Scenes from the Life of Joachim and Anna
Master of Alkmaar (c. 1500)

The Evangelical statement reads as follows:

Immaculate Conception. Evangelicals find unnecessary and unbiblical the notion that Mary was preserved from the stain of original sin from the first moment of her conception. Still, we affirm much of what this teaching is intended to convey—that Mary was the object of God’s gracious election in Christ; that she was uniquely prepared to become the mother of our Lord; that she is an extraordinary model of the call to discipleship and the life of holiness; that her assent to the purpose of the Lord was itself the result of God’s unmerited favor toward her—an example of sola gratia; and that she should be honored and called “blessed one” in all places and by all generations.

Much interconfessional discussion has centered on the Greek kekaritomene of Luke 1:28 which the Vulgate renders gratia plena and the Douay-Rheims version as “full of grace.” In its clearest form, this perfect passive participle expresses divine favor in the passive voice, as in the King James Version: “Hail thou that art highly favoured” (cf. Luther, holdselige, and Calvin, agréable). Luke 1:28 does not mention Mary’s conception, though Scripture does teach that God’s redemptive call can take place before birth or even conception (Jer. 1:5; Gal. 1:15).

The concrete manifestation of divine favor occurred through the descent and overshadowing of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35), whose sanctifying activity enabled Mary’s response of faith and thus inaugurated the renewal of all creation in her womb (Luke 1:38). Calvin affirms this point by stating that “to carry Christ in her womb was not Mary’s first blessedness, but was greatly inferior to the distinction of being born again by the Spirit of God to a new life” (Commentary on the Harmony of the Gospels, 42). By divine grace alone Mary was enabled to give birth to the Son of God, and from her alone he received his human nature. It is not to be doubted that this was wrought by the power of God in a way no less miraculous or mysterious than the virginal conception itself.

Immaculate Conception is not accepted as a dogma by the churches of the East and was much debated in the West before and after the Reformation. Augustine held to a high view of the personal holiness of Mary but believed that God’s abundant grace was conferred on her “for vanquishing sin in every part” (On Nature and Grace 36.42). The idea that Mary was conceived without original sin was rejected by Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Aquinas, among other notable teachers of the Church. Their thinking about Mary deserves fresh consideration.

Evangelicals confess the sinlessness of Christ but not the sinlessness of Mary. Hebrews 7:26 refers to Jesus as our High Priest. He alone was perfectly holy, blameless, unstained, separated from sinners. The Bible makes clear that no other human being can claim this (John 8:46; Rom. 3:23, 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:22; 2Cor. 5:21; Eph. 2:3; Heb. 4:15). Jesus taught his disciples, among whom Mary was the first, to pray “Our Father who art in heaven . . . forgive us our trespasses” (Matt. 6:12). The Bible declares that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and he was the Savior as well as the son of his blessed mother (1 Tim. 1:15; Luke 1:46–47).

What disagreements lie behind the disagreements stated here by Evangelicals concerning the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception? I find five underlying disagreements.

The first is the notion that only what is explicitly stated in Scripture, or follows by logical entailment from what is taught explicitly in Scripture, is necessary for Christians to believe. That can be seen in the claim that “Evangelicals find unnecessary … the notion that Mary was preserved from the stain of original sin from the first moment of her conception.”¹ (emphasis mine) The Catholic teaching, by contrast, is that the deposit of faith comes to us through both Scripture and Tradition. See “Sola Scriptura: A Dialogue Between Michael Horton and Bryan Cross VIII. Scripture and Tradition.” Therefore, from this Catholic perspective a doctrine not being explicitly stated in Scripture does not make it unnecessary.

The second underlying disagreement visible here is the notion that Tradition is not an authoritative guide in the interpretation of Scripture, but is instead itself judged by the interpretation of Scripture one arrives at apart from that Tradition. That notion can be found in two claims made in the Evangelical statement above. Evangelicals find the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception “unbiblical” because in their view (a) “The Bible makes clear that no other human being can claim [to be perfectly holy, blameless, unstained, separated from sinners]. (John 8:46; Rom. 3:23, 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:22; 2Cor. 5:21; Eph. 2:3; Heb. 4:15), and (b) “The Bible declares that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and he was the Savior as well as the son of his blessed mother (1 Tim. 1:15; Luke 1:46–47)”

Regarding the second claim, Evangelicals assume that since Christ was the Savior of His Mother, therefore it must follow that was a sinner, and that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is false. But that conclusion does not follow, as Lawrence Feingold explains in “Mary’s Immaculate Conception, drawin from Scotus.”² Through His Passion, Christ gloriously saved His Mother by preventing her from falling into original sin and actual sin.

Evangelicals think Mary was not sinless, on account of their interpretation of five verses:

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, (Rom 3:23)

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned— (Rom 5:12)

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. (1 Cor 15:22)

Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. (Eph 2:3)

For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. (Heb 4:15)

Evangelicals assume that the ‘all’ (and ‘our’ in the Hebrews passage) in each case is intended to include Mary, because they do not find in Scripture any exegetical evidence to justify qualifying the extension of the term to everyone but Mary. Then having concluded that the ‘all’ must include Mary, they claim that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is “unbiblical,” i.e. contrary to Scripture. And they thereby conclude that the Tradition regarding the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception must be the result of a false accretion that worked its way into the Church’s beliefs and liturgical practices. What is therefore at work in this claim that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary is contrary to Scripture is the notion that Scripture is to be interpreted only by Scripture, apart from Tradition, and then the interpretations thus attained are the standard by which Tradition is to be judged. The Catholic position, by contrast is that Tradition is the authoritative guide for the interpretation of Scripture, and therefore informs us that the ‘all’ should be interpreted as qualified. (See “The Tradition and the Lexicon.”)

The third underlying disagreement concerns the nature of grace. Evangelicals view grace as only divine favor, whereas in Catholic doctrine grace is not only divine favor, but also the divine gift God gives as a result of that favor, namely, a participation in the divine nature. (See “Lawrence Feingold on Sanctifying Grace and Actual Grace.”) This difference in our conceptions of grace changes how we understand the implication of Luke 1:28. A conception of grace as mere divine favor allows for a simul iustus et peccator view of Mary’s soul even while Gabriel is speaking to her or at any other point in her life. But a Catholic understanding of grace as participation in the divine nature, along with Luke 1:28, not only indicates a prior infusion of grace, but allows a Catholic to see Christ as Mary’s Savior through preventing her at every moment from being deprived of sanctifying grace.

The fourth underlying disagreement is an implicit denial of the development of doctrine. This can be seen in the Evangelicals’ claims that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception “is not accepted as a dogma by the churches of the East and was much debated in the West,” and “The idea that Mary was conceived without original sin was rejected by Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Aquinas.” Their appeal to these facts as evidence that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is false presupposes that doctrine does not develop. If doctrine develops, as St. Vincent of Lérins describes in his Commonitory, and Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman describes in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, then the fact that at some earlier time not all Christians recognized or affirmed it is not in itself evidence that it does no belong to the Tradition.

The fifth underlying disagreement in this Evangelical statement regarding the Immaculate Conception concerns the basis of ecclesial authority. When the Evangelicals assert that the reasoning by which St. Bernard and St. Thomas rejected the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception “deserves fresh consideration,” they are not only implicitly denying the development of doctrine; they are also denying the magisterial authority of the Catholic Church, because Pope Pius IX infallibly defined the dogma in 1854, writing:

Accordingly, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, for the honor of the Holy and undivided Trinity, for the glory and adornment of the Virgin Mother of God, for the exaltation of the Catholic Faith, and for the furtherance of the Catholic religion, by the authority of Jesus Christ our Lord, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own: “We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.” (Ineffabilis Deus)

Moreover the Evangelical statement implicitly affirms the ecclesial authority of Calvin and Luther. The statement not only appeals to Luther’s and Calvin’s translations of terms, but writes, “Calvin affirms this point by stating that “to carry Christ in her womb was not Mary’s first blessedness, but was greatly inferior to the distinction of being born again by the Spirit of God to a new life.” Why do Luther’s and Calvin’s opinions come up in an explanation by Evangelicals of their reasons for not accepting the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception? The appeals to Luther and Calvin demonstrate performatively that these Evangelicals believe that Luther and Calvin hold some kind of ecclesial/interpretive authority. But Catholics do not believe that Luther or Calvin had ecclesial/interpretive authority. So one more disagreement underlying Evangelicals’ disagreement with the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is the basis for ecclesial/interpretive authority. For Evangelicals, that authority reduces to agreement with their own interpretation of Scripture.³ For Catholics, that authority comes through apostolic succession.⁴

Conclusion

The resolution of a disagreement, and especially a seemingly intractable disagreement, typically requires locating the underlying disagreements that are the fundamental source and cause of the disagreement in question. In this case, the Evangelical statement concerning their disagreement with the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary reveals five underlying disagreements: (1) the notion that only what is explicitly stated in Scripture, or follows by logical entailment from what is taught explicitly in Scripture, is necessary for Christians to believe, (2) the notion that Tradition is not an authoritative guide in the interpretation of Scripture, but is instead itself judged by the interpretation of Scripture one arrives at apart from that Tradition, (3) the notion of grace is merely divine favor, (4) an implicit denial of the development of doctrine, and (5) the notion that ecclesial authority is grounded in agreement with one’s interpretation of Scripture and not in apostolic succession in union with the episcopal successor of the one to whom Christ gave the keys of the Kingdom. Subsequent attempts to resolve the Evangelical-Catholic disagreement concerning the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception will require turning to these underlying disagreements.

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, 2011.

1. This assumption is also manifested in the statement that “Luke 1:28 does not mention Mary’s conception.”
2. For more detail, see Volume XX of Scotus’s Lectura in Librum Tertium Sententiarum (Q.1 dis. 3), titled “Utrum Beata Virgo fuerit concepta in peccato originali (whether the Blessed Virgin was conceived in original sin).
3. See “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority.”
4. “Sola Scriptura: A Dialogue Between Michael Horton and Bryan Cross, IX. Apostolic Succession.

Jason Kettinger
Easter Vigil, 2011

As we survey the interesting “space” that is the internet, we find intellectual pursuits and human interactions of varying quality. This is no less so in the field of religion, where the Lord Jesus Christ is often obscured behind a veil of ignorance and even needless hostility. It is my sincere hope that this meager contribution be a step toward affirmative dialogue and reconciliation.

With my purpose stated, the humble reader turns to ask the question he wants to know: Why? What makes a Reformed future pastor toss it all aside, and become Catholic? That is of course complicated, but I’ll try to explain. The story is really one of the harmony and convergence of truth, and the place where that convergence led was the Catholic Church.

The story begins with God, as it always does. What do we do when we offend God, who has graciously given us all things? Even in light of Christ’s sacrifice for us this turns out to be a deeper question than it seems. A friend once remarked that the sacrament of Reconciliation “does do justice to the existential reality of sin.” Every Christian I know, and every Christian community of which I have been a part, understands and attempts to take account of the individual and personal dimension of sin. The individual and corporate experience of union with Christ tells us that we cannot be cavalier about sin. Our relationship with Christ is bilateral, real, and demanding. We all have done business with God; I’m not surprising anyone here, I trust.

The church family from whom I’ve learned the most taught me that what we did mattered; we had a liturgy that reflected the reality of what I’ve just written. Before we enjoy the benefits of sonship, we have to acknowledge our sins, and allow God to restore us. Then we are exhorted to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel. Then we shared the meal which proclaimed our restoration: the Eucharist. We didn’t fear to call it that, because if Eugene Peterson can do it, so can we. We were intentionally liturgical; we were intentionally ecumenical; we were doggedly Eucharistic. We believed that our life in prayer with God would lead us to ask new questions, and that the answers could lead us to revise aspects of our Reformed tradition. At the same time, if the Reformers or others gave us anything, it was that “faith once delivered to all the saints.” Truth doesn’t change; truth stands the test of time; the Church of Jesus Christ is old; His truth is both old and new. We were creedal, because the gospel was given to us, and we will give it in turn. There is a Great Tradition, we said, and we’re only a part of it. We read not only Calvin and Edwards but also O’Connor and Chesterton. I might have heard it a thousand times: “The Church did not start in 1520.” Continuity. Love. Simplicity. Jesus. There are so many stories I could tell. Just know that when I left for seminary in 2005, the unity of all Christians wasn’t some pie-in-the-sky dream; it was how we lived, and what we worked toward. Need I say more about that?

So I had an instinct for unity, and a tendency to express my theology in liturgical action. I was political, which is another way of saying I wanted my faith to make a difference in the world. We chalked up theological disagreements as historical anachronisms that awaited the clarity of God’s grace, which would show a truer, deeper unity in the times to come. I didn’t yet see the tensions which were coming to the fore.

I admit, I always enjoyed being branded as “dangerous.” But what struck me as I read more about liturgy and covenant theology was how warmly these theologians spoke of Jesus, how liturgical action was the way they not only experienced God’s love, but declared it. It was missional. If on some gut level they spoke with such resonance about the Christian life I understand, how bad could they be? If one reflects on what we’re saying here, it’s that liturgy has an ability to speak a language that bridges traditional hostilities.

If we begin theology with the simplicities of liturgy, and work outward, it is highly possible that we will face tensions with traditional formulations. The question we ask is what we will do about it. I’m not a systematic theologian; in the truest sense, I am an evangelist. The life of prayer, the liturgical life, needs settled truth to ground it as we reach out in faithfulness to God. I have never been averse to correction. What I began to experience and to attempt to describe was the inability to reconcile a contradiction, between righteousness imputed and righteousness shared. Essentially, something had to give. Either the righteousness of Christ was imputed to me by faith and fully completed, leaving the life of the church and repentance a good, but not necessary step by us, or Chapter 15 of the Westminster Confession of Faith was more correct: repentance and perseverance are an absolute requirement of the Christian life. It absolutely could not be both, despite how much we may insist on it. The buzzword “union with Christ” only makes it worse. Imputation either puts God in union with manifestly unholy people, or the participation suggested by the life of sanctification undercuts the truth of imputation extra nos. You have to choose.

What I do dare to say is that these sympathies in the direction of continual necessary repentance do undercut the principled basis for the Reformed separation in the 16th century. Why? Because we had insisted that true participation (as it was articulated in medieval Catholic theology) denigrated the work of Christ and the reality of our victory in Him. We had no cause to pretend otherwise, nor to smuggle in that which we opposed in the vanity of having a “fully-orbed” theology. Does this protest still have merit? What should we do if the battle-cries we raised once have no correspondence to our Christian lives? It is a life grounded in experience; we would not dare say that our liturgy, sustained by the interplay of repentance and forgiveness, of humility and exaltation, was a formality. In fact, this was both its liveliness, and its danger. Now on the table as never before are issues of apostasy and sacramental objectivity that never would have been asked among the Reformed. In one sense, there has always been a variety of perspectives within Reformed theology, and tensions therein. But never before have the tensions demanded an answer. Against the backdrop of my basic view of church history — continuity — the tensions or contradictions became such that questions like, “Why do we seek forgiveness for sins we say have already been forgiven?” are brushed aside at one’s peril.¹ What I’m illustrating here is a tension between historic and systematic theology, and lived experience in the pews.

If we might criticize some people with a certain lack of precision, a riposte with no good reply is that we don’t need answers to questions that no one is asking. What we were fighting about is the sacramental life versus an historic faith, with due respect, that is at its core anti-sacramental. If any of the sacraments have an objective character, the Church which gives them must also. Our communities were forged in the white-hot fire of theological disputation; our fathers in Protestant and Reformed faith would not share this new tolerance. If we have been led here because the law of prayer is the law of faith, I reasoned, it is a cause for serious discussion. I need only allude to those Reformed congregations who have opened their Lord’s Supper to Catholics and Orthodox to show that we have arrived at such a moment.² Even if the occasion only served to sober the hasty when such people refrained in obedience to their communities, the discussion will occur by necessity. In any case, we can see that the questions of the 16th century are giving way to the questions of the 21st. At the least, I assert that the issue isn’t on the front-burner. If so, maybe it’s time to lay down arms. For me, I could not stand apart on the strength of a slogan that meant nothing. Not even out of loyalty.

But what of the basic claim of the Reformers, that they had better captured the spirit and intent of the Church Fathers? It’s true that they were not ignorant of them. As for me, I knew nothing of the Fathers on their own terms. It had to be an open question, if I were to be intellectually honest. After all, any group can read history in such a way as to vindicate themselves. And this leads directly to the question of history, and because salvation history is at issue primarily, we are asking, “What is the Church?” This was a question like a shard of glass in my heart starting in 2006. The magnitude of the social and political issues we are facing absolutely demands that we reject most forms of “co-belligerence” as insufficient, because the answer to all of them is Christ; it is our love, it is our striving together in Christ and for Christ that can answer these problems. And they stem from existential questions surrounding the identity and purpose of man. If Christians do not answer these in the same way, how will people know that it is Christ who meets them? Moreover, if we do not accept one another as brothers, which Christ shall they follow? But do we dare force one another to adopt differing paradigms of the Church and salvation? How could that be anything but a failure? We may rightly say there is much that unites us. But if those things do not impel us toward one another, they are folly at best, and a violation of our consciences at worst, if we pretend the differences aren’t real. On both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide, we conceive of the Church and of history in very different ways. Which view of history and Church does justice to the ancients?

Confessionalism may indeed preserve those ancient elements of truth which predate the schisms, but it does a terrible job of indicating how we are to pursue unity practically. This was the second thing I realized: being confessionally Reformed is in contradiction with the very definition of the Church found in the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter XXV.³ An invisible Church cannot define itself, or what it believes. But the certainty of Reformed distinctives depends on the authority of a visible Church. There is a quotation attributed to one John L. Girardeau within the essay “The Discretionary Power of the Church” that took my breath away every time I read it. It reads in part:

The delivery of Christ’s doctrines and commandments by men does not make them the doctrines and commandments of men. … Their dogmas are not man’s, they are God’s dogmas.

I’ve got to drop the guard a bit, take leave of that measured tone for which this site is known, and I beg your pardon if it sounds rude, but does that sound like an invisible church to you? Take your pick: Either the Westminster divines re-constituted the visible community that Christ established (which was obviously contrary to what I had been taught, not least the promise of Christ in Matthew 16:18) or we cannot be reasonably certain that our conclusions are more than opinion; that is, there could be also more fundamental truth possessed by those who are not us. In fact, our very definition presupposes that that is the case. In the twenty-fifth chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the first article tells us that the catholic church is invisible. The second article, by contrast, strongly asserts the visibility of that church. Moreover, the fifth article in this same chapter discusses the purity and truth of various “Churches” on Earth. First, which of the first two articles actually controls here, so that we might find out where we ought to reside, and what we are to believe? Second, what authority did this assembly have to make such a determination? The fifth article utterly depends on the invisible church asserted in Article I, but the comfort of being in the supposed household of God comes from Article II. Which is it? And who are they?

“Ah,” says the alert reader, “but Scripture is our guide.” We’ll get to that. For now, the guest post by Fred Noltie will be my answer. All this is to say that one question would not leave me alone, and it is the question that people of my generation are asking: “What is the Church?” The traditional definition for the Reformed is fine to a point, and that point is where our distinctives meet their doom against the presumption of historical continuity. If our communities as Protestants existed and subsisted on the unstated premise of ecclesial deism, then the concrete action taken in regard to history to explain it is what I call “ecclesial plagiarism.” The ancients may be dead, but we owe them at least the right to tell us what living for Christ was actually like before we retroactively re-write them into a history more amenable to the community we inhabit. I have already said that my fundamental approach to history was and had to be continuity. This is often claimed to refute the charge of schism. I had warmly sung “The Church’s One Foundation” for years as a prayer for unity, unaware that my own ecclesial commitments prevented me directly from ever realizing my hope. That may seem unfair, but I do believe the creeds themselves help explain it.

In that wonderful but critically unexamined tutelage of sympathy and continuity with history, the creeds figure prominently. In even the popular mind, we recite the creeds in solidarity with our ancestors in the faith, and even with those Christians who are separated from us. This is largely a lovely expression of catholicity, and would pass without a mention if not for the minor inconvenience of Sola Scriptura. As a principle, it does not admit any external authority for the creeds. The final authority is presumably Scripture, and the creeds would function as a norm only after they had been tested by it.

But as I heard one elder speak about the creed (the Apostles’, in this case) I came to realize — as though I had been hit by a brick in the face — the truth of this assertion that welled deep within me, first, after I read Mathison’s The Shape of Sola Scriptura, and now loudest in Sunday School just days before I entered the Catholic Church: “Derivative authority is a sham.”⁴ The elder said in effect that if we wanted to edit the creeds (to delete the word “catholic” as I recall) we could, because the Creed wasn’t Scripture. I saw then that Mr. Cross’s claim contra Mathison was true. There is no real, principled distinction between the “Solo Scriptura” that Mathison abhors, and the Sola Scriptura that he commends. If there is a difference in practice or in result, it has to do with the person’s own piety, and God’s grace lovingly keeping him from a more severe individualism. In fact, the chapter in Mathison’s book on the error of Solo Scriptura almost made me Catholic by itself. Why would I pay as much attention to the text, context, place in the canon, authorial intent, and myriad other things in order to rightly handle the word of truth, and completely ignore the same with respect to the creeds? This is the ecclesial plagiarism I mentioned. If I edit the creed, it no longer functions as an authority over me, but I over it. In this sense, we cannot say we are in solidarity with anyone, either today or long ago, in the recitation of the creeds as Protestants. Why would the ecclesiology which gave it birth and the battles therein be incidental to its meaning? Can I think that St. Augustine is with me when I spurn the Church to which he submitted?⁵ Thanks be to God for various creeds and their use in Protestant communities. But it is not altogether clear that a principled creedalism actually exists apart from the Catholic Church and the individualism of “me and my Bible.”

I have made two perhaps frustrating assumptions: that the Church of Christ is visible, and that the Catholic Church today is that Church. I can only say that Petrine primacy was rather easily established from the Fathers,⁶ and that patristic authors on the Eucharist and apostolic succession cast more than a reasonable doubt on both the authority of my community to believe otherwise (and still be the Church) and the antiquity of those particular beliefs. Some might say that I have been a rebel from day one, and there is some truth in that. However, even as I actively investigated Catholic claims, and explored Catholic life, I never lost sight of Christ Jesus. I found Him there as I went; I pleaded with Him to guide me. I gave Jesus every question.

Even as I entered RCIA last August, I was uncommitted. Yes, I had dared to walk on the dangerous ground of uncertainty of all but Jesus. Yes, I put my career on hold, and then ended what it would have been. Yes, I struggled, and hurt, and cried, and prayed. You bet, I was afraid. It wasn’t as bad as what Francis Schaeffer went through, and though he took a different path, I thank God that I never doubted Jesus as he did. I knew Him, and He knows me. But the heart of it all is that Jesus asked me to surrender everything to follow Him, even to Rome, and the vicar who sits on Peter’s chair. The intellectual and historical collided with the personal; I had to do it in the peace of conscience. In that peace, and for that peace.

The most damaging chimera, the most serious error of the Reformation, is Sola Scriptura. It caused me to kidnap our ancient brethren in the faith, to claim them as my own against their wills. I had to ask my own heritage boldly, “Who asked us?” and be willing to live with the reality that no one did. I could not live with a hermeneutic that couldn’t silence the Baptist down the street (and bring us into harmony) much less the heretic. I had to face the reality of Christian division, and the reality that these divisions were caused by false principles I’d inherited from a movement I’d thought necessary. Its animating principle conspires to make invisible and without doctrine the Church we’d rightly claimed as our mother, outside of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. The old saw that, “If I’m wrong, I’ll be on me knees tomorrow morning outside the Vatican doing penance” is just a toothless phrase if one’s hermeneutic of Scripture, history, and Church disallows the very consideration that one is wrong.

My beloved brethren in Christ Jesus scattered in many places, let us prayerfully consider whether the convergence of truth now leads us to begin again, to return home in peace.

Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mother

1. See “Reformed Imputation and the Lord’s Prayer.”
2. For example, see Trinity Kirk’s “On Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Reformed Catholicity.”
3. See WCF XXV.
4. See, for example, “C. The Delusion of Derivative Authority.”
5. Think of his statement to the Donatists, “You know what the Catholic Church is, and what that is cut off from the Vine; if there are any among you cautious, let them come; let them find life in the Root. Come, brethren, if you wish to be engrafted in the Vine: a grief it is when we see you lying thus cut off. Number the Bishops even from the very seat of Peter: and see every succession in that line of Fathers: that is the Rock against which the proud Gates of Hell prevail not.” (PL 43.30.) See also his statement against the epistle of Manichaeus quoted in The Chair of Peter: D. Fifth Century.
6. See, for example, Steven Ray’s book Upon This Rock. Other relevant works can be found in “The Papacy” section of Suggested Reading.”

Mark Galli

His reasoning begins with a notion of the early Church as “Massive confusion.” He writes, “The Holy Spirit set the pattern for what church would be like at the day of Pentecost. And it looked like this: Massive confusion.” For Galli, the New Covenant introduced “radical leveling” such that there was no magisterium, and widespread doctrinal disagreements, often taking decades to resolve. No decisions by Apostles or councils were authoritative. The Apostles tried to use their authority to settle disputes, but the best they could do was appeal to Scripture just as any other Christian could. Doctrinal disagreements were eventually resolved by Christians who “lived and argued together at the prodding of the Holy Spirit,” without any magisterium. Galli concludes, writing, “We don’t need a magisterium. We already have a Lord, who told us that not even the gates of Hades (whose landlord loves to sows confusion in the church!) will prevail against the church. In short, we don’t need premature closure as much as we need persevering confidence that the Spirit will lead us into all the truth we need, when we need it.”

Did the Early Church have a Magisterium?

Of course having a magisterium is useful, but the utility of having a magisterium is no reason to become Catholic. Ultimately, one should become Catholic only if the Catholic Church is the Church Christ founded, and thus only if the authority of the Catholic magisterium is a divinely established authority, having been established by the incarnate Christ before His Ascension. If the Catholic magisterium was not established by Christ, then the Catholic magisterium is not even useful, because it has no authority at all, and thus cannot authoritatively adjudicate any question whatsoever. But if the Catholic magisterium was established by Christ, then the due response is not determining whether having this magisterium is useful, but submitting to it, as an expression of our submission to Christ who governs His Church through it.

So the right starting question is whether Christ established a magisterium (i.e. a teaching and governing authority) in His Church. For Galli, the day of Pentecost is the paradigm, and he sees there only chaos and confusion. But that conclusion may itself be premature. Between Christ’s Ascension and Pentecost, the only event Scripture records is the filling of Judas’ office, under the leadership of St. Peter. That would have been superfluous and misguided if in a few days there would be a radical leveling that eliminated any magisterium. In fact, nothing about Pentecost is disordered. Those persons who did not understand the other languages the Apostles were speaking were possibly bewildered by the fact that simple men from Galilee were able to speak foreign languages. The event itself, however, was not “massive confusion” but well-ordered for the very purpose that persons of all different languages could hear and believe the one message the Apostles were preaching, not a multiplicity of contrary teachings. The purpose of the birth of the Church at Pentecost was precisely to ‘unconfuse’ the separation and confusion God had sent on prideful man at the Tower of Babel.¹ If the Church were to be “massive confusion,” that would not be any different from the post-Babel situation; disorder and confusion cannot possibly rectify disorder and confusion.

And there is evidence in Scripture not only of order, but of a magisterium. About seventeen years after Pentecost, when a dispute arose in the universal Church, we see in Acts 15 that it was settled in an orderly way at the Jerusalem Council attended by Apostles and elders. And in his first letter to the Corinthians St. Paul writes clearly, “for God is not a God of confusion [ἀκαταστασίας -- disorder] but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.” (1 Cor. 14:33) A few verses later he writes: “But all things must be done properly and in an orderly [τάξιν] manner.” (1 Cor 14:40) To see only confusion on the day of Pentecost and in the early Church is to miss the clear evidence that Christ gave authority to His Apostles, and that they authorized others to succeed them in governing and teaching the particular Churches so that all things would be done in an orderly manner, and that there was an established means by which the unity and peace of the Church would be preserved.²

Confidence in the Holy Spirit Requires not Co-opting the Holy Spirit

According to Galli, even though there was no visible order or structure in the early Church, nevertheless the Spirit always continued to lead the Church into all truth, not only in that first generation of Christians but even down to the Evangelicalism of the present day. He writes:

But even after they [i.e. the Apostles] spoke or wrote, the church had to go through a period of discernment to determine what the Holy Spirit was, in fact, teaching the church. … 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. … We mustn’t forget that for a couple of hundred years, most Christians were not Trinitarians in the way we understand the Trinity today, but the Holy Spirit slowly led the church into a fully Trinitarian faith.

Galli’s notion of the Spirit continually and faithfully leading the Church into all truth is something that Catholics also deeply affirm.³ But there is a fundamental incompatibility in Galli’s position, because the notion that the Holy Spirit continually “guides the Church into all truth” justifies the “confidence” of which Galli speaks only if the Church has visible, institutional unity. The claim that “the Church” had to determine something is an objective claim only if “the Church” has a visible unity as a single institution. Otherwise, the claim reduces to “those with whom I agree reached the conclusion with which I agree.” By denying the existence of a magisterium, Galli is left to pick out “the Church” by way of agreement with his own interpretation of Scripture. And there is no basis for confidence that the Holy Spirit is uniquely leading that group of persons into all truth, because any group of heretics could make the very same claim.

For example, the reason the Arians could not credibly claim that the Church had to go through a period of discernment to determine that the Holy Spirit was, in fact, teaching the Church that Arianism is true, that after the Nicene Council the Church continued only with those in the Arian tradition and that those persons who followed the decision of the Council were the heretics who were thereby separated from the Church, is precisely that the visible Church made this decision at that Council by way of the magisterium of bishops in communion with the episcopal successor of the Apostle Peter.

Similarly, the monophysites could not credibly claim to be the continuation of the Church by the leading of the Holy Spirit precisely because the magisterium of the Church decided against monophysitism at the Council of Chalcedon ratified by Pope Leo. And the same is true of each of the heresies the Church faced in her early centuries. A magisterial decision made it possible for the claim that the Holy Spirit is guiding the Church to be an objective claim, rather than a relativistic claim made by one of multiple parties, each attempting to co-opt the ‘guidance’ of the Holy Spirit to support their own particular interpretation of Scripture.

For claims about the Holy Spirit leading “the Church” to determine something to be objective claims, rather than merely self-serving attempts to co-opt the Holy Spirit to support the emergence of one’s own interpretations and theology, the Church must be visible and visibly one. Yet the Church can have a visible unity as a single institution only by way of a hierarchical unity, i.e. only if there is a magisterium, for the reasons Tom Brown and I explained in “Christ Founded a Visible Church.”

Confidence and the Consensus Criterion

Galli claims that “a consensus emerges,” but he does not include the “among whom” qualifier. A consensus did not emerge among the conjunction of those following the decision of the Council of Nicea and those following Arius. The magisterial decision against the Arians forced the Arians out of the visible Church, and thus did not allow Arianism to be even a “branch within” the Church. A consensus did not emerge between Catholics and Marcionites; rather, the magisterial decision by the Church of Rome forced the Marcionites out of the visible Church, and again did not allow Marcionism to be a “branch within” the Church. And so on, with all the heresies throughout Church history.

In order for the “a consensus emerges” criterion to be meaningful as a basis for confidence that this consensus is the result of the Holy Spirit’s guiding, this consensus must be distinguishable in principle from the sort of consensus that heretics can attain among themselves. But without a magisterium, the only kind of consensus possible is a consensus of precisely that sort, i.e. a consensus among those who agree with oneself and one’s own interpretation. Without a magisterium, any heretical group could claim to be the Church, and could claim that its own heretical beliefs are the result of what the Holy Spirit gradually taught the Church, and could claim that consensus was reached among those who agree with their particular heresy. When heretical groups make such claims, each claiming to be the Church uniquely led into all truth by the Spirit, while each group holds beliefs incompatible with beliefs held by the other groups, this shows that in claiming to have been led to their ‘truth’ by the Holy Spirit they are merely co-opting the Holy Spirit to support their own interpretation and the historical process by which their own set of beliefs and interpretations arose. For Galli to have a basis for confidence in the Spirit’s guidance of the group of persons who agree with his own interpretation of Scripture, he cannot be in the same epistemic situation as those heretical groups, groups which he himself would claim to be heretical. And yet that is exactly the epistemic situation he is in, defining “the Church” by way of agreement with his own interpretation of Scripture.

Church history shows that heretical groups naturally treat the divine providence by which they were divinely permitted to fall into heresy as though it were instead the Holy Spirit supernaturally and uniquely leading their particular group into the truth that none of the other sects holds. Any heretical group could claim like Galli that “the full sweep of church history suggests that the Holy Spirit has, in fact, led us into all truth.” Any group of persons can be an “us” and claim to be “the Church.” But without a magisterium instituted by Christ, every claim to be “the Church” reduces to a claim about a group of persons who shares one’s own theological opinion. Without a divinely established magisterium, the confidence one can have that one’s own theological opinion is what the Holy Spirit has led “the Church” to determine cannot be qualitatively greater than that of every heretical group throughout Church history who thought the same about themselves and their theological opinion.

Without a magisterium, therefore, there is no basis for confidence that the set of persons picked out by their agreement with one’s own theological opinion is the Church being led into all truth by the Holy Spirit, and that one’s own theological opinion is that to which the Holy Spirit has been guiding the Church for the past two thousand years. Without a magisterium, confidence in the Spirit guiding “the Church” is actually confidence in one’s own interpretation of Scripture, by which what counts as “the Church” is determined. So for any claim about “the Church coming to determine what the Holy Spirit is saying,” what has always made it possible for such claims to be objective and not a mere retrospective co-opting of the Spirit to give divine sanction to one’s own interpretation, has been the existence of a divinely established magisterium by which that determination was authoritatively made definitive in the visible Church.

Depending on the Magisterium while Denying its Existence

Thus in appealing to what the Church came to determine by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Galli is implicitly depending on the Catholic magisterium of the first millennium. In that sense Galli is implicitly borrowing from the Catholic Church in order to ground the determinations he claims were made by the leading of the Holy Spirit through the early centuries of the Church.⁴ For Galli, however, “there was no magisterium in the early church, but only Christians who lived and argued together at the prodding of the Holy Spirit.”

But as I have just shown, his claim that the Holy Spirit guided “the Church” to make determinations requires that there was a magisterium, because otherwise “Church” would be reduced to “those persons throughout time who generally agree with my own interpretation of Scripture.” In that case Galli’s claim that the Holy Spirit teaches and prods the Church would be a co-opting of the Holy Spirit in support of the process by which those who generally agree with Galli came to the set of beliefs and interpretations he himself affirms. By denying that there was a magisterium in the first millennium, Galli undermines his claim that anything has been determined or settled. Everything remains up in the air, an open question yet to be settled. And thereby he undermines the very story he tells about the Spirit guiding the Church into all truth. There can be no objective development of doctrine without a magisterium, because without a magisterium not only can nothing be definitively determined, but even the identity of the Church cannot be objectively determined; there can only be those who share one’s own interpretation, and all the other groups who do not.

Every heretical group in Church history could claim that it does not need a magisterium because it has has the Spirit, and this fact undermines the objectivity of Galli’s claim, as I have shown above. But no less problematic for Galli’s position is that to hold that things have been determined in any definitive sense over the course of Church history, there has to have been a magisterium. Otherwise, what has happened is not in any sense a ‘determination,’ but merely a choice by Galli to place himself in one among hundreds of different theological traditions that emerged through various schisms and doctrinal disputes, each claiming to have been guided by the Holy Spirit to the ‘truth’ of their own unique position. In order to appeal to the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the Church, and this not ultimately reduce to a burning in one’s own personal bosom, “the Church” must be picked out by something other than its agreement with one’s own interpretation of Scripture; it must be a visible body with a unified magisterium established by Christ. And if that is the case, then the proper response is to find that teaching and governing authority Christ established in His Church, and follow Christ by following it.

What would a Rejection of a Divinely Established Magisterium Look Like?

Galli claims that he does not need a magisterium, because he already has the Spirit:

We don’t need a magisterium. We already have a Lord, who told us that not even the gates of Hades (whose landlord loves to sows confusion in the church!) will prevail against the church.

The notion that “we don’t need a magisterium; we have the Spirit” is not a new one. The Montantists held something quite similar toward the end of the second century. Presbyterian minister Rick Philips replied similarly to Michael Liccione a few years ago.⁵ But there is a principled epistemic difference between submitting in the “obedience of faith” to the Church that Christ Himself founded when He was on the earth, not because it conforms to one’s own interpretation of Scripture but because Christ founded it, and forming or joining a novel community of persons because their doctrines generally match one’s own interpretation of Scripture. When we work our way through Church history and we examine the plethora of heretical sects that arose and decayed over the past two thousand years, we find that these heretical sects all have something in common; they were each formed on the basis of a particular novel interpretation of Scripture, and other persons not infrequently joined them on the basis of their agreement with that interpretation, rather than submitting to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church Christ founded. Following the Church that is already there and has always been there in continuity from the Apostles, is an act of faith in Christ who founded it. But forming a new sect on the assumption that the Church that has always been there in continuity from the Apostles is wrong, has always been an act of pride and rebellion against ecclesial authority.

As Christians we know both that Satan wants to make us think more highly of ourselves than we ought, and that he wants to destroy Christ’s Church. Pride is the chief of the seven deadly sins, and this was the sin by which Satan fell. So we know that one of his chief goals in attacking Christ’s Church is to entice Christians to rebel against Christ, by rebelling against the teaching and governing authority Christ established in His Church. We also know that he is an angel of light, and that he tempts men by making evil seem good. So how can he persuade men to rebel against Christ, while making them think that they are serving Christ? What would it look like, if Satan were successfully to persuade Christians to rebel against Christ’s Church? He would do this through pride portrayed as zeal for Christ and His gospel, convincing men to think that they can interpret Scripture better than can the magisterium Christ established in His Church. It would in effect reduce to an ecclesial version of Pink Floyd’s ‘we don’t need no education.’

That is not the virtue of faith, but the vice of pride coated in the veneer of love for Christ and His gospel. Such persons take interpretive authority to themselves, rather than submitting in humility to the ecclesial authority Christ established, in succession from the Apostles. This is the way Satan causes schisms and heresies, through a pride in which a person takes to himself an ecclesial and interpretive authority not given to him by the magisterium Christ established. Faith is not expressed through ‘submitting’ to “the Church” as picked out by its agreement with one’s own interpretation of Scripture.⁶ That is neither submission nor faith. That is distrusting Christ, by distrusting the Church He founded, and distrusting His governance of His Church through the persons He chooses and authorizes to teach and govern His Church.

Faith, by contrast, “believes and professes all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.” Because faith does not presume eccleisal deism, faith submits to the Church that has always been there, even before the sixteenth century and all the way back to the Apostles, in the humility that is the very opposite of the pride that takes to oneself an ecclesial and interpretive authority that has not been given to oneself by those already having that authority. This is what St. Thomas Aquinas explained about the relation between faith and the Church, namely, that faith in Christ is faith through the Church Christ founded.⁷ It should be of no small concern that one’s position is indistinguishable in principle from a case of rebellion against divinely established authority. In order to justify separation from the already existing magisterium, one must have a principled basis for distinguishing rightful dissent from rebellion. And “following my own interpretation of Scripture” is no such principled basis, because it is common to all the heretical and schismatic sects and their founders.

We need a magisterium in order to have an ecclesial faith, rather than a me-and-my-Bible [along with whoever happens to agree with my interpretation] faith, and because otherwise Christ would not have established a magisterium in His Church, and enjoined us to “submit” to them and “obey” them as persons who keep watch over our souls (Heb 13:17). Christ chose and authorized Apostles not to force the early Church to choose between following the Apostles and following the Holy Spirit, but so that they could follow the Spirit by following the Apostles. Similarly, Christ’s promise concerning His Spirit leading men into all truth is not a promise that the Spirit will guide private interpretation or private bosom-burning into all truth. It provides no ground for certainty “that I am being guided into all truth” for those persons separated from the magisterium and following their own interpretation of Scripture along with others who share that interpretation. Christ’s promise that the Spirit will guide “you” into all truth has been understood in the visible Church as a promise that the Spirit will lead the Church through the magisterium He established. That is precisely how we can have confidence to know that we are being led by the Holy Spirit, and not co-opting the Spirit to sanction our own private interpretation or subjective bosom-burning.

1. See “Pentecost, Babel, and the Ecumenical Imperative.”
2. See “Sola Scriptura, a Dialogue Between Michael Horton and Bryan Cross, section IX, Apostolic Succession.
3. See “Ecclesial Deism.”
4. Of course this borrowing is arbitrary, since Galli is taking some things determined by the Catholic Church, and rejecting others. But nevertheless, by taking magisterial decisions as determinations produced by the Spirit, Galli is implicitly relying on the Catholic magisterium.
5. My reply to Philips is titled “Play church.
6. See “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority.”
7. See “St. Thomas Aquinas on the Relation of Faith to the Church.”

What if Protestantism in its present form is the fractured remains of a Catholic protest movement that began in 1517, but which has long since forgotten not only what it was protesting, but that it was formed by Catholics, in protest over conditions and practices within the Catholic Church? What if Protestantism has forgotten that its original intention was to return to full communion with the Catholic Church when certain conditions were satisfied?

During the week approaching Reformation Sunday last year those questions prompted me to write, “Trueman and Prolegomena to “How would Protestants know when to return?”.” I included the term ‘prolegomena’ because before discussing the conditions under which Protestants can return to full communion with the Catholic Church, Protestants (and Catholics) must first recover the memory of our history, not only our shared history as one Church prior to the sixteenth century, but also the history by which we came to be divided during that century. Recovering that history shows not only that the early Protestants never intended to form a perpetual schism from the Catholic Church, but also helps us remember that Protestant communities are by their history, communities in exile from the Catholic Church, and thereby by that history ordered toward eventual reconciliation and reunion with the Catholic Church. According to that history Protestantism began as a protest movement initially made up of Catholics protesting the Catholic Church and seeking to reform her; it was never intended to remain perpetually in schism from her.¹ Semper Reformanda does not translate as “perpetually in schism.” Hence in “Trueman and Prolegomena” I quoted Protestant professor of historical theology Carl Trueman, who wrote:

[W]e [Protestants] need good, solid reasons for not being Catholic; not being a Catholic should, in others words, be a positive act of will and commitment, something we need to get out of bed determined to do each and every day.

Yet even among those Protestants who retain the memory of Protestantism’s origin as a Catholic protest movement, Reformation Day is typically viewed as a day of celebration. On Reformation Sunday of 2009, we posted a 1995 Reformation Day sermon by the Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas, named by Time magazine as America’s best theologian. A few weeks ago I had a chance to talk with Hauerwas in person, and he said that he still affirms every word of that sermon. In that sermon Hauerwas says:

After all, the very name ‘Protestantism’ is meant to denote a reform movement of protest within the Church Catholic. When Protestantism becomes an end in itself, which it certainly has through the mainstream denominations in America, it becomes anathema. If we no longer have broken hearts at the church’s division, then we cannot help but unfaithfully celebrate Reformation Sunday.

Tomorrow will be celebrated by many Protestants as “Reformation Sunday.” To be sure, part of what Protestants celebrate on Reformation Day are what they believe to be the truths upheld and preserved within Protestantism. But without careful qualification, celebrating “Reformation Day” while remaining separated from the Catholic Church is a kind of performative contradiction, because it implies that separation, not reform, is the ultimate goal of the protest. Celebrating Reformation Day can be for that reason like celebrating a divorce, or more accurately, celebrating estrangement from our mother and from all our brothers and sisters who remain in her bosom, when in truth Christ calls us all to full communion and prays that we would be one. Moreover celebrating what is a division can blind the celebrants to the evil of that continuing division, just as celebrating divorce could blind children to its evil, or celebrating abortion could blind the celebrants to its evil.

But Reformation Day can be approached differently. It should be an annual reminder of the continuation of the evil in our midst that is the Protestant-Catholic division, a division that causes scandal to the rest of the world regarding the identity and efficacy of Christ’s gospel. In that respect, Reformation Day is a day to ask ourselves the following question:

What have I done, since the last Reformation Day, to help bring reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics?

If the answer is ‘nothing,’ then by our inaction we are in actuality perpetuating the schism which has continued now for almost five hundred years. Reformation Day ought therefore be a day in which Protestants are reminded to enter into authentic and charitable dialogue with Catholics, and Catholics are reminded to enter into such dialogue with Protestants, in order to put this schism behind us as a tragic event in Church history, through which God can nevertheless bring good. The lot of those who despair over the possibility of reconciliation is to die without seeing it. However, that generation which in faith truly believes that with God nothing is impossible will live to see it, and will be graced with the everlasting privilege of being the instruments through which this reconciliation is accomplished.

Having recollected our memory of our history, and a shared understanding of the early Protestants’ intention to reform the Catholic Church, not to form a schism from the Catholic Church, each Protestant faces the following question: How would I as a Protestant know when to return? No one Protestant can answer that question for all Protestants, because no one Protestant has the authority to speak for all Protestants. Each Protestant therefore must answer that question for him or herself.

But at the same time, the Protestant is faced with a second-order question and a second-order problem. The problem is that if we survey a thousand Protestants, and ask each what the Catholic Church would have to change, in order for him or her to stop protesting and be reconciled to the Catholic Church, we get almost a thousand different answers. When the Protestant reflects on his own act of setting conditions that the Catholic Church must meet in order for him to return to full communion with her, he is faced with an awareness that because each Protestant has a different set of conditions for return, and because he has no unique authority above that of all other Protestants to speak for all other Protestants, his very approach makes Protestant-Catholic reconciliation impossible. That’s because even if (per impossible) the Catholic Church could abandon her own doctrine and adopt a Protestant doctrine, the Church could not possibly adopt and simultaneously hold the incompatible Protestant positions on any particular theological question.²

The Protestant who reflects on this cannot but notice that to approach reconciliation this way is to fall into ecclesial consumerism, as each person demands that the Church conform to his own interpretation of Scripture before he will submit to her. Implicit in the very nature of an “I won’t return unless the Church does x” condition for reconciliation is a denial of ecclesial authority, a denial that not only presumes precisely what is in question between Protestants and the Catholic Church with respect to the existence of magisterial authority, but implicitly exercises that magisterial authority. So the second-order question is this: How can a Protestant pursue an end to the Protestant-Catholic schism without falling into ecclesial consumerism?

If, as Neal and I argued in “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority,” to make conformity to one’s own interpretation a condition for submission is performatively to make oneself one’s own authority, the Protestant’s very act of laying out a list of conditions for reunion with the Catholic Church is not a theologically neutral act. In this act the Protestant intrinsically arrogates to himself an interpretive authority exceeding that of the magisterium of the Catholic Church. He is therefore confronted not only with the changes he wants to see in the Catholic Church, but with the realization that if he sets conditions that the Catholic Church must satisfy in order for him to return to full communion with her, he is performatively arrogating to himself ultimate interpretive authority, and seeking to conform the Church to the image of his own interpretation of Scripture. So the question I invite our Protestant readers to answer is not “What would the Catholic Church have to change in order for me to return to her?” but rather, “What does the multiplicity of Protestant answers to that question reveal about both the prospects and presuppositions of that approach to Protestant-Catholic reconciliation?

1. So long as Protestants redefine schism from the Church as heresy, that memory will remain hidden.
2. See, for example, the various Protestant notions of justification in the recent book Justification: Five Views.

The claim in the Westminster Confession of Faith that all controversies of religion ultimately are to be determined by the Holy Spirit speaking in Sacred Scripture contradicts the testimony of the Church Fathers, who repeatedly teach the necessity of judging such controversies by way of the Church and Sacred Scripture. The Westminster Confession of Faith is a classic restatement of Reformed theology born in the 17th century from an assembly of ‘Divines’ convened by the British Parliament. In its Chapter One, the Divines took up what is perhaps the clearest point of distinction between Protestant Reformers and Catholics, namely the locus of ecclesial authority to settle the doctrine of the faith.

The Westminster Confession addresses the matter this way:

The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.¹

Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Westminster Confession, expounds upon this point:

That the Supreme Judge, by which all controversies in religion are to be determined, is no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture, is asserted in opposition to the Papists, who maintain that the Church is an infallible judge in religious controversies; though they do not agree among themselves whether this infallible authority resides in the Pope, or in a council, or in both together. Now, the Scripture never mentions such an infallible judge on earth. Neither Pope, nor councils, possess the properties requisite to constitute a supreme judge in controversies of religion; for they are fallible, and have often erred, and contradicted one another. Although the Church or her ministers are the official guardians of the Scriptures, and although it belongs to them to explain and enforce the doctrines and laws contained in the Word of God, yet their authority is only ministerial, and their interpretations and decisions are binding on the conscience only in so far as they accord with the mind of the Spirit in the Scriptures. By this test, the decisions of councils, the opinions of ancient writers, and the doctrines of men at the present time, are to be tried, and by this rule all controversies in religion must be determined.²

That is, for the Reformed subscriber to the Westminster Confession, every controversy of religion, and every theological decree, opinion, or doctrine, is to be put to one test: the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture. This is meant to avoid ultimate reliance upon human ecclesial authorities (specifically, the Catholic Magisterium) who, from the Reformed perspective, can, and have, erred on religious matters.

Given the finality with which the very Word of the Third Person of the Trinity must be taken, it might seem straightforward enough to rely on this Word to settle controversies. With this rule, the English Reformers were marking out a bright dividing line between the Church of England and those Churches in communion with Rome. The reformational church authorities were not over the Bible, could not declare contrary to it, and would not be taken as having a voice against the Holy Spirit. But how does this work practically, this putting a controversy of religion or theological doctrine to “the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture”?

Shaw explains that it works this way: a controversy may properly be put to the Church or her ministers, who, acting as ‘guardians’ of the Scriptures and enforcers of the law contained therein, yield ‘ministerial’ authority. However, he also cautions, their decisions on any given controversy are only binding on the believer’s conscience insofar as the decisions are in line with “the mind of the Spirit in the Scriptures.” The believer may, under this scheme, try the word of the ministerial authorities in an effort to ensure it is sound.

Because a believer-disputant can cross-check his ministerial authorities before being bound by their settlement of any given controversy, these authorities offer “final judgment” on nothing. The relationship is one of ‘guardianship,’ but the guardians are followed only to the extent that the guarded are in consent and agreement with the guardians’ interpretations. But the believer-disputant, too, is a fallible and often-erring authority, so fails the very test Shaw attempts to apply to Catholic authorities. This leaves the believer-disputant in no better position than his guardian to render “final judgment” on a controversy of religion. Given these deficiencies, what the ministerial authorities and believer-disputants cannot do individually, they cannot do in conjunction. As both authorities who could determine what the Holy Spirit has said have failed the test Shaw believes he has properly applied to the Catholic Church, there is no practical way in the Reformed scheme to settle a controversy of religion with certainty through “the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.”

With that background, I would like to explore how the Church Fathers treat the question of whether the final judge of controversies of religion, or of theological decrees, opinions, or doctrines is Scripture or the Church, or whether there is a third way. I will also briefly identify what the Catholic Church itself officially teaches on this matter.

II. Church Fathers

A great deal of extant writings from the early Church Fathers have “controversies of religion” as their very topic or subject matter. The early Church Fathers penned these works, which were mailed and passed amongst the early Churches with great zeal, to combat a host of disputes, controversies, and heresies. From them we can glean an understanding of how the early Church resolved controversies, or measured theological decrees, opinions, or doctrines. This makes for a useful comparison to the conclusion on the same subject drawn by the Westminster Divines.

The works of St. Ignatius of Antioch provide a fine example. He lived from around the year AD 50 to approximately AD 107, and wrote on the subject of resolving controversies of religion on the way to his martyrdom, just a few years after the Apostle St. John died. He wrote that:

For, all who belong to God and Jesus Christ are with the bishop. And those, too, will belong to God who have returned, repentant, to the unity of the Church so as to live in accordance with Jesus Christ. Make no mistake, brethren. No one who follows another into schism inherits the kingdom of God. No one who follows heretical doctrine is on the side of the passion.³

For St. Ignatius, returning to one’s bishop is identical with returning to the unity of the Church. One lives in accordance with Jesus Christ by way of seeking unity with the Church. There is no apparent place for conflict between belief necessary for unity with the Church and belief in accordance with Jesus Christ.

Elsewhere, he writes:

Let all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ did the Father, and the priests, as you would the Apostles. Reverence the deacons as you would the command of God. Apart from the bishop, let no one perform any of the functions that pertain to the Church. Let that Eucharist be held valid which is offered by the bishop or by one to whom the bishop has committed this charge. Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful to baptize or give communion without the consent of the bishop. On the other hand, whatever has his approval is pleasing to God. Thus, whatever is done will be safe and valid.⁴

From this text we see how inextricably intertwined are the authorities of the Church and the Word of God. Theirs is not a non-binding guardianship over Scripture. Rather, they have the shepherd’s authority to lead. Consider St. Ignatius’ claim that “whatever has [the bishop’s] approval is pleasing to God.” Of course St. Ignatius does not have in mind a bishop who invents novel doctrines that are contrary to the deposit of faith. But nor could he mean to say that whatever has the bishop’s approval is pleasing to God only insofar as the bishop is ruling in a way that is subordinate to and fully consistent with the Bible. Since one could say the same of the determinations of non-bishops (i.e., that their decisions are pleasing to God insofar as they conform to Scripture), this incorrect interpretation of St. Ignatius would leave the Bishop with no ruling authority at all.  A third way to view this question of final doctrinal decretal authority starts to emerge – the Church and revealed truth resolve controversies of religion together; they are the inseparable, final authority.

To take up just one other brief example, the works of St. Irenaeus provide a helpful perspective on this subject. St. Irenaeus, born in the early second century, speaks with great clarity in identifying what is a proper authority to settle controversies of religion. He does not teach that the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture is our final authority in controversies of religion, as the Westminster Confession claims. Rather, he says:

Since therefore we have such proofs, it is not necessary to seek the truth among others which it is easy to obtain from the Church; since the apostles, like a rich man depositing in a bank, lodged in her hands most copiously all things pertaining to the truth: so that every man, whosoever will, can draw from her the water of life. For she is the entrance to life; all others are thieves and robbers. On this account we are bound to avoid them, but to make choice of the things pertaining to the Church with the utmost diligence, and to lay hold of the tradition of the truth. For how stands the case? Suppose there arise a dispute relative to some important question among us, should we not have recourse to the most ancient Churches with which the apostles held constant intercourse, and learn from them what is certain and clear in regard to the present question? For how should it be if the apostles themselves had not left us writings? Would it not be necessary to follow the course of the tradition which they handed down to those to whom they did commit the Churches?⁵

For St. Irenaeus, “[t]he supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined” for the individual Christian is not the Holy Spirit speaking in Sacred Scripture. In cases of controversy of religion, we should “have recourse to the most ancient Churches with which the apostles held constant intercourse, and learn from them what is certain and clear in regard to the present question.” In helping to shed light on how to resolve a dispute about an important question among the Christians, St. Irenaeus argues from a hypothetical scenario wherein the Apostles had left us with no writings (that is, imagine if there was no New Testament by which to judge a matter). In that case, he argues, Christians would be left to turn to the traditions handed down by the Apostles to the most ancient Churches. Likewise, for disputes that persist even though all disputants have the Apostolic writings in hand, his argument concludes that we must “lay hold of the tradition of the truth,” which was passed on through the apostles.

These examples are from just two of the early Church Fathers, but each of them would support this recurring theme. These are not cherry-picked snippets from the early Church Fathers, but exemplary of early discourses on this question. And this question is one that came up routinely as the early Church struggled with settling the proper procedure necessary to address substantive theological debates in a binding fashion. We learn from the ancient Church that controversies of religion are resolved by ecclesial authorities expounding upon the Sacred Scriptures and Sacred Tradition together.

III. Catholic Teaching

There are noteworthy similarities between the Reformed and Catholic doctrines on Sacred Scripture. Both would agree that Sacred Scripture is the word of God.⁶ God is its author.⁷ He chose human authors, and inspired them to write what He wanted, and nothing more.⁸ The inspired books that make up the canon teach truth, and are truth without error.⁹ The Church venerates Scripture as she does the Body of Christ itself.¹⁰ In Scripture, “the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children and talks with them.”¹¹ The concept of personal communication from God to believer in Scripture is not antithetical nor even foreign to a Catholic understanding. The Catholic Church’s teaching and the Westminster teaching coalesce even insofar as they teach that the Holy Spirit is our interpreter of Scripture.¹²

But there is certainly a difference between Protestants and Catholics when it comes to belief about Sacred Scripture, and this difference relates to the section of the Westminster Confession I began by quoting. The Catholic Church teaches that Christianity is not a “religion of the book,” but rather a religion of the Eternal Word, a “Word which is incarnate and living.”¹³ While the Holy Spirit interprets Scripture, He does so for the Church and through the Church, not in a private-yet-authoritative fashion.

This contrast highlights an essential feature of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church does not believe that the Holy Spirit ordinarily operates directly and immediately in the heart of the individual Christian to teach Scripture and illuminate its meaning. If the Holy Spirit ordinarily operated in this way, the individual would not have need for the Church as a teaching agent of God. This view denies that Christ established a visible organ through which the Holy Spirit ordinarily operates. Such is the view of the Montanists. The Catholic Church, against Montanism, believes that Christ did establish a visible organ through which the Holy Spirit operates, including the key operation of illuminating revealed truths for the Church’s benefit so that she can, in turn, reliably and authoritatively teach the faithful.

In regard to the roles of the Church and Sacred Scripture in resolving controversies of religion, the Reformers seemingly had to reach the conclusion articulated in the Westminster Confession because they subscribed to a false dichotomy between the Scripture and the Church as the final doctrinal authority. For the Westminster Divines, and for Calvinists today, the starting point for analysis is that either the Magisterium or the Bible can settle controversies of religion, or bind upon believers a theological decree, opinion, or doctrine. It could not be both together because, they believe, any human agent cooperating with Scripture qua Word of God would compete with or detract from its Divine character.  (And it goes without saying that, for Calvinists, it could not be the Magisterium.)

According to the Catholic Church, all interpretations of Scripture — and we could say all attempts at resolving controversies of religion — are “subject to the judgment of the Church which exercises the divinely conferred commission and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God.”¹⁴ While believers can and should read Sacred Scripture with great devotion, listening for the voice and guidance of the Holy Spirit while they do so, their conclusions are always subject to the guidance and correction of the Church’s teaching authority. Without Her divinely given authority, there is no safeguard on the deposit of faith from dilution and admixture of human or sinful error.

There is no middle ground between this divinely given authority of the Church to guide scriptural interpretation, on the one hand, and complete individualism in interpretation which leads to unceasing division, on the other. This is because the method dependent upon individual interpretation cannot compensate for the admixture of sinful error without resort to the Montanist’s view of the Holy Spirit’s action in guiding each individual’s interpretation of Scripture — a view which experience with diverse interpretations of Scripture betwixt the faithful, if nothing else, has proven invalid. The early Church Fathers saw the need for having resort to the Church’s teaching authority in settling controversies of religion, and they addressed this need time and again. It is this the Catholic Church sees today while it stands firm on its own teaching authority while simultaneously yearning for reunion with the separated eastern churches and Protestant ecclesial communities.

IV. Conclusion

The Westminster Confession’s claim that every controversy of religion, and every theological decree, opinion or doctrine is to be taken to none other than the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture is ahistoric. The primary subject of the extant writings of the early Church Fathers is precisely controversies of religion; this is far from an alien topic to them. And the recurring answer they give is that controversies of religion are settled ultimately from the Church and Scripture in inseparable unison. Only this position allows for binding answers to disputes within the faith. The Catholic Church has held this position steadfastly through two millennia.

1. WCF, ch. I, sec. 10.
2. Robert Shaw, Exposition of the Westminster Confession, ch. 1, available here.
3. Letter to the Philadelphians, ch. 3, MG 5, 700; FC I, 114.
4. Letter to the Smyrnaeans, ch. 8, MG 5, 713; FC I, 121.
5. Against Heresies, bk. 3, ch. 4, MG 7, 855; ANFI, I, 416.
6. Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 104.
7. Id., para. 105.
8. Id., para. 106.
9. Id., para. 107.
10. Id., para. 103.
11. Id., para. 104.
12. Id., art. 3, sec. III.
13. Id., para. 108, quoting St. Bernard, S. missus est hom. 4, 11: PL 183, 86.
14. Dei Verbum 12, sec. 3.

Terry Johnson, senior minister of Independent Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Savannah, Ga., wrote an article titled “Our Collapsing Ecclesiology” in the March issue of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s magazine New Horizons. The article is well worth reading, because it examines the recent trends in Evangelicalism away from attendance in Sunday morning services, even away from organized institutional church altogether. It cites George Barna’s announcement of the “New Church,” which is “without structure, organization, clergy, officers, accountability, or discipline. It has no location, commitments, or physical presence. It is merely an informal, ad hoc, uncovenanted association of believers.” According to this view “the local church ceases to exist. The requirement of Hebrews 10:25 (that believers assemble together) could be fulfilled … “in a worship service or at Starbucks.” In the mind of these Evangelicals, “I am not called to attend or join a church. I am called to be the church.” For them, writes Terry, “Church … is like the YMCA, except that one actually has to join the YMCA. It’s good to go there to exercise, but sometimes one can do just as well at home—or maybe somewhere else. “Do what feels right for you,” we hear said. “Go where your needs are met.”

For Terry, this Evangelical conception of ecclesiology is deeply flawed, and he contrasts it with the ecclesiology in the Reformed tradition. He writes:

Thankfully, we have a strong ecclesiology in the Reformed tradition. Calvin endorsed Cyprian’s statement that there is no salvation outside of the church. The Westminster Confession of Faith warns that outside of the visible church “there is no ordinary possibility of salvation” (25.2). Jesus gave to the church the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the power of binding and loosing (Matt. 16:19), and the authority to forgive and retain sin (John 20:23). He appointed apostles, who appointed elders, who are responsible for calling the church to assemble on the Lord’s Day, for conducting public worship, for administering the word and sacraments, and for maintaining a disciplined membership (Matt. 18:15-20; 28:18-20).

As a Catholic, I’m very glad to see interest among Reformed Christians in ecclesiology. I say that because I believe that Terry is absolutely correct in his evaluation of Evangelical ecclesiology and the “Revolution” Barna is describing. The rejection of the local church is a mistake, and the consequence of that rejection is, I suspect, that in one or two generations the children of such Evangelicals will mostly not even identify themselves as Christian. Watching the collapse of Evangelicalism is like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion, but in this case the wreck is the rapid de-Christianizing of a significant percentage of the Christian population. So I affirm the desire of Reformed Christians to separate themselves theologically from the ecclesial desert that is Evangelicalism. And I agree with much of the above cited paragraph.

At the same time, I wish to show here that the ecclesial problem Terry is pointing out in Evangelicalism is not limited to Evangelicalism, but is intrinsic to Protestantism as such. Evangelicalism is only the further inevitable stage in the outward expression of the essence of Protestant ecclesiology. According to that essence, there is no sacramental difference between laity and clergy, the individual ultimately has highest interpretive authority,¹ and there is no visible catholic Church, even though reference is made to such a thing. Terry claims that commitment to “the visible institutional church” has become optional among Evangelicals. But there is a certain sort of irony here, because as I have shown in “Why Protestantism has no “visible catholic Church,”” there is no “visible catholic Church” into which the various Protestant denominations are fully incorporated. Given Protestant ecclesiology, if the alleged entity “the visible catholic Church” were removed and we were left only with embodied Christians, congregations, denominations, and an “invisible catholic Church,” nothing at all would change in reality. And this shows that in Protestant ecclesiology, the “visible catholic Church” is only an idea, not an actual entity; in that respect it is like the clothes in the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The child can know that the Emperor isn’t wearing any visible clothes, because the Emperor’s appearance is in every way identical to what it would be if he were not wearing any visible clothes.

That there is no “visible catholic Church” into which the various Protestant denominations are fully incorporated is also shown by the fact that within Protestantism there is no way of distinguishing between a schism from the visible catholic Church and a branch within the visible Catholic Church. And yet the Church Fathers distinguished between heresy and schism, and they condemned schism from the Church. St. Cyprian, for example wrote against the Novatian schism from the Church, and St. Optatus and St. Augustine wrote against the Donatist schism from the Church. These saints [i.e. St. Cyprian, St. Optatus, and St. Augustine] saw Novatianism and Donatism as schisms from the Church, not as mere denominations or ‘branches within’ the Church. And the reasons to which they appealed to make this determination would entail that the various Protestant denominations are schisms from the Church, not branches within the Church. (See my post titled “Branches or Schisms?“)

Of course I agree that the Church Christ founded is visible.² But the only visible catholic Church is the Catholic Church in communion with the bishop of Rome.³ But Protestant denominations are not in full communion with the Catholic Church. At the Reformation Protestants made commitment to the “visible catholic Church” optional, by separating themselves from the only visible catholic Church there is. Hence the irony mentioned above, in Terry’s claiming that Evangelicals now are making commitment to “the visible institutional church” optional.

Reformed Ecclesiology vs. Evangelical Ecclesiology

The relation between twenty-first century Evangelicalism and traditional Protestantism in certain respects parallels the relation between sixteenth century Protestantism and the Catholic Church. Terry writes:

Church, as “traditionally” understood, was for Barna a human institution, not a biblical one. The new church, as he construes it, is without structure, organization, clergy, officers, accountability, or discipline. It has no location, commitments, or physical presence. It is merely an informal, ad hoc, uncovenanted association of believers.

Terry points out that for Barna and like-minded Evangelicals, the Church has no structure or hierarchical organization. For Barna, the “visible institutional Church” to which people like Terry refer is merely a set of man-made institutions. And regarding all the Protestant denominations, it is relatively easy to see why Barna could reach that conclusion; they were each founded by mere men, not by Christ Himself. (See “How old is your church?.”) But the “the visible, institutional church” to which Terry refers likewise has no structure or hierarchy. Reformed Christians cannot identify the boundaries of “the visible catholic Church.”⁴ To the question, “What would be different if there were no visible, catholic Church, but only embodied Christians, visible local churches, denominations and associations of denominations?” the Reformed Christian must answer, “nothing.” And this shows that the term does not refer to anything actual in reality, but that in Protestant ecclesiology, the “visible catholic Church” is only a concept in the mind, a mental category under which all Christians are mentally placed.

The collapse of ecclesial structures in Evangelicalism is the logical consequence of this Emperor-has-no-clothes version of Protestantism’s “visible, catholic Church.” If, as Reformed ecclesiology entails, the Church is fundamentally invisible at the universal level, then the Church is essentially invisible all the way down to the local level. In that case the man-made structures at the local level are just that, merely man-made and therefore not only dispensable, but rightly dispensed with, since they were not instituted by Christ. If they are merely man-made ecclesial organizations, then they are instances of the use of human power, control, and manipulation, since the persons who control them have no more divine authority than Joe Protestant. So with respect to authority, there is no reason for these Evangelicals to submit to traditional Protestant denominations or local hierarchies.

Consumerism

Terry claims that people like Barna helped create “the purpose-driven, market-driven church.” He laments the “ipodization” of Christian ministry, in which particular segments of the demographic are ‘targeted,’ leading to “cowboy churches” and “hip-hop churches,” and the endless pursuit of novelty. He adds:

The eccentricities of the highly influential Barna are matched by the commonplace practices of a growing number of unaffiliated and nonattending believers. Church, for many, is like the YMCA, except that one actually has to join the YMCA. It’s good to go there to exercise, but sometimes one can do just as well at home—or maybe somewhere else. “Do what feels right for you,” we hear said. “Go where your needs are met.”

Again, the irony is that going where they believe their needs are being met is precisely why all the members of Terry’s church attend his church. They are going where they believe their needs are being met, according to their own interpretation of Scripture. Protestantism is the “purpose-driven, market-driven church,” as I showed in Ecclesial Consumerism, where I argue that ecclesial consumerism belongs to the very nature and essence of Protestantism. What Barna is talking about as a future Revolution is just another step ‘forward’ in the very same revolution Protestants are living in from five centuries past. Barna’s is the fruit of Protestantism’s ecclesial seed. Terry, however, is making an arbitrary distinction, criticizing the ecclesial consumerism of Evangelicals, but accepting it when his own congregation does it.

There is no principled difference between the ecclesial consumerism that targets a specific demographic or makes itself attractive by following a popular trend, and an ecclesial consumerism that targets a specific “ecclesiastical culture,” or a particular interpretive framework or doctrinal system. The latter is the father of the former.

Concerning the Evangelical pursuit of novelty and trendiness, Terry writes:

Trendy, culturally driven, market-driven churches sow the seeds of their own irrelevance. As the saying goes, “He who marries the spirit of the age will soon find himself a widower.” Their claim upon their audience is temporary: personal preferences expressed, personal needs met, and personal desires fulfilled. Treat the congregation like a market where the consumer is key, where the market’s fickle whims are sovereign, and expect transitory commitments or no commitments.

Terry is right. But what he says applies just as much to ecclesial communities that exist because they preach and teach according to a novel “interpretation of Scripture,” such as the ones Luther and Calvin proposed in the sixteenth century.⁵

Terry wants to put the brakes on the movement of Protestants into the full-blown invisible-Church ecclesiology Barna describes. But this movement is the consequence of the universal acid the first Protestants unleashed in the sixteenth century, the universal acid of the supremacy of the individual’s interpretation of Scripture over against that of the Church. What Barna is describing is that universal acid eating away at Protestantism’s own confessions and denominational structures. If in the sixteenth century Luther and Calvin were justified in rejecting Catholic doctrine, Catholic tradition and the Catholic hierarchy on the basis of their own interpretation of Scripture, then it logically follows that their tradition’s descendants in the twenty-first century may do the same with the Calvinistic/Lutheran/Wesleyan etc. traditions. Protestantism can’t have it both ways. If it wants immutability of doctrine, it needs ecclesial infallibility. But because Protestantism rejected ecclesial infallibility in the sixteenth century, confessional Protestants have no authority to prevent their contemporary heirs from remaking ‘church’ in their own image, each man doing what is “right in his own eyes,” according to his own interpretation, and fashioning a religious practice that Calvin wouldn’t even recognize.

Privately defined marks of the Church

Concerning Barna, Terry writes:

He announces the emergence of the “New Church,” which in fact is no church at all.

Any Catholic bishop in the sixteenth century could have said the same about what Protestants at the time were doing. So in a way, what Terry is criticizing is a case of Protestantism applied to itself. Because the rejection of the sacrament of Holy Orders is intrinsic to Protestantism, each version of Protestantism can define ‘the Church’ according to its own interpretation. Terry, according to his definition (derived from the early Protestants) judges the new Evangelicals not to be a church. But these Evangelicals, by means of their own interpretation of Scripture have arrived at different criteria regarding what is and isn’t a church, and could just as easily judge Terry’s not to be one, or could judge his to be one along with theirs. In Protestantism, no one person or group’s ecclesial criteria (i.e. determination of what is or isn’t a church) has any more authority than anyone else’s. So any person’s “You’re not a church” charge is not only question-begging, but is also a form of theological bullying, because it seeks to impose by stipulation one’s own judgment concerning the marks of the Church over such judgments by other persons, as though one Protestant has authority over the others, when, given Protestantism, no one has the authority to bind anyone else’s conscience regarding the interpretation of Scripture and thus the marks of the Church.

According to Terry, on Sunday morning we are to:

Do what the Scriptures require and what Christians have done for two thousand years. Go to the public assembly, gathered under the discipline of Christ’s appointed officers to be ministered to by the word read, preached, sung, prayed, and administered. God’s people should consider no other alternative, nor desire any other option.

Again, I agree with Terry that God’s people should go to the public assembly on the Lord’s Day. But during the first fifteen hundred years of those “two thousand” years, to all the Christian ancestors of Protestants what was meant by “Christ’s appointed officers” were those having apostolic succession. In the sixteenth century, Protestants redefined ‘apostolicity’ as ‘the Apostles teaching,’ which in practice means, “agreement with one’s own interpretation of Scripture.” So long as Protestantism determines “Christ’s appointed officers” as those who agree with one’s own interpretation of Scripture, rather than those who received authorization from the Apostles, the ecclesial error Terry is addressing in Evangelicalism will only get worse, because the Barna-type ecclesial consumerism is only the more explicit outworking of the same ecclesial consumerism intrinsic to Protestantism itself, where each person chooses who counts as “Christ’s appointed officers” based on the agreement between what those potential officers believe, and one’s own interpretation of Scripture. (See “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority.”)

Catholicity

Terry argues that Evangelicals are abandoning ‘catholicity.’ He writes:

The Reformers and their children took catholicity seriously. John Owen, Richard Baxter, and other mainstream Puritans embraced the titles of “Reformed catholic” or even “mere catholic.” They sought continuity with the catholic tradition, which they accused the Roman Catholics of abandoning in favor of medieval novelties. They rooted their reforms in both Scripture and in catholic practice, particularly as found in the church fathers and the best medieval theologians, such as Bernard of Clairvaux. Universal practice, the established practices of all the churches, was an apostolic ideal (see 1 Cor. 1:2; 4:7; 11:16; 14:33) that the Reformers sought to honor. It matters what “the churches of God,” or “all the churches,” believe and practice. The apostles expected that individual churches would conform to universal (i.e., catholic) norms.

I agree that the early Reformers applied the term ‘catholicity’ to themselves, and wanted to be ‘catholic.’ But in doing so they emptied the word ‘catholic’ of meaning, because in their mouths what counted as ‘catholic’ in the tradition was only what agreed with their own interpretation of Scripture. And so anyone could in that way claim to be catholic. The first Protestants proposed doctrines that were novel and not held by the other local Churches throughout the Catholic Church of that time, and had never been universally held throughout the history of the Catholic Church. Concerning the early Protestants, Terry writes, “Their public ministry was historic—what the church, more or less, had always practiced.” Except without apostolic succession, Holy Orders, Confirmation, Eucharistic Adoration, exorcisms, holy water, relics, penance, absolution, bishops, religious orders, the liturgical calendar, fast days, icons, the sacrifice of the Mass, prayer to the saints, etc. The Protestant movement has been an exercise in historical eclecticism by each of the founders of each Protestant tradition.

And this has left us with an ecclesial mess — there are presently forty-four Reformed denominations just in North America. Catholicity becomes a meaningless word the way it is used in the paragraph just cited, because even the most provincial denomination or Protestant tradition could have written the same paragraph. When one picks and chooses from the Church Fathers according to one’s own interpretation of Scripture, and dismisses everything between St. Ignatius of Antioch and Martin Luther that doesn’t fit with one’s own interpretation of Scripture, the claim to historical catholicity is just empty semantics, because what took place between St. Ignatius of Antioch and Luther wouldn’t look any different if the Reformed system of doctrine is not in fact ‘catholic’ at all, but is a novelty never before believed by any Christians.

Part of Terry’s conception of catholicity is not attempting to appeal to any particular culture or demographic. And again, I agree with him. There should be only one local church in each geographical parish, and all Christians of every age, race, and ethnicity who live in that parish should worship together in that parish. It is the Protestant experiment that has left us with churches of all different denominations in a square-mile area, even across the street from each other, dividing Christians on Sundays by every conceivable doctrinal system, style of worship, and cultural tastes. Terry writes:

Churches ought not to adopt the cultural preferences of any single demographic in the church. To do so is to give an unwarranted preference to one group and unnecessarily alienate everyone else. What should the church do? What did Protestant churches do for the last four hundred years? Or two hundred years? Or one hundred years prior to 1980? Their public ministry was catholic. They ministered and worshiped in the forms of their own ecclesiastical culture, founded on Scripture and tested by time. … A resilient ecclesiology honors catholicity and the communion of all the saints. It maintains universal practice over against the latest thing

There has never been universal practice within Protestantism, since Luther thrust his knife into the table during his unresolved dispute with Zwingli over the Supper at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529. As soon as Protestants left the Catholic Church, they began to become provincial. At first the divisions were based only on differences of interpretation, but soon the differences were based on style, culture, ethnicity, language, socio-economic status, etc. All those differences became factors in determining where and how and with whom one would worship on Sundays. Terry is a member of the Presbyterian Church in America, itself a member of NAPARC, i.e. the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council, which is not itself a member of some international body of Christians encompassing all the nations and ethnicities of the world (except the invisible catholic Church). That’s not catholicity; that’s regionalism and provincialism.

But in the prospect of the collapse of Evangelicalism, Terry is advocating a qualified ecclesial uniformity among Protestants:

Do the public ministries of any two churches anywhere look alike? Absolute uniformity is not necessary, to be sure, but how about some measure of uniformity? Churches ought not to design their public ministries in isolation from the rest of the church, past, present, and future. No public ministry should be idiosyncratic. … A church that targets a specific demographic, be it the young or the old, cowboys or surfers, rockers or hip-hoppers, forfeits apostolicity. Why? Because the apostles did not target specific kinds of people. They cast their gospel nets widely, and their churches, as a consequence, were heterogeneous.

I’m reminded of what the Hebrew said to Moses prior to his divine calling: “Who made you judge over us?” Terry wants uniformity, and calls for it, but he has no more authority to effect it than any other Protestant pastor. So his voice is merely one additional opinion in the sea of competing voices, each offering church-as-he-sees-it, to all the persons seeking church-as-I-want-it. To reject the Catholic Church is to embrace ecclesial pluralism on the grandest scale, because the uniformity Terry wants requires unified authority, which is impossible when, given the “priesthood of all believers” and the rejection of Holy Orders, each man is essentially his own pope, his own conscience being his own highest authority under God.⁶ For this reason, to choose Protestantism, while calling for ecclesial uniformity, is a performative contradiction.

When the first Protestants chose to depart from the practice of the rest of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, that idiosyncracy was perfectly acceptable, from Terry’s point of view. But when other Protestants presently do not conform to Terry’s particular form of Protestantism, then this idiosyncracy is unacceptable to him. And that’s ad hoc. Terry’s opinion about this is no more authoritative than that of those Protestants who disagree with him and seek to take Protestantism in new directions. The authority vacuum created by the rejection of apostolic succession necessarily leads to a pluralism in which promoters of Reformed ecclesiology have no more authority than do Evangelical ecclesiology, and that authority vacuum created by Protestantism’s fundamental principles is precisely what makes possible the Evangelical ecclesiology Terry is calling Evangelicals to reject.

Yes the Apostles as a whole did not limit themselves to any specific demographic. But that is not what defines apostolicity. Protestantism lost apostolicity at its inception, when it abandoned Holy Orders and apostolic succession. Though apostolicity is related to catholicity, the two are not the same. A person having Holy Orders in succession from the Apostles, who is called to evangelize only say, the Gentiles, retains apostolicity even if his ministry is to a specific group of people. He retains catholicity if he remains part of the Catholic Church. But if he forms or joins a schism, he will necessarily lose catholicity, because no schism can be catholic. The root of the problem of provincialism is schism from the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church Christ founded. Catholicity, like the other three marks of the Church, cannot be removed from the Church Christ founded, because it is part of the very essence of the Church. Just as provincialism is a sign of schism from the Church, so reconciliation to the Catholic Church is the only solution to provincialism, the only way to attain and retain catholicity.

Roots in Tradition

In his diagnosis of the Evangelicalism’s ecclesial problem, Terry advocates a recovery of tradition:

A church without roots in tradition is a church that forfeits the respect that accompanies the voice of historical consensus. It violates catholicity and, as a consequence, forfeits authority. It is perceived as arbitrary, mutable, human, and, ultimately, optional.

Terry is absolutely right. The problem is that merely having “roots in tradition” is not sufficient to give actual authority; it is only sufficient to give the appearance of authority, since any heretical sect could have roots in tradition, either by having originated many centuries ago, or by reading itself back into the Church Fathers through historical ecclecticism, and painting itself as drawing from the past. Terry is telling Evangelicals that by not drawing from the past, they lose the appearance of having authority, and are perceived as merely optional. They can present themselves as having authority (though having no actual authority) only if they sufficiently portray themselves as having roots in the tradition.

It would not be difficult for the new Evangelicals to have their cake and eat it too. So long as they can lay claim to a few phrases or captions from Church Fathers (see “Ligon Duncan’s “Did the Fathers Know the Gospel?“), they can lay claim to those same roots, and avoid this appearance-of-rootlessness problem. It is a very easy solution, since the problem of not having roots in tradition, as Terry describes it, is merely a cosmetic problem. Terry is not saying that the problem with Evangelicalism is that it is not the Church Christ founded, only that its disregard for the tradition in history makes it be perceived (by certain people) as having no authority, and thus to lose the respect of those people.

But the Evangelical rejoinder could just as well be a de-masking of confessional Protestantism as Evangelicalism with window-dressing drawn from Christianity’s past to make itself seem authoritative, but giving it no actual authority. These Evangelicals might just be seeing through the window-dressing, and no longer cowed into submission by it. If it all comes down to a relationship with Jesus, and no man has any more interpretive authority than does anyone else, then, they might say, “we don’t need the window-dressing of tradition; that’s still other men, with no authority over us, trying to control how we ‘do church.’” What is needed for actual authority is not merely “roots in tradition,” but to be, in fact, the very Church Christ founded.

Terry is objecting to what these new Evangelicals are doing, namely, stripping away the appearance of transcendence and authority in what among Protestants has been treated as “the church.” He writes:

In the process, the transcendent reality of the church as Christ’s church, to which respect is due and where authority is recognized, will be lost.

That’s just what Protestantism did in the sixteenth century, by constructing ‘church’ according to each individual’s interpretation of Scripture concerning what are the marks of the Church. Terry accepts that revolution, because he himself works in it; but he objects to the application of it to his own Protestant ecclesial practice. He does not place these new Evangelicals outside the Church. (Notice the title of his article: “Our Collapsing Ecclesiology.”) Instead, he claims that their ecclesiology hides the transcendent reality of the Church. But if respect and authority are due to every part of the Church, including the part which is the new Evangelicalism, then why think that those who wish to emphasize ecclesial transcendence and ecclesial authority have more authority than those Christians who prefer not to emphasize these things, such that the former can tell the latter how to organize and run their churches?

The new Evangelicalism is exposing the chimera of Protestant ecclesial authority. Because anyone can leave any Protestant church at any time and join or form another, while remaining a “branch within,” the ‘authority’ of these communities is only an illusion. The form and practice of the new Evangelicalism is making that explicit, unmasking the illusion of ecclesial authority in the more traditional Protestant churches.

Conclusion

Terry concludes his article with this:

Ecclesiology is collapsing all around us. Our Reformed foundations are sound. However, if we get swept up in the ecclesiastical trends, we too may find our people perceiving the church as something less than the indispensable institution that it is meant to be.

The “Reformed foundations” are Protestantism’s foundations, which are the very foundations upon which the ecclesial consumerism Terry decries are built. Terry is concerned that confessional Protestants may be swept up in the ecclesial consumerism rush. The problem is, they already are, simply by being Protestants. Barna Evangelicals and Emergents are merