Category: Roman Catholicism

What Do Pope Francis and Russell Moore Have in Common?

Published on by D. G. Hart60 Comments

With all the discussion of the piece on Russell Moore, few have seemed to notice the parallels between Moore, the newly installed director of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and Pope Francis, compared to Richard Land, his predecessor at the Commission, and Benedict XVI. Moore and Francis, at least as journalists portray them, are backing away from the strictness and scolding of their predecessors, Land and Benedict. Granted, as Keith Miller observes, the problem could simply be with the journalists. They have a narrative and they are sticking to it — the old guy was mean, the new guy is nice.

Even so, journalists are not stupid and the parallels are striking. Consider the following with Francis and Benedict in mind:

“When Richard Land spoke to most issues, he was certain that Southern Baptists were behind him and he was their mouthpiece,” Mr. Mohler says. “Russ will need a deft touch to make sure that Southern Baptists stay behind him.” [me – okay, U.S. Roman Catholics have never lined up behind the Vatican, but please keep reading]

Mr. Moore is in no way a liberal. He equates abortion with the evils of slavery, considers homosexuality a sin, and insists the Southern Baptist Convention will never support gay marriage. At the same time, he emphasizes reconciliation and draws a traditional doctrinal distinction between the sinner and the sin. . . .

Mr. Moore would like the Southern Baptists to be able to hold on to people such as Sarah Parr. The 31-year-old social worker grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist family in southern Virginia. She graduated from Liberty University, founded in 1971 by the Falwell family. But she says she found herself increasingly less at home in the church, and left it altogether in her 20s.

She now attends a nondenominational church that meets in an old theater on Washington’s Capitol Hill. Politically, she describes herself “as a moderate at best, if I’m anything. But I don’t find myself in either party.”

When Mr. Moore took over in June as the Southern Baptists’ top public-policy advocate, he startled some in the church by declaring as dead and gone the entire concept of the Bible Belt as a potent mix of Jesus and American boosterism. “Good riddance,” he told thousands of the faithful at the group’s annual convention in Houston in June. “Let’s not seek to resuscitate it.”

In an essay for the conservative Christian magazine “First Things,” titled “Why Evangelicals Retreat,” he dinged the movement for “triumphalism and hucksterism” and lampooned a time when its leaders dispatched voter guides for the Christian position on “a line-item veto, the Balanced Budget Amendment, and the proper funding levels for the Department of Education.”

Mr. Moore says there is no doctrinal daylight between him and his church, and he insists he isn’t seeking to return the Southern Baptists to a past in which it shunned politics entirely.

He travels almost weekly from his home in Nashville to Washington to meet with members of the Obama administration and with congressional leaders. He has allied with the Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups to make the case that overhauling the U.S. immigration system is a Christian goal. He is pushing the Pentagon to give religious chaplains in the military freer rein to preach, and has helped build a new coalition to fight a federal requirement that insurers provide contraception coverage.

His approach, however, is strikingly different from that of his predecessor Mr. Land, who for a quarter century served as the leading voice of the Southern Baptists. Like many evangelical leaders of his generation, Mr. Land, a Princeton-educated Texan, openly aligned himself with the Republican Party and popped up frequently in the Oval Office during the George W. Bush years.

Long before their divergent approaches on the gay-marriage issue, Messrs. Moore and Land split over the huge rally held by conservative talk-radio host Glenn Beck in front of the Lincoln Memorial in August 2010. Mr. Land attended the rally as Mr. Beck’s guest, and later compared Mr. Beck to Billy Graham, calling him “a person in spiritual motion.”

Mr. Moore, in an essay posted after the rally, said the event illustrated how far astray many conservative Christians had wandered in pursuit of “populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads.”

In an interview, Mr. Land said the Southern Baptist leadership is divided into those who think the culture war is lost; those who are weary and want it over; and those who think they are losing the war but feel victory is still possible. He declined to say where he puts Mr. Moore, but said he counts himself among the latter. “We are like where Britain was in 1940, under heavy attack but still not defeated,” he said.

Asked to respond, Mr. Beck in a written statement applauded Mr. Land and said, “In times like these, we need to find common ground.”

At the very least, readers might reasonably conclude that Francis and Moore are saying they each need to reconsider their predecessor’s approach to the culture wars.

But one important difference does exist. While Francis, whose pay grade is to interpret the church’s teaching, relies on a bevy of interpreters to make sense of his quips to the press, Russell Moore does actually interpret what he means.

