school room. Protestants in class have no teacher, only a book. Wrong, but let’s go with it for now. Roman Catholics have a teacher and a book. Therefore, Rome has a teacher to instruct and determine the right answer.

The problem with the analogy for the folks at Called to Communion is the failure to notice that post-Vatican II Roman Catholics seem to ignore their teacher as much as Protestants behave when no classroom authority is present. Granted, a time existed, and Quebec between 1900 and 1960 is an example of that era, when Roman Catholics did heed with deference the church hierarchy. But just as Quebec secularized in the 1960s to become one of the least observant places in the West, so Roman Catholicism in the West has shown a marked hostility to the teaching authority that CTCers tout. According to Mark Noll in what is one of his best essays:

As a final element in Canada’s recent ecclesiastical history, it is important to highlight the significance of the Second Vatican Council. The role of the Council was obviously important for Canada’s Catholics, but may have been almost as significant for its Protestants. In Quebec, but also for Canadian Catholics in general, the Council was destabilizing because it rapidly altered the liturgy, the language, the music, the tone, the disciplines, and the calendrical observances that for a great part of the faithful had simply constituted the meaning of the faith. In this sense, Canada resembled Western European Catholicism, which was also disconcerted by the Council, rather than Eastern European, African, and Asian Catholicism, which was energized by its work.

The lack of compliance among Roman Catholics is a huge problem for those who celebrate Rome’s superiority as a communion with a teacher who can instill order and discipline in this imaginary classroom. If Rome has it, and I don’t doubt that Rome claims it, why won’t it use that authority to make the students sit down and be quiet? Why won’t it teach those students what they are supposed to learn? Well, one big reason is Vatican II (more on that at another time).

Another reason is that no communion since the late 18th century has the school principal to back up its teachers (Protestants do actually believe they have ministers with authority who exercise the keys of the kingdom). Since the separation of church and state in the West, all of us inside the classroom don’t have the fellow with the big stick at the end of the hall who will spank the bottoms of unruly students. That means that Protestant teachers and Roman Catholic popes are left with the same amount of authority — it’s all spiritual. We can exhort, cajole, excommunicate. But at the end of the day, without the state to back up our rulings, the unrepentant sinner is free to walk down the street and attend another church, and over time join and become a member in good standing.

Even so, I wonder what good the CTCers promotion of infallibility does. It seems, given the state of North American and European Roman Catholicism, the main effect is to remind Protestants what we don’t have. Great. I got it. Rome has authoritative authority. Protestants don’t. That may make Rome more orderly and coherent. But then why does the classroom with a teacher look so much like the classroom without one? It sure seems to me this is a question that the serious minded folks at CTC could ponder.

The Primacy of James (or the Ante-Ante-Nicene Fathers)

Published on by D. G. Hart86 Comments

One of the puzzles of Roman Catholic claims about the primacy of the papacy is that the biblical support for this view rests almost entirely on Matt. 16:18. Theologians and church members (at least of Protestant derivation) should always beware of so little biblical support. In addition, when you read the New Testament (if you do), Peter largely fades from view. In Acts Peter does not show up after the fifteenth chapter (according not to superior biblical knowledge but to a word search — “advanced,” mind you — at ESVBible.org). The rest of the book is really Paul’s story. And the rest of the New Testament is really Paul’s teaching. Yes, Peter, John and James write epistles but they are short compared to Paul (leaving aside Revelation in page count totals).

What is also striking about the New Testament is the interaction among the apostles. Galatians 2 proves to be a particularly difficult text to square with claims about Peter’s primacy, not to mention his infallibility, since it records Paul publicly rebuking Peter for caving to the Judaizers. Here first is Calvin’s rendering of Paul’s order of James, Peter, and John in Galatians 2:9:

I have already stated, that James was the son of Alpheus. He could not be “the brother of John” who had been lately put to death by Herod, (Acts 12:2,) and to suppose that one of the disciples had been placed above the apostles would be absurd. That he held the highest rank among the apostles, is made evident by Luke, who ascribes to him the summing up and decision of the cause in the council, (Acts 15:13,) and afterwards mentions his having assembled “all the elders” of the church of Jerusalem. (Acts 21:18.) When he says, that they seemed to be pillars, he does not speak contemptuously, but quotes the general opinion, arguing from it, that what was done by such men ought not to be lightly set aside. In a question relating to diversity of rank, it is surprising that James should be mentioned before Peter; but the reason perhaps is, that he presided over the church at Jerusalem.

