Both these objections misunderstand what Catholics mean by Tradition. In the broadest possible sense, Tradition is simply everything that the Church has and does to transmit the faith from generation to generation. This includes her liturgy, sacraments, canons, devotions, teaching, and preaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains Tradition this way:  ”Through Tradition, the Church, in her doctrine, life and worship, perpetuates and transmits to every generation all that she herself is, all that she believes.” (CCC 78)

From this definition, it should be clear that Tradition and Magisterium are not redundant. Tradition is the ordinary vehicle for transmitting the faith. The Magisterium is its authoritative interpreter. We could not eliminate Tradition and rely only upon the Magisterium for many reasons.

First, the content of Tradition is broader than the dogmatic pronouncements of the Magisterium. Tradition conveys a great deal of positive content that may never have been treated by way of dogmatic pronouncement. A good case in point would be the doctrine of male-only priesthood. For millennia, Tradition effectively transmitted this doctrine through Scripture, liturgy, sacramental practice, canon law, the patrimony of the fathers, and so forth.  Only in recent years have the Popes found it necessary to teach specifically on this topic. It is absurd to say that we only knew this doctrine when the Popes finally decided to pronounce upon it. Therefore, Tradition and the Magisterium are not redundant.

Second, Tradition offers an important witness to the integrity and antiquity of the faith that may not be conveyed by magisterial pronouncements alone. To illustrate, the weight of Tradition was a strong motive for me to accept the Church’s dogmatic teaching on the communion of saints. I saw that devotion to Mary and the saints was both very ancient and very widely attested. This prompted me to investigate the reasons that Catholics have given for the practice. Thus, Tradition served a function in my life that could not have been served by the dogmatic statements of the Magisterium.

Third, Tradition conveys the faith in a manner that the Magisterium alone could never replace. Christian faith is not reducible to creedal formula. The experience of the faith is far richer than simply a list of teachings, but includes the life of liturgy, catechesis, preaching, charity, and prayer. Even if the Magisterium pronounced on every conceivable theological topic, we would still need Tradition as the normal mode of conveying the faith.

Protestant Christians, I think, implicitly understand this distinction between message and medium. No Presbyterian would be content simply to email the Westminster Confession to all professed Christians and then consider that he had “done Church.” He would not reduce his faith to the pronouncements of teaching authorities, or even to the contents of Scripture. Why else did the Reformers think so deeply about the reform of the liturgy? They understood that the medium is, itself, part of the message.

What about the charge that Tradition is too vague to be workable?  I have sometimes heard Protestants say that Tradition is of no use unless the Church can produce an exhaustive list of Traditions in the same way that she has produced an exhaustive list of inspired books. I think what motivates this objection is the belief that Scripture and Tradition must form a sort of neutral data set, from which we exegete the content of the faith. Unless I know that I have the whole set, I cannot possible draw reliable conclusions about the content of the faith.

Ironically, I think this objection works better against the Protestant doctrine of Scripture than it does against the Catholic doctrine of Tradition. On the view of someone like R.C. Sproul, we can only make a definitive account of the faith in terms of the inspired books. However, we don’t know with certainty which canonical books are inspired. (According to Sproul, we must be content with “a fallible list of infallible books.”)

Catholics, however, don’t view Scripture or Tradition this way. They do not form a neutral data set from which we independently exegete the content of the faith. Rather, they transmit the content of revelation within a community endowed with authoritative interpreters. Only within such a community could you ever know with certainty that you possessed a definitive account of the faith.

Furthermore, it is just not true to say that we don’t know the contents of Tradition. If you would know the Church’s Traditions, look to her liturgies, devotions, canons, the writings of the fathers, architecture, art, music, catechesis, and doctrinal pronouncements. Heinrich Denzinger composed a nearly exhaustive list of the latter that is widely available.¹

The substantive dispute between Protestants and Catholics is not over the usefulness of Tradition, therefore, but over its authority. Does Tradition transmit the deposit of faith in a way that authoritatively conditions my interpretation of Holy Scripture and of the faith? Or, does my interpretation of Scripture stand in judgment of Tradition? We can only answer this with reference to two other questions: “What provision did Christ make for the transmission of the Christian faith? And with what authority did he invest it?”

Christ gave very specific instructions concerning the transmission of the Christian faith. First, He instituted the Church’s liturgy, and ordered that it be handed on in perpetuity. (Luke 22: 19-20; John 20: 21-23). Second, He committed His body of oral teaching, including instructions about baptism, to the disciples (the eleven), and commanded that they teach it to all nations. With this command He included a promise of divine assistance. (Matthew 28:18-20) Third, He assigned the Church the responsibility of rendering binding decisions, and promised that heaven would confirm those decisions. (Matt 16:18; 18:18)

When it comes to the apostles, we find that they transmitted each of these elements to posterity. Paul includes the elements of the liturgy as part of the deposit of faith. (1 Corinthians 11:23-24.). The elders at Jerusalem considered their disciplinary decisions to reflect the central doctrines of the faith, and to be guaranteed by the Holy Spirit. (Acts 15) And, the apostle entrusts the charge of handing on the faith to successors. Again, this charge is accompanied by the promise of divine assistance. (2 Timothy 1:6; 2 Timothy 2:2).

There is only one part of Tradition that the apostles do not mention. They completely ignore the formation of the New Testament canon. The closest they come is the reference to “Paul’s Letters” in 2 Peter 3:16, but this hardly constitutes a doctrine of the Canon. As far as we know, neither Jesus nor the apostles had any concept of a New Testament Canon serving as the primary vehicle for the transmission of the Christian faith. Anyone who says otherwise depends neither on Scripture, nor ancient Tradition, but upon modern innovation.

How, then, can Scripture and Tradition relate usefully? Justin Martyr (d.165)  gives one of the best answers in chapter 67 of his First Apology. Normally, they relate liturgically:

 And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought . . .

In this scenario, neither element is useless. The Scriptures inspire us as God’s very words. The Sacrament brings us Christ, in his very flesh. Tradition, by the authority of Christ himself, conveys the deposit of faith (and Christ himself) in multiple ways.

What about the question of a norma normans? If Tradition conditions our reading of Scripture, then can Scripture be a norm for Tradition?  Scripture norms Tradition in the sense that Scripture provides the primary subject matter for theology, dogmatic discourse, and the Church’s kerygma. Crucially, Scripture contains the very words of Christ. There can be no question of teaching or preaching contrary to Scripture.

But, ironically, the one who places his interpretation of Scripture over Tradition destroys the authority of both. It is only through Tradition that Scripture can even be a final authority. This is because there is always an interpretive gap between the words of Scripture and the understanding of the reader/hearer. How do I know that my interpretation of Scripture is what God really meant? I can only know if I rely on the interpretive method established by Christ, if I rely on an interpretive method that possesses divine authority.

Let me illustrate. Consider the exception clause in Matthew 19: 9. Christ permits divorce in the case of πορνείᾳ. What exactly does Christ mean by “πορνείᾳ?”  And, how am I to understand “divorce” in this passage relative to the parallel passages in the synoptics, and in the teachings of St. Paul? Scripture cannot possibly rule my behavior, it cannot be an authority, if I do not know what it means. How, then, do I proceed. Do I rely on my own lexical, exegetical skill to interpret this difficult passage? Do I rely on experts? Or do I defer to Tradition?

The Fathers of the Church gave a clear interpretation of the teaching on divorce and that interpretation has been confirmed by the canonical Tradition of the Church for millennia. If I rely upon Tradition as a divine authority established by Christ, then I can clearly, and unambiguously obey the unique authority of Scripture. If I reject Tradition, however, can I be certain that my interpretation possesses divine authority? It is only Tradition that allows Scripture to be a final authority.

In conclusion, Sacred Tradition is very useful.  Christ established it for the authoritative transmission of the faith and the sanctification of the Church. He also made us a promise of His divine assistance, to accompany the transmission of the faith and to guarantee its integrity. Tradition is an important witness to the antiquity, unity, and Catholicity of the faith.  It conveys content that Scripture and the extraordinary Magisterium may not have addressed. Finally, reliance on Tradition does not diminish the unique authority of Scripture. Scripture alone contains the inspired words of God. Therefore, we reverence Scripture and accord it a unique place in our faith and worship. But Tradition is what allows Scripture to guide me, to rest assured that I have understood it aright.

1. There is also an updated Latin-English version.

The treatise of St Fulgentius of Ruspe on the forgiveness of sins

Whoever conquers will not be harmed by the second death

St. Fulgentius of Ruspe

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye as the final trumpet sounds, for the trumpet shall indeed sound, the dead shall rise incorruptible and we shall be changed. In saying “we,” Paul is indicating that the gift of that future change will also be given to those who during their time on earth are united to him and his companions by upright lives within the communion of the Church. He hints at the nature of the change when he says: This corruptible body must put on incorruptibility, this mortal body immortality. In order, then, that men may obtain the transformation which is the reward of the just, they must first undergo here on earth a change which is God’s free gift. Those who in this life have been changed from evil to good are promised that future change as a reward.

Through justification and the spiritual resurrection, grace now effects in them an initial change that is God’s gift. Later on, through the bodily resurrection, the transformation of the just will be brought to completion, and they will experience a perfect, abiding, unchangeable glorification. The purpose of this change wrought in them by the gifts of both justification and glorification is that they may abide in an eternal, changeless state of joy.

Here on earth they are changed by the first resurrection, in which they are enlightened and converted, thus passing from death to life, sinfulness to holiness, unbelief to faith, and evil actions to holy life. For this reason the second death has no power over them. It is of such men that the Book of Revelation says: Happy the man who shares in the first resurrection; over such as he the second death has no power. Elsewhere the same book says: He who overcomes shall not be harmed by the second death. As the first resurrection consists of the conversion of the heart, the second death consists of unending torment.

Let everyone, therefore, who does not wish to be condemned to the endless punishment of the second death now hasten to share in the first resurrection. For if any during this life are changed out of fear of God and pass from an evil life to a good one, they pass from death to life and later they shall be transformed from a shameful state to a glorious one.

Plato and Aristotle
From Raphael’s
The School of Athens, 1511

At stake in the debate are two conceptions of rights:

1)      Rights as arising spontaneously from the nature of the human person, discoverable by reason, and which should be recognized by the state

2)      Rights as essentially privileges ceded by an omnicompetent legislative authority.

The first conception derives from the classical, Thomist/Aristotelian doctrine of natural law. Law is something pertaining to reason. (S.T. 1.2.90.1) Human laws are just or unjust insofar as they derive from reason and natural law. (S.T. 1.2.96.4)

The second conception of rights is what we find in modernist philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, who conceived of government not so much as protecting natural rights (like the right to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), but as an omnipotent authority to which we cede the right to adjudicate disputes and to legislate in order to protect ourselves against the unbridled and rapacious aggression of our neighbor.

Ironically, the second conception of rights is one also held (unconsciously) by many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. The fundamentalist shares the premise that law is simply something dictated by an omnicompetent legislative authority. (In this case – God, through the Holy Scriptures.) Consider the statement on gay “marriage” at the website of the National Association of Evangelicals:

Let’s go to the most basic question of all — who defines marriage? As Christians, we turn to the Bible as our authority. Quoting God in Genesis 2:24 Jesus said, “Haven’t you read, that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate” (Matthew 19:4-6).
Changing the definition of marriage does not change what God has said marriage is to be. Just because someone faces west and calls the sun on the horizon a “sunrise” does not change what it is. A sunset is a sunset no matter what it is called.

There is an irony in this statement. The writer likens the definition of marriage to the definition of sunset. He correctly notes that the nature of a sunset does not derive from our statements about it. When it comes to marriage, however, he fails to draw the same conclusion. In this case, the nature of marriage proceeds not from the nature of the male/female relationship or the normal mode of procreation, but rather from divine fiat.

Based on this reasoning, the argument for traditional marriage is only as good as the argument for divine revelation. Unfortunately, traditional Protestantism offers no argument for divine revelation. In fact, it denies such an argument is possible in principle. Consider John Calvin:

 Let it therefore be held as fixed, that those who are inwardly taught by the Holy Spirit acquiesce implicitly in Scripture; that Scripture carrying its own evidence along with it, deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments, but owes the full conviction with which we ought to receive it to the testimony of the Spirit. Enlightened by him, we no longer believe, either on our own judgment or that of others, that the Scriptures are from God; but, in a way superior to human judgment, feel perfectly assured – as much so as if we beheld the divine image visibly impressed on it -that it came to us, by the instrumentality of men, from the very mouth of God. We ask not for proofs or probabilities on which to rest our judgment, but we subject our intellect and judgment to it as too transcendent for us to estimate. (Inst. I.7.5)

Not all Protestant Christians share this doctrine, to be sure. But there is a strong tradition of “Divine Command Ethics” within Protestantism. This derives, in large measure, from Luther and his rather harsh assessment of human reason. In some of his more unguarded moments, Luther could even argue that irrationality was a mark of true religion:

But as He is the one and true God, and moreover incomprehensible and inaccessible by human reason, it is right, nay, it is necessary, that His righteousness should be incomprehensible. –Luther, On the Bondage of the Will

Protestant arguments for traditional marriage thus can play right into the hands of their opponents. The advocate of gay marriage can respond, “By your own admission, you have no principled argument. You appeal, instead, to a non-verifiable, interior religious experience to justify your belief in a divinely inspired law book. This is no basis for public policy in a pluralistic, secular culture.”

Classical Pagan and classical Christian philosophy, by contrast, have never shared this positivist conception of law. As long ago as Plato’s Euthyphro, philosophers have recognized the threat to freedom, dignity, and reason inherent in the idea that “a thing is good because God (or the government) says so.”

The greatest danger in the “Gay marriage” debate is that of unwittingly abandoning the classical conception of rights in favor of the modernist conception of rights. The long-term results of such a move are potentially disastrous.

A Comparison: The Civil Rights Movement and Natural Law

Advocates of gay marriage argue that we should “level the playing field” between homosexual and heterosexual couples in the field of family law. This ‘leveling of the playing field’ is presented as a matter of civil rights, comparable to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, or even to the emancipation of the slaves. But, in fact, the cases are very different.

What was at stake in the Civil Rights movement and in Emancipation? In both cases, proponents advanced arguments for freedom on the basis of the integrity of the human person. In the classical conception, freedom, as a natural right, is something that proceeds immediately from man’s rational nature. Indeed, freedom just is the ability to form rational judgments and to act on them.

In classical philosophy, justice is commensurate with the nature of a thing. This why Catholic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas could argue centuries before modern slavery that slavery was not a natural condition, and why the Popes began to condemn the modern slave trade from its inception. Slavery is not commensurate with the nature of the human person as rational (i.e., free). This is also why Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could argue for civil rights on the basis of the integrity of human nature.

The civil rights movement in America (like the Declaration of Independence) was grounded thoroughly in the classical conception of natural rights. MLKs “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” argues explicitly from the concept of natural law. Appealing to classical philosophy, King argues “An unjust law is no law at all.”

The “Gay Marriage” Debate:

Freedom, as such, is not at stake in the Gay marriage debate. No one is arguing about the rights of people to form judgments or to pursue “life, liberty and happiness” as they see fit. Rather we are asking about whether the state should privilege and especially protect those domestic relations that arise spontaneously from the nature of human sexuality (between parents and children particularly), or whether the state should seek to create those relations through legislation, without regard to the natural process of human generation?

What is not at stake? No rational opponent of gay marriage is arguing for Homo-pogroms, or even for enforcement of strict anti-sodomy laws. Nor is this particularly a debate about inheritance or hospital visitation rights. The substantive issue is the legal definition of family and of parent/child relationships. It involves the nature of the right that parents have to beget and raise offspring.

Gay marriage proponents suggest a radical and dangerous conception of freedom and right. In their view, freedom requires that the state define human relations in whatever way suits a constituency. It is not a matter of discovering, through reason, those relations that arise from human nature and of protecting their inherent integrity and dignity.  Thus, I have a right to someone else’s children (which is what is at stake in a debate about adoption) because I want them and the state cedes them to me.

If the state can redefine marriage and family to create “a right” (namely, the right to adopt another man’s children), then the “right” to marriage and children is not something that proceeds from the natural process of human generation and sexuality, but one that proceeds from the state.

There is also a whole different discussion that we can have about the sociological data on homosexual relations and child rearing, which is not irrelevant to the discussion. But I think the philosophical implications are primary. Catholic opponents of gay marriage initiatives believe that the gay marriage movement will ultimately threaten the protection of all natural rights by radically reconfiguring our legal philosophy in an even more positivist direction.

Conclusion:

Protestants and Catholics agree on the dangers inherent in the Gay Marriage debate. Both recognize the enormous threat to religious liberty, and to the integrity of the family. Protestants, however, do not recognize the dangers inherent in their own public policy statements. The secular retort to defenders of traditional marriage is that our position is grounded in prejudice, convention, and appeals to ancient holy books. Unfortunately, this charge is entirely true as applied to strict Sola Scriptura Protestants. Furthermore, traditional Protestant apologetics has no reasoned response to this charge apart from evangelism.

Catholic philosophy does not fall prey to this charge. Catholics clearly believe in divine revelation, but they do not restrict moral reasoning to the data of revelation. Instead, they hold that reason and revelation both affirm the normative status of traditional marriage.  To all who care about this debate, therefore, I appeal. Reconsider the wisdom of classical Christianity. You know in your bones that there is a reasoned response to secularism. I leave you with the words of Protestant historian Mark Noll:

Whenever evangelicals in recent years have been moved to admonish themselves and other evangelicals for weaknesses in ecclesiology, tradition, the intellectual life, sacraments, theology of culture, aesthetics, philosophical theology, or historical consciousness, the result has almost always been selective appreciation for elements of the Catholic tradition. Whatever Protestants may think of individual proposals, methods, or conclusions proceeding from any individual Catholic thinker, the growing evangelical willingness to pay respectful attention to the words and deeds of a whole host of Catholic intellectuals, beginning with Pope John Paul II, makes an important contribution to better intellectual effort.⁷

Archbishop Minnerath offers an interpretation of Patristic history in which he extends great liberality to Orthodox sensibilities and construes the historical data in a non-polemical light. Thus, while recognizing the early date for a specifically Petrine claim for Roman primacy, the archbishop acknowledges that this claim was not unanimously accepted, and that some Eastern synods articulated a canonical rather than a Petrine justification for Roman primacy. Key passages in that regard include the following statements:

The Eastern church has never taken into account the developments about the Roman bishop as vicar, successor or heir of the Apostles Peter . . . The East never shared the Petrine theology as elaborated in the West. It never accepted that the protos in the universal church could claim to be the unique successor or vicar of Peter.[2]

We must not construe these passages in the wrong way: “No acceptance of Papal claims in the East!” Rather, there is an important context that cannot be overlooked. It would be surprising indeed if a Catholic archbishop thought that Petrine theology was innovative and uncatholic. However, the archbishop offers important qualifications:

For instance:

If we look at churches established outside the patriarchal territoris of the Roman Empire, we find amazing support for the primacy of the See of Rome on the ground of the Scriptures and not of the synodical canons. So a Persian collection of 73 canons attributed to the council of Nicea and composed around the year 400 develops a mystique of the four patriarchates of Rome, Alexandria, Ephesus, and Antioch. The Syriac version says ‘the patriarch of Rome will have authority over all the patriarchs, as Peter had over the whole community.’[3]

Thus, it clear from the essay that Minnerath does not mean to assert that no one in the East accepted Roman claims for a Petrine primacy. Rather, he has in mind the specifically Byzantine development of an alternate theory to explain (in non-Petrine terms) the universally acknowledged primacy of Rome.

Sylvester I and Constantine

The Archbishop offers other qualifications as well.  He acknowledges, for example, that by Nicea II the cooperation or “Synergeia” of the bishop of Rome was considered necessary for a valid council, even in Byzantium.  He also remarks, “It is worth mentioning that the Petrine claims of the popes were never invoked as a cause for schism by the Eastern church during the first millennium.” Finally, Archbishop Minnerath clearly believes in a Petrine primacy and hopes future ecumenical developments will show that “synodality and primacy are not only compatible, but mutually necessary, and that primacy and synodality are both implied in the words the Lord directed to the apostle Peter.”[4]

Obviously, it is necessary to place the Archbishop’s essay in context, and especially to define what we mean by “The East never accepted Roman claims to a Petrine Primacy.” If we mean that Byzantine theologians offered alternative (and novel) readings of Papal primacy that Orthodox theologians would appropriate in the following millenium, then well and good. No argument here. (We must  recognize, though, how very anachronistic it would be to identify modern Orthodoxy with Eastern Patrology tout court.) If, however, we mean that Petrine primacy was invented in the West, and rejected wholesale in the East as a novelty, then the evidence contradicts that claim.

East and West both accepted the fact of Roman primacy, but the theory of a merely canonical primacy, deriving from convention or from Rome’s location as seat of the Empire is a later  and exclusively Byzantine development. On the contrary, the earliest arguments for Roman primacy were exclusively theological¸ based on Rome’s fidelity to apostolic tradition or upon apostolic succession. The oldest theory we know of explaining the primacy of Rome’s bishop was given by Pope Stephen I (254-257), who claimed unambiguously to sit in cathedra Petri.

In what follows, I wish to consider some of the evidence that this claim was understood, acknowledged, and even embraced by Catholic Christians East and West from antiquity to our own day. Only then can we properly understand the Archbishop’s essay.  That that end, I would suggest we consider four lines of evidence: Papal theology in the Syriac tradition, the witness of the sui iuris churches (especially the Maronites), the surprising acquiescence to Roman claims by even professed Byzantine anti-Romanists, and the full acceptance of Roman claims by at least some pre-schism Byzantines. After we have looked at this evidence, we can assess the significance of the Archbishop’s essay.

The Syriac Tradition

As the Archbishop points out, there is substantial evidence for a doctrine of Petrine succession in the canons, liturgy, and theology of Syriac Christianity. In our own day, we have witnessed the reconciliation to Rome of many of the Nestorian Christians (Assyrian Church of the East). Their own theologian and Bishop Mar Bawai Soro explains one reason why:

The Church of the East attributes a prominent role to Saint Peter and a significant place for the Church of Rome in her liturgical, canonical and Patristic thoughts. There are more than 50 liturgical, canonical and Patristic citations that explicitly express such a conviction . . . The Church of the East possesses a theological, liturgical and canonical tradition in which she clearly values the primacy of Peter among the rest of the Apostles and their churches and the relationship Peter has with his successors in the Church of Rome.[5]

Probably the clearest Syrian witness to Petrine primacy can be found in the works of Theodore Abu Qurrah, a Syrian Catholic bishop who died in 820 A.D. Here is what Qurrah had to say about the Bishop of Rome:

You should understand that the head of the Apostles was St. Peter . . . Do you not see that St. Peter is the foundation of the church, selected to shepherd it, that those who believe in his faith will never lose their faith, and that he was ordered to have compassion on his brethren and to strengthen them? As for Christ’s words, ‘I have prayed for you, that you not lose your faith; but you, have compassion on your brethren, at that time, and strengthen them’, we do not think that he meant St. Peter himself. Rather, he meant nothing more than the holders of the seat of St. Peter, that is, Rome. Just as when he said to the apostles, ‘I am with you always, until the end of the age’, he did not mean just the apostles themselves, but also those who would be in charge of their seats and their flocks; in the same way, when he spoke his last words to St. Peter, ‘Have compassion, at that time, and strengthen your brethren; and your faith will not be lost’, he meant by this nothing other than the holders of his seat.[6]

Based on this tradition alone, it is simply impossible to argue without qualification that “The East” never accepted Roman claims.

Sui Iuris Churches (Especially Maronites)

There are currently 22 sui iuris Churches in communion with Rome. These are Eastern-rite Catholics, with their own hierarchies, canons, and liturgies, but which nevertheless accept all the claims of the Pope.  Each of them has their own unique history with Rome. Many have suffered persecution in the East for their fidelity to the Holy Father. To discuss each in detail is beyond the scope of this article, but their present existence puts the lie to the claim that Eastern Churches have never accepted Papal claims.

Of particular importance are the Maronites, a Syriac rite that has never been in formal schism from Rome.  The Maronites were pre-Arab Semites in the Levant, Chalcedonian in theology, and persecuted by the Jacobin, Monophysite Church. Eventaully, they fled Syria and found refuge in Lebanon. They are named for their 4′th century founder, St. Maron, hermit and one-time friend of St. John Chrysostom.

In 517, the Monastery of St. Maron could address Pope Hormisdas as “Hormisdas, the most holy and blessed patriarch of the whole world, the holder of the See of Peter, the leader of the apostles.”  During the 11th century, at the same time that Constantinople was excommunicating Rome (and vice versa), the Maronites reaffirmed their unity with the Holy See.  Pope Pascal II gave crown and staff to the Maronite Patriarch Youseff Al Jirjisi in 1100 A.D.  Innocent III likewise recognized the authority of their Patriarchate, and a Maronite bishop was present at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.  They remain to this day a shining, blatant, everlasting, and definitive rebutal to the bald assertion that “The East” has never accepted Roman claims.

It is worth noting, furthermore, that Byzantium itself was not fully united with Constantinople in issuing the excommunications of 1054. Intercommunion between Eastern and Western Christians persisted for many years after 1054. Many, including the Slavs whose descendants reunited with Rome through the Unions of Brest and Uzhhorod, only accepted the schism as a reality as the centuries went on. (We should also recall that the excommunications  have been revoked.)

Byzantine Acquiescence

As Archbishop Minnerath points out, the doctrine of Petrine primacy was never a cause of schism with the East. Even Photius and Cerularius, the critical players in the East-West schism, never argued that the Petrine doctrine could justify schism.  Therefore, to the extent that modern Orthodoxy rejects reunion with Rome on this basis, to that extent Orthodoxy is novel.

Furthermore, there can be little doubt that ancient Byzantium understood the Roman claim to Petrine succession, and at times even acquiesced to it.  Thus, the Libellus Hormisdae (519), signed by Byzantine bishops, reads:

We cannot pass over in silence the affirmations of our Lord Jesus Christ, “You are Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.’ . . . These words are verified by the facts. It is in the apostolic see that the Catholic religion has always been preserved without blemish . . . This is why I hope that I shall remain in communion with the apostolic see in which is found the whole, true, and perfect stability of the Christian religion.[7]

The papal legates at Ephesus (431) also advanced a very robust doctrine of Petrine primacy. None of the council fathers could have been ignorant of the claim. Consider:

Philip, presbyter and legate of the Apostolic See said: We offer our thanks to the holy and venerable Synod, that when the writings of our holy and blessed pope had been read to you, the holy members by our [or your] holy voices, you joined yourselves to the holy head also by your holy acclamations. For your blessedness is not ignorant that the head of the whole faith, the head of the Apostles, is blessed Peter the Apostle. And since now our mediocrity, after having been tempest-tossed and much vexed, has arrived, we ask that you give order that there be laid before us what things were done in this holy Synod before our arrival; in order that according to the opinion of our blessed pope and of this present holy assembly, we likewise may ratify their determination. (Acts of the Council, session II).

Aidan Nichols, O.P.  expounds on this incoventient truth:

Not only did Cyril preside over the council in the Pope’s name, but Nestorius himself, when faced with the apparent victory of his bitterest opponents – the extreme Alexandrians – at the subsequent latrocinium of 449 (for Monophysites, the Second Council of Ephesus), also appealed to Roman authority as an indispensable element in the determination of doctrine. As he pointed out in criticism of the Ephesian synod: “We did not find there the bishop of Rome, the see of Saint Peter, the apostolic dignity, the beloved leader of the Romans.” Faced with such texts, contemporary Orthodox spokesmen sometimes claim that, in the patristic age, Easterners appealed to Rome only when desperate, plying her with high-sounding titles in the hope of gaining her active support. And yet such appeals are made not only by individuals in difficulties but also by councils themselves.[8]

Finally, let us not forget the famous acclamation of Chalcedon, “Peter has spoken through Leo.” It has been argued that this cry did not amount to an acceptance of specifically Petrine primacy for Rome. Whether or not this is true, however, there can be little doubt that Pope Leo believed in and articulated such a Primacy. If his claims were considered heretical, how could the council fathers have celebrated the faith of Peter, received through an avowed heretic?

Nichols points to a possible rejoinder to these texts. Namely, the East only acquiesced to Roman claims when desperate or under duress. Still, this does nothing to falsify the claim that Papal claims were widely understood and at least sometimes accepted. Nor were they ever understood as a justification for schism.