The recent profile in the Wall Street Journal highlighted a generational change in terms of the way evangelicals approach cultural and political engagement: toward a gospel-centered approach that doesn’t back down on issues of importance, but sees our ultimate mission as one that applies the blood of Christ to the questions of the day.

The headline, as is often the case with headlines, is awfully misleading. I am not calling, at all, for a “pullback” from politics or engagement.

If anything, I’m calling for more engagement in the worlds of politics, culture, art, labor and so on. It’s just that this is a different sort of engagement. It’s not a matter of pullback, but of priority.

What I’m calling for in our approach to political engagement is what we’re already doing in one area: the pro-life movement. Evangelicals in the abortion debate have demonstrated convictional kindness in a holistic ethic of caring both for vulnerable unborn children and for the women who are damaged by abortion. The pro-life movement has engaged in a multi-pronged strategy that addresses, simultaneously, the need for laws to outlaw abortion, care for women in crisis pregnancies, adoption and foster care for children who need families, ministry to women (and men) who’ve been scarred by abortion, cultivating a culture that persuades others about why we ought to value human life, and the proclamation of the gospel to those whose consciences bear the guilt of abortion. . . .

We teach our people that their vote for President of the United States is crucially important. They’ll be held accountable at Judgment for whomever they hand the Romans 13 sword to. But we teach them that their vote on the membership of their churches is even more important. A church that loses the gospel is a losing church, no matter how many political victories it wins. A church that is right on public convictions but wrong on the gospel is a powerless church, no matter how powerful it seems.

That does sound like the old Christian Right, an elevation of matters temporal to the level of things eternal — voting having redemptive consequences. Even so, whether Moore did this simply to silence critics, or to avoid showing disrespect to Richard Land, at least he did respond. Francis still hasn’t. (Didn’t see that one coming, did you.)

And They Thought the PCA Was Divided

Published on by D. G. Hart244 Comments

You are not going to find much on the contemporary Roman Catholic Church in Jason and the Callers’ rifling through the early church fathers. Maybe for good reason since Pope Francis has apparently opened the old fault lines of Vatican II within the U.S. hierarchy (at least):

The election of Pope Francis in March heralded a season of surprises for the Catholic church, but perhaps none so unexpected — and unsettling for conservatives — as the re-emergence of the late Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin as a model for the American Catholic future.

While there is no indication that Francis knows the writings of Bernardin, who died in 1996, many say the pope’s remarks repeatedly evoke Bernardin’s signature teachings on the “consistent ethic of life” — the view that church doctrine champions the poor and vulnerable from womb to tomb — and on finding “common ground” to heal divisions in the church.

Ironically, the re-emergence of Bernardin — a man who was admired by a young Chicago organizer named Barack Obama — is exposing the very rifts he sought to bridge, especially among conservatives who thought his broad view of Catholicism was buried with him in Mount Carmel Cemetery outside Chicago.

Francis, for example, repeatedly stresses economic justice and care for the poor as priorities for Catholics, and he warned that the church has become “obsessed” with a few issues, such as abortion, contraception and homosexuality, and needs a “new balance.”

The new pope has also sought to steer the hierarchy away from conservative politics and toward a broad-based view of Catholicism “that is not just top-down but also horizontal” — focused on dialogue in the church and with the wider world.

“Please do not let up, as you fill our cups with hope as well as knowledge.”

“The point that (Bernardin’s) consistent ethic makes is exactly the same point that Pope Francis is making — let’s look at the whole picture and not just focus almost exclusively on three or so issues,” said Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe, N.M., who had been close friends with Bernardin since the 1970s.

“I certainly think that if Cardinal Bernardin were alive he would be very pleased with what Pope Francis is saying and doing,” echoed Archbishop Joseph Fiorenza, retired archbishop of Galveston-Houston, whose 1998-2001 term as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was seen as one of the last in the mold of Bernardin. . . .

Several other bishops, church officials and observers agreed. But if those assessments are manna to Catholics hungry for a new direction in the church, they are anathema to conservatives who believe Bernardin epitomized everything that was wrong with the U.S. church before Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI pushed the hierarchy to the right.

“The Bernardin Era is over and the Bernardin Machine is no more,” the conservative writer George Weigel wrote in the journal First Things in a 2011 essay that trumpeted the end of a time “in which a liberal consensus dominated both the internal life of the Church and the Church’s address to public policy.”

The fact that Weigel and others would still be driving a stake through the heart of Bernardin’s legacy — as Peter Steinfels put it in a rejoinder in Commonweal magazine — 15 years after his death is a testimony to the stature Bernardin once had, and the angst he can still inspire.

In fact, a generation ago, Bernardin was viewed as the quintessential American churchman — a longtime president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and then its resident wise man, coaxing the hierarchy into approving landmark documents on war and poverty that shaped the public debate on faith in America.

Yet the “John Paul II bishops” who came to power in the 1980s and beyond saw Bernardin’s style and views as too accommodating and too reluctant to mount the barricades on behalf of a more assertive Catholic identity marked by a few hallmark issues rather than a spectrum of teachings.

So just when Jason and the Callers thought they had escaped the unsatisfying clutches of Protestantism, they entered a communion riven by the same kind of divisions that characterized the modernist-fundamentalist controversy. One side wants the church to continue to adapt to the modern world (as Vatican II taught) and the other, like neo-conservatives mugged by the reality of liberal change, wants to put the brakes on adaptation by stressing fundamental markers of Christian identity. Both sides are a long way from early church fathers in which Jason and the Callers have buried their heads.

A Communion In Search of a Call

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Perhaps Jason and the Callers should devote more time to their new fellow believers:

Archbishop Müller’s concise and clear re-statement of the theological foundations of Christian marriage offers a vision of permanent, fruitful and faithful love between a husband and wife, who are a sign for all of human history of the creative fire of Trinitarian love. It also offers a vision of Christ’s unstinting care for his Church — and thus a preparation for eternal life with God.

“Sacramental marriage is a testimony to the power of grace, which changes man and prepares the whole Church for the holy city, the new Jerusalem — the Church, which is prepared, ‘as a bride adorned for her husband,’” observed Archbishop Müller, gently but firmly. “By adapting to the spirit of the age, a weary prophet seeks his own salvation, but not the salvation of the world in Jesus Christ.”

However, his elucidation of Church teaching was accompanied by a frank acknowledgement that many cradle Catholics who participate in a Church wedding know little of sacramental theology and have been formed instead by modern notions of marital love as a human contract that necessarily requires an escape hatch.

The CDF prefect suggested that this state of affairs increases the likelihood that marriages blessed by the Church may not be valid, and that reality might influence judgments made by Church marriage tribunals.

Could the reason for this ignorance be a catechism that is too long? Or could it be that sacramentalism gets in the way of didacticism? Either way, Jason and the Callers have their work cut out for them.

Vatican Sporting Scene

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

While Jason is knee-deep in Eucharist studies and Bryan is trying to wrap his mind around Vatican II, officials in Rome are engaged in various competitions. First, a story about cricket as the new evangelism:

The Holy See has plans to finally beat the Church of England at its own game: not in a theological debate, but on the cricket field. The Vatican has a new cricket club that aims to encourage dialogue between cultures, as well as growing virtue among the athletes, both on and off the field.

“The idea was if we start a cricket club, cricket being so popular in the whole of the East, especially in the Indian subcontinent, we could start a dialogue through cricket,” said Father Theodore Mascarenas.
Father Mascarenas is a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture, overseeing the departments for Asia, Africa and Ushuaia (capital city of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina). He is also the new chairman for the Vatican cricket team, called St. Peter’s Cricket Club.

St. Peter’s Cricket Club currently has several different objectives. The first is to organize a tournament among the various colleges in Rome, which, according to a survey done earlier this year, will be able to count on roughly 300 players and supporters from the city.

Eventually, the club hopes to challenge the Church of England to a match and aims in the future to play teams from Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist educational institutions in order to fortify relationships and dialogue with various cultural communities.

Of course, no one would really see much of a contest in theological debates with the Anglicans. What is of interest is the emerging debate between Pope Francis and Archbishop Gerhard Muller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:

Given that Pope Francis has himself spoken of the need to take a new look at the situation of divorced and remarried, and has convened a Synod of Bishops for 2014 to discuss this and other issues, it’s legitimate to wonder where the church is really headed: substantial change or another dead-end debate.

The archbishop makes several important points:

— He underlines that, in his view, this is not simply a pastoral question but a doctrinal issue that involves the church’s theological understanding of the sacrament of marriage. He states categorically that the Orthodox practice of allowing second or third marriages under certain circumstances “cannot be reconciled with God’s will” – which is interesting, considering that Pope Francis himself has referred to the Orthodox practice without explicitly repudiating or endorsing it.