Calvin follows with these remarks on Paul’s rebuke to Peter:

Now, as I have said, he goes further, and asserts that he had blamed Peter for leaning to the other side; and he proceeds to explain the cause of the dispute. It was no ordinary proof of the strength of his doctrine, that he not only obtained their cordial approbation, but firmly maintained it in a debate with Peter, and came off victorious. What reason could there now be for hesitating to receive it as certain and undoubted truth?

At the same time, this is a reply to another calumny, that Paul was but an ordinary disciple, far below the rank of an apostle: for the reproof which he administered was an evidence that the parties were on an equal footing. The highest, I acknowledge, are sometimes properly reproved by the lowest, for this liberty on the part of inferiors towards their superiors is permitted by God; and so it does not follow, that he who reproves another must be his equal. But the nature of the reproof deserves notice. Paul did not simply reprove Peter, as a Christian might reprove a Christian, but he did it officially, as the phrase is; that is, in the exercise of the apostolic character which he sustained.

This is another thunderbolt which strikes the Papacy of Rome. It exposes the impudent pretensions of the Roman Antichrist, who boasts that he is not bound to assign a reason, and sets at defiance the judgment of the whole Church. Without rashness, without undue boldness, but in the exercise of the power granted him by God, this single individual chastises Peter, in the presence of the whole Church; and Peter submissively bows to the chastisement. Nay, the whole debate on those two points was nothing less than a manifest overthrow of that tyrannical primacy, which the Romanists foolishly enough allege to be founded on divine right. If they wish to have God appearing on their side, a new Bible must be manufactured; if they do not wish to have him for an open enemy, those two chapters of the Holy Scriptures must be expunged.

Of course, defenders of the magisterium need not trust Calvin since he is writing out of a position of disobedience to the papacy. That is why it is intriguing what a Roman Catholic biblical commentary has to say about this passage:

St. Paul says that he withstood St. Peter to the face “because he was to be blamed,” inasmuch as, whereas he had hitherto eaten openly with Gentiles, he was now led by fear of the Judaizers to refuse to do so, “fearing them who were of the circumcision.” “To his dissimulation,” adds the Apostle, “the rest of the Jews consented, so that Barnabas also was led by them into that dissimulation.” St. Jerome maintained that the whole scene was a “dissimulation,” Peter was not “to be blamed” by Paul, but solely by those brethren whom he had offended by withdrawing from their table; the scene, therefore, was meant to appease both parties, viz. those who believed in circumcision—for they could follow Peter, and those who repudiated circumcision—for they could follow Paul. St. Jerome’s reasons for holding this view are briefly that Paul could not have withstood Peter, who was his senior, and further that Paul, by circumcising Timothy and shaving his head at Cenchre, was guilty of the same obsequiousness towards Jewish prejudices. Some, he says, try to avoid the dilemma by saying that “Cephas” is not the Apostle Peter, but one of the Seventy disciples, and, moreover, that Acts is silent concerning the whole affair. But St. Jerome replies that Cephas and Peter are but Aramaic and Greek forms of the same name; that he knows of no other Cephas than the one who is termed at one time “Cephas,” at another “Peter”; and finally, that St. Luke was not bound to mention every event he knew of.