Byzantine Acceptance

Finally, there is ample evidence that individual Byzantine Church leaders understood and embraced the doctrine of the papacy. We could provide great lists of quotations (see here, and  here) but, as that seems rather pedantic, I prefer to select only one example: St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 650) (Thanks to  www.fisheaters.com):

The extremities of the earth, and everyone in every part of it who purely and rightly confess the Lord, look directly towards the Most Holy Roman Church and her confession and faith, as to a sun of unfailing light awaiting from her the brilliant radiance of the sacred dogmas of our Fathers, according to that which the inspired and holy Councils have stainlessly and piously decreed. For, from the descent of the Incarnate Word amongst us, all the churches in every part of the world have held the greatest Church alone to be their base and foundation, seeing that, according to the promise of Christ Our Savior, the gates of hell will never prevail against her, that she has the keys of the orthodox confession and right faith in Him, that she opens the true and exclusive religion to such men as approach with piety, and she shuts up and locks every heretical mouth which speaks against the Most High. (Maximus, Opuscula theologica et polemica, Migne, Patr. Graec. vol. 90)

How much more in the case of the clergy and Church of the Romans, which from old until now presides over all the churches which are under the sun? Having surely received this canonically, as well as from councils and the apostles, as from the princes of the latter (Peter and Paul), and being numbered in their company, she is subject to no writings or issues in synodical documents, on account of the eminence of her pontificate …..even as in all these things all are equally subject to her (the Church of Rome) according to sacerodotal law. And so when, without fear, but with all holy and becoming confidence, those ministers (the popes) are of the truly firm and immovable rock, that is of the most great and Apostolic Church of Rome. (Maximus, in J.B. Mansi, ed. Amplissima Collectio Conciliorum, vol. 10)

If the Roman See recognizes Pyrrhus to be not only a reprobate but a heretic, it is certainly plain that everyone who anathematizes those who have rejected Pyrrhus also anathematizes the See of Rome, that is, he anathematizes the Catholic Church. I need hardly add that he excommunicates himself also, if indeed he is in communion with the Roman See and the Catholic Church of God …Let him hasten before all things to satisfy the Roman See, for if it is satisfied, all will agree in calling him pious and orthodox. For he only speaks in vain who thinks he ought to pursuade or entrap persons like myself, and does not satisfy and implore the blessed Pope of the most holy Catholic Church of the Romans, that is, the Apostolic See, which is from the incarnate of the Son of God Himself, and also all the holy synods, according to the holy canons and definitions has received universal and surpreme dominion, authority, and power of binding and loosing over all the holy churches of God throughout the whole world. (Maximus, Letter to Peter, in Mansi x, 692).

Conclusion:

The fourth century witnessed rival interpretations of Papal authority. What no one questioned, however, was the fact of Roman primacy.  To quote one Orthodox theologian, Nicholas Afanassieff:

Rome’s vocation [in the pre-Nicene period] consisted in playing the part of arbiter, settling contentious issues by witnessing to the truth or falsity of whatever doctrine was put before them. Rome was truly the centre where all converged if they wanted their doctrine to be accepted by the conscience of the Church. They could not count upon success except on one condition — that the Church of Rome had received their doctrine — and refusal from Rome predetermined the attitude the other churches would adopt. There are numerous cases of this recourse to Rome…[9]

When the Council of Constantinople (381) advanced a theory of Papal primacy based on her connection to the Imperial capital (rather than Petrine primacy), the Roman legates adamantly refused to accept it, and Pope Damasus I repudiated it at a Roman synod the following year (382).  The canonical theory was clearly an alternative to Rome’s older position, argued by Pope Stephen I (254-257), that Rome’s primacy derived from Petrine succession.  That Byzantine theologians would offer alternative interpretation is not surprsing, since they wanted to bolster Constantinople’s position as the new seat of the Empire.  Thus, Aidan Nichols, O.P. in his book Rome and the Eastern Churches, can write, “The rupture between Rome and Orthodoxy may not unfairly be called a separation between Rome and Constantinople.“[10]

Modern Orthodox, who deny Papal claims to a specifically Petrine succession, look back to these Byzantine theories for support. As a justification for schism, however, their position is completely novel. The Roman claim is older, and was widely accepted in both East and West. We have provided ample evidence that both Greeks and Syriacs understood and accepted the claim to a Petrine Primacy. Even Byzantine synods and theologians acknowledged them.

Archbishops Minnerath’s essay is no “smoking gun.” He has admitted nothing that has not been common knowledge for 1,000 years. Some Byzantine theologians resisted Papal claims. Their work has provided some theologial “cover” for modern Orthodoxy. But, once again, this just has no significance for the Catholic doctrine of the Papacy. Of the “Blasphemy of Sirmium,” St. Jerome once lamented, “The whole world groaned and marveled to find itself Arian.” At that time, there was but a handful of bishops who maintained the Nicaean faith and stayed faithful to the Pope. This was no threat to the unity or Catholcity of the Church. After all, “Where Peter is, there is the Church.”
___________

[1] In How Can the Petrine Ministry Be a Service to the Unity of the Universal Church?  ed., James F. Puglisi (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), pgs. 34-48.

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] “The Position of the Church of the East Theological Tradition on the Questions of Church Unity and Full Communion” cited at http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2008/05/3000-assyrians-received-into-catholic.html

[6]  John C. Lamoreaux, trans. Theodore Abu Qurrah. (Liberary of the Christian East, vol.1, Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 68-69.

[7] Aidan Nichols, O.P. Rome and the Eastern Churchs. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010), 210.

[8] Ibid., 203-204

[9] (Source)

[10] Nichols, 143.

“The Assumption of the Most Holy Mother of God”
Pietro Cavallini

As a seminary student, I was superficially aware of the cult of saints in Christian antiquity. I had read Augustine’s Confessions with their favorable mention of the practice. I knew something about the cult of martyrs in the Church. But, I dismissed these as as sort of periphery to the “real heart” of Christianity: grace and justification. I benignly tolerated Augustine’s belief in relics the way I tolerated his Neo-Platonism: an unfortunate hold-over from his pagan environment. The first real blow to this interpretation came when I read Peter Brown’s book, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity.

Brown challenged my view that the place of saints and relics in the church was a mere holdover from paganism, and that the practice was somehow peripheral to true Christianity. Instead, Brown painted a picture of ancient Christianity and paganism in which relics were indispensable to the former, and repulsive to the latter. Far from a holdover from paganism, the place of relics in the Church appeared as something intensely Jewish, Hebraic, and Old Testament. Pagans, like Julian-the-Apostate, found the practice revolting and legislated against it. (Paganism, with its notions of ritual purity, had strictly delimited the realm of divine worship and neatly separated it from the realm of corpses and the dead.)

Peter Brown:

 On this point, the rise of Christianity in the pagan world was met by deep religious anger. We can chart the rise to prominence of the Christian church most faithfully by listening to pagan reactions to the cult of martyrs. For the progress of this cult spelled out for the pagans a slow and horrid crumbling of ancient barriers.¹

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that it posed a problem. It is one thing to dismiss something as peripheral to the faith of the ancient Church, but to dismiss something that was ubiquitous and central to devotion and even to liturgy? G.J.C. Snoek had made just this point in his monograph Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction. Snoek showed just how much the Christian liturgy itself had been influenced by the ancient cult of relics.  I began to realize that dismissing saints and relics was to dismiss the same Church that gave us the Ecumenical councils, Augustine’s doctrines of grace and justification, and the canon of Scripture. I needed to look into this more carefully.

Saints and Relics as Biblical

As I explored this conundrum, the first thing I began to appreciate was just how biblical the practice really was. I realized that the veneration of relics, belief in their miraculous powers, and in the intercession of departed saints and angels was deeply Hebraic and Jewish. We find testimony to it in such places as 2 Kings 13:20-21, 2 Maccabees 15:12-16, and Tobit 12:12-15, considered especially in comparison to Revelation 5:8. (At this point, it was immaterial to me whether Maccabees and Tobit should be considered canonical texts. It was enough that they expressed a historic Jewish belief in these concepts.)

To take my favorite example:

2 Kings: 13:20-21:

 Elisha died and was buried. At the time, bands of Moabites used to raid the land each year. Once some people were burying a man, when suddenly they spied such a raiding band. So they cast the dead man into the grave of Elisha, and everyone went off. But when the man came in contact with the bones of Elisha, he came back to life and rose to his feet.

Archeological evidence confirmed that this “cult of the dead” was deeply ingrained and widespread in ancient Hebrew Religion. Here is Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, in her book Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead:

 [Archeological studies suggest] a widespread, flourishing cult of the dead, practiced in Jerusalem as in the rest of the country, which persisted throughout the Iron Age. A ‘cult of the dead” is here taken to mean that the Judahites believed the dead possessed powers and acted on that belief.²

Brown and others have shown that these practices continued in Judaism into the era of the New Testament, and of the Midrash and Talmud. Especially important in this regard is J. Jeremias’s untranslated work, Heiligengräber in Jesu Umwelt. (Göttingen, 1958) Jeremias shows that this cult was both extremely important to Jews, and of great significance for the development of the relic cult in early Christianity. Likewise, Josef W. Meri in The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria shows that the Jewish practice continued with Jews in Babylon, Syrian, North Africa, and elsewhere, and included pilgrimages to the tombs not only of Biblical figures, but even more contemporary “saints,” like Maimonides. Cultic visits to the resting place of the ancestors continue in Israel to this day.

Why?

Why did the Jews believe and practice such things? And why were Christians so amenable? There are two important Hebraic and biblical concepts to understand: that of the Zaddiqim (or saints) and the doctrine of zekhut avot (or merits of the ancestors).

Zaddiqim:

In Judaism, the Zaddiqim are the “Holy Men of Old” who are given special powers because of their close relationship to God. Think of Moses with his Shekinah glory, and of Elijah with all his miracles. As we saw from the passage of 2 Kings, these powers were understood to endure after death. And, given the Hebrew view of the body, its sanctity, and dignity, and the concomitant belief in resurrection, it is no wonder that these powers were believed to inhere even in the flesh.

Again, Elizabeth Bloch-Smith:

 Following death, these individuals were thought to possess special powers and to maintain intimate contact with Yahweh as they had during their lifetimes. Given the presumed posthumous powers of the dead, it was important for the supplicant to know the location of the burial in order to petition the deceased.³

St. James gives New Testament testimony to this belief in Zaddiqim his epistle:

The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. (James 5:16-18)

Not only do the powers adhere to the flesh, but they can be transferred to physical objects. 2 Kings 4 recounts that Elisha raised the dead by commanding that his staff be laid on a corpse. In the New Testament, Peter’s power of healing extended even to his shadow, and to his handkerchief. (Acts 5, Acts 11). Is it any wonder that Augustine accepted accounts of the miraculous cures attributed to relics in his own day?

Zekhut avot

 The doctrine of zekhut avot is the doctrine of the “merits of the ancestors.” Meri summarizes the doctrine of Zekhut avot, and its relation to the Zaddiqim this way:

 The doctrine of zerkhut avot or ‘merits of the ancestors’ holds that the people of Israel were favoured not because of their own merits, but because of those of their ancestors, particularly biblical heroes, the Patriarchs and other righteous ancestors. Ancestral merits and good deeds are required for the salvation of the soul. Jews held the zaddiqim above the ministering angels (Sanh 93a) and believed that they possessed divine powers which they employed of their own volition. (Sanh.65b).⁴

As I mentioned above, this is a very biblical doctrine. We find throughout the Old Testament the idea that God metes out reward and punishment to the many on behalf of the righteousness or disobedience of the few. Consider a few examples:

Exodus 20:6

I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Sharing Responsibility and Punishment:

Joshua 7: 1-24:  Israel is punished for Achan’s Sin.

2 Samuel 12:10: For David’s sin – the sword will never depart from his house.

Lamentations 5:7: “Our fathers sinned, and are no more; It is we who have borne their iniquities.”

Sharing in Reward/Blessing/Clemency:

Genesis 18:26ff: “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

Exodus 32:13: “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.”

 The Concept of Corporate Identity in One

2 Samuel 20:1: “We have no share in David”

Galatians 3:27:  the baptized are “clothed in Christ.”

Romans 8:1 : No condemnation for those in Christ

2 Corinthians 5:17 – If any man is in Christ he is a new creation.

To Be in Christ

This idea of corporate, covenant responsibility and identity is the necessary theological background for the Christian and New Testament doctrines of being in Christ, of the atonement, of satisfaction for sins, and of sanctifying grace. The Old Testament clearly taught the idea of shared responsibility and merit, but none of the Old Testament saints could merit for us the beatific vision. In order to receive a share in God’s own life, we need a suberabundance of merit that only the Son of God can provide. We receive this by being in Christ. Corporately connected to the head, we share in his merits and benefits. Thus, in medieval devotion, the Holy Eucharist is the relic par excellence.

The key to the New Testament doctrine of the saints is not to destroy the older Hebraic doctrine of shared merit and responsibility, but to elevate it to an even greater place. Through Christ, and because of his infinite merits, the finite merits of the saints can now take on an eternal significance. This is why, far from detracting from Christ, the Christian belief in the intercession of saints enhances, fulfills, and completes the doctrine of Christ’s infinite and sufficient intercession.

Remember Colossians 1:24: “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.”  As members of Christ’s body, the Saints now share in his divine life and participate in his work of intercession.

From the NT perspective, it is fitting that the grace of Christ should be distributed in this way, through the Church. This is because the whole point of the redemption we have in Christ was to overcome the problem of human alienation – man alienated from God, and from one another. This is why saint Paul can speak in such glowing terms of the Church in Ephesians: both as the revelation of God’s mystery, reconciling all things, and also as the Body of Christ. Hence St. Gregory of Nyssa’s famous saying, “He who beholds the Church beholds Christ.” Understood in this way, the Biblical doctrine of saints, and relics expresses our conviction that the redeemed are truly a part of Christ and therefore connected to us. God does not want us to be saved without them.

Mary and the Assumption

How does all of this relate to the doctrine of Mary and the Assumption? At one level, my discovery of the saints was a necessary precondition for understanding the doctrine of Mary. Once I came to accept the place of the saints in the Church, it was much easier to understand Mary’s role as one of the saints. If devotion to the saints in general is acceptable, then how much more so devotion to the Theotokos? But naturally, there is more going on in Catholic Mariology than just devotion. There is what St. Thomas calls Super Devotion (hyper dulia).  And here, it was John Henry Newman who helped me most.

Newman, in his famous essay on Mary, pointed out that the fundamental Patristic doctrine on Mary was that she was the second Eve. Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that this was the teaching of Justin, Tertullian, Ephrem, Ireneaus, Cyril, Epiphanius, Jerome, and others. But why? To the fathers, particularly in light of the biblical idea of corporate responsibility and the exalted role of Biblical heroes, it was obvious that Eve must have her counterpart in the work of redemption. Next to the second Adam, there must be a second Eve. Thus, Eve’s No was undone by Mary’s Fiat mihi.

If you are committed to the doctrine of sola scriptura, this may not be persuasive for you. However, if you are open to the witness of history, to the faith of the Church, to what has been held semper, ubique, et ab omnibus¸ then the Patristic doctrine on Mary makes perfect sense and fits with the whole trajectory of Hebrew Religion. From the doctrine of the second Eve, furthermore, all the other Mariological doctrines flow – her preservation from original sin, her virginity, and even her assumption. Mary is the prototype of the Church, the woman “clothed with the Sun,” who enjoys and figures proleptically the fullness of the redemption of the whole Church.

On this feast of the Assumption, I wish to conclude by tying together the teaching on relics and saints with one key fact from the life of the Virgin. As Calvin and other Protestant polemicists pointed out, medieval Catholic Europe did not lack for spurious relics. Multiple heads of John the Baptist, even foreskins of Christ, circulated on the relic market, to the amusement of some and disgust of others. But in the whole history of Christendom, no one ever came forth with a putative first class relic of the Blessed Virgin. The reason was plain.

St. John Damascene (d. 749) related the following story which explains why:

St. Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, at the Council of Chalcedon (451), made known to the Emperor Marcian and Pulcheria, who wished to possess the body of the Mother of God, that Mary died in the presence of all the Apostles, but that her tomb, when opened upon the request of St. Thomas, was found empty; wherefrom the Apostles concluded that the body was taken up to heaven.⁵

1. Brown, Cult of Saints, 6.
2. (Sheffield, 1992), 23.
3. op. cit., >111.
4. (Oxford, 2002), 63.
5. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02006b.htm

St. Gregory the Great [AD 540 - 604]
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1797)

But the logic and coherence of a system does not make it true. It is also important to recognize that there are objective, biblical, and historical grounds for finding the Catholic claims credible. (Whereas the biblical and historical case for Protestantism is weak and contradictory.)  Catholics refer to these evidences collectively as The Motives of Credibilty. This evidence is not sufficient to compel the assent of faith. (It wouldn’t be faith, then, it would be knowledge.) But it is sufficient to show that the assent of faith (aided by divine grace) is rational.

We have treated some of this evidence – especially for the divine foundation of the Church and Papacy – before. What follows is a brief roundup of some of those articles.

Christ founded a visible Church and Magisterium

• That Christ founded a visible Church
• That Christ founded holy orders and established a sacrificial priesthood
• That Christ established a Magisterium in the Church
• St. Ignatius of Antioch on the Church
• St. John Chrysostom on the Priesthood

The Papacy in Scripture and History:

• That Peter is the Rock of Matthew 16:18
• That the New Testament ascribes Primacy to Peter
• The witness of history on Petrine/Roman Primacy
• St. Vincent of Lerins on the Magisterium
• St. Optatus on Schism and the Bishop of Rome
• St. Cyprian on the Unity of the Church

The witness of history against key Protestant doctrines

• The witness of history against Sola Fide
• The witness of history against “primitivism” and the claim to have “recovered” the Gospel.
• The witness of history on baptismal regeneration
• St. Augustine on Law and Grace
• St. Clement of Rome on soteriology and ecclesiology

Philosophy and the Papacy

• Philosophy and the Papacy

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas
Caravaggio

As someone raised across the two worlds of American Evangelicalism and Reformed Protestantism, I confess to finding this line of reasoning strange and novel.  Growing up, I cut my theological teeth on Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis.  In seminary, I discovered the likes of B.B. Warfield, the Hodges, Graham Machen, Carl Henry, and David Wells –all of whom would be astonished, I think, to learn that we could not be certain in our act of faith. Indeed, the whole 20th century Reformed and Evangelical apology for traditional Protestantism against liberalism and modernism was that it offered the only rational basis for sure knowledge of ethics and metaphysics.

But it is not just 20th century Protestants who took this line. In graduate school, I turned to a much deeper study of the sources of the Reformed tradition. There I found no skepticism at all about theological knowledge, provided it was derived from Scripture as interpreted by Spirit-illumined ministers of the Gospel. Granted, the early Reformers allowed for human depravity and were not surprised by religious dissent, but they believed that Christians could arrive (were in fact morally obligated to arrive) at certainty and agreement regarding the core doctrines of the faith.  Moreover, one of the earliest arguments for sola scriptura was that it would allegedly provide doctrinal clarity whereas the multiplicity of Catholic authorities had brought only confusion.

Where, then has this new-found assault on certainty come from? How does it compare to earlier Reformed statements on religious epistemology? The answers, I think, are more historical, social and psychological than exegetical or theological. Early in the Reformation, there was a very broad range of topics about which certainty  was believed both possible and necessary. Calvin, for example, did not hesitate to assert that proper Eucharistic theology is necessary for salvation.  (See his Petit traicté de la Saincte Cene.) With each passing generation, however the promise of agreement became more and more elusive. Eventually, Protestants were forced by circumstances to declare themselves theologically pure in the most narrowly sectarian way, or else continually and reductively to redefine what counts as “core,” or “essential.” In some cases (Schleiermacher, Barth, and some evangelicals) this “core” was redefined in non-doctrinal terms altogether.

Against this theological reductionism, the Catholic Church begins to appear an attractive alternative.  Catholicism offers a principled way to distinguish dogma from mere theological opinion.  Rather than admit the impossibility of doctrinal certainty arising from Scripture alone, however, Reformed detractors now impugn the very desire for the certainty promised by Catholicism.

To be fair, Michael Horton, Wes White and the others who have made these claims do not personally ascribe to the radical theological skepticism I think their critique suggests. They do acknowledge a type of theological certainty. However, I would like to place their view of certainty in historical context, and ask why it has failed to satisfy the restless heart of the ex-Reformed.

Certainty and the Catholic Tradition

If you are going to object to the quest for doctrinal certainty in the Catholic Church, I think it is very important that you understand just what the Catholic Church offers. Some Reformed Christians of my acquaintance object to the Catholic doctrine of an infallible magisterium on the grounds that “there is no infallible list of infallible pronouncements,” or “Catholics disagree on the status of such-and-such a dogma,” or “where is the infallible interpretation of such-and-such a verse?”  What such objections amount to, it seems to me, is – “If you cannot give me an infallible answer to every question I have, then your infallibility is of no use.”

All of these objections miss the mark. The point of the extraordinary Magisterium (councils and ex cathedra pronouncements) is not to give an infallible answer to every question, but only to intervene on those questions that the Church deems essential to the faith. There are many issues on which the Magisterium has refused to dogmatize. (See the Congregatio de auxiliis, for example). There are others for which the ordinary teaching of the church is deemed sufficient.

In all of these cases, what must be born in mind is the distinction between dogma and theological opinion. The Catechism: “The Church’s Magisterium exercises the authority it holds from Christ to the fullest extent when it defines dogmas, that is, when it proposes truths contained in divine Revelation or also when it proposes in a definitive way truths having a necessary connection with them . . . Dogmas are lights along the path of faith; they illuminate it and make it secure.” (CCC, 88)

What the Catholic Church promises, then, is not an answer to every question, but a principled way, established by divine authority, to differentiate dogma from mere opinion, and to do so in a way that allows for certainty in our act of faith. As we shall see, the historic Reformed tradition makes very similar claims, but on a very different basis.

Certainty in the Reformed Tradition

Zwingli

Ulrich Zwingli offered one of the earliest apologies for the doctrine of sola scriptura. In his Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God (1522), he argued that a spirit-illumined reading of Scripture could provide far more certainty and clarity than any appeal to competing Catholic authorities:

When the rabble of carnal divines that you call fathers and bishops pronounce upon a doctrine about which there is a doubt, are you enlightened, and do you know with absolute certainty that it is as they say? . . . [You] put your trust in fallible men, who can do nothing without the grace and spirit of God . . . You believe that men can give you certainty, which is no certainty, and you do not believe that God can give it to you. . . .You do not know that it is God himself who teaches a man, nor do you know that when God has taught him that man has an inward certainty and assurance. . . . If you think there can be no assurance of certainty for the soul, listen to the certainty of the Word of God. The soul can be instructed and enlightened – note the clarity – so that it perceives that its whole salvation and righteousness, or justification is enclosed in Jesus Christ. [1]

Zwingli here specifically contrasts the lack of certainty in Catholicism with the absolute certainty one has of one’s salvation from Scripture and the Spirit. This emphasis on soteriology and pneumatology continues to be a mainstay of Protestant hermeneutical theory, and the response to Catholic claims about authority.

Calvin

Anyone familiar with Calvin’s struggle for “doctrinal purity” in Geneva, his imposition of a common catechism, the legal strictures placed on theological dissent, and the harsh words he uttered against other Protestants  cannot doubt that he thought doctrinal clarity was both possible and necessary. (See How John Calvin Made me a Catholic.)

Not only did Calvin believe in doctrinal certainty, he also believed that failure to agree with an ordained minister was a sign of reprobation.  On Friday June 28 and Saturday June 29, 1549, Calvin preached two sermons that must have goaded the individualists in his congregation.  Calvin taught that the mother of all superstition and idolatry, and the cause of all dissension is the belief that one can “discern between the good and the bad apart from the rule of God.” [2]  He made it quite plain, however, that the office of discerning good from bad belongs exclusively to the ordained ministry.  Those who obey this rule are the elect, those who disobey the reprobate.  Calvin says:

We see that those who have charge of the word of God, their office is to discern what is good in order to approve it and what is bad in order to condemn it.  And when men submit themselves to the doctrine that we preach, we [should] regard them as those in whom God is working [i.e., the elect].  On the contrary, those who draw themselves back, we [must] hold them in derision. [3]

In a number of places, Calvin equates opposition to ministerial teaching (i.e., the Reformed Magisterium) as rebellion against God himself.  Some deny that the ministry of the prophets continues in the church, Calvin says, but this is “execrable blasphemy.”  Though his word may be pronounced by a mortal man, “we must be completely certain that God ratifies from heaven whatever is pronounced here in his name.”  Those who oppose a prophet, Calvin explains, oppose not the prophet but God.  “If someone brings us the word of God and he is despised among us,” he preaches, “we must not look to mortal men as if it were to them that we had done injury, but let us know that God will always be their guardian, and let us feel that it is him we have offended.” [4]

This is why the mature Calvin could even affirm the doctrine of implicit faith. The majority of the faithful, he held, are unable accurately to derive doctrinal conclusions from Scripture, but must be content with an implicit faith in the teaching of the ordained ministry.

The Westminster Confession on Certainty and Infallibility

Zwingli and Calvin were naive in their belief that Scripture-interpreted-by-the-Reformed-ministry would provide doctrinal clarity and theological unity. By the time of the Westminster Assembly, theological pluralism was a fact of Protestant life.  Rather than give up the hope for clarity and unity, however, the Westminster divines articulated a nascent theological reductionism.  According to Westminster, certainty might not be possible for every issue, but God did promise infallibility and certainty regarding those doctrines necessary for salvation.

In chapter one, the WCF treats of Holy Scripture, its composition, nature, authority, clarity, and interpretation. For our purposes, the most interesting part is how the confession addresses the problem of Scriptural interpretation. It acknowledges that “all things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all,” yet it asserts that “those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them .” WCF I.vii

The confession is equally interesting when it considers the kind of knowledge available to the elect regarding those doctrines “necessary for salvation.”

The Confession:

[S]uch as truly believe in the Lord Jesus . . . may in this life be certainly assured that they are in a state of grace . . . This certainty is not a bare conjectural and probably persuasion, grounded upon a fallible hope; but an infallible assurance of faith, founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God.  XVIII.I (Emphasis mine.)

Certainty. Infallible. Assurance. This is the language of the Confession, though limited to the doctrines and knowledge of salvation.

Protestantism and Theological Reductionism

Why did some Reformed Protestants take the reductionistic path? Scripture does not call for theological reductionism. Paul could exhort the Corinthians “to agree on everything.” Clearly, Calvin and the early Reformed tradition envisioned something much more solid than the current Reformed fare.  The answer, I think, is historical. Although the process of doctrinal disintegration began immediately with the Reformation (and is reflected in the WCF) it had reached a fever pitch by the 18th century.

As I have discussed elsewhere, the 18th century revivals were disastrous for Protestant Ecclesiology and hermeneutics. As Protestants across denominations began to testify to the same saving experiences, revival proponents concluded that denominational differences did not matter. George Whitefield, for example, remarked:

I saw regenerate souls among the Baptists, among the Presbyterians, among the Independents, and among the Church [i.e., Anglican] folks—all children of God, and yet all born again in a different way of worship: and who can tell which  is the most evangelical.

And again,

It was best to preach the new birth, and the power of godliness, and not to insist so much on the form: for people would never be brought to one mind as to that; nor did Jesus Christ ever intend it. [5] (Emphasis mine.)

Whitefield’s remarks are very far removed from the sentiments of Calvin and the early Reformed Tradition, but they are emblematic of the emerging direction of Reformed Ecclesiology. Eventually, some schools of Reformed theology would move away from doctrinal affirmations of any sort.

Certainty, the Blogosphere, and the Reformed Tradition

The historic Reformed tradition promises doctrinal certainty. Zwingli believed in certainty at least regarding the soteriological core  of the Christian faith. Calvin had a much more robust notion of doctrinal certainty, based on the authority of the Reformed Magisterium. Westminster, like Zwingli, promises certainty and assurance regarding the question of personal salvation.

Some contemporary writers, like Horton, recognize the more robust, classical Calvinist view of certainty and religious authority.  To Horton, it seems incredible that anyone could defect from a “Reformational” view of Scripture and authority, and seek certainty from the elusive and questionable Catholic magisterium. The question then arises, “Why would so many ex-Reformed Christians find the Reformation option ultimately unsatisfying?”

Assessment:

Horton would have us believe that anyone who defects from the Reformed faith must not really have understood the Reformed faith, and its nuanced view of Scripture, tradition, and ministerial authority. But this is not true. There are a number of problems with the Reformed view, so that even a fully-orbed Reformational view of Scripture fails to satisfy the ex-Reformed.

To begin with, we note that the historic Reformed faith is as interested in the question of certainty and assurance as any Catholic. Zwingli uses the language of absolute certainty; the WCF speaks of an infallible assurance. The problem enters in with the basis of that certainty. The Reformed tradition offers two approaches.

First, there is the infallible assurance that WCF lodges in the individual conscience. This is the theme, taken in a highly reductive sense, of the Evangelical tradition. Second, there is the magisterial authority – worthy of implicit faith – that Calvin asserts. Writers like Horton and Keith Matthison seek to blend the two, emphasizing the final authority of Scripture, while stressing both Scripture’s soteriological core and the role of authorized interpreters. Let’s take each view in turn.

First, the subjectivist view. The subjectivist dimension to Reformed theology is particularly problematic when considered in light of the WCF teaching on false assurance (basically, that false assurance is possible). (XVII.i)  If infallible assurance is possible, and false assurance is possible, then there must be some way to differentiate an infallible witness of the spirit from a spurious one. What is that way? What could it possibly look like?

Here is where I would like particularly to challenge our Reformed readers. Can you give a coherent description of how one could distinguish a genuine from a spurious claim to illumination? I imagine that the true and the genuine could be distinguished only by what philosophers of mind call qualia: those utterly subjective and ineffable elements of consciousness that color our perceptions, like the way that green appears to me. I can give no coherent description of what green “looks like,” nor can I know with certainty that my “green” is not your “orange.” This is what philosophers call the “inverted spectrum” problem.

I can think of no coherent way to differentiate genuine from spurious claims to illumination that does not fall prey to the inverted spectrum problem.  It is always possible, it seems to me, that my experience of “true faith,” is really your “hypocritical and passing faith.” This is rendered even more likely by the Reformed doctrine of original sin. If my every thought and inclination is depraved, then even my most perfect act of faith and trust must be deficient. In the final analysis, it seems to me that Reformed subjectivism can provide certainty of only one proposition: “I am the subject of something; I have had an experience.” But that purely interior experience can tell me nothing certain and objective about the world outside my mind.

Another problem with the subjectivist view is that it wrecks havoc with ecclesiology. This may not bother Schleiermacher or the radical evangelical, but it should seem problematic to anyone with an even slightly empirical doctrine of the Church. Without an external authority to check my private experience, the church necessarily reduces to “Me and whoever agrees with me.” This is, in fact, precisely the answer to religious pluralism given by one recent critic of Catholic converts. He writes, “The way forward is to separate oneself from all that is evidently doctrinally and morally corrupt [sic!] and fellowship with small groups of like-minded believers.”

What of the Reformed Magisterum? Many Reformed Christians acknowledge the authority of creeds, confessions, and Church ministers. These serve allegedly as a check on the private interpretation of individuals. The problem with this view comes in the criteria we must use to identify that Magisterium, and the degree of authority we ascribe to it.

The Reformed tradition clearly rejects apostolic succession, miracles, or any other empirical criteria for recognizing the Magisterium. Calvin’s view was that the Reformed Magisterium be recognized by its fidelity to “The Word.” Horton stresses the hermeneutical centrality of “the Gospel.”  The problem with these is that they reduce, in the end, again to subjectivism.  Who gets to be the judge of an authority’s fidelity to “The Word?” Who judges fidelity to “The Gospel?”  This very question befuddled the Genevan church in Calvin’s day, which was wracked over just these problems of biblical interpretation and the criteria for religious authority.

There is a way to illustrate this from something in the field of finance. In my business (investments), you NEVER give unqualified investment advice. You always qualify it with a lengthy, legal disclaimer saying, in effect, “This investment advice really should not be construed as investment advice. Really, its just for educational purposes. If you act on it and lose your shirt, remember that we never told you to act on it.” In the end, the Reformed Magisterium reduces to something similar. The only infallible interpreter of Scripture is Scripture itself. The only infallible assurance is the subjective assurance of salvation. Therefore, any pronouncement of the Reformed Magisterium is qualified by, “But, we’re really not certain of this. Make sure you check it against Scripture.”

Again, in his own ministry, Calvin had no credible answer to this problem. When members of his congregation challenged him on biblical exegesis, he would respond by insulting them, impugning their motives, questioning their election, and asserting his own divine authority. (Oh, and by urging the city council to enact legal strictures against, and punishments of theological dissent.)

Another problem with the Reformed view of Scripture and authority is the glaring historical record, the very reason for evangelical reductionism. However you construe theological certainty, there just hasn’t been any in Protestant history. The only way you can say otherwise is to assert some doctrinal core (based on subjective criteria) and then to go poking through history looking for theological bedfellows. But this hardly does justice to the actual theological pluralism of Protestantism – of even the Reformed tradition. (If anyone doubts the existence of Reformed pluralism, please take a peak at Janice Knight’s Orthodoxies in Massachusetts.)

Closely related to this is another problem: the putative “clarity” of Scripture’s soteriological core. One of the mainstays of Reformed hermeneutics is the alleged clarity of those doctrines “necessary for salvation.” By this, the WCF means the whole complex of ideas related to justification, imputation, faith-alone, atonement, etc. Increasingly, the claim that these are clear even to the unlearned seems less and less credible.

At risk of provoking shrieks and catcalls, I invoke N.T. Wright and the “New Perspectives.” Anyone who has read Wright’s Justification can hardly question his commitment to sola scriptura, his seriousness as an exegetical scholar, and his rejection of traditional Reformed soteriology. Now, it is one thing to reject Wright on exegetical grounds (as many do). But then what to make of the WCF claim that the core doctrines of the faith are so plain that even the unlearned (elect) can grasp them in Scripture? Do we really conclude that Wright is among the unregenerate simply because he disagrees with the Reformed doctrine of justification? To many ex-Reformed, this appears an egregious case of special pleading.

There is yet another problem with the “soteriological core” view of Scripture’s clarity. Positing a clear “core” of soteriological doctrines, and a less clear penumbra of ecclesiology is one way to distinguish essential from non-essential. But, it is atrociously ad hoc. Who says we should divide essential and non-essential this way? Calvin clearly didn’t limit the “essentials” to only soteriological data. Neither did Nicaea. Nor does Scripture itself. (“Agree on everything,” says Paul.)

Then finally, there is the actual teaching of Scripture about religious authority. Many of the ex-Reformed were persuaded in favor of the Catholic Magisterium on the basis of Scripture itself. The ultimate problem with the Reformed view of biblical authority (however you construe it) is that it is unbiblical. Scripture simply knows no doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Scripture says much, however, about the authority of the Church.

Conclusion

More and more Reformed Christians are becoming Catholics in search of doctrinal certainty. They have recognized that Protestantism has no principled way of objectively distinguishing dogma from opinion. The Catholic claim to be able to do this is not only attractive and satisfying, but it is objectively grounded in revelation and history.

Some Reformed writers have criticized this quest for certainty. They object to this search for “hard edges.” Instead, they urge humility and prayer, veneration of Scripture alone, and a limited reliance on ministerial authority and tradition. They acknowledge that these measures are prone to failure and cannot provide absolute certainty, but they suggest that they provide enough certainty to guarantee a saving knowledge of Christ.

We have placed this objection in historical context. We see that the early sources of the Reformed tradition were not reticent about promising doctrinal certainty, but that over time Protestantism was subjected to a type of theological reductionism. This reductionism is a challenge to the Reformed view of doctrinal certainty. We have also called into question a central claim of the Reformed view of Scripture: that there is a (Reformed) soteriological core that is so clear as to be reasonably beyond question. We have also questioned why theological certainty should be limited to only soteriological issues?

Finally, it is not true that all Reformed converts to Catholicism are ignorant of Reformation history and doctrine. I, for one, was raised fully in the reductionistic, evangelical school of Reformed history. When I began to study the Reformation in earnest, however, I discovered the more robust view of ecclesiastical authority, liturgy, and sacramental life. I also discovered an intolerance of schism, and a real desire for doctrinal unity on even (seemingly) trivial questions. Inspired by this more robust, Calvinistic vision of doctrinal unity, theological certainty, and ecclesial life, I pursued a systematic investigation of Scripture, history, and tradition to discern which communion had the strongest claim to orthodoxy, historical continuity, and biblical fidelity.  Study of history, Scripture, and tradition made the Calvinist claim to authenticity incredible to be. It made the Catholic claim credible.

____________

Calvin Preaching

Calvin was so strict about this that he even condemned the liturgy of the hours, since Scripture nowhere enjoins rising in the evening to pray.¹

According to Calvin, the central element of Christian worship is the preaching of Scripture by the ordained ministry. In his mind, this is the hinge on which all else turns. Even sacraments, for Calvin, derive their efficacy from the hearing of the preached word.

For this reason, Calvin’s liturgical writing and Geneva’s legislation insisted that the sacraments be performed before an assembled congregation, and always conjoined to the preaching ministry. Private masses or baptisms, including midwife or emergency baptisms, were forbidden. The words of institution were to be pronounced audibly and in the vernacular.²

To support his teaching on worship, Calvin pointed to the example of the early Church. (He was especially fond of Augustine.)  He also drew on the work of late medieval liturgists, the Reformer Martin Bucer, and, in constructing his own liturgies for Strasbourg and Geneva, he even drew on the structure of the Mass of the Roman Rite.  To what extent, though, were Calvin’s liturgy and theology of worship actually guided by Scripture? Does Scripture actually teach the form of worship and administration of sacraments envisioned by Calvin?

Scripture on the Administration of Baptism

Let’s begin with baptism. There are a number of baptisms in Scripture. However, I am at a loss to see how any one them conforms to the pattern set forth by Calvin. Leaving aside the very unliturgical and outdoor baptisms of John the Baptist, let us restrict ourselves to those performed in the post-resurrection Christian community. Do any of them suggest that baptism must be performed by an ordained minister, before an assembled congregation, and conjoined to the preaching of Scripture?

Matthew 28: 16-20 – Christ’s commission to the apostles: This text gives no explicit instruction on the timing or context of baptism. If anything, it seems to suggest that teaching is to follow baptism.

Acts 2:41- Peter calls on crowds to repent and be baptized. 3,000 are added to the Church. Again, no details on the administration of the sacrament.

Acts 8:36 – A baptism, administered by a deacon, performed by the side of the road.

Acts 9:18 -  Paul is baptized in a private home, by a prophet. Again, no indication of a public liturgy.

Acts 16:15- Lydia’s conversion. Baptized in the presence of Paul, Timothy, and Silas. No indication of a public liturgy.

Acts 16:33 – The Philippian jailor is baptized privately, “at that hour of the night.”

What can we conclude from Scripture? Baptisms can be performed in private homes, on the side of the road, in the dead of night, by deacons and prophets.

Scripture on the Administration of the Eucharist

What of the Eucharist? Does Scripture indicate that the Eucharist must be celebrated in a public setting and only when conjoined to the preaching of Scripture? It seems to me that the Reformers were on slightly firmer ground here, as Acts 2:42 and 1 Corinthians 11 clearly suggest that the Eucharist was a communal affair. However, these texts do not prescribe this, nor do they insist on the element of preaching.  The main prescription Paul gives is to follow the liturgical consensus and tradition of the Church.

Nor do the Gospel narratives of the institution clearly support Calvin’s views (Matt. 26, Mark 14, and Luke 22). I grant that Scripture reading was likely used on Holy Thursday as part of a passover meal, and that Christ’s words were audible and in the vernacular. However, the celebration was clearly private and domestic, in keeping with Jewish custom, and there is no indication that Christ limited future celebration to preaching liturgies.

Scripture on Preaching

Finally, what of the role of preaching, especially exegetical preaching, in Christian worship? There is clear evidence that the apostles practiced exegetical preaching in the context of outdoor evangelism, but there is nothing in Scripture which prescribes this for the Christian liturgy. I grant that Paul exhorts Timothy to know the Scriptures. The Bereans are also commended for their knowledge of Scripture. But there is no indication that this is to form the central place in Christian worship, nor that it is necessary for the celebration of the sacraments.

Tradition

The Catholic Church does conjoin Scripture and the Sacraments, and does value biblical preaching. But how does the Church know to do these things? The Scriptures themselves are remarkably obscure on these questions. In fact, the Protestant biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias reasoned that Scripture deliberately witholds information about the celebration of the sacraments, in keeping with the ancient Christian practice of the disciplina arcani. (Hiding the sacraments from the uninitiated.)³

The truth is, we only know how to conduct Christian worship from tradition.  As it turns out, Calvin himself had to construct his liturgy using traditional sources. Auguste Lecerf has noted that Geneva’s liturgy follows the main divisions of the Roman rite.  The tripartite structure of both the Mass and the Genevan liturgy consists in the Ante-communion (invocation, psalm, confession, prayer for illumination, reading and exposition of the sacred text, and prayers of intercession), the canon of the Mass (or liturgy of the Supper), and the post-communion (thanksgivings and benediction).  Like the sursum corda, moreover, Calvin’s invocation (“Our help is in the name of God …”) is a biblical text, but it comes into the Reformed liturgies directly through the missal.  (“Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini.”)⁴

Conclusion:

In this post, I do not intend to criticize the Reformed liturgy. In fact, I find much there that is admirable and in common with Catholics. I wish to point out, rather, that the elements of Reformed worship simply cannot be sustained on the basis of Scripture alone. To be quite frank, if I believed in the “Regulative Principle,” I would say that the Pentecostal tradition would be on far stronger ground than the Reformed.  Theirs is a straightforward application of the principle: “Do what you see the apostles doing in Scripture.” And, “Follow Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 14 literally.”

1. Calvin writes, “Superstition may be viewed, either in itself, or in the disposition of the mind. In itself when men have the audacity to contrive what God has not commanded. Such are those actions which spring from will-worship, (ejqeloqrhskeia, Colossians 2:23,) Which is commonly called devotion [vulgo devotionem]. One man shall set up an idol, another shall build a chapels another shall appoint annual festivals, and innumerable things of the same nature. When men venture to take such liberties as to invent new modes of worship, that is superstition.” Commentary on Isaiah 1:14

   In 1549, Calvin writes to Bucer urging him to encourage Somerset in his opposition to superstition. “I have attempted to encourage the Lord Protector,” Calvin says, “and it will be your duty to insist … that those rites which savor of superstition be entirely removed.” In 1550 Calvin writes to Somerset again, urging him to stay the course “for the re-establishing of the Gospel in all its purity in England, and that every kind of superstition might be abolished.” In a short letter to King Edward in 1551, Calvin recalls the reign of Josiah, during which the king pursued godliness, although “there was still some remainder of bygone superstitions.” Calvin entreats the young monarch to follow the example of that biblical king, “that you might have the honor, not only of having overthrown impieties which are clearly repugnant to the honor and service of God, but also of having abolished and razed to the ground whatsoever served merely to nourish superstition.” To Cranmer, finally, in 1550, Calvin writes in order to encourage him to pursue the same path. See Calvin to Bucer, 21 October 1549, Letters 2: 233; Calvin to Somerset, January 1550, Letters 2: 258; Calvin to the King of England, January 1551, Letters 2: 301. On the important image of Josiah in Calvin’s conception of Christian kingship, see Graeme Murdock, “The Importance of Being Josiah: An Image of Calvinist Identity,” Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 1043-1059. Calvin to Cranmer, December 1550, Letters 2: 356-358. On Calvin’s critique of the liturgy of the hours, see Calvin, La famine spirituelle: sermon inédit sur Esaïe 55, 1-2 (Église française de Londres, Ms. viii. f. 2), ed. Max Engammare. English, trans. Francis Higman. (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 54.

2. Baptism is to be performed “with the whole church looking on as witness,” and accompanied by a recitation of the confession of faith “with which the catechumen should be instructed.” The supper, likewise, is to be “set before the church,” and accompanied by a sermon, the words of institution, excommunications, and a recitation of “the promises which were left to us in it.” It is to be concluded with “an exhortation to sincere faith and confession of faith, to love and behavior worthy of Christians.”Institutes, 1536 Edition ed. Ford Lewis Battles (Geneva: Eerdmans, 1995),122. See also Institutes 4.14.4; 4.15.20.
3. Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1962).
4. Auguste Lecerf, “The Liturgy of the Holy Supper at Geneva in 1542,” trans. Floyd D. Shafer, Reformed Liturgics 3 (1966): 208.

The Revelation of St John:
14 The Whore of Babylon”
Albrecht Dürer (1497-1498),

History has always posed a challenge to Protestant apologists.  However you construe the Reformation, there is always a yawing gulf of some sort between the Protestant present and the Catholic past. It demands explanation.

The traditional Protestant response has been that the Reformers recovered a gospel that had been lost.  In other words, Primitivism of some sort has played a key role in the Protestant apology.¹ The “Restoration” movement of the 19th century represents one of the strongest forms of this doctrine. Leaders like Alexander Campbell (1788-1866) presumed that nearly everything subsequent to the New Testament was ill-formed. Thus, he declared, “I have endeavored to read the Scriptures as though no one had read them before me.”² The most radical version of primitivism is the Mormon view that the entire church was lost in a “Great Apostasy.”

To explain why the Gospel was lost, Protestants have traditionally had recourse to the apocalyptic dimension. The Antichrist, identified with the Papacy, is to blame for the “smothering” of Gospel truth under a cloud of superstition and idolatry. This was the doctrine of Luther, of Calvin, and of the later Reformed tradition. Thus, the Westminster Confession states:

 There is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ: nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof; but is that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God. (WCF XX.6)

For a Protestant, the theory has much to commend it. History would seem to require something of apocalyptic dimensions to explain the utter and complete destruction of “true Christianity” from the earth in the earliest moments of Christian history. Otherwise, the situation for Protestant historians is dire. Newman, of course, said it best:

So much must the Protestant grant that, if such a system of doctrine as he would now introduce ever existed in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge, suddenly, silently, and without memorial; by a deluge coming in a night, and utterly soaking, rotting, heaving up, and hurrying off every vestige of what it found in the Church, before cock-crowing: so that ‘when they rose in the morning’ her true seed ‘were all dead corpses’—Nay dead and buried—and without grave-stone.³

Unfortunately for the Protestant historian, invoking the apocalypse is not as fashionable today. Major Protestant denominations have removed the condemnations of [pope as] Antichrist from their doctrinal statements. Historical scholarship has also rendered the theory less tenable. (As Newman noted, there just is no Protestant early Church to which one can appeal.) This calls for a new apologetic.  How to account for that yawning gulf?

I have noticed that a number of conservative Protestant writers now employ a hermeneutic of development to explain the gap between antiquity and the Reformation. On this view, the ancient church possessed only an incipient, inchoate form of Christianity. Continuity with modern Protestantism is therefore only implicit. Doctrines take shape in history, and become explicit, if at all, only through time and controversy.

I grant that this is not an entirely new approach. Protestant liberalism has always appealed to the concept of development. The more conservative Mercersburg theology of the 19th century also employed the theme. And, of course, the Catholic Church embraces a doctrine of development. What is surprising in recent evangelical appeals to development, however, is the willingness to relativize the core of their own doctrinal orthodoxy.

One striking example of this comes in the work of Allister Mcgrath. McGrath is a prolific, well-known, and respected evangelical theologian and historian. His book Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification is perhaps the definitive, English-language treatment of that subject. In the book, McGrath deals squarely with the fact that Luther’s understanding of the nature of justification is an utter novelty in the Christian tradition, “a complete theological novum.”⁴ Oddly enough, McGrath the evangelical makes no apologies for this. Instead, he declares,

 That there are no ‘forerunners of the Reformation doctrines of justification’ has little theological significance today, given current thinking on the nature of the development of doctrine.⁵

McGrath nowhere elaborates on this “current thinking,” so I am at a loss to determine why he thinks utter historical novelty has “little theological significance.” John Henry Newman, by contrast, the author of all “current thinking” on development, went to great pains to evaluate claims of development. Newman elaborated multiple “notes” to distinguish genuine development from corruption. No such elaboration is forthcoming from McGrath.

I find an equally casual, but more explicit, appeal to development in a recent article by Christianity Today senior writer Mark Galli (recently reviewed here by Bryan Cross). Galli contends that the early Church was characterized by “mass confusion,” and a “radical leveling” in which people of different ecclesiastical ranks spoke in God’s name, and offered mutually exclusive interpretations of Christianity. Only over time did something like consensus emerge:

 The full sweep of church history suggests that the Holy Spirit has, in fact, led us into all truth through no other way than men and women, slave and free, Jew and Gentile wrestling with one another about whatever issue is at hand until, in the Spirit’s good time, a consensus emerges.

Galli gives no indication of how to recognize a definitive consensus. Is it by conciliar authority? A majority or plurality of votes? Statistical sampling? In any event, this is a far cry from primitivism. Instead of the pristine purity of the early Church, Galli argues for mass confusion.  Applying this logic to current events, Galli suggests that clarity on issues like homosexuality and women’s ordination will only emerge over decades or centuries:  development; not recovery.

There is an interesting variation on this contrast between primitivism and development in another book reviewed by Devin Rose: John Armstrong’s Your Church is Too Small. Like the Reformers, Armstrong appeals to the past. Like Galli, however, Armstrong sees the early Church as characterized by confusion and division, with a weak consensus emerging only over time. Ironically, this is the feature of antiquity he finds appealing.

For Armstrong, doctrinal fluidity and a weak consensus are ideal; too much certainty is a bad thing. In his view, the doctrinal divisions of the Middle Ages and Reformation are unfortunate blemishes on the face of the Church. Armstrong celebrates current developments in world Christianity which, he thinks, portend a post-denominational era in which doctrinal divisions are significantly less important. Fluidity, change, and weak consensus are thus the hallmarks of vibrant Christianity.⁶

Assessment:

As a Catholic, I am obviously glad that many Protestants have left off blaming the “Papal Antichrist” for the loss of “true Christianity.” I am also glad that Protestant writers have commenced at least selective appropriation of the Catholic tradition. Protestant historian Mark Noll approvingly notes the current intellectual situation for Protestants:

Whenever evangelicals in recent years have been moved to admonish themselves and other evangelicals for weaknesses in ecclesiology, tradition, the intellectual life, sacraments, theology of culture, aesthetics, philosophical theology, or historical consciousness, the result has almost always been selective appreciation for elements of the Catholic tradition. Whatever Protestants may think of individual proposals, methods, or conclusions proceeding from any individual Catholic thinker, the growing evangelical willingness to pay respectful attention to the words and deeds of a whole host of Catholic intellectuals, beginning with Pope John Paul II, makes an important contribution to better intellectual effort.⁷

“Development” is one of these elements of Catholic tradition that Protestants have appropriated. However, I don’t think of this as an unqualified good. The title of this post (“Why Protestants Need the Antichrist”) is supposed, tongue in cheek, to suggest the problem.  In Protestant hands, the theory lacks a clearly identified “center” to evaluate claims of development, and to distinguish them from corruptions.

The spirit of classical Protestant apologetics is far different, and is captured in the name of Ulrich Zwingli’s famous treatise: The Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God (1522). For centuries, the debate between Protestants and Catholics has not been whether or not we could attain doctrinal certainty, but rather what is the proper basis for doctrinal certainty. The virtue of primitivism, however spurious its central premise, is belief in a pristine clarity to which we can appeal.

The modern evangelical purveyors of development, by contrast, seem content to abandon doctrinal certainty. Some years ago, evangelical theologian David Wells foresaw this abandonment of truth. His No Place for Truth (1994) and The Courage to Be Protestant (2008) diagnosed an emerging Evangelical culture in which truth claims and theology are seen as impeding “relevance” and “ministry.” This is clearly the case with Armstrong, whose proposal is for a “missional” rather than doctrinal identity in the Church.

The Catholic view of development is far different. The guiding hand of the Church’s Magisterium distinguishes true from false development. Development is acknowledged, but there is still a clear center.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

 It is clear therefore that, in the supremely wise arrangement of God, sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium of the Church are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others. Working together, each in its own way, under the action of the one Holy Spirit, they all contribute effectively to the salvation of souls. (CCC 95)

Conclusion:

Jesus said, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:16) How can we fulfill Christ’s command to believe if we cannot know for certain what to believe? The historic (and primitive) Christian position has always been that we need certainty concerning this belief. The traditional Protestant view was that the pattern of the early Church (as found in Scripture) can provide this certainty.

It seems to me that many Protestants no longer believe this. In a recent article in the Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, Allister McGrath has acknowledged that both deep-seated and recent Protestant disputes about the meaning of the Sacred Text are “beyond resolution.”⁸ The question, therefore, becomes, “Do you accept some level of skepticism and doctrinal relativism, or do you appeal to an authority outside the Scriptures to resolve disputes about interpretation?”

We have highlighted one answer in this post: a new found trust in “development” to lead us into all truth. Handbook editor Gerald McDermott has signaled another approach. Speaking to First Things about his new book, he writes:

 The book, he says, “registers a major shift in Evangelicalism, from triumphalist disdain for the Great Tradition to self-critical recognition that Evangelical theology is doomed if it does not learn respectfully from that tradition.⁹

It is a good thing that some Evangelicals are showing more respect for “The Great Tradition.” Likewise, their openness to something like the Catholic doctrine of development suggests possibilities for future dialogue. However, “development” and “tradition” are no more self-interpreting than Scripture. By invoking these concepts, recent Protestant writers have merely broadened the dataset for interpretation. They have done nothing to bring clarity or authority to interpretation. On the contrary, some have actually weakened their own truth claims. For Protestants, there is now much less certainty than when Rome was safely rejected as Antichrist.

1. On this topic, see T. Dwight Bozeman’s To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
2. Cited in Mark Noll, America’s God: from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), >380.
3. http://www.newmanreader.org/works/development/introduction.html.
4. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 34,215.
5. Ibid. 217-218.
6. John Armstrong, Your Church Is Too Small: Why Unity in Christ’s Mission Is Vital to the Future of the Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 14, 35.
7. Mark Noll, “The Evangelical Mind Today,” First Things (October, 2004).
8. Allister McGrath, “Tradition and the Interpretation of Scripture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, >ed. Gerald McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 83.
9. “While We’re at It,” First Things (March, 2012).

Religious Camp Meeting
Watercolor by J. Maze Burbank, c. 1839

It was simply inconceivable to me that the great John Calvin did not know how to be saved! Nevertheless, as I kept studying, a clear but shocking picture emerged. Calvin knew no conversionistic account of Christian initiation. His was a vastly more ecclesial, sacramental view of the Christian life – one begun in baptism, and nourished through the Eucharist. It was not conversion but the Eucharist, Calvin held, which “brings an undoubted assurance of eternal life.”¹

Ultimately, these discoveries – along with renewed study of Scripture and the Church Fathers – led me away from evangelicalism and the PCA, and into the Catholic Church. (See How John Calvin Made me a Catholic.) And today, I realize that I am not the first one to note these incongruities in the Reformed tradition. There is, in fact, a vast literature playing off Calvin against his heirs, or alternately defending them against the charge of innovation.² Within the Reformed world, there is ongoing disagreement over the extent and implications of these tensions.³ What few historians dispute, however, is that modern evangelicalism breathes a different air from traditional Calvinism.⁴ Mark Noll’s assessment of the emerging evangelicalism of the 19th century is not far off the mark:

It is not an exaggeration to claim that this nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicalism differed from the religion of the Protestant Reformation as much as sixteenth-century Reformation Protestantism differed from the Roman Catholic theology from which it emerged.⁵

For my own purposes, it became something of a passion to trace this evolution in Protestant doctrine. How did we get from an ecclesial, sacramental view of Reformation (what Philip Schaff would call The Principle of Protestantism) to an ideology of denominationalism in which the form of Church is seen as accidental to Christian identity and only “new birth” counts as important?

There are many factors in this evolution of doctrine, of course, and probably no one has done more work on this question than Mark Noll. I highly recommend his book America’s God for those who want a detailed analysis. In this article, I want to highlight only one factor that I think has poignancy for Reformed/Catholic dialogue and readers of this website. My goal is simply to identify key moments in the evolution of the Reformed understanding of being “Born again.” My thesis: that Calvin’s view of salvation was ultimately destructive of his ecclesiology, particularly in the Anglo-American context. I would not go so far as to say that it was necessarily destructive. Obviously, Reformed doctrine evolved differently in France than in England, differently in Hungary than in Holland. But, subjected to particular historical pressures, Calvinism’s great weak point (as I see it) could not hold.

Calvin saw regeneration in an ecclesiological context, united to liturgy, sacraments, and authority. Ecclesiology was to some extent constitutive for his understanding of regeneration. Eventually, however, regeneration came unhinged from this context. The Reformed doctrine of new birth became, instead, constitutive of Reformed ecclesiology. Once this happened, Calvin’s high ecclesiology became impossible.

Understanding Calvin’s Theological Context

Calvin’s theological concerns were different from Luther’s. Luther’s major preoccupation was to ease his troubled conscience. Calvin’s major concern was to unify the nascent Protestant movement in doctrine and liturgy, and to purify Christian worship of “superstition.” As a young man, he was also exercised by social disorder, for which he blamed Papal “Tyranny and superstition.” He believed that submission to proper theological authority and a purified liturgy would bring social equity.⁶

It is difficult to overestimate how important liturgy and worship were to this view of Reformation. Controlling the administration of and access to the sacraments was probably Calvin’s single greatest concern in his practical ministry from the 1530s to the 1550s. Major controversies in Geneva, such as the explosion over baptismal names, are almost inconceivable to modern Protestants, but were issues of the greatest moment for the time.⁷

Early Calvinist attempts to control prayer and devotion sound almost ludicrous today, but must be judged against Calvin’s horror of disorder and “superstition.” Consider the following account of an altercation between a 17th century Calvinist pastor and one of his flock:

Curiosity led a [Reformed] minister into [the church of] Saint André [in Bordeaux] … As he entered a little before vespers, he looked around the hall and noticed a man of his acquaintance praying in a corner of the chapel on his knees … The minister, therefore, seeing one of his flock, whom he noticed in the corner of the church, called him before the Consistory … where he asked him, “You know well what I saw you doing in the church yesterday? Aren’t you ashamed?” “If you saw me there,” the other replied, “weren’t you there too?” “Yes,” answered the minister, “but I was not praying to God like you were.” “Certainly,” he replied, “I had not known until now that it was bad to pray to God.”⁸

Calvinists today likely cannot even understand the pastor’s concern. He worried that praying in a church when there was no liturgy suggested superstition. It was too reminiscent of the Catholic practice of hallowing shrines and sacred spaces. When one studies the records of the Genevan consistory under Calvin, cases like this emerge with some frequency.

Calvin on Baptism and Regeneration

We need to keep this context in mind when considering Calvin’s doctrine of regeneration. Calvin understood quite well the Patristic doctrine of baptismal regeneration. (See Church Fathers on Baptismal Regeneration.) Luther, too, affirmed that regeneration comes through baptism. Calvin had no intention of departing from the traditional view that salvation is communicated in and through the Church and her sacraments. What he objected to was an unthinking, “superstitious” reception of the sacraments.

For Calvin, baptism was the normative means of salvation. “It is true,” Calvin writes quite bluntly, “that, by neglecting baptism we are excluded from salvation.”⁹ “All these graces,” Calvin writes, “are conferred on us, when it pleases him to incorporate us into his kingdom by Baptism. “[T]he truth and substance of baptism is comprised in [Christ] … as he communicates his riches and blessings by his word, so he distributes them by his Sacraments.”¹⁰ God, regenerating us in baptism, ingrafts us into the fellowship of His Church, and makes us His by adoption.¹¹

There were two challenges for Calvin in this close identity between the Church and salvation. The first was to make the sacraments intrinsically efficacious without denying the need for personal understanding or appropriation. In this, he was guided by his fear of unthinking “superstition.” His solution was ultimately to limit the efficacy of the sacraments to those who put forth no obstacles. Commenting on Titus 3:5, Calvin writes:

Although by baptism wicked men are neither washed nor renewed, yet it retains that power, so far as relates to God, because, although they reject the grace of God, still it is offered to them. But here Paul addresses believers, in whom baptism is always efficacious, and in whom, therefore, it is properly connected with its truth and efficacy.¹²

The second challenge, to Calvin, involved the issues of predestination, perseverance, and assurance. The key innovation in Reformed soteriology is the claim that regeneration is co-extensive with election. In Calvin’s soteriology, all the regenerate will necessarily persevere.¹³ He also taught that “certainty of election” was possible and desirable.¹⁴ It is manifest, however, that not all the baptized persevere. How to unite a high doctrine of baptism’s efficacy with a doctrine of perseverance, election, and assurance of salvation? Calvin’s solution was typically ecclesiological. Communion with the Church and reception of the sacraments are signs of election. Those who do not persevere are those who ultimately break fellowship with the Church or refuse her discipline. (It should be obvious that this ecclesiological emphasis poses difficulties for any absolute assurance of salvation. Calvin never resolved this tension.)]¹⁵

The case of Pierre Mygerandi and his sister Jane provides a good example. On April 20, 1542 Pierre and Jane were called before the Genevan Consistory about a domestic conflict. In the course of the investigation, Jane was asked both whether she had received communion, and why. She responded appropriately that she received Communion “for the love of Our Lord.” However, she must also have revealed some scruples, because the Consistory admonished “that she not go looking for her damnation, considering that she has received and confesses having received Holy Communion.”¹⁶

Calvin was very sensitive to the charge that his doctrine of election might be a threat to his doctrine of the sacraments. In his Secunda defensio piae et orthodoxae de sacramentis fidei contra Ioachimi Westphali calumnies (1556), Calvin responds to this charge, stating quite explicitly that the faithful are not to find their assurance in election, but rather to find their election in the liturgical ministry of word and sacraments. He writes:

He [Westphal] says, that the effect of baptism is brought into doubt by me, because I suspend it on predestination, whereas Scripture directs us to the word and sacraments, and leads by this way to the certainty of predestination and salvation. But had he not here introduced a fiction of his own, which never came into my mind, there ‘was no occasion for dispute. I have written much, and the Lord has employed me in various kinds of discussion. If out of my lucubrations he can produce a syllable in which I teach that we ought to begin with predestination in seeking assurance of salvation, I am ready to remain dumb. That secret election was mentioned by me in passing, I admit. But to what end? Was it either to lead pious minds away from hearing the promise or looking at the signs? There was nothing of which I was more careful than to confine them entirely within the word. What? While I so often inculcate that grace is offered by the sacraments, do I not invite them there to seek the seal of their salvation?¹⁷

The problem that Calvin did not anticipate or fully appreciate was this: what of those who, through no fault of their own, are excluded from the “proper” celebration of the sacraments? As we shall see, this was precisely the issue that began the dissolution of Calvinist ecclesiology.

The Puritan Innovation

Puritanism began as an attempt to reform the liturgy and sacraments of the Anglican Church along Calvinist lines. When this failed, English Calvinists were faced with a dilemma: how to confront questions of assurance and election without the “proper” ecclesiological context? Patrick Colinson summarizes the development of Puritanism this way:

The theological achievement of the Puritans, from William Perkins onwards, can be roughly interpreted as the adaptation and domestication of Calvinism to fit the condition of voluntary Christians, whose independence of the ordered, disciplined life of the Church Calvin would have found strange and disturbing.¹⁸

Their solution was a turn inward. “Self contemplation,” as Newman would later call it, or introspection, became the principle method for discerning regeneration and election. Hence, Perry Miller’s famous quip: “Protestantism liberated men from the treadmill of indulgences and penances, but cast them on the iron couch of introspection.”¹⁹

It is important to realize that this Puritan turn inwards corresponds in no way to the revivalistic, “pray-to-receive-Christ” type of Born-Againism of modern evangelicalism. Instead, Puritan writers produced a slew of publications designed to aid in this discernment of spirits. They were intended to identify the interior signs of regeneration and election. Pastors like Richard Greenham, Richard Rogers, Arthur Dent, William Ames, and the indomitable William Perkins produced works with titles like A treatise Tending unto a Declaration Whether a Man be in the Estate of Damnation or Salvation, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, or A Christian and plaine treatise of the manner and order of predestination. A few generations later Jonathan Edwards would produce highly sophisticated works in this vein, his most famous being Religious Affections.²⁰

Different authors listed different criteria, but by the time of the Westminster Confession (1646), there was a consensus that interior experience could convey infallible knowledge of election. The confession speaks of:

[A]n infallible assurance of faith, founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God; which Spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption. (WCF XVIII).

The question of assurance was certainly not unfamiliar to Calvin, but the frame of reference Puritanism suggested was very foreign to his way of thinking. Nowhere was this difference more in evidence than New England.

New England Ecclesiology

The Calvinists of New England drew out the ecclesial consequences of this new emphasis on interior experience and assurance. Puritan separatists sought to overcome their exclusion from the national church by “covenanting” with fellow “saints” to form autonomus congregations. The key to this ecclesiology was the conviction that one could reliably identify “the saints.” The novelty of “the New England Way,” therefore, was to make regeneration the condition of Church membership, rather than initiation into the Church the condition of regeneration. By 1636, most of the congregations of New England restricted membership to “visible saints.” This led ultimately, and ironically, to denying baptism to the children of those who could not “prove” their election. Authorities in Massachusetts created a concession in the form of the “half-way covenant,” allowing baptism for the children of the “unregenerate.” However, this was not universally accepted.

The insistence on assurance and interiority did not immediately destroy either objective church polity or morality, but the seeds were sown. The Antinomian controversy of the 1630s spoke directly to this issue. Anne Hutchinson and her supporters denied that legal evidences or “duties” could be of any value in ascertaining the state of one’s soul. They preferred immediate religious experience. Although Hutchinson’s position was condemned as heretical, it would later become the norm.

The death knell of traditional, Reformed ecclesiology sounded with the brilliant work of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Edwards synthesized the best in Puritan thought with a keen philosophical sense, and produced one of the most profound set of reflections on religious experience. However, his strong advocacy of interior experience finally turned Reformed ecclesiology on its head. Breaking with the logic of the half-way covenant, Edwards insisted that the sacraments be denied to all who could not attest to their conversion. Edwards’s doctrine led directly to the logic of the First Great Awakening: above all, work for discernible “conversions.”²¹

In the work of Edwards’s co-laborer and revivalist George Whitefield (1714-1770), the logic of “conversionism” finally bears its fruit. The destruction of any distinctive ecclesiology follows as a matter of course. Whitefield insisted on offering communion to any who showed the signs of conversion, regardless of their ecclesial affiliation. His position is telling:

I saw regenerate souls among the Baptists, among the Presbyterians, among the Independents, and among the Church [i.e., Anglican] folks — all children of God, and yet all born again in a different way of worship: and who can tell which is the most evangelical.

And again,

It was best to preach the new birth, and the power of godliness, and not to insist so much on the form: for people would never be brought to one mind as to that; nor did Jesus Christ ever intend it.²²

New England Puritanism insisted on discerning the marks of election/regeneration, and saw this as essential to constituting a true, visible Church. However, the half-way covenant still allowed for the possibility of a mixed congregation, one containing both”Tares and Wheat.” Edwards rejected the half-way covenant, and pushed Puritan ecclesiology closer simply to identifying “true Church” with the discernibly regenerate. By making the marks of regeneration essentially interior (“religious affections”) rather than sacramental, he prepared the way for a radical, redefinition of “true Church.” Whitefield’s denominationalism now follows logically. The true Church is simply the one containing all those possessing the (self-attested) interior marks of regeneration.

Innovations of the Second Great Awakening

The innovations of the First Great Awakening led directly to the innovations of the second. If signs of regeneration can be reliably discerned apart from any normative conception of Church or sacrament, then why cannot any type of means be employed to produce them? The leaders of the Second Great Awakening applied this exact argument, holding that men could be brought to show these signs of regeneration through deliberate, revivalistic measures. Institutions like the “anxious bench” and the altar call were the direct results of this thinking.

These new measures led to further refinements in the concept of regeneration itself. Edwards and the Puritans held that regeneration, as the fruit of the Spirit, is ultimately mysterious and dependent on the sovereign mercies of God, even if the signs of regeneration are readily apparent. Theologians of the Second Great Awakening, by contrast, saw that the new measures worked. They could reliably produce these signs. What does this signify for the meaning of regeneration itself?

The Premier theorist of the Second Great Awakening, Charles Grandison Finney, inventor of the “anxious bench,” reasons as follows:

I remark, then, that regeneration must consist, doubtless, in a change of the disposition of the mind — a voluntary consecration to God . . . I remark, again, in other words, that regeneration consists in a change in the ultimate intention, or end of life. The mind, in regeneration, withdraws itself from seeking, as the ultimate disposition and end, the gratification of self, and choose a higher end than itself. Its disposition is changed from supreme selfishness to an entire devotion of the whole being to the great end for which God lives, and for which he made man to live. Regeneration, then, consists in ceasing to live to sin and for selfishness, and to live to and for God.²³

This is a far cry from the Patristic notion of regeneration, or even Calvin’s doctrine, in which regeneration is brought about by our union with Christ by the Holy Spirit through baptism and incorporation into the visible Church. Finney’s “measures” moved the concepts of regeneration and Christian initiation in a distinctively individual and psychological direction, even if many Protestants were unwilling to follow all his theological conclusions. Most importantly, Finney defended the idea that regeneration is something that can be chosen and effected immediately entirely through mental processes. And while he may have relied on quasi-liturgical methods – like the anxious bench – to influence those processes, there is no reason, given his premises, that any method at all be normative.

Finney placed a strong emphasis on the ethical component of conversion. Others influenced by him preferred to emphasize the more Calvinist elements of assurance and grace. What they inherited from the era of Finney, then, was the emphasis on personal decision and instantaneous change – leading, in this case, to assurance more than ethical transformation. A simple, unemotional, voluntary consecration to God – even the recitation of a formula – privately, apart from church – now counts as Christian initiation. Thus, the birth of “the sinner’s prayer.”

Paul Harrison Chitwood has identified D. L. Moody (1837-1899) as the evangelist who first used such formulaic methods to define Christian conversion and initiation.²⁴ After Moody, however, the practice and the doctrine it implies became commonplace. Billy Graham presents a version of this in his book Peace with God. Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, makes this doctrine central to his famous pamphlet The Four Spiritual Laws. The website of Campus Crusade, for example, explains that one receives Christ, and experiences regeneration, immediately through an act of the will. It suggests a specific prayer to effect this, and follows it with the exhortation: “Now that you have received Christ . . .”²⁵

Ecclesiological Implications

Calvin made regeneration depend upon the ministrations of the Church. In Puritanism, we saw ecclesiology depend upon regeneration. However, the Puritans maintained belief in an objective polity and sacramental life. In modern evangelicalism, the revivalist thesis is carried to its logical conclusion. The Church, the bride of Christ, with which one must be in communion, is redefined as an entirely invisible affair, merely the set of those redeemed by Christ through personal conversion. Visible schism thus becomes a conceptual impossibility. Denominationalism is affirmed as a matter of principle.

Consider the Amsterdam Declaration, issued by Amsterdam 2000 (organized by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association):

The one, universal church is a transnational, transcultural, transdenominational and multi-ethnic family of the household of faith. In the widest sense the church includes all the redeemed of all the ages, being the one body of Christ extended throughout time as well as space. Here in the world, the church becomes visible in all local congregations that meet to do together the things that according to scripture the church does.²⁶ (Emphasis mine)

The National Association of Evangelicals provides an even more interesting example. In its statement of faith, the NAE does not even include an article on the Church, but rather this nebulous declaration: ” We believe in the spiritual unity of believers in our Lord Jesus Christ.”²⁷

In its most extreme form, this evangelical ecclesiology devolves into popular rants against any Church. This is not new. We find essentially the same thing in the well-known revivalist Billy Sunday (1862-1935):

Jesus said: “Come to me,” not to the Church; to me, not to a creed; to me, not to a preacher; to me, not to an evangelist; to me, not to a priest; to me, not to a pope; “Come to me and I will give you rest.” Faith in Jesus Christ saves you, not faith in the Church.²⁸

Assessment

They key innovations in Reformed soteriology were the identification of election with regeneration, and the claim that absolute assurance of salvation was possible. (Catholic tradition, by contrast, has always allowed that the regenerate may lose sanctifying grace. Catholics, therefore, profess to having assurance and hope, but not absolute assurance.) Calvin tried, furthermore, to unite this view of election and assurance with a high view of church and sacrament.

The great difficulty with Calvin’s view, as I see it, is that you can have either an absolute (though ultimately subjective and spurious) assurance of salvation or an objective certainty in the nature of a visible Church, the means of grace, and the content of revelation. You cannot have both.

If I am inwardly and infallibly assured of my union with Christ, then I must by definition disregard any possible “defeaters” arising from my contingent, historical relationship to the visible church. By contrast, if my assurance can be potentially marred by any judgment of the Church regarding my own worthiness to be admitted to communion or by any disagreement over dogma or morals, or even by my own apparent perseverance or defection, then my assurance by definition cannot be absolute and infallible.

The history of Geneva is very interesting in this regard. Throughout the 1540s, as opposition to Calvin grew more and more vociferous, Calvin evidenced an increasing willingness to link the exercise of church discipline and authority to his doctrine of predestination. The Genevan populace, by contrast, was increasingly insistent that the ministers could not read their hearts. The tension inherent in Reformed theology was playing out.

Calvin was deeply concerned with the question of visible unity, “denominationalism,” authority and sacraments. In his Petit Traicté (1540), he depicts the inter-Protestant disputes about the Eucharist as positively injurious to salvation. His solution to doctrinal disagreement was for the laity to submit with implicit faith to the teaching authority of the Reformed “Magisterium.” He was also quite clear that a verdict of excommunication should be an infallible “defeater” to any false assurance of salvation. He repeatedly taught that the excommunicated were “estranged from the Church, and thus, from Christ.”²⁹

As early as 1537, Calvin had described those who resist ministerial authority as heretics.³⁰ The Institutes, likewise, describes submission to the Church as a sign of election. The elect are “joined and bound together by such great agreement of minds that no sort of disagreement or division may intrude.” “We cannot disagree with our brethren,” Calvin adds, “without at the same time disagreeing with Christ.” The elect are “bent to obedience,” but the reprobate are “obdurate” and “unteachable.” The purpose of discipline, therefore, is to restrain those who “rage against the doctrine of Christ.”³¹

Calvin eventually went so far as to teach that the judgment of pastors effectively defines the limits of God’s election:

We see that those who have charge of the word of God, their office is to discern what is good in order to approve it and what is bad in order to condemn it. And when men submit themselves to the doctrine that we preach, we [should] regard them as those in whom God is working [i.e., the elect]. On the contrary, those who draw themselves back, we [must] hold them in derision.³²

The response of Geneva’s laity is telling. Between 1541 and 1546, there were no mass protests against Calvin’s authority or theology. However, there were numerous individuals who opposed the new ministers on theological grounds. The 1541 Ordonnances of Geneva had forbidden “dogmatizing against the received doctrine.” Both the pastors and magistrates felt it necessary to restate this prohibition in 1546. Legislation from that year identified “contradicting the word of God” as an offense specifically meriting censure before the consistory.³³

The consistory also leveled numerous undefined charges of “blasphemy” and “words against the ministers” throughout this period.³⁴ Any statement against “God, the word, or the ministers” could qualify for the indictment.³⁵ Moreover, though many of those summoned to the consistory were inarticulate, they seem to have taken great offense at the notion that the ministers could read their hearts. To state the case more theologically, they rejected the idea that the consistory could accurately define the boundaries of God’s election.

A certain Jane Pertennaz, for example, protested to the consistory that she “is not excommunicated and separated from the church … and no one will ever know her faith but God.” On February 18, 1546, similarly, Jehan Bosson protested, “that he had the Gospel in his heart as much as the ministers, and as many books.” In one of the most striking statements, a woman protested before the consistory on March 4, 1546 “that she did not hold at all to this [new] law, and wanted only the law of God.”³⁶

My personal favorite: Jane Pignier had no scruples about the church and denied calling Calvin a false prophet. However, she did want to know “whether it is necessary to believe if the preachers say there is no water in the Rhône.”³⁷

The practical problem with Calvinist doctrine, evidenced throughout its history, is that it creates an insoluble division between “real Christians” and Christians in name only. Thus, it potentially marginalizes the objective elements of Church, faith, and sacraments that all Christians visibly share. It sets up a conflict between subjective, interior “evidences” of grace and those that are objective. It pits “those of us who know we have the Spirit” against everyone else.

Calvin sought to resolve these conflicts through the exercise of Church discipline and an insistence on the objective efficacy of the sacraments.³⁸ The Puritans took a similar approach, restricting Church membership to those who were “really” Christians. The Evangelical tradition has sought to resolve the tension by denying or severely limiting the significance of the visible Church altogether.

It was precisely this division that led the young John Henry Newman to abandon his Calvinism. In considering Sumner’s Apostolical Preaching¸ he realized that Scripture does not divide the Church in this way. While Catholics believe that the Church contains both wheat and tares (those who will ultimately be saved, and those who will not), the identity of these parties is not presently revealed to us. Both wheat and tares, moreover, are truly members of the Church militant. With his characteristic clarity, Newman sums up this difference between Calvinism and the Catholic Church:

Calvinists make a sharp separation between the elect and the world; there is much in this that is parallel or cognate to the Catholic doctrine; but they go on to say, as I understand them, very differently from Catholicism, — that the converted and the unconverted can be discriminated by man, that the justified are conscious of their state of justification, and that the regenerate cannot fall away. Catholics on the other hand shade and soften the awful antagonism between good and evil, which is one of their dogmas, by holding that there are different degrees of justification, that there is a great difference in point of gravity between sin and sin, that there is the possibility and the danger of falling away, and that there is no certain knowledge given to any one that he is simply in a state of grace, and much less that he is to persevere to the end.[xxxiv]³⁹

Newman realized, as well, that the Calvinist system, at least as practiced in the Church of England in the nineteenth century, was utterly destructive of ecclesiology and objective truth. It placed a priority on the subjective experience of grace, rather than focusing on the objective content of revelation and the means of grace. Nineteenth-century Calvinism was, thus, something of the stepsister to nineteenth century liberalism:

So now we have the two views of doctrine clearly before us: — the ancient and universal teaching of the Church, which insists on the Objects and fruits of faith, and considers the spiritual character of that faith itself sufficiently secured, if these are as they should be; and the method, now in esteem, of attempting instead to secure directly and primarily that “mind of the Spirit,” which may savingly receive the truths, and fulfil the obedience of the Gospel.⁴⁰

I once doubted Newman’s conclusions. After all, my evangelical Church had insisted upon both doctrinal clarity and the assurance of faith. Indeed, the leading theologian of twentieth century Evangelicalism, Carl F. H. Henry, vociferously argued that the evangelical doctrines of Biblical inspiration and inerrancy were the only remedy for liberal subjectivism. His multi-volume God, Revelation, and Authority was an extended defense of that thesis. Henry also co-founded Christianity Today to provide a rigorous, ongoing critique of theological liberalism.

In view of CT‘s origins, I found it ironic and sad when senior CT writer Mark Galli gave up the fight for doctrinal certainty. He effectively ceded Henry’s signature issue to liberalism. In a recent article, Galli rejected the motives of those who turn to Rome for doctrinal certainty. Unlike Henry, however, he argued that the search for doctrinal certainly is fundamentally illusive. He strongly implied that issues like “homosexuality, the nature of the atonement, the prosperity gospel, the place of women in church leadership, [and] the historicity of Adam” simply cannot be answered clearly. When forced to choose between doctrinal certainty and Evangelical spirituality, he chose the latter.

I now believe that Galli’s kind of skepticism is ultimately inevitable if one insists on subjective assurance of the Spirit as an absolute priority. Objective certainty about identity of the Church and the content of revelation, or subjective (and spurious) assurance of salvation. You cannot have both. Calvin was unable to hold them together. The history of Evangelicalism, in part, is the unfolding of this tension.

Conclusion

This article has surveyed the development of a theme in Reformed theology: the progressive destruction of ecclesiology as it conflicts with the peculiar Reformed accents given to regeneration and assurance. I argue that Calvin sought to unite two conflicting priorities: an absolute assurance of salvation and the absolute necessity of visible Church and sacrament. The working out of this tension in the Anglo-American context resulted in the victory of the former over the latter.

I have not sought to touch on all the nuances of assurance, election, predestination, or the sacraments, but merely to highlight key moments in the evolution of Anglo-American Calvinist theology. Nor would I argue that these contingent, historical facts are somehow necessarily implied by the themes of Calvin’s theology. Both Lutheranism and the wider history of Calvinism evidence other ways of resolving the conflict.⁴¹ Nevertheless, I would claim that the conflict itself is necessary, even if its resolution is not.

For the Reformed reader, I would now ask, “How do you feel about the convoluted continuity between Calvin and Billy Graham? What does it mean to be born again? And how do you know? What role do sacraments play? What do you make of the inability of the Reformed tradition to make consistent sense of Scripture on these issues?”

As a very young child, I believed that salvation came through recitation of a mantra: the sinner’s prayer. As I grew older, I learned to nuance this with a more thorough understanding of the doctrines of grace, justification, and election. Eventually, the question of sacraments arose. And then the relationship between assurance and the moral life. As I surveyed the Reformed tradition, I learned that there was literally no consistent way of framing these issues. As clear as I once thought salvation was, I learned that there was simply no universal Protestant answer to the question, “How do I get to Heaven.” Now I thank Heaven for the clarity of the Catholic Church.

1. Inst. 4.15.5; 4.17.1; 4.17.32.
2. R.T. Kendall would be representative of the discontinuity thesis; Richard Muller of continuity. See, for example, R.T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: OUP, 1981), and Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988).
3. The current doctrinal controversy in the PCA over the Federal Vision Theology is another witness to these tensions in Reformed theology.
4. Some helpful introductions to evangelicalism and its emphasis on “born again” spirituality include David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1989); Mark Noll, American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Alister McGrath,. Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1995.
5. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 3.
6. There have been numerous studies of Calvin’s social concern. Among the more important are Marc-Edouard Chenevière, La pensée politique de Calvin (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1937); André Bieler, La pensée économique et sociale de Calvin (Geneva: Librairie de l’Université, 1961); Josef Bohatec, Calvin und das Recht (Feudingen in Westfalen: Buchdruckereri uverlagsanstalt, 1934); Fred Graham, The Constructive Revolutionary: John Calvin and His Socio-Economic Impact (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1971); Elsie Anne McKee, John Calvin on the Diaconate and Liturgical Almsgiving. (Geneva: Droz, 1984); Jeanine Olson, Calvin and Social Welfare: Deacons and the Bourse Française. (Sellingsgrove, PA: Susquehana University Press; London: Associated University Press, 1989). Calvin’s condemnation of popular superstition as a cause of disorder recurs throughout his corpus. For specific examples, however, see Joannis Calvini Opera Selecta. Edited Petrus Barth. 4 vols. (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1926) 1: 467 (cited hereafter as OS); Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia. Edited by Guilielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, and Eduardus Reuss, for the Corpus Reformatorum. 59 vols. (Brunswick: 1863-1900), 6: 472-473 (cited hereafter as CO).
7. Karen Spierling, Infant Baptism in Reformation Geneva: The Shaping of a Community, 1536-1564 (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2009).
8. Florimond de Raemond, Histoire de la naissance, progrez et decadence de l’hérésie de ce siècle (Rouen: Chez P. La Motte, 1628-1629), 999; cited in Thomas Lambert, “Preaching, Praying and Policing the Reform in Sixteenth-Century Geneva.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1998.), 280.
9. Comm. John 3:5; CO 47: 55.
10. CO 6: 187. Incorporation into Christ is incorporation into the church, for Calvin, although this creates a tension in his theology concerning those who leave the Church. Egil Grislis, “Calvin’s Doctrine of Baptism,” Church History 31 (1962): 47, 56.
11. Inst. 4.17.1
12. Comm. Titus 3:5; CO 52: 431.
13. Inst. 3.21.7
14. Inst. 3.24.4
15. “We are taught . . . that call and faith are of little account unless perseverance be added.” Inst. 3.24.6. “Yet it daily happens that those who seemed to be Christ’s fall away from him again, and hasten to destruction.” Inst. 3.24.7.
16. Registres du consistoire de Genève au temps de Calvin I: 42-43 (cited hereafter as RCG); Registers of the Consistory of Geneva in the time of Calvin I: 46-47 (cited hereafter as RCGT).
17. CO 9: 118-119; CTS 2: 343.
18. Collinson, Godly People: Essays in English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), 539, cited in Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 318.
19. Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition, (New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 207.
20. Benedict, Christ’s Churches, 318-320.
21. Noll, America’s God, 41-44.
22. Journals (London: Banner of Truth, 1960), 458, Cited in Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (Downers Grove: IVP, 2003), 13-15.
23. http://www.revival-library.org/catalogues/miscellanies/sermons/finney.html
    
24. Paul Harrison Chitwood, “The Sinner’s Prayer: An Historical and Theological Analysis,” (Dissertation, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2001).
25. (http://www.campuscrusade.com/fourlawseng.htm)
26. Cited in J. I. Packer and Thomas Oden, One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus (Downers Grove: IVP, 2004), 207.
27. http://www.nae.net/about-us/statement-of-faith
28. Edwin Scott Gaustad and Mark Noll, A Documentary History of Religion in America: Since 1877 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 283.
29. Inst. 4.12.9.
30. OS Vol. 1: 390-391, 397, 411-415; See also Inst. 4.3.1
31. Inst. 3.24.14; 4.12.1; 4.17.33; 4.17.38.
32. CO 6: 48: “En cela nous voyons que ceulx qui ont charge de la parolle de Dieu, leur office est de discerner ce qui est bon pour l’approuver et ce qui est meschant pour le condampner. Et quant les hommes se rengent à la doctrine que nous portons que alors nous les regardions comme ceulx en qui Dieu besogne. Au contraire ceulx qui s’en retirent que nous les ayons en mespris.”
33. Registres de la Compagnie des Pasteurs de Genève 1: 12, 17 (cited hereafter as RCP).
34. RCG II: 8, 11, 20, 21, 22, 29, 33, 51, 57, 108, 132, 142, 155, 202, 229.
35. RCG II: 21.
36. RCG I: 26-27, 85-86, 198, 205, 283; RCGT I: 30-31, 92, 142, 209, 216, 301; RCG II: 142: “qu’il avoit autant d’Evangile en son cueur que led. ministres, et autant de livres que luy.” RCG II, 154: “qu’elle n’estoyt point de ceste loy, mail volloyt estre seulement de celle de Dieu.” This last remark should not necessarily be taken as an affirmation of the principle of sola scriptura. Throughout the consistory records, dissidents contrast the phrase “cette loi” with the previous regime, not with the “Law” of God.
37. RCG I: 102, 210, 293; RCGT I: 108-109, 222, 313; RCG II, 18, 229.
38. This is a very involved topic. In sum, however, Calvin ended up appealing to the same kind of subjective, illusive criteria that he decried in popular resistance to his theology. In the final analysis, he “knew” that his interpretation of Scripture was correct, and therefore, authoritative. His was literally a divine, prophetic authority. On this topic, see Max Engammare “Calvin: a Prophet without a Prophecy.” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 67 (1998): 643-661.
39. http://www.newmanreader.org/works/apologia/part3.html
40. http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume2/sermon15.html
41. On this topic, see Randall Zachman, The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2005), 7.