— Muller pointedly rejects the argument that the individual conscience can be the final arbiter on whether a divorced and civilly remarried Catholic can receive Communion. Again, there seems to be a contrast in tone with Pope Francis’ own recent remarks on the duty to follow one’s conscience.

— In what appears to be a remarkably direct response to Pope Francis’ call for “mercy” as the framework for dealing with divorced and remarried Catholics, Archbishop Muller says that “an objectively false appeal to mercy also runs the risk of trivializing the image of God, by implying that God cannot do other than forgive.”

Do Jason and the Callers have an opinion about any of this? Would any of this matter to their projection of Rome as savior from error? Perhaps they are playing a different game.

Can Jason and the Callers Gain Francis' Blessing?

Published on by D. G. Hart42 Comments

Probably. All they need to do is do what these Roman Catholics did.

Then again, they might be feeling ambivalent, the way these Roman Catholics are, those whom John Allen identifies as having “the older son” problem:

Some Vatican personnel who have tried to do their best over the years in service to the successor of Peter and who may feel a bit demoralized hearing the pope describe their work environment as infested with careerism, “Vatican-centrism,” and the “leprosy” of a royal court.

Some pro-life Catholics who feel like they’ve carried water for the church on controversial and sometimes unpopular issues such as abortion and gay marriage and who now get the sense the pope regards some of their efforts as misplaced or over the top.

Some evangelical Catholics, both clergy and laity, who’ve tried to reassert a strong sense of Catholic identity against forces they believe want to play it down, who now feel the pope may be pulling the rug out from under them. Some leaders in the reborn genre of Catholic apologetics, for instance, weren’t thrilled recently to hear Francis call proselytism “solemn nonsense.”

Then again, Jason and the Callers might be too young in the faith to qualify as older sons.

Postscript: Meanwhile, Jason has become an Arminian since joining the Roman Catholic Church:

So when it comes to salvation and the five points, the paradigm shift from penal substitution to pleasing sacrifice played a big role. Once that shift occurs, limited atonement becomes sort of meaningless. With total depravity, I think a Catholic can affirm the substance of the idea while maintaining man’s free will. Unconditional election isn’t a problem, although Catholics are free to disagree. Irresistible grace can be affirmed, with some qualifications, but perseverance of the saints is untrue from a Catholic POV (since all who are baptized are regenerated, but not all the regenerated are elect to salvation).

But never forget, it’s all about paradigms.

The Pietist Pope

Published on by D. G. Hart330 Comments

I was at first dismissive of the lead singer of Jason and the Callers’ invocation of categories I developed in Lost Soul of American Protestantism to explain the current statements from Pope Francis. Not to say I wasn’t flattered or surprised that an arch-Roman Catholic would lean on Protestant categories to defend an institution and person who is so superior to Protestantism. But after reading Francis’ interview, I believe Jason is more astute than he realizes (but not so much here). (He should also realize that he belongs to a flock of interpreters, the members of which seem to have forgotten that it was the papacy itself that was supposed to end the Protestant craze of various interpretations.)

Several commentators have been concerned about the mainstream media’s highlighting the pope’s apparently lackadaisical views about homosexuality and abortion, such as:

In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are ‘socially wounded’ because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this. During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge. By saying this, I said what the catechism says. Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person. Here we enter into the mystery of the human being. In life, God accompanies persons, and we must accompany them, starting from their situation. It is necessary to accompany them with mercy. When that happens, the Holy Spirit inspires the priest to say the right thing.

A confessionalist, that is, a churchly Christian who values ecclesial forms and ordinances (preaching, sacraments, prayer) as the means by which the Spirit works, as opposed to a pietist who generally disregards forms and elevates the Spirit over all religious externals or man-made doctrines or liturgies, might have responded to the predicament of homosexuality or abortion by pointing a person struggling with these matters to the regular ministry of the church. For someone like Francis — “is the Pope ecclesial?” could be a new taunt — you would expect him to uphold Rome’s sacramental system of Baptism, the Eucharist, and Penance. Say what you will about the flaws in those teaching and practices from a Reformed Protestant perspective, Rome’s ministry as outlined, for instance, in Trent’s Catechism is as thorough a way of addressing the plight of sinners as someone could imagine.

