How John Calvin Made me a Catholic

John Calvin

Dr. David Anders received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 2002, in Reformation history and historical theology. He was received into the Catholic Church in 2003. He has recently written an article titled "How John Calvin Made me a Catholic." He will be on EWTN Live on June 23rd, 7:00 pm Central (8 EST), and may be discussing some of the material from this article.

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St. Thomas Aquinas on the Unity of the Church

Today, on this eighth and last day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, we will look at what St. Thomas Aquinas says about the unity of the Church, drawing from his commentary on the Apostles’ Creed in his catechism, his Summa Contra Gentiles and his Summa Theologica. (Continue reading)

St. Francis de Sales: Reconciling Calvinists to the Catholic Church

Today, the seventh day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, is the feast day of St. Francis de Sales, (1567-1622), bishop of Geneva and Doctor of the Church.

In 1594 he volunteered to go to Le Chablais, south of Geneva, where the population had become Calvinist and separated from the Catholic Church. The encyclopedia article explains St. Francis' subsequent activity:

He journeyed through the entire district, preaching constantly; by dint of zeal, learning, kindness and holiness he at last obtained a hearing. He then settled in Thonon, the chief town. He confuted the preachers sent by Geneva to oppose him; he converted the syndic and several prominent Calvinists. At the request of the pope, Clement VIII, he went to Geneva to interview Theodore Beza, who was called the Patriarch of the Reformation. The latter received him kindly and seemed for a while shaken, but had not the courage to take the final steps.

Through his work in this region over the course of four years (from 1594 to 1598), 72,000 Calvinists were brought back into the Catholic Church. When he initially went from house to house to talk with the Calvinists, they refused to talk with him or even listen to him. So he started writing pamphlets, and slipping them under doors in the villages and towns. Those pamphlets have been collected into the book now published under the title: The Catholic Controversy: St. Francis de Sales' Defense of the Faith.

One of the more important points in these pamphlets is that the Church comes from the Apostles, as the Apostles come from Christ, and as Christ comes from the Father. The Father sent the Son. The Son authorized and commissioned the Apostles. The Apostles authorized and commissioned the bishops. And these bishops authorized and commissioned bishops. This is a top-down transmission of divine authority and mission, from the Father to Christ, from Christ to the Apostles, and from the Apostles to the bishops they ordained. Only those persons authorized and sent by the Apostles should be received by Christians as rightful shepherds, and thus only those authorized and sent by the bishops sent by the Apostles should be received by Christians as rightful shepherds. We should not follow those who are self-sent, or self-appointed, for such persons are not authorized by Christ to shepherd the Lord's sheep. Anyone can claim to be authorized, but only those who have been authorized by those whom the Apostles authorized are actually authorized. The Calvinists were following self-appointed men who were not authorized to speak for the Church. St. Francis taught that these men had not entered the sheepfold by the door, but were climbing in some other way.

St. Francis explained that the unity of the Church derives directly from the unity of Christ Himself, through a continuous organic relation to the incarnate Christ, by holding to the shepherds who have authorization from the Apostles. Just as an organism grows, so by apostolic succession the Church retains within itself the unity it received directly from the incarnate Christ, its Head. "We are to grow up in all aspects into Him, who is the head, even Christ from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by that which every joint supplies ...." (Ephesians 4:16)

The bust at right is located on the west side of the Saint Louis Cathedral Basilica.

Ecumenical flowchart

Evangelicals and the Crisis of Authority

Jim Tonkowich has written a must-read article titled "Evangelicals and the Crisis of Authority." The article describes a present authority crisis at Calvin College regarding homosexuality and academic freedom. One person is quoted as saying "academic freedom means I can interpret Scripture in any way I see fit." The article considers the possibility that this seeming primacy of individual interpretive judgment is intrinsic to the essence of Protestantism. But in the last third of his article Jim concludes that that is a false understanding of Protestantism. I have quoted that last section in full:

[Timothy] George argues that Luther and the other Reformers were far more nuanced than a cursory reading of the dialogue at Worms indicates. Rather than seeing themselves as creating something new based on individual insights, they "saw themselves as part of the ongoing Catholic tradition, indeed as the legitimate bearers of it." The Reformers had a "sense of continuity with the church of the preceding centuries." Neither Luther nor John Calvin rejected the past or even the Roman Church in its entirety.

While the Reformers believed Scripture alone was the final authority for life and doctrine, they insisted that assent to ancient creeds was also incumbent upon Christians. They were so strongly persuaded, says George, that they saw justification by faith, the cornerstone of the Reformation, as "the logical and necessary consequence of the ecumenical orthodoxy embraced by Catholics and Protestants alike."

As to academic freedom, the Reformers were marked, "by their desire to read the Bible in dialogue with the exegetical traditions of the church." George writes:

In their biblical commentaries… the Reformers of the sixteenth century revealed an intimate familiarity with the preceding exegetical tradition, and they used it reverently as well as critically in their own expositions of the sacred text. The Scriptures were seen as the book given to the church, gathered and guided by the Holy Spirit.

These three, the sense of continuity with the Church through the ages, an embrace of ecumenical orthodoxy as expressed in the creeds, and a determination to read the Bible with the Church, form guardrails for academic and personal freedom and inquiry. They prevent biblical interpretation from falling prey to the latest cultural fad, the hippest intellectual fashion, and individual predilections.

As John Armstrong comments:

[W]e need to recover a proper emphasis upon tradition. Some Christians are accused of being stuck in the past, especially by progressive and more liberal Christians. I believe the much greater danger is an uncritical acceptance of new teachings and practices that undermine the historic faith itself. We need what my friend, the late Robert Webber, called "ancient-future faith." It is right to lean into the future and to prepare for what the Spirit will do. But the Spirit does not lead us to abandon the historic faith in the process.

Christian freedom—academic freedom and personal freedom—is not the right to interpret the Bible in any way we see fit and then act on our interpretation. It is the freedom to be fully human in company with and under the authority of the Church throughout the ages and in accord with the unchanging truth that is in Jesus Christ.

The solution to this authority problem, according to Jim, is that present-day Protestants need to recover a sense of continuity with the Church, embrace the orthodoxy of the ancient creeds, and read the Bible in dialogue with the exegetical traditions of the Church. The problem with Jim's suggestion is that it is just that, a mere suggestion. It has no authority. The things he proposes are all good things, but they are not, and cannot be, the solution to the authority vacuum within Protestantism. An authority problem cannot be solved without authority. Appealing to "the authority of the Church,"as he does in the last line of his article, is impossible when "the Church" is ultimately defined by each individual in terms of "those who agree with my general interpretation." Jim is trying to hang on to the solo scriptura / sola scriptura distinction in order to salvage Evangelicalism's decay. But as Neal Judisch and I recently argued in "Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority," there is ultimately no real distinction between solo scriptura and sola scriptura. By its rejection of apostolic succession Protestantism necessarily makes the individual the ultimate interpretive authority. And that entails that anyone can reject the ancient Church and her creeds as outdated and antiquated, and give no heed to the various exegetical traditions. Merely calling for a "sense of continuity" and an "embrace" of the ancient creeds and for reading the Bible in continuity with ancient exegetical traditions will not stop the flowering of the seeds sown almost five hundred years ago, when Protestants rejected apostolic succession and the authority of the Church. In doing so, they unwittingly made each man his own pope, though the full fruits of this sowing remained hidden under the gradually declining inertia of Catholic Tradition. Those who sow rejection of apostolic succession must ultimately reap the individualism and fragmentation of "solo scriptura." As Louis Bouyer argued:

The Protestantism which rejects the authority of the Church because it rejects all authority has come out of the Protestantism which rejected the authority of the Church because of the fear it wronged that other authority, held to be sovereign, of the Scriptures. If it was possible for the first to come from the second, it must somehow have been contained therein.

The only solution to this authority problem is a recovery of apostolic succession.

Fr. Barron: Protestantism and Authority

"Clement of Rome: First Known Exercise of Papal Primacy"

Yesterday Professor Feingold (Ave Maria University) gave a lecture titled "Clement of Rome: First Known Exercise of Papal Primacy." Audio of the lecture can be found here.

Apostolicity and the Ecumenical Challenge

"The Sacrament of Ordination"
Nicolas Poussin (1636-40)
(click on the painting for a larger image)

Today is the seventh day of the week of prayer for Christian unity. It is also the feast day of St. Francis de Sales, who brought 72,000 Calvinists back into the Catholic Church. Recently I came across Michael Spencer's post titled "Spiritual Depression and the Search for the One True Church", and it prompted the following reflection.

The greatest challenge to the goal of reconciling Protestants and Catholics in full unity is not coming to an agreement regarding whether charity is merely coexistent with justifying faith (Turretin) or whether charity is that which makes faith to be living faith, and thus to be justifying faith (Trent). (See here.) I suspect that only a very small percentage of contemporary Christians has even thought about that question. Many Protestants, I suppose, if they didn't know the source, probably would be open if not sympathetic to Pope Benedict's recent talk on justification. In my opinion the greatest challenge for reuniting Protestants and Catholics has to do, rather, with reconciling two very different ecclesial paradigms that differ on the question of whether or not Christ founded His Church with a perpetual hierarchy in unbroken succession from the Apostles.

In the ecclesial paradigm of contemporary Evangelicalism, the Church Christ founded is something spiritual, and faith in Christ is a sufficient condition for full membership in Christ's Church. Of course Christians are called not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together (Hebrews 10:25), and so some local organized congregation or regional organization (i.e. denomination) is practically useful if not necessary. But these are all merely man-made organizations. That is why, in the Evangelical mind, it is fine to initiate and form entirely *autonomous* congregations of all different sorts and styles, even in the same town. The Church is the invisible spiritual entity to which true believers are invisibly joined by the Holy Spirit, regardless of any organizational or institutional affiliation. We can see this ecclesial paradigm in the consumeristic way evangelicals determine which congregation or denomination to join, and in the way they decide for themselves which doctrines are essential and which are non-essential.

We can see this paradigm implicit in the common notion that it is more important to join an imperfect denomination than to continue searching for a 'perfect church'. The notion of finding "the Church that Christ founded" is typically not even on the conceptual radar, precisely because the Evangelical ecclesial paradigm does not recognize that Christ established and endowed His Church with a perpetual hierarchy of leadership in succession from the Apostles. But, it was to this perpetual hierarchy that the Holy Spirit, speaking through the inspired author of Hebrews, commanded us to submit and obey (Heb 13:17) -- not to those whom we have accumulated to ourselves who teach according to our own interpretation of Scripture (2 Tim 4:3).

When the Apostle Matthew records Jesus saying to Peter in Matt 16:18, "upon this rock I will build My Church", and then saying, in Matt 18:17, "tell it to the Church", and "listen to the Church", the most natural way of understanding these passages is that the term 'ekklesia' ('Church') is being used in the same way in all three places. And it is clear in the Matthew 18 passages that 'ekklesia' there refers to the visible Church, not a merely spiritual entity. That implies that Matt 16:18 is also referring to the visible Church. This is the one, holy, catholic (i.e universal) and apostolic (i.e. hierarchically organized in succession from the Apostles) Church.

When we look at the transition in the early Church from Apostolic to post-Apostolic leadership in the first century, we find a very different ecclesial paradigm from that of contemporary Evangelicalism. We see apostolicity understood as an apostolic authorization to hold ecclesial authority, to speak and teach in Christ's name, and with His authorization. Ecclesial authority could not come from non-authority; it could come only from those having authority from the Apostles.

This conception of ecclesial authority carries with it a very different ecclesiology, because to be a member in full communion with the Church thus requires being in full communion with this perpetual hierarchy. To be in full communion with Christ's Church, it is not enough simply to believe in Christ and love Christ. I discussed apostolicity in more detail here and here. Only in rediscovering what apostolicity meant in the early Church as taught in the fathers can Evangelicals and Catholics come to share the same ecclesial paradigm by which we can be truly united.

The early Reformers had a more accurate understanding of the visibility of the Church than do contemporary Evangelicals. Consider the following quotation from Keith Mathison (a Protestant):

Unlike modern Evangelicalism, the classical Protestant Reformers held to a high view of the Church. When the Reformers confessed extra ecclesiam nulla salus, which means "there is no salvation outside the Church," they were not referring to the invisible Church of all the elect. Such a statement would be tantamount to saying that outside of salvation there is no salvation. It would be a truism. The Reformers were referring to the visible Church… The Church is the pillar and ground, the interpreter, teacher, and proclaimer of God’s Word… The Church has authority because Christ gave the Church authority. The Christian who rejects the authority of the Church rejects the authority of the One who sent her (Luke 10:16). (Keith A. Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura, pp. 268, 269.)(H/T: David Waltz)

Or consider what Scott Clark (a Protestant professor at Westminster Seminary in California) says about connectionalism in his ecclesiology article. There he writes, "It is often assumed in the American Church that the New Testament Churches were independent of one another and autonomous, that is, subject to no one's authority but their own. In fact this is less a New Covenant picture than an amalgam of the historic Anabaptist view of the Church with traditional American self reliance." Clark's article implies that the visible catholic Church that Christ founded consists of local congregations *networked* together and subordinate to the decisions of general assemblies such as in Acts 15.

It is to that visible catholic Church that the promises of Christ to the Church refer. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the visible catholic Church (Matt 16:18). Christ will be with the visible catholic Church to the end of the age (Matt 28:20). The Holy Spirit will guide the visible catholic Church into all truth (John 16:13). Whatever the visible catholic Church binds on earth will be bound in heaven (Matt 16:19, 18:19). The visible catholic Church is the pillar and ground of truth (1 Tim 3:15). These promises would be superfluous and unhelpful if intended only for the set of all the elect.

So when asked "Which is the visible catholic Church that Christ founded?", we should at least be able to refer to the network of congregations constituting the visible catholic Church. If we're left scratching our heads, then there are only three possibilities: either Christ's promises didn't apply to the visible catholic Church (and the visible catholic Church simply faded out of existence at some point in history), or Christ didn't found a visible catholic Church, or it is *we* who have lost sight of the visible catholic Church. In Evangelicalism, there is no such thing (conceptually) as a visible catholic Church. In confessional Protestantism there is at least a familiarity with the concept of the visible catholic Church, but the question "Which is the visible catholic Church that Christ founded?" nevertheless leads to the scratching of heads. Few are willing to say that it is their own denomination.

The offense that some Protestants took to Responsa ad quaestiones in July of 2007 is due precisely to their unfamiliarity with what it means that Christ founded one, visible catholic Church. The visibility of the Church is entailed by what the Church has believed and taught from the beginning about apostolicity as ecclesial authority derived in succession from the Apostles through the laying on of hands by those having that authority. (Reducing apostolicity to formal agreement with the Apostles' doctrine therefore vitiates the grounds for ecclesial visibility.) It should be no surprise that if we want to reunite all Christians, we have to be united together in Christ's Church. And further it should be no surprise that if we are going to find and be united in Christ's Church, we have to dig deeply into her four marks as repeated in the Creed: Credo in ... unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam.

St. Francis de Sales, focusing on apostolicity, wrote the following to the Protestants of Geneva:

"First, then, your ministers had not the conditions required for the position which they sought to maintain, and the enterprise which they undertook. ... The office they claimed was that of ambassadors of Jesus Christ our Lord; the affair they undertook was to declare a formal divorce between Our Lord and the ancient Church his Spouse; to arrange and conclude by words of present consent, as lawful procurators, a second and new marriage with this young madam, of better grace, said they, and more seemly than the other. ... To be legates and ambassadors they should have been sent, they should have had letters of credit from him whom they boasted of being sent by. ... Tell me, what business had you to hear them and believe them without having any assurance of their commission and of the approval of Our Lord, whose legates they called themselves? In a word, you have no justification for having quitted that ancient Church in which you were baptized, on the faith of preachers who had no legitimate mission from the Master.

St. Francis de Sales, pray for us, that we would all be one in the visible catholic Church that Christ founded.

He Made Them Wander in the Wilderness Forty Years

Moses and the Brazen Serpent
Sebastian Bourdon (1653-1654)

What Fr. Williams says here fits with what St. Thomas Aquinas says here about the relation between faith and ecclesial authority.

St. Ignatius of Antioch shows us the way to unity

Today is the feast day of St. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, who was martyred in Rome in 107 AD under the Emperor Trajan. St. Ignatius shows us the way to unity by teaching us what the Catholic Church believed about ecclesial authority. It is what the same Catholic Church still believes and teaches today.

St. Ignatius, pray for us that all those who love our Lord Jesus will be united in full visible unity, for the glory and honor of our Lord Jesus, and for the salvation of the world.