St. Chrysostom’s explanation is fundamentally the same as that of St. Jerome. It could not, he urges, have really been a dispute, for this they would have had in private. Therefore “to his face,” κατὰ πρόσωπον, must be a figure of speech, and the equivalent of “in appearance,” σχημα. The explanation, then, is that Peter withdrew from the table of the uncircumcised converts for two reasons: lest he should offend the Jewish converts, and in order to give St. Paul an occasion for correcting him. This correction was necessitated, not because St. Peter was in the wrong, but because those who saw him eat with Jews might fancy he did so out of fear of St. Paul. The latter, of course, had no such feeling. “Paul, then, rebukes, and Peter bears with it; so that while the master is silent under rebuke his disciples may be the more easily induced to put aside their suspicion. . . . Peter, then, joins Paul in this pretense, συνυποκρινεται, as though were really in fault, so that owing to this rebuke they might be corrected. . . . Thus, by his silence Peter corrected their false suspicions; he put up with the imputation of dissimulation so as, by a real dissimulation, to free the Jews.”

This view was strenuously combated by St. Augustine, who pointed out that it made Scripture untruthful. St. Jerome replied that his view was derived from Origen, and that it seemed to him compelling from the twofold consideration that (a) Peter knew from the conversion of Cornelius that the Gentiles were to be received into the Church, and (b) that St. Paul had done the same in the case of Timothy, and in shaving his own head at Cenchre. Finally, he endeavored to show that he and Augustine were really saying the same thing in different words. But Augustine declined to accept this statement. The idea that the whole scene was fictitious was repellent to him, since it imperiled the whole truth of Scripture: “Non nunc inquiro quid fecerit, sed quid scripserit quaero.” “If Peter was doing what he had a right to do, then Paul lied when he said that Peter walked not uprightly unto the truth of the Gospel. . . . But if Paul wrote the truth, then it was true that Peter walked not rightly.” St. Augustine then shows that the cases of Timothy and the shaving of Paul’s head are not parallel with this episode at Antioch; he further points out that in St. Jerome’s list of authorities for his view Apollinaris the Laodicean and Alexander are heretics, while Jerome himself acknowledges that there are errors in Origen and Didymus. Augustine’s main exegetical point, however, is that the scene at Antioch took place either after or—as he himself at that date seems to have thought merely more probable—before the Council at Jerusalem. If after the Council, then it is to be noticed that whereas the Decrees forbade anyone to compel the Gentile converts to Judaize, they did not prohibit the Jewish converts from Judaizing. If before the Council, then it is not to be wondered at that St. Paul should urge St. Peter to uphold what he had already learnt from the case of Cornelius. But Augustine really based his whole position on the irrefragable veracity of Scripture; again and again in the course of the controversy does he return to the principle that if the scene is fictitious, then we can no longer trust Scripture. It is certainly remarkable that St. Jerome nowhere takes up this point, while his marked descent from acrimony to an unusual suavity in the course of the correspondence seems to indicate that he felt that Augustine’s position was really the sounder, though he never sang the palinodia for which St. Augustine called!

The point to notice in this commentary is the lack of consensus among the early church fathers even about as important an episode as this for claims about the primacy of Peter. The constant theme at Called To Communion is that the early church is in agreement about the deposit of the faith and that this provides a much more certain basis for faith than do Protestant interpretations of the Bible. Well, if Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine don’t see eye to eye on this matter, how unified are those early fathers? What kind of consensus exists that falls right down from Matt. 16:18 to a unified body of truth? Or how is it that Roman Catholic understandings of the early church fathers’ teaching do not rely on interpretations while Protestants only have their opinions? History is not so easily appropriated.

And that is an important point implicitly in Eamon Duffy’s history of the papacy (Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes, Yale, 1997). As students of the Reformation may know, Duffy is one of those historians that Roman Catholics like to cite because his book on England (The Stripping of the Altars) shows how vibrant Roman Catholic piety was before Henry VIII came along. Instead of being moribund, late medieval piety was alive and popular. But his introduction to Saints and Sinners will not set well with those CTCers who claim that the reality of Rome needs no interpretation:

All the essential claims of the modern papacy, it might seem, are contained in this Gospel saying about the Rock, and in Irenaeus’ account of the apostolic pedigree of the early bishops of Rome. Yet matters are not so simple. The popes trace their commission from Christ through Peter, yet for Irenaeus the authority of the Church at Rome came from its foundation by two Apostles, not by one, Peter and Paul, not Peter alone. The tradition that Peter and Paul had been put to death at the hands of Nero in Rome about the year AD 64 was universally accepted in the second century, and by the end of that century pilgrims to Rome were being shown the ‘trophies’ of the Apostles, their tombs or cenotaphs, Peter’s on the Vatican Hill, and Paul’s on the Via Ostiensis, outside the walls on the road to the coast. Yet on all of this the New Testament is silent. Later legend would fill out the details of Peter’s life and death in Rome — his struggles with the magician and father of heresy, Simon Magus, his miracles, his attempted escape from persecution in Rome, a flight from which he was turned back by a reproachful vision of Christ (the ‘Quo Vadis’ legend), and finally his crucifixion upside down in the Vatican Circus in the time of the Emperor Nero. These stories were to be accepted as sober history by some of the greatest minds of the early Church — Origen, Ambrose, Augustine. But they are pious romance, not history, and the fact is that we have no reliable accounts either of Peter’s later life or of the manner or place of his death. Neither Peter nor Paul founded the Church at Rome, for there were Christians in the city before either of the Apostles set foot there. Nor can we assume, as Irenaeus did, that the Apostles established there a succession of bishops to carry on their work in the city, for all the indications are that there was no single bishop at Rome for almost a century after the deaths of the Apostles. In fact, wherever we turn, the solid outlines of the Petrine succession at Rome seem to blur and dissolve. (p. 1)

As I’ve said, the idea that only Protestants have opinions and Roman Catholics have epistemic certainty is nonsense historically considered.

Escondido Magic

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

For all with blogs to read, a wonderful time of unanimity among neo-Cals, 2kers, theonomists, experimental Calvinists, and neo-Turretinis has prevailed. In the presence of a common foe — infallible popes, antiquity without apostles or prophets, and overdetermined historical narratives — Reformed partisans are breaking bread on various blogs, all singing in one Protestant voice.

For such a time as this, readers of Old Life, both friendly and hostile, may be inclined to give ear to an interview that Scott Clark did with the authors of the new history of Westminster Seminary California — W. Robert Godfrey and yours truly (all about me). The book is entitled A New Old School and if readers follow the links I am fairly confident they will find their way to a page where a purchase would be in order.

Let lions lie down with lambs.

Development of Doctrine — Protestant-Style

Published on by D. G. Hart205 Comments

Dust-ups trickling down from recent Protestant conversions to Rome have revealed contrasting views of history. The Called To Communion view seems to involve a church in place — bulletins, pews, and all — just after Christ ascended to heaven. According to Bryan Cross:

[The Protestant convert to Rome] finds in the first, second and third (etc.) centuries something with a divine origin and with divine authority. He finds the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church and its magisterial authority in succession from the Apostles and from Christ. He does not merely find an interpretation in which the Church has apostolic succession; he finds this very same Church itself, and he finds it to have divine authority by a succession from the Apostles. In finding the Church he finds an organic entity nearly two thousand years old with a divinely established hierarchy preserving divine authority.

If this is not a Roman Catholic version of Scott Clark’s QIRC I don’t know what is.

In addition to this non-Protestant version of primitivism (could it be that the Called To Communion guys are still affected by the primitivism that many of them knew when Pentecostals or Charismatics?) comes the argument that Protestants believe in ecclesiastical deism. Again, Bryan Cross is instructive (and wordy which is why I have not read the whole post). The logic runs like this. Protestantism came late, not until the sixteenth century. Protestants believed that Rome was a false church and had begun to apostasize about the time that Augustine’s body was buried. This leaves a gap of almost 1,000 years, between the right-thinking early church and the right-thinking Reformation church. In between, allegedly, God withdrew from his saving plan and planet earth was without a witness to (not hope) but Christ — hence, ecclesiastical deism. This is, by the way, the argument that Thomas More used against William Tyndale, a subject of a couple of papers by (all about) me while in grad school.