But instead of upholding the gracious character of the sacramental system, or the mercy that Rome shows in recommending that a person wrestling with sin seek forgiveness and repentance through the ministry of her priests, Francis went in a pietistic direction. That is, he spoke of ways to make the church seem more responsive and charitable.

How are we treating the people of God? I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbour. This is pure Gospel. God is greater than sin. The structural and organisational reforms are secondary­ – that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude. The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost. The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind. But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.

“Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent. The ones who quit sometimes do it for reasons that, if properly understood and assessed, can lead to a return. But that takes audacity and courage.”

I mention to Pope Francis that there are Christians who live in situations that are irregular for the church or in complex situations that represent open wounds. I mention the divorced and remarried, same-sex couples and other difficult situations. What kind of pastoral work can we do in these cases? What kinds of tools can we use?

“We need to proclaim the Gospel on every street corner,” the pope says, “preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing, even with our preaching, every kind of disease and wound. In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are ‘socially wounded’ because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this. During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge. By saying this, I said what the catechism says. Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

To be sure, Francis does mention briefly the role of the confessor in the life of a woman who has had an abortion:

This is also the great benefit of confession as a sacrament: evaluating case by case and discerning what is the best thing to do for a person who seeks God and grace. The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord’s mercy motivates us to do better. I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and she is now happy and has five children. That abortion in her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do?

But the pope’s presentation of the issue is open ended. What should the confessor do? No answer. A woman with a guilty conscience? She needs to work it out with a confessor, but not in a way that would involve the pain of repentance or the acts of contrition, confession, and satisfaction. What happened to the words of Trent which defined contrition as “a sorrow and detestation for sin committed, with a purpose of sinning no more . . . joined with a confidence in the mercy of God and an earnest desire of performing whatever is necessary to the proper reception of the Sacrament”?

In other words, Francis appears to be confused like many pietists, who mistake experience for authenticity. He apparently wants to offer forgiveness to a broken world but does not value highly the very means that his own communion has (and has had for six hundred years) for reaching out to a broken world. It is as if he had read too much Gilbert Tennent and believed that new circumstances required new ministry measures. It is a Roman Catholic instance of pietism’s promotion of feelings and experience at the expense of the outward and ordinary means of grace.

By the way, it is also breathtaking since it is supposed to be either the low church Protestants or the Roman Catholic mystics who are so indifferent to sacraments and ordinances.

Postscript: in a related story, the Vatican press reported on Francis’ efforts to avoid taking a hard line with couples who are cohabiting:

The Pope told priests they should welcome couples that live together and championed the courageous and creative choices involved in going out to the “existential peripheries”, RomaSette says in its article. But the truth factor is crucial here. “The truth must always be told,” not just in the dogmatic sense of the world but in the sense of “love and God’s fullness”. The priest must “accompany” people.

Francis referred to some experience he had in Buenos Aires as examples of creativity. For example, when some churches were kept open around the clock, with confessors or “personal courses” available for couples who want to marry but can’t attend a prenuptial course because they work till late. The “existential peripheries” are the priority. These also refer to the kinds of family contexts Benedict XVI often talked about, for example second marriages. Our task is to “find another way, the just way,” Francis said. . . .

“The problem cannot be reduced to whether” these couples “are allowed to take communion or not because whoever thinks of the problem in these terms doesn’t understand the real issue at hand,” Francis said. “This is a serious problem regarding the Church’s responsibility towards families that are in this situation.” Francis reiterated what he said on the return flight from Rio to Rome after World Youth Day, saying he will be discussing the issue with the group of eight cardinals who will be meeting in the Vatican in early October. Francis added that the issue will also be discussed at the next Synod of Bishops on the Gospel’s anthropological relationship with individual people and the family, so that the whole Synod can look into this problem. “This,” Francis said “is a real existential periphery”.

Religious Life at Notre Dame

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While Jason and the Callers are admiring the early church fathers, here is an observation on their contemporary brothers and sisters from Mark Noll in a review of George Weigel’s, Evangelical Catholicism:

It is mostly inconsequential, but perhaps also of some interest to record how I have read this book against the background of experience at Notre Dame. From that experience I would conclude that there are indeed some Catholics committed to deep church reform who already practice something like Weigel’s evangelical Catholicism. But it also seems obvious that such Catholics make up only one part of a church that in its U.S. expression includes many other Catholics eager to promote their respective visions of reform. This rainbow of reformers includes Garry Wills Catholics, G. K. Chesterton Catholics, Robert Barron Catholics, Joe Biden Catholics, Dorothy Day Catholics, Sandra Schneider Catholics, Opus Dei Catholics, Oscar Romero Catholics, and many more. As someone who has read several works by John Paul II and Benedict XVI with real appreciation, I hope very much that they have set the church on a path that it will follow, but then I wonder why in some conversations at Notre Dame, I as the non-Catholic seem to have the most positive things to say about these two popes.

One of the great privileges of being at Notre Dame has been to witness what can only be called Roman Catholic Christianity at its best, marked by profound understanding of fundamental Trinitarian theology, strong commitment to the Christology of Nicea and Chalcedon, expert deployment of philosophy in service to theology, deep personal piety, and dedicated Christian commitment to a wide range of social reforms. Examples of what to all appearances look like admirable personal religion supported by admirable family, parish, and social religion also abound.

Yet Notre Dame is also a place where a broad array of often incompatible ideals are proposed for Catholic reform, where cafeteria religion seems pervasive for what Catholics choose to do or believe, where students participate in dormitory masses and standard college dissipations with equal fervour, and where no one seems too concerned about vast stretches of nominal Catholic adherence.

Demanding

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Speaking of the Land of Chocolate, the lead singer of Jason and the Callers has another defense of the magisterium as he understands it. In it is this assertion:

Because in order to distinguish between divine revelation and human opinion in a principled way, some visible body must exist with the authority to do so.

This is a frequent claim by ex-Protestants who go to Rome. Protestantism is in chaos and can’t resolve its divisions. Rome has unity and visibility and this is what you need to overcome Protestant fissiparousness. Possibly.

But who says that we need a visible body to distinguish between divine revelation and human opinion (not that Jason makes this distinction very clear since he keeps comparing the “interpretations” of the magisterium to the very revelation they are supposed to be interpreting; in other words, it’s one thing for the Bible to be hard to interpret, it’s another altogether for the visible and principled interpretations not to add up)? I know I am as a Protestant a Bible thumper. But I have no idea where Jason would derive this notion from the pages of Holy Writ (unless he wants to hang everything on Matt. 16 and 18 again and again and again).

For instance, the Old Testament saints had a single, visible authority, the Israelite monarchy, and it lasted for all of David and Solomon before splitting into the northern and southern kingdoms. Let’s not forget that the kings were not exactly models of interpretive fidelity.

Then we have Jesus’ own promise to his disciples in John 16 that when he leaves his Spirit will come who will lead the church into all truth. Curious that with Peter right there, Jesus didn’t say, and rest assured, Peter and his successors will lead you into all truth and rightly divide revelation from interpretation.

And then there is Peter’s own counsel to the church in his second epistle where he constantly warns about the danger of false teachers, and warns, and warns, and warns (pastors considering a series on 2 Peter be warned). If Peter knew what Jason pines for, that a visible body was around to distinguish opinion from revelation, why would he write to your average Simon and Hannah about the need to keep a lookout for false teachers? Why not write the first Christians about God’s great provision of the visible church and its capacity to direct the faithful into all truth?

Jason puts this assertion in a post about how grown ups talk. I wonder if he has considered the difference between childish wishes and adult resignation. I mean, some kids insist that Santa exists. What does that prove?

Mother Church, Baby Bible, Grandpa Pentateuch

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Peter Kreeft is writing a series of posts to defend Roman Catholicism against fundamentalism. I am not sure why fundamentalism is a threat but I am still getting up to speed on things Romish.

In his post on the Bible, he has this line:

It is a fault, of course, to ignore Mother Church. But it is a virtue to love Baby Bible, a virtue we should respect and imitate.

This is apparently a clever way of saying that the church gave birth to the canon of Scripture, a common point that Roman Catholics make against Protestants. But does this line implicitly and unintentionally contain an element of anti-Semitism?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures was well in place well before Peter allegedly became bishop of Rome or before Constantine started to convene ecumenical councils (without consulting the bishop of Rome, I might add). Peter himself, Paul, Christ, and all the authors of the New Testament recognized the Old Testament sacred books.

(And one other wrinkle, parenthetically, is why would high papalists back the idea that the early church councils gave us Scripture and then deny the councils authority later when they decree that popes need regularly to convene councils?)