Unity, my way

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes "grey town" as a place that is constantly expanding at its outskirts as people perpetually try to get farther away from each other, unable to get along with each other, and wanting to be lord of their own domain. That desire for autonomy continually divides and separates the citizens of 'grey town' from each other. I think it plays a similar role here on earth, even among Christians.

Responding to Catholic claims that we cannot have unity without a "uniform teaching authority", Michael Spencer writes:

I agree with your basic contention that we need the boundaries of unity and authority in order to talk about the "Christian faith." Millions of people reading their favorite verses to one another won't produce unity. If Protestantism has demonstrated anything, it's that.

But what kind of unity? Many of us believe that a kind of "creedal minimalism" brings the necessary unity to Christianity. The Nicene and Apostles' Creeds provide this minimum coverage, and the leadership of local churches (or geographic/denominational structures) use it for the purposes of mission, definition and discipline.

In other words, we don't believe that the infallible teaching authority of a completely hierarchical church defining every detail of Christian faith and mining tradition for further dogma is the necessary expression of unity. All the unity we need is available through the processes of a fallible church.

Earlier this year I presented some problems with the notion of a 'mere Christianity'. (Yes, here we have Lewis vs. Lewis.) If the "fallible church" to which Michael refers is the 'invisible Church', then how the invisible Church is supposed to provide the means for unity is never spelled out by anyone. Michael agrees that if Protestantism has demonstrated anything, it is that millions of people reading the Bible are not going to come to unity by doing so. But if Protestantism has demonstrated that, then hasn't it also demonstrated the failure of the "invisible Church" to unify Christians? Yet if by "fallible Church" Michael is referring to some set of embodied human persons, then what is it, exactly, that makes persons to be members of that set, and how does Michael know this, and who gets to determine the sufficient conditions for membership in this set, and why do they and not other people get to determine these conditions? There is no circumventing the authority problem, behind which lies the fundamental reason for our present disunity. We are either submitting to God-ordained authority, or submitting to a pseudo-authority whom we mistakenly think to be a God-ordained authority, or we are taking authority to ourselves, even in the very act of constructing the conditions upon which all Christians should be unified.

"But I hate him because he never prophesies anything good about me, but always bad." (1 Kings 22:8)

The fundamental problem with heresy is not the content of belief, but the basis of that belief. The content problem [i.e. having false beliefs] is derivative and per accidens. That's why persons born into heresies are not ipso facto guilty of heresy. Gnosticism misconstrues the fundamental problem with heresy as merely propositional. Hence the gnostic life consists in an unending series of theology readings aimed at honing one's orthodoxy (whether toward maximized specificity or specified minimization). But the beginning of wisdom is not a proposition per se; it is a disposition of the will toward God. (Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 9:10) If the devil were entirely orthodox in what he believed, but had come to believe these orthodox truths not through faith and trust in God, but through his own prideful efforts, would he be less estranged from God than he is now? With respect to the basis of the content of the faith, the 'mere Christianity' mentality is no different from any other form of Protestantism. The individual remains the final arbiter of what should be believed, and in this way the notion of a 'mere Christianity' remains intrinsically disposed to perpetual fragmentation. If the ecclesial authority says that more (or less) needs to be believed than we think needs to be believed, then we simply reject that authority, move farther out, and find authorities saying pretty much what we think, more or less, needs to be believed. Unity by 'mere Christianity' is still "unity, my way". But it is precisely the "my way" that is the root cause of disunity.

"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires." (2 Timothy 4:3)

The resolution of the divisions between Christians does not consist in finding a lowest-common denominator or minimal content of Christianity around which we can all agree. That is because the fundamental source of the disunity between Christians is not the intellect; it is the will. Though lack of knowledge is a factor in perpetuating divison, lack of knowledge is not the ultimate source of our divisions. The fundamental cause of the disunity between the devil and God is the devil's will; it is his sin of pride. And likewise pride was the fundamental cause of the division between Adam and God. The antidote to our present disunity is the exact opposite of pride; it is humility. And this involves submitting to Christ by submitting to the shepherd He has placed over His flock (St. John 10:16). It has never ceased to be true that "He who listens to you listens to Me; he who rejects you rejects Me". (St. Luke 10:16) It wasn't some magical effect of having seen Christ that made this true of the Apostles; it was authorization to speak on behalf of Christ, the same authorization later given by the Apostles to their episcopal successors to speak on their behalf. Apart from submission to the authority had by apostolic succession, the only remaining option is the disunity of "millions of people reading their favorite verses to one another". We can either dip in the muddy Jordan seven times with Naaman and be healed, or we can go back to the rivers of Damascus and wash in a manner of our own choosing. The former is the only way to true unity. The latter is the multifarious way of sinful man, the way of perpetual division and ever-widening separation found in "grey town". Milton's Satan says "Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav'n", and this self-exalting disorientation of the will is intrinsically related to Sartre's "hell is other people"; it is precisely this that keeps extending the limits of 'grey town'.

"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God." (1 John 4:7)

By contrast, love turns us back around, toward unity, away from pride, away from self-exaltation, and away from division. Love does not sacrifice truth; it labors to share truth with one's neighbor, and listens to receive truth from one's neighbor, in order to be truly one with one's neighbor. That's why love is catholic, and not provincial or sectarian; love seeks to evangelize the whole world, and it listens humbly to the whole world. Love is the perfection of truth, the adequatio of person to person. And humility is bound up in love, as demonstrated in Christ's humbling of Himself in love. Love therefore is what brings us back from the outskirts of grey town, to our knees in humility before Christ and His Body, so that we may be incorporated into this one Body, with one faith, having the same Spirit, and under one hierarchy. Love draws us to dance together.

The Wedding Dance
Marten Van Cleve (1527-1581)

Giving lip-service to teaching authority

I intend to continue the series on the fathers on the Church. But I was prompted to write this after reading the ongoing discussion over at De Regnis Duobus.

To place one's own interpretation of Scripture above that of all the bishops in plenary council is performatively to deny that Christ established any enduring teaching office or teaching authority in the Church. For such a person, the only remaining 'teaching authority' possible is by definition that of "those who agree with me and my interpretation". And that is no authority at all, but only a self-deceiving pretense at being under authority, as St. Paul describes in 2 Timothy 4:3. Such a person may give lip-service to the notion of 'secondary' authority, but in principle his position is still individualistic, because the authority of the 'secondary authority' always remains subject to the individual's own approval and agreement.

Individualism always leads to fragmentation and disintegration (i.e. loss of unity), for agere sequitur esse, i.e. a thing acts according to what it is, and there is no being where there is no unity. But Christ set up His Church to endure (i.e. remain in being) until He returns, and therefore He did not leave it without an enduring teaching authority. And therefore it follows that the individual and his own interpretation of Scripture are subject to the teaching authority of the bishops in plenary council.

To accept the teaching authority of the Church for the determination of the canon of Scripture, while rejecting the teaching authority of the Church for the interpretation of Scripture, is a deep tension internal to all Protestant ecclesiologies. Either the determination of the canon is subject to each individual, or the determination of the interpretation of Scripture is subject to the teaching authority of the Church. Anything else is ad hoc.

The Protestant reply is to appeal to the perspicuity of Scripture, meaning that the nature of the gospel as recorded in Scripture is self-evident to any competent reader. So there doesn't need to be any "teaching authority", because any competent reader can determine for himself from Scripture what is the nature of the gospel. Any competent reader can therefore go against all the bishops in plenary council (or any other group of persons for that matter) when that reader determines for himself that what they are teaching is contrary to what is self-evident from Scripture concerning the gospel. But which is more self-evident from the available evidence: that the nature of the gospel is self-evident to any competent reader, or that over the course of Church history, many competent readers have deeply disagreed with each other about the nature of the gospel to the point of schism and even violence? The claim that the nature of the gospel is self-evident to any competent reader is a presupposition that is imported (by Protestants) to the interpretive process. It is not derived from Scripture. (Even the attempt to derive the notion of perspicuity from Scripture in a certain sense presupposes it.) It has its origin not in the fathers, but with the invention of the printing press and the surge of confidence in the power of human reason accompanying Renaissance humanism. It assumes that the nature of the gospel as recorded in Scripture is such that no competent reader will come to a determination about it that is contrary to one's own, all other things being equal. It assumes that the effort that was necessary for a Protestant to come to his present determination of the nature of the gospel is all the effort necessary for him to have understood fully and truly what is the nature of the gospel.