As effective as this argument might seem — and when I was studying More I found it intriguing — it is not very historical, at least in the way that people who regard the past as a distant country, a place not readily grasped, understand history. From a historical perspective, not to mention the way we understand ourselves, truths don’t simply fall out of the sky, pile up in neatly proportioned columns, steps, and arches, and remain intact for time immemorial. Instead, truths evolve (or develop if you don’t like Darwinian associations). This is true of the Bible. Redemptive history shows the unfolding of the gospel across millennia of salvation history, such that the seed of Genesis 3:15 does not blossom until 2 Samuel 7 which does not bear fruit until Luke 24 which then generates the harvest of Acts 2. The notion of development is also evident in our own lives. I am and am not the same person I was when I was 8. I loved my parents and the Phillies then (in that order) and I still love them but in very different ways (especially this season).

So if development is basic to history — to creation for that matter — why would church history be any different? The development that would make sense to a Protestant runs something like this. The church began among the apostles and disciples in Jerusalem and then spread to the center of the ancient church in Asia Minor and eventually to Europe. The Eastern Church remained relatively strong until the rise of Islam. The Western Church picked up the pieces of the Roman Empire and had fewer threats from Islam. Both of these churches, though different in culture and language, did not formally sever ties until the eleventh century. After 1054 Constantinople went into decline, Rome went the opposite way. The papal reforms of the eleventh century improved the authority of Rome. But even during the heyday of the papacy’s vigor — the high middle ages –Rome hardly controlled what was going on in the British Isles or France. Europe had no trains, not postal service, and little political consolidation. Trying to give coherence to Christianity was an impossible proposition until modernity gave us print, the nation-state, and effective transportation.

In these circumstances in the West Protestantism emerged. It was clearly different from the Eastern Church. The West’s understanding of salvation was always forensic — how am I right with God? — compared to the East’s which was more metaphysical — how am I one with God? Protestants were still asking the West’s question but found Rome’s answer insufficient. At the same time, Rome’s answer was hardly codified. It existed in any number of commentaries and summas. But Rome itself did not begin to rationalize or systematize its understanding of the gospel until the Council of Trent. Then Rome rejected the systems and reasons of Protestants with a fairly heavy hand. Then too Rome began to try to generate, through the activities of the Jesuits for starters, greater uniformity among the faithful and their clergy.

This view of Rome’s development is evident (at least to all about me) at a terrific website that includes a list of all the popes’ encyclicals and all the councils of the early and medieval churches. On the one hand, popes did not begin to send letters of counsel to their bishops until the thirteenth century. And then the encyclicals, which often pertained to matters of ordination and church-state relations, were infrequent. Between 1226, the first papal encyclical (or bull), and 1500 fifteen popes issued only twenty-two such communications. In contrast, Pope Benedict XIV (1740-1758) issued 44 encyclicals (and I don’t think he was writing about the First Pretty Good Awakening). It may be a stretch, but the correlation between the papacy’s consolidation of the Western church and the use of encyclicals hardly seems coincidental.

The same goes when it comes to General Councils. Here is the list of councils at Papal Encyclicals Online:

1. The First General Council of Nicaea, 325
2. The First General Council of Constantinople, 381
3. The General Council of Ephesus, 431
4. The General Council of Chalcedon, 451
5. The Second General Council of Constantinople, 553
6. The Third General Council of Constantinople, 680-681
7. The Second General Council of Nicaea, 787
8. The Fourth General Council of Constantinople, 869-70
9. The First General Council of the Lateran, 1123
10. The Second General Council of the Lateran, 1139
11. The Third General Council of the Lateran, 1179
12. The Fourth General Council of the Lateran, 1215
13. The First General Council of Lyons, 1245
14. The Second General Council of Lyons, 1274
15. The General Council of Vienne, 1311-12
16. The General Council of Constance, 1414-18
17. The General Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence, 1431-45
18. The Fifth General Council of the Lateran, 1512-17
19. The General Council of Trent, 1545-63
20. The First General Council of the Vatican, 1869-70
21. Vatican II – 1962-1965

Notice that in the early era, councils were in the East, suggesting the weight of authority and structure among the Eastern Orthodox. Notice also that Rome does not begin to hold church councils until the twelfth century, the same time that the papacy is emerging as the religious authority in Europe.

What this means, for the sake of doctrinal development, is that Protestantism emerged out of and did not necessarily break with what was happening in Western Christianity. During the crisis days of the sixteenth century, humanists and Protestants all agreed that the papacy was an institution that needed serious reform. Protestants also began to offer up interpretations of the Bible that were certainly possible in the Roman church but were forbidden after Trent.

It is an arguable point, but the compatibility of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in the late middle ages looks plausible if you read the only existing confession of faith approved by one of the general church councils (it is anyway the only one I can find since all the other church councils in the West appear to be devoted to questions of papal authority, schismatic bishops, and uncooperative emperors). Here is the Confession of Faith of Rome in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council:

We firmly believe and simply confess that there is only one true God, eternal and immeasurable, almighty, unchangeable, incomprehensible and ineffable, Father, Son and holy Spirit, three persons but one absolutely simple essence, substance or nature {1} . The Father is from none, the Son from the Father alone, and the holy Spirit from both equally, eternally without beginning or end; the Father generating, the Son being born, and the holy Spirit proceeding; consubstantial and coequal, co-omnipotent and coeternal; one principle of all things, creator of all things invisible and visible, spiritual and corporeal; who by his almighty power at the beginning of time created from nothing both spiritual and corporeal creatures, that is to say angelic and earthly, and then created human beings composed as it were of both spirit and body in common. The devil and other demons were created by God naturally good, but they became evil by their own doing. Man, however, sinned at the prompting of the devil.

This holy Trinity, which is undivided according to its common essence but distinct according to the properties of its persons, gave the teaching of salvation to the human race through Moses and the holy prophets and his other servants, according to the most appropriate disposition of the times. Finally the only-begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ, who became incarnate by the action of the whole Trinity in common and was conceived from the ever virgin Mary through the cooperation of the holy Spirit, having become true man, composed of a rational soul and human flesh, one person in two natures, showed more clearly the way of life. Although he is immortal and unable to suffer according to his divinity, he was made capable of suffering and dying according to his humanity. Indeed, having suffered and died on the wood of the cross for the salvation of the human race, he descended to the underworld, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. He descended in the soul, rose in the flesh, and ascended in both. He will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, to render to every person according to his works, both to the reprobate and to the elect. All of them will rise with their own bodies, which they now wear, so as to receive according to their deserts, whether these be good or bad; for the latter perpetual punishment with the devil, for the former eternal glory with Christ.

There is indeed one universal church of the faithful, outside of which nobody at all is saved, in which Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrifice. His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood, so that in order to achieve this mystery of unity we receive from God what he received from us. Nobody can effect this sacrament except a priest who has been properly ordained according to the church’s keys, which Jesus Christ himself gave to the apostles and their successors. But the sacrament of baptism is consecrated in water at the invocation of the undivided Trinity — namely Father, Son and holy Spirit — and brings salvation to both children and adults when it is correctly carried out by anyone in the form laid down by the church. If someone falls into sin after having received baptism, he or she can always be restored through true penitence. For not only virgins and the continent but also married persons find favour with God by right faith and good actions and deserve to attain to eternal blessedness.

Protestant Reformers would have objected to parts of this confession especially in the last paragraph. But it is hard to see how with some Protestant clarifications this might have been a serviceable confession for both Rome and Geneva.

The contention here, then, is that justification came late to debates in the Western Church. Protestants initiated those debates and made proposals. Rome rejected those proposals outright at least at Trent. But prior to Trent Rome had no official position on justification. Protestantism accordingly developed within Roman Catholicism, which developed from relations with churches in the East, which developed from the ministry of Jesus and the apostles in Jerusalem. To say that what we have in Roman Catholicism is what the early church had in the first three centuries is like saying that some angel of God left some gold plates containing the final revelation buried underground somewhere in upstate New York.