So why write the priests and rabbis out of the formation of the canon? Or why show disrespect to the Hebrew Scriptures, as if they were not authoritative until the Council of Hippo? (Answer: it doesn’t fit the RC paradigm which may turn out to be as authoritative as the pontiff of Rome.) And why not recognize how much longer and agenda setting the Old Testament is for what happens with Jesus and the church? If we are going to play the genealogy game, as Kreeft wants, then lets include the Hebrew saints. Does that mean King Saul is a forerunner of the papacy?

Irony: When A Council Kills Conciliarism

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Oakley’s chapter on the First Vatican Council contains the following nuggets. The first is that conciliarism was alive and sort of well in ecclesiologists such as Henri Maret, the last dean of the theology faculty at the Sorbonne. Oakley describes his position this way:

In conscious opposition, then, to De Maistre, Maret sought to identify in the Church’s constitution a liberal element that could open the way to his longed-for ‘reconciliation of the Church with the modern notion of freedom’. Noting the presence in the Church’s constitution of a ‘democratic element in that any member of the faithful could be called to the episcopal state and that is was the original practice of Christian communities to elect their bishops, he insists, none the less, that democracy cannot claim sovereignty in the Church. But nor does that sovereignty reside in any form of absolute monarchy. It belongs, instead, to monarchy tempered with aristocracy (in one place he calls it ‘a monarchy essentially aristocratic and deliberative’), in effect, what is sometimes called a mixed government, one framed along the same lines as ‘constitutional and representative monarchy’ in the world of secular regimes.

That much can be said, Maret believes, even without having determined the precise relationship between pope and bishops. But as soon as one attempts to make that determination, one comes up against the fact that two long-standing schools of thought compete for one’s allegiance. The first is the Italian school, which . . . . says, ‘the pope possesses a monarchical power that is pure, indivisible, absolute and unlimited.’ . . . The competing school, that of Paris, . . . asserts to the contrary that, while the pope is indeed the monarch of the Church, that monarchy is ‘truly and efficaciously tempered by [the] aristocracy’ of bishops. . . .

One has to decide between these competing schools, and to do so (he says) one has to put them to the test of scripture and tradition. So far as the scriptures are concerned, the celebrated cluster of texts (notably Matthew 16 and 18) which together constitute what he calls (and pace De Maistre) the very ‘constitutional charter’ of the Church, certainly seem to suggest that the sovereign power was given, not to Peter alone, but to the ‘collective unity’ of Peter and the other apostles, and to exclude from the government of the Church therefore any sort of ‘pure, absolute and indivisible monarchy’. But it is to the acts of the general councils down through history that one must turn for the ‘authentic commentary’ on and ‘legitimate interpretation’ of that fundamental scriptural’constitutional charter’. . . . [O]n the conflicted issue of the pope-bishop relationship the decrees emanating from Constance and Florence are ‘the most weighty and celebrated’. (211-213)

Maret’s conclusion was that Haec Sancta and Frequens, the conciliar determinations that resolved the Western schism, were not “dogma of faith,” but “constitutional law” that regulated ecclesiastical power. These were decrees that stated more clearly and solemnly than had been before that the “Church’s constitution was to be viewed as a mixed one, a ‘monarchy . . . essentially aristocratic and deliberative’, one in which the pope, while possessing by divine authority the plenitude of power, was no pure absolute and unlimited monarch but a ruler who, in the exercise of that power, was limited by the aristocratic element constituted by the bishops themselves — ‘true princes,’ he added, possessing by divine right a share in the Church’s sovereign power.”

The second nugget is that First Vatican Council ended this tradition of conciliarism:

Maret’s position was to be doomed, thrust into the outer darkness of heterodoxy by Pastor aeternus, the First Vatican Council’s historic decrees on the primacy of jurisdiction and infallibility of the pope. Or so the pertinent curial officials clearly concluded. If Lord Acton as a layman was able to avoid any forthright endorsement of the council’s teaching on infallibility against which he had fought so vigorously, clerics like. . . Maret were permitted very little room for manoeuvre. . . . [Maret] was to find that his earnest attempts to identify some fugitive common ground between his own form of neo-Gallicanism and the ecclesiology which informed Pastor aeternus were unacceptable at Rome. In August 1871, then, though without specifying what is was, precisely, that he had in mind, he publicly disavowed ‘whatever in his book and in his Defense is opposed to the Council’s definition.’ (216)