If this claim [i.e. that the nature of the gospel is self-evident to any competent reader] is false, then the person claiming to have derived it from Scripture is deeply mistaken, not only by importing a false presupposition to the interpretive process, but also in falsely deriving that false presupposition from Scripture. But the claim is not only a presupposition; it is also an empirical claim that is in principle falsifiable. So, if history has not falsified it, what would history have to look like in order to falsify it? How much more divided over the nature of the gospel would Christians have to be (and have been) before the perspicuity claim would be falsified?

Tu quoque, Catholic convert

I received a good question in the combox of a prior post on sola scriptura, and the matter is important enough, I think, to warrant a post of its own.

As I pointed out in that prior post, one of the problems with sola scriptura is that the individual becomes the de facto interpretive authority, and then defines and locates "the Church" as those who agree with his own interpretation of Scripture. And this obviously leads to a multiplication of sect upon sect, as history shows.

But the objection to this argument is that the person who moves from Protestantism to Catholicism does the very same thing, essentially creates "Church" in his own image by reading the Bible and deciding that the doctrine of the Catholic Church most closely matches what the Bible teaches. So, the objection is a form of the tu quoque (i.e. you too) objection. Below I have pasted my combox response to that objection (with a few changes).


I receive this objection quite frequently. I discussed it briefly in my post titled "The alternative to painting a magisterial target around our interpretive arrow".

The gist of the objection is that in becoming Catholic I'm doing the same thing, i.e. interpreting the Bible and locating those persons who share my interpretation, and then placing myself under their authority.

But there is a very important difference. What is problematic in the Protestant approach is not that the individual uses his own intellect and will in making decisions about the identity and nature of the Church. We can't but use our own intellect and will in making decisions. Individualism is not equivalent to individual agency. So, that's not the issue.

The issue is the criterion by which we decide what is the true Church. The approach in the Protestant case (because in Protestantism "apostolic succession", insofar as the term is used, is thought to refer fundamentally to the doctrine of the Apostles) is to interpret Scripture, while typically assuming sola scriptura, and work out what one thinks was the Apostles' doctrine, and then find a present-day community of persons who shares that doctrine, call them "the Church", and then join "the Church". That very same sort of approach can, though rarely, I think, lead persons to the Catholic Church.

But if a person becomes a Catholic only because he sees that the Catholic Church shares his own interpretation of Scripture, he is not truly a Catholic at heart; he's still a Protestant at heart. One does not rightly become a Catholic on the grounds that one happens to believe (at present) all that the Church teaches; one rightly becomes a Catholic by believing (as an act of faith) all that the Church teaches (even if not fully understanding), on the ground of the sacramental authority of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. When we are received into the Catholic Church, we say before the bishop, "I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God." We aren't saying that we just happen to believe Catholic doctrines, i.e. we are not merely reporting our present mental state vis-à-vis Catholic doctrine. We are making a confession of faith, an act of the will whereby we are submitting to the sacramental authority of the Church regarding what it is that she "believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God" on the ground of her sacramental magisterial authority in succession from the Apostles whom Christ Himself appointed and sent.

That is why those persons who decide to wait until they agree with all Catholic doctrines before becoming Catholic are thinking like a Protestant. They're not understanding the act of faith that one makes in becoming Catholic. They are still in the mindset of 'submitting' to church authority on matters of doctrine only when they agree (or mostly agree), or picking a "church" based on whether it teaches what they already believe. They are not recognizing the sacramental authority of the Catholic Church and the difference that sort of authority makes. They are treating the Catholic Church as if it were another denomination, a Protestant "ecclesial community", without Holy Orders from the Apostles. That approach is a form of rationalism, not fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). "Faith seeking understanding" is possible only where submission is required, but strictly speaking, submission is not required wherever the identity and nature of the Church is determined and defined by one's own interpretation of Scripture.

So what exactly is the relevant difference between the Protestant picking out a Protestant denomination that fits his own interpretation of Scripture, and the Protestant adult who becomes Catholic for the right reason? In the former case, the individual works out a set of doctrines from Scripture, and then seeks out those persons who are presently teaching according to that set of doctrines, and joins their community and submits to them. In the latter case, by contrast, the individual finds in history those whom the Apostles appointed and authorized, observes what they say about the basis of the transmission of Magisterial authority, and then traces that line of successive authorizations down through history to the present day to a living Magisterium, and then submits to what this present-day Magisterium is teaching. In both cases the individual inquirer is using his intellect and will. But in the former case he is using his own determination of *doctrine* from his interpretation of Scripture to define and locate "the Church", but in the latter case he is using the *succession of sacramental authority* from the Apostles to locate the Church and then let the Church tell him what is and is not orthodox doctrine.

Unity, Faith and Submission

Here is a quotation from the Catholic encyclopedia article on "Protestantism":

[BOQ] Again, it is illogical to base faith upon the private interpretation of a book. For faith consists in submitting; private interpretation consists in judging. In faith by hearing, the last word rests with the teacher; in private judgment it rests with the reader, who submits the dead text of Scripture to a kind of post-mortem examination and delivers a verdict without appeal: he believes in himself rather than in any higher authority. But such trust in one's own light is not faith. Private judgment is fatal to the theological virtue of faith. John Henry Newman says "I think I may assume that this virtue, which was exercised by the first Christians, is not known at all amongst Protestants now; or at least if there are instances of it, it is exercised toward those, I mean their teachers and divines, who expressly disclaim that they are objects of it, and exhort their people to judge for themselves" ("Discourses to Mixed Congregations", Faith and Private Judgment). And in proof he advances the instability of Protestant so-called faith: "They are as children tossed to and fro and carried along by every gale of doctrine. If they had faith they would not change. They look upon the simple faith of Catholics as if unworthy the dignity of human nature, as slavish and foolish". Yet upon that simple, unquestioning faith the Church was built up and is held together to this day.

Where absolute reliance on God's word, proclaimed by his accredited ambassadors, is wanting, i.e. where there is not the virtue of faith, there can be no unity of Church. It stands to reason, and Protestant history confirms it. The "unhappy divisions", not only between sect and sect but within the same sect, have become a byword. They are due to the pride of private intellect, and they can only be healed by humble submission to a Divine authority. [EOQ] (my emphases)

Michael Brown on "Sola Scriptura or Scriptura Solo"

I recently read Michael Brown's "Sola Scriptura or Scriptura Solo". What I say below is a reply to his post. (On a related note, my post on Keith Mathison's The Shape of Sola Scriptura can be found here.)

Michael claims that the sola scriptura position is not "me-and-my-own-interpretation-is-authoritative". He claims that sola scriptura advocates read and interpret the Bible "with the church". Sola scriptura advocates, he claims, are not biblicists. Their position, according to Michael, is not solo scriptura.

But when you ask sola scriptura advocates what exactly they are referring to by 'church', they will eventually answer with something semantically equivalent to "whoever reads and interprets the Bible just like I do, or at least pretty close to just like I do". And if you ask them, "Which creeds, confessions and historical theology are authoritative?", their ultimate answer is semantically equivalent to "those creeds and confessions and historical theology that agree with me-and-my-own-interpretation-of-Scripture." Some will answer this latter question by claiming that they follow those creeds and confessions and historical theology that were put forward by "the church". But, again, when you ask them what exactly they are referring to by 'church', you find eventually that their ultimate answer is semantically equivalent to "whoever reads and interprets the Bible just like I do, or at least pretty close to just like I do." Sometimes sola scriptura advocates appeal to Protestant confessions like the Westminster Confession or the Belgic Confession. But if you ask them why they believe those confessions to be authoritative, and not, say, the Council of Trent, you will eventually find an answer semantically equivalent to "because those confessions [or those who wrote them] interpret the Bible just like I do, or at least pretty close to just like I do." This is what I have previously called "painting a magisterial target around one's interpretive arrow", like shooting an arrow into a wall, and then painting a target around one's arrow to make it look as if one shot a bullseye.

Advocates of sola scriptura distinguish their position from that of biblicists by claiming that biblicists practice solo scripture. And I imagine that most self-described advocates of sola scriptura are not biblicists in the I-only-use-Scripture sense. But this distinction [between sola scriptura and biblicism/solo scripture] is not relevant to the fundamental authority problem of solo scriptura. That is because for both sola scriptura and solo scriptura/biblicism, the individual remains the final interpretive [of both Scripture and Tradition] authority.

This is more difficult for advocates of sola scriptura to see about themselves, because by claiming that the Church is the final authority [where 'Church' is defined as "whoever reads and interprets the Bible just like I do, or at least pretty close to just like I do"] they create a semantic and social layer between themselves and their treatment of themselves as their own ultimate interpretive authority.

According to Michael, biblicism, but not sola scriptura, encourages people not to "subject themselves to any theological or ecclesiastical authority that might be contrary to their own interpretation." But if you ask sola scriptura proponents to whom they themselves subject their interpretations, you will soon discover that the answer is "those who interpret Scripture mostly or entirely like I do." So in this respect, there is no principled difference between sola scriptura and biblicism.

Michael likewise criticizes biblicists for attempting to restore primitive Christianity. He claims that early-American biblicists wrongly rejected systems of theology because they suspected them as "likely perversion[s] of genuine biblical truth". But sola scriptura advocates typically use quite the same rationale [i.e. restoring primitive Christianity] to reject Catholic doctrines, and have been doing so since leaving the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. They are no less suspicious than biblicists of uniquely Catholic doctrines, generally treating them as "likely perversions of genuine biblical truth". So here again there is no principled difference between the biblicist and the proponent of sola scriptura.

Michael also claims that in the sola scriptura paradigm, "the church does not give individuals license to think and say whatever they want". But apparently this did not apply to the first Protestants, who thought and said whatever they wanted, thumbing their noses at the Pope and the Catholic bishops under whose ecclesial authority they were. Conveniently, once the early Protestant figures had thumbed their noses at the existing ecclesial authorities, they then refused to allow their *own* followers the "license to think and say" whatever those followers wanted. But one can't have it both ways. If it is a disobedient act of rebellion to think and say whatever we want in defiance of ecclesial authority, then Protestantism is built on a disobedient act. But if rebellion against ecclesial authority is permissible for Protestants in the sixteenth century, then there is no non-arbitrary reason why it must be wrong now. Protestantism is built on this fundamental contradiction: "We rebelled, but you [Protestants] mustn't rebel against us. Our rebellion was justified because the Church was wrong, but you must not rebel against us because we are right."

But the obvious question is "Says who?" The Catholic Church of Luther's time also taught that she was right and that Catholics like Luther should obey the Church's Magisterium. So the contemporary Protestant who insists that Protestants should obey [and not rebel against] their Protestant leaders because Protestants "are right", is saying exactly what the Catholic Church of Luther's time said. So why is rebellion in one case wrong and in the other case right? "Because we [Protestants] are right," comes the reply. But that, obviously, just begs the question. If rebellion is justified when the subordinate thinks the superior is incorrect, then, contra Michael, when Protestants disagree with their pastors, they have the license to think and say whatever they want. They may leave and start their own denomination if they want.

So there is a contradiction between the claim by advocates of sola scriptura that Protestants must submit to the Church, and the actions by the first Protestants on which Protestantism is founded. That contradiction manifests itself more and more over time, because people start to realize that the "don't rebel" position as taught by Protestant 'authorities' is ad hoc. If Luther can do it, why can't I? That is why there is no principled difference with respect to one's relation to ecclesial authority between sola scriptura and solo scriptura -- in both, the individual is his own final authority. The former hides it by including lesser 'authorities' (i.e. creeds, confessions, pastors, historical theology) which are hand-picked by the individual in virtue of their agreement with his own interpretation.

Michael claims that "the Bible was never meant to be interpreted apart from pastoral guidance". He claims that "the Reformers denied the autonomy of the conscience in private, subjectivist interpretation." But Luther didn't agree when it came to his own actions; he spurned the pastoral guidance of his bishop and the bishop of Rome. Here is what Luther said at the Diet of Worms:

Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason -- I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other -- my conscience is captive to the Word of God.

Luther is saying there that he has bound his conscience to his own interpretation of the Scripture. So this is the problem for the defender of sola scriptura. If Luther can do it, and Luther is the father of Protestantism, then Luther's heirs can do it. But if it was not right for Luther to do it, then the Protestant separation from the Catholic Church is built on a fundamental error on Luther's part. The Reformers did deny the autonomy of the conscience of private, subjectivist interpretation for their followers, but they did not deny the autonomy of the conscience of private, subjectivist interpretation for themselves. Yet one can't have it both ways; contraries cannot be held together. That is why even if among Protestants submission to ecclesial authority continued for centuries because of a kind of intertia of Catholic practice and thought, the individual-as-authority kept becoming more and more explicit within Protestantism. It dominates the Protestant scene today in the form of individualism and ecclesial consumerism.

Michael writes:

Tragically, however, things have not changed for the better. As Hatch chillingly points out, "Americans continue to maintain their right to shape their own faith and to submit to leaders they have chosen." The result of eighteenth and nineteenth century biblicism has been a church that increasingly looks less like New Testament Christianity and more like the egalitarian culture in which she lives. Populist hermeneutics and privatized, experiential religion has continuously had wide appeal to the American individualistic ethos. The "chronological arrogance," to borrow C.S. Lewis’ maxim, of disparaging tradition and centuries of theologizing persists with cavalier vigor.

What Michael describes is something that belongs to the essence of Protestantism, even though many Protestants do not recognize that to be so. "I am my own interpretive authority" is part of the essence of Protestantism precisely because Protestantism is founded upon such acts [in defiance of the Church] by the early Protestants themselves. The legitimacy of Protestantism and its separation from the Catholic Church hangs on those acts. If those acts were wrong, then Protestantism (as such) should not exist; Protestants should be in the Catholic Church, and not in schism from her.

Michael continues:

It is in this tempestuous sea of autonomy that creeds and confessions act as an anchor to the ship of Christianity.

But if one picks as one's 'authorities' only those creeds or confessions [or makes new creeds and confessions] that agree with one's own interpretation of Scripture, one is far more likely to be anchoring oneself not to the "ship of Christianity" but to the ship of heresy and schism. Merely adhering to creeds and confessions is not sufficient to anchor one to the ship of Christianity. Heretics can do that by picking and choosing for themselves which creeds and confessions to 'submit' to, and by composing their own confessions and then 'submitting' to them. What heretics have had in common, from the time of the early church, is determining for themselves what is the "true doctrine", and then defining "the Church" as those who teach the "true doctrine". But what anchors us to the ship of Christianity is adhering to the Church that Christ founded, and then submitting to *her* teaching as the true doctrine. The former approach leads to myriads of heresies. The latter approach leads to the one orthodoxy, for there is only one orthodoxy.

The very first Christians did not determine which persons were Christ's Apostles by seeing who taught what they themselves thought must have been Christ's gospel. They determined what Christ's gospel was by finding those whom Christ sent, and then listening to their teaching. And the second generation of Christians did not determine which persons were the bishops by determining who believed and taught what they themselves thought was Christ's gospel, but rather by finding those whom the Apostles had authorized and sent, and then listening to their teaching. And the third generation of Christians did the same. That is the way Christ set up the Church. There was never a time when the bishops said, "Ok, now that the New Testament has been written and the canon settled, we are going to change the way things operate. From now on, the rightful bishops are no longer to be determined by listening to those whom we ordain in sacramental succession from the Apostles, but instead by finding those who agree with your own interpretation of Scripture." In 200 AD we see Tertullian refuting the heretics precisely by pointing out that they do not have the authoritative interpretation of Scripture. But what Tertullian says there also applies to Luther's interpretation of Scripture, and thus to the whole of Protestantism. Luther and Protestantism define "the Church" based not on sacramental succession from the Apostles but rather on agreement with their [i.e. Protestants] own interpretation of Scripture. However, we find such a practice earlier in Church history only among the heretics.

The reconciliation and reunion of Protestants and the Catholic Church depends fundamentally on facing this issue of authority. There cannot be unity so long as people think that the identity of "the Church" is determined as "those who agree with me". There can be unity among Christians only when we recognize that the identity of the Church is determined by those whom Christ authorized, and those whom they authorized, and those whom they authorized, in perpetual succession to the present day. The identity and extent of the Church is determined by them. Unity is achieved not when we all make 'Church' in our own image (i.e. in the image of our own interpretation), but when we all conform to her image.

Freedom and Ecclesial Authority

Today in the United States we celebrate "Independence Day", and our freedom as a nation. But our conception of freedom has shifted, over time, from liberty to something closer to license. The contemporary American conception of freedom is roughly the right to do whatever one wants. The lyrics to The Rolling Stones' song "I'm Free" capture the contemporary concept quite well:

I’m free to do what I want any old time
I’m free to do what I want any old time
So love me, hold me, hold me, love me
I’m free to do what I want any old time

I’m free to sing my song though it gets out of time
I’m free to sing my song though it slips out of time
So love me, hold me, hold me, love me
And I’m free to do what I want any old time

Love me, hold me, hold me, love me
But I’m free to do what I want any old time

I’m free to choose what I please at any old time
I’m free to please who I choose any old time
So hold me, love me, love me, hold me
I’m free to do what I want any old time

So love me, hold me, hold me, love me
I'm free to what I want any old time.

This conception of freedom pervades our religious thought as well. Since we believe that freedom is a great good, and since Christ came to set us free (John 8:36; Galatians 5:1), and since freedom in the contemporary sense of the term seems to be at odds with hierarchy and institutional authority, therefore hierarchy and institutional authority are thought to be restrictive of true Christianity. True Christianity, according to this conception of freedom, eventually does away with institutions and hierarchies. In true Christianity everyone has equal access to God; everyone is a priest. We all have the Spirit, and we all have the truth, and the truth sets us all free (John 8:32). No one except Christ has the authoritative determination of doctrine or the authoritative interpretation of Scripture. In Christ we are free to worship God as we see fit.

But in the Christan tradition, freedom has not been understood as doing whatever one wants. To make my argument as briefly as I can, let me start by going back to Socrates. Socrates makes this same sort of argument to Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. Callicles, like Mick Jagger, thinks that freedom is being able to do whatever you want, where "whatever you want" is entirely disconnected [conceptually] from the ontological structure or nature of the human person. In the course of his dialogue with Callicles, Socrates shows that the person who lacks self-control, and is thereby enslaved to his appetites, is not free. So while "being able to do whatever you want" is a true description of freedom, it is very much incomplete and misleading, apart from a fuller account of what it is exactly to do what one truly wants, given the structure of our nature as human persons.

That is why in the classical and Christian philosophical tradition, it was understood that freedom is perfected as one becomes virtuous, and freedom is lost as one becomes vicious. The perfectly virtuous person is maximally free; he does whatever he wants, because whatever he wants (given his ordered disposition in his virtuous state) is truly good for him and perfecting of him – whatever he wants is what he truly and most deeply wants. The vicious person, by contrast, is in bondage to his disordered appetites, constantly doing what he does not truly want to do, and thereby is not free. The early pagan philosophers recognized this truth, particularly those (such as Socrates) who held that only the wise man is free -- and by "wise man" they meant the man trained to live in accordance with his human nature, that is, in justice and virtue. The early Church fathers recognized that here, the pagan philosophers were exactly right. That is why the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to "the slavery of sin." (cf. Rom 6:17) (CCC 1733)

St. Augustine, for example, argued against the Pelagians that if the possibility of deviating from the good belonged to the essence or perfection of freedom, then God, the angels, and the saints in heaven (who cannot deviate from the good) would either have no freedom or would have less freedom than humans in their present state on earth. St. Anselm argued, on the same grounds, that the ability to sin is not itself a part of freedom, but is actually a weakness, i.e. a privation of the power to avoid sin necessarily; in this way he argued that that power [i.e. the power to avoid sin necessarily] perfects freedom. St. Thomas Aquinas says something similar when commenting on Jesus' statement "Whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin." (John 8:34).

My point is that in the Christian (and Greek) tradition, freedom has been understood to be dependent on its relation to goodness and virtue. In this tradition we have distinguished between liberty and license, not reducing the former to the latter. This is why, in this tradition, just law has not been treated as impinging on freedom, but as helping to perfect human freedom. In the Enlightenment tradition, by contrast, the awareness of the relation of freedom to virtue was largely lost. Hence the Enlightenment thinker J.S. Mill replaces virtue with the emptiness and open-endedness of "the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others".

For a Christian, willingly giving oneself over to God, in love and trust and obedience, is not a loss of freedom, but a perfection of freedom, for such union with God is our highest end and purpose; it is what we most deeply and truly want. To be perfectly united to God is thus to be perfectly free. In the Christian tradition, in heaven we will not be able to turn away from God, to rebel against Him. In that respect, we will be like the angels. Our dispositions toward the good will be so fixed and established that we can no longer ever desire evil. And yet we are there and then perfectly free. In freely loving God and binding ourselves to Him, we gladly and eagerly desire the ability never to turn away from Him, for all eternity. And in acquiring that ability, our freedom is perfected, and we ourselves are perfected.

When we understand what freedom truly is, then we can perceive that freedom and authority go together, because freedom and order go together. So contrast Mick Jagger's notion of freedom with Jesus' relation to the Father. Jesus is perfectly free, and yet Jesus does only what the Father tells Him.

"the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing" (John 5:19)

"I can do nothing on My own initiative" (John 5:30)

"I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me." (John 8:28)

"for I have not even come on My own initiative, but He sent Me." (John 8:42)

"For I did not speak on My own initiative, but the Father Himself who sent Me has given Me a commandment as to what to say and what to speak." (John 12:49)

The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works. (John 14:10)

Similarly, St. Paul tells us that "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." (2 Corinthians 3:17) So the Holy Spirit is likewise perfectly free. And yet the Holy Spirit also does not speak on His own initiative, but speaks only what He hears.

"But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. (John 16:13)

Read St. Therese's Story of a Soul, and you will see a nun who rejoices to find freedom under the authority of her Mother Superior. Why? Because she perceived that the authority was there for her good, and that freedom is perfected as we advance in virtue and goodness. When Christ founded His Church, He did not leave the sheep without shepherds. He appointed Apostles, and they appointed bishops, presbyters (from which we get our word priest), and deacons. The true shepherds are those who do not presume ecclesial authority to themselves, but who are chosen by the Church and sent out by her, just as Jesus and the Holy Spirit do nothing on their own initiative, but only what the Father tells them to say and do. Just as the authority of the Father is not a restriction on the freedom of the Son and the Holy Spirit, so likewise the hierarchy of the Church is not a restriction on the freedom of the sheep; on the contrary, it is precisely that by which we find true freedom. But Christ warned us that there would be those who do not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climb in by some other way. (John 10:1) These are those who make themselves out to be shepherds, but have not obtained ecclesial authority in the manner laid down by the Church from the beginning. They do not have apostolic succession. (See my "The Seduction of Presumed Authority".) From such men we should not be surprised to find bondage instead of true freedom, a message that allows us to remain comfortable in our sinfulness and vices.

If we wish to find true freedom, we must find the true (i.e. validly authorized) shepherds, and "obey" them and "submit" to them, for they keep watch over our souls, as those who will give an account. (Hebrews 13:17) Freedom according to Christ is not freedom according to Mick Jagger, nor is it the conception of freedom in the minds of most contemporary Americans. The way of license is the way of death, and many there be who go there. The way of virtue and obedience is the way of life, and few there be who find it.

The Stone Caster

"Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery"

Rembrandt, 1644

In my opinion, the Donatistic conception of ecclesial authority is one of the primary factors hindering ecclesial unity. According to this conception, ecclesial authority is contingent upon one's own determination of the moral or theological qualifications of the individual holding some ecclesial office; and if one determines that the particular ecclesial authority does not meet those qualifications, one may justifiably 'rebel'. (I discuss Donatism, along with Montanism and Novatianism in "The Gnostic Roots of Heresy".) This Donatistic conception fails to recognize the sacramental nature of ordination, instead treating ecclesial authority as if this authority is derived democratically, from the bottom-up.

Last month I mentioned in passing the way David treated Saul, and what Jesus says about the "seat of Moses". Recently I read Jonathan Deane's post titled "The Stone Caster". He brings out very well the implications of Christ's words about the Pharisees in the "seat of Moses" for a Donatistic conception of ecclesial authority. Here's the link.

"That they may be one"

"Adoration of the Trinity"
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)

Today's Gospel reading includes some of the verses that serve as the Scriptural reason for this blog:

Lifting up his eyes to heaven, Jesus prayed saying:
"I pray not only for these,
but also for those who will believe in me through their word,
so that they may all be one,
as you, Father, are in me and I in you,
that they also may be in us,
that the world may believe that you sent me.
And I have given them the glory you gave me,
so that they may be one, as we are one,
I in them and you in me,
that they may be brought to perfection as one,
that the world may know that you sent me,
and that you loved them even as you loved me.
Father, they are your gift to me.
I wish that where I am they also may be with me,
that they may see my glory that you gave me,
because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
Righteous Father, the world also does not know you,
but I know you, and they know that you sent me.
I made known to them your name and I will make it known,
that the love with which you loved me
may be in them and I in them." (John 17: 20-26)

Last year I had a conversation with a Protestant concerning the interpretation of one word in this passage. But to explain this conversation, I'll need to give some background.

The early Church knew that Christ is divine, that Christ is not God the Father, that the Holy Spirit is divine, that the Holy Spirit is neither God the Father nor Christ, and that there are not many Gods but only one God. But the early Church did not initially have the philosophical tools to explain how these various truths are compatible. Faced with the challenges from skeptics and philosophers, and especially from Greek philosophy, the Church fathers acquired philosophical tools to explain that Christ and the Father [and the Holy Spirit] are homoousious [the same in substance or being], not the same in hypostasis [Person]. We see this language already in the first Ecumenical Council of Nicea in 325, from which (with some additions from the Second Ecumenical Council) we get the Nicene Creed. In this way, the Church took these philosophical tools and used them in the making of Catholic dogma, through the Ecumenical Councils. The notions of substance and person in explication of the Christian teaching about the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit have since been part of the infallible dogma of the Church.

Now, fast forward fifteen hundred years. Bound up with the [Protestant] notion of sola scriptura is a denial of the infallibility of any Church council or papal decree. Sola scriptura thus entails that any line of any creed or conciliar or papal decree could be false. Hence the Protestant conception of sola scriptura calls into question the Church's dogmatic conclusions resulting from her appropriation of philosophical concepts to explain the coherence of her theological claims about the relation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The result is that beliefs such as Sabellianism or even tritheism are 'heresies' only if the individual Protestant interlocutor concludes that these beliefs are contrary to his interpretation of Scripture.

The term 'heresy', which in Catholic theology is defined in relation to the authoritative determinations of the Church, in a sola scriptura context can only ultimately be defined in relation to the individual's interpretation of Scripture; see here. To see that, one need only ask the Protestant who denies being a biblicist the grounds on which he determines which councils and creeds are authoritative. It soon becomes clear that he determines whether or not they or any part of them are 'authoritative' by seeing whether or not they agree with his own interpretation of Scripture. He is therefore actually a biblicist, though he typically acts and treats himself as though he is not [see here, for example]. The self-described biblicist/fundamentalist is thus more self-aware than the Protestant who denies being a biblicist.

The particular conversation I mentioned above concerned the meaning of the word 'one' in the verses of today's Gospel reading, wherein Christ says that He and the Father are one. My interlocutor, coming from a sola scriptura point of view, did not recognize the authority of the Creed and thus the truth of homoouious. He was suspicious of any philosophy used in theology, and especially suspicious of Greek philosophy. His position regarding the Trinity was a form of "social trinitarianism" in which the three Persons are one not in substance or being, but in love. (This is a form of tritheism, although my interlocutor would not have described his position with that term.)

When Jesus prays (in John 17) that all who believe in Him would be one just as He and the Father are one, a tritheist interprets these verses very differently than the Catholic Church understands them. A tritheist interprets these verses to mean that Jesus simply wants us all to love each other; our unity is to be an interpersonal unity. The tritheist does not interpret these verses to mean that Christ wants us all to be in any sense ontologically one (i.e. one in being), because of course Christ would not ask that we be more unified with each other than He is with the Father. The Catholic Church believes, of course, that Christ wants all believers to love one another. But because the Catholic Church understands the unity of the divine Persons of the Trinity as not only interpersonal but also ontological (e.g. homoouious), the Church understands that Christ is praying in John 17 that all believers also be incorporated into one Body, the Church, whose Head is Christ. So the difficulty here in talking with a biblicist about the ecclesial implications of this passage in John 17 is that the Church's appeal to these verses as a support for Christ's desire for institutional unity among all believers depends upon a Catholic understanding of the Trinity, which itself is grounded in a Catholic understanding of the authority of Ecumenical Councils. This seems to put the defender of Catholicism in a position of circularity viz-a-viz the biblicist.

How then do we (Catholics) reason with the biblicist with the aim of coming to theological agreement and ecumenical unity? It seems to me that we cannot do so within the framework of his biblicism. (See Tertullian's statement regarding ecclesial authority and interpretation.) We have to turn our attention to his biblicism itself, such that he comes to see that his denial of Church authority is the error underlying his disagreement concerning what sort of unity Christ is praying for in John 17. But the movement from biblicism to an acceptance of Church authority is not simply a matter of following the movement from the premises to the conclusion of a deductive argument; it is rather a kind of paradigm shift. (See my post titled "Two Paradigms".) So the conversation with a biblicist about such a matter requires the patience and humility of learning to look at all the available evidence (including the evidence from the early Church and the fathers) from within these two different paradigms, and thus helping our biblicist interlocutors come to see this evidence from within the Catholic paradigm.

Underlying biblicism is a form of doubt, a distrust. It is in fact a distrust of Christ, though it is typically expressed and consciously experienced and understood as only a form of distrust in men and the Church as institution. (Even though it is a distrust of Christ, it is not culpable insofar as it is the result of invincible ignorance.) This distrust/doubt is itself made possible by a kind of gnosticism that separates matter from form, Body from Spirit, and the Church from Christ her invisible Head. (See my post titled "Sex, Dualism and Ecclesial Unity"; see also my paper on the gnostic roots of heresy.) This gnostic separation of matter from form allows its holder to presume to trust the spiritual while rejecting the material. It thus allows the biblicist to claim to trust the invisible Christ while rejecting His visible Body, to claim to be a member of the "invisible Church" while eschewing the visible institution Christ founded. It claims to want the spiritual Jesus, not the incarnate Jesus, to want the living Spirit, not a "dead institution". (Sound familiar?) The reality and permanence of Christ's incarnation means that Christ and His Body can never be separated, that to trust in Christ is to trust in His Body the Church, to love Christ is to love His Body. (See here and here.) The gnostic division of matter and form (embracing form while rejecting matter) is what sets up the ecclesial deism that underlies both Mormonism and Protestantism, as I have argued here.

In my next post, I'm going to write about love and ecclesial unity. But here I have tried to show that in order to talk with the biblicist about the ecumenical implications of John 17, we have to step back and help our interlocutor come to see outside the biblicist paradigm, helping him to see all the evidence from the Catholic paradigm. When one looks at all the evidence from both paradigms, the experience of moving from the biblicist to the Catholic paradigm is like the experience of peering into a dim room when someone turns on the light. The Catholic paradigm includes and incorporates all that is true in the biblicist paradigm, but explains so much more, including why the biblicist paradigm is so incomplete. But the same is not true when moving from the Catholic paradigm to the biblicist paradigm. So the ecumenical dialogue should be something like a kitchen table conversation in which we are seeking to help each other see the evidence from our respective paradigms. The standard mistake in ecumenical dialogue is to start debating a text or doctrine without taking into account our paradigm [meta-level] differences. We end up simply talking past each other, and misunderstanding each other and sometimes getting frustrated, because we are not focused on the fundamental *perspectival* and *methodological* differences that stand under and behind our more proximate and apparent differences in Scripture interpretation and doctrine.

In accord with the intention of Christ's sacred heart exposed in this high priestly prayer, may the Holy Spirit work through us to make us all one, as Christ and the Father are one, by incorporating us all fully into Christ's Body, the Church.

Is the Church a Democracy?

In my conversations with Protestants it is not uncommon for me to hear or read a statement like this, "I'd come back to the Catholic Church if the Pope did x, y, and z", where x, y, and z are actions that in some respect would 'Protestantize' the Catholic Church, either in doctrine, in sacraments and liturgy, or in Church government. (For a similar way of thinking, see, for example, the Touchstone article titled "Plausible Ecumenicism", and my reply to Craig Higgin's comments therein.) Last week I was in a conversation in which a Protestant said, "True ecumenicism means everybody has to compromise."

Statements such as that reveal a Protestant conception of the Catholic Church, a viewing of the Catholic Church while wearing Protestant 'glasses'. Of course I do not expect Protestants to wear Catholic 'glasses' while looking at the Catholic Church, but successful ecumenical dialogue does require that all participants, insofar as possible be aware of the 'glasses' they are wearing. Protestants are in some way aware of this shared Protestant paradigm. When I went from Pentecostal to Presbyterian, nobody said anything to me. When I went from Presbyterian to Anglican, again, nobody said anything to me. But when I made known that I was becoming Catholic, suddenly, I was getting many letters and phone calls urging me to reconsider, even on the very morning that I was to be received into the Catholic Church. Why?

These well meaning persons (who genuinely love me, and whom I genuinely love) recognized that I was leaving "the Protestant paradigm". I have discussed this before, in my post titled "Two Paradigms", but I want to expand on it here. Just as a fish cannot know that it is wet until it experiences dryness, so it is very difficult to know a paradigm that one has always been in, until one steps out of it (in some respect). When I stepped out of the Protestant paradigm, I came to see it more clearly. It had been with me all along, through my Pentecostalism, through my Presbyterianism, and through my Anglicanism.

What had been with me all along, through this process, was a certain way of thinking about the Church and myself in relation to ecclesial authority. In this paradigm, I would pick the denomination that seemed to me most true to Scripture and most conducive to meeting my spiritual needs. That right there almost defines the paradigm. (See my post titled "Ecclesial Consumerism vs. Ecclesial Unity".) According to this paradigm, if or when that particular community or denomination no longer seemed most true to Scripture or no longer met my spiritual needs, then I could and should go elsewhere.

Once, for example, when I was discussing my list of 'exceptions' to the Westminster Confession of Faith, a fellow seminary student said to me, "Well, if you're going to take that many exceptions, why do you even want to be one of us?" The obvious background assumption was that one joins this denomination because one agrees with it for the most part. Notice what he didn't say: "You should agree with and submit to our denomination because of the authority of our denomination." The recent FV controversy in the Presbyterian Church in America shows the very same way of thinking, as FV advocates are sometimes urged to leave and find a denomination that is more friendly to their FV way of thinking. J.I. Packer's recent decision to leave the Anglican Church of Canada, and align himself with a South American Anglican bishop shows a similar way of thinking. You place yourself under those who teach your way of interpreting Scripture (cf. 2 Timothy 4:3). Those Protestants who reply to the Catholic, "But you do the same thing" show that they are still perspectivally restricted to the Protestant paradigm. (See "The Alternative to painting a magisterial target around our interpretive arrow".)

Loaded into this paradigm is a conception of the Church as defined by form, not matter, as I shall explain. According to this paradigm the Church is an invisible body with many 'branches' more or less true to Scripture but whose essence is some kind of "mere Christianity". Conceiving of the essence of the Church as some kind of "mere Christianity" is the way in which this paradigm defines the Church by "form". According to this paradigm, no 'branch' is "the Church" or is "the institution that Christ founded". According to this paradigm, no existing ecclesial institution was founded by Christ. Hence in this paradigm, no 'branch' of the Church has ultimate ecclesial authority. Each 'branch' has an equal say at the ecumenical dialogue table, though in practice the greater number of members had by a denomination gives it more say. (This is, roughly, the ecumenical paradigm one finds in the World Council of Churches.) In this paradigm, the Christian's ecclesial task is to find the branch that best suits him at that time in his life. Hence the phenomenon of "church shopping". If you are disciplined or 'excommmunicated' in one branch, you just move to another branch, or start your own branch.

The Catholic conception of the Church, on the other hand, is that the Church is a visible body founded by Christ upon the Apostles. Essential to the Church is the authority of Christ passed down through sacramental succession from the Apostles by the laying on of hands. This sacramental understanding of Apostolic succession is what makes the Catholic conception of the Church not merely formal, because the laying on of hands intrinsically involves matter. Form (i.e. doctrine) and matter (i.e. sacramental succession from the Apostles) are retained as integrated and mutually essential to the Church. This precisely is why the Catholic Church recognizes Orthodox Churches as actual [particular] Churches, but regards Protestant bodies as "ecclesial communities", for they lack Apostolic succession. See Responsa ad quaestiones, which was released last July. And see here for the response by the World Council of Churches. Hopefully it is clear, given the differences between the two paradigms I am describing, why the Catholic Church is not a member of the World Council of Churches.

In the Catholic paradigm, if a person is excommunicated, there is simply nowhere else to go (cf. John 6:68); that person has been excommunicated from "the Church". In the Catholic paradigm, if the Church establishes a dogma, and a person rejects it, that person is ipso facto a heretic. (See Aquinas' statement on that here.) The person who accepts it by faith on the authority of the Church, even while not understanding it or its basis, exemplifies that supernatural virtue of faith described by the phrase fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). Faith involves believing on the basis of the authority of the successors of the Apostles, for that is the way in which the hearers of the Apostles believed the Gospel, i.e. on the authority of the Apostles. ("For my part, I should not believe the Gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church." - St. Augustine) The individualism and egalitarianism of the Protestant ecclesial paradigm limit faith to belief in the divine inspiration and authority of the Scriptures, excluding faith from the interpretive act per se.



As you can see from the diagram above, there are twenty-two Churches within the Catholic Church. There are even four Rites with the Latin Church. So in this sense, from the Catholic point of view, there is diversity, and there are branches, *within* the Catholic Church. But these are all still within one institution, in full communion with the bishop of Rome.

As I have argued here, conceiving of the Church as defined by form, not matter, has individualism and anti-hierarchical egalitarianism as a necessary implication. And the only form of government that conforms to individualism and egalitarianism is democracy. Statements like "I'd come back to the Catholic Church if the Pope did x, y, and z" are intrinsically anti-Catholic, because they carry with them democratic and egalitarian theological assumptions rooted in the paradigm that conceives of the Church as identified essentially by *form*. And the same is true of statements like "True ecumenicism means everybody has to compromise." The democratic conception of the Church is one of individual autonomy. Since governing authority is derived from the governed, it can therefore be taken away by (and/or is ultimately subject to the wishes of) the governed. But imagine if the Pope had to conform to the particular wishes and positions of all Christians, and achieve unity by common ground or common consensus. Not only would there would be no doctrine left (see here) , there would be no unity left. And without unity, there would be no being, i.e. the Church would no longer exist. (See here.) Ecumenicism grounded in this democratic paradigm is, as I wrote here:

"the kind of ecumenicism that seeks unity by finding the lowest common denominator between all the divided parties. Such an ecumenicism is doomed to failure, like the fragile unity with which the feet and toes made of iron and clay were unified (Daniel 2). The peace it pursues is the world's peace."

The Catholic conception of the Church is not democratic, and never has been. If we look at the way David treated Saul, we see a very different way of thinking, one that does not make the authority of the ruler depend on the opinion of the ruled concerning the character or beliefs of the ruler. Jesus shows us the same way of thinking in Matthew 23:2-3 when He tells the people that because the Pharisees sit in the "chair of Moses", "therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them." According to Jesus, their hypocrisy did not nullify their authority. (This is what made Montanism, Novatianism, and Donatism schisms from the Catholic Church – see page four and following, here.) That is because in the Catholic paradigm, the ecclesial authority of Church leaders does not have its origin in the choice of those leaders by the laymen. In the Catholic conception, as I pointed out recently , authority is not bottom-up, but rather from the top-down. That is not to say that laypersons had no role or responsibility in contributing to the decisions and actions of the Church. But the locus of hierarchical authority has always been believed to come from the top-down, from Christ, to the Apostles, through the Apostles to the bishops whom they appointed, and then to the bishops they appointed, and so on. The locus of authority was never conceived of as coming from the bottom-up, that is, from the laypersons to the clergy.

The irony in statements like "I'd come back to the Catholic Church if the Pope did x, y, and z" is that persons who think this way would still be Protestant in their conception of Church authority, even if the Pope happened to do x, y, and z, because such persons think that the Church should conform to themselves. We do not become Catholic to make the Church conform to what we think it should be; we become Catholic so that Christ through the Church may make us into what He wants us to be. To submit to Christ is to submit to His Church. Similarly, the notion that "True ecumenicism means everybody has to compromise" carries with it the implicit assumption that no present institution is the one Christ founded and to which all Christians should conform. Implicit in the very statement is the assumption that the speaker has the authoritative determination of what is "true ecumenicism". The authority issue simply cannot be avoided; one either finds authority and submits to it, or one arrogates it to oneself. I frequently see a bumper sticker that reads, "If you want peace, work for justice". In the context of the Church I think an appropriate one would be: "If you want ecumenical unity, seek out authentic sacramental authority."

As we prepare for Pentecost, may the Holy Spirit work in us to make us truly one.

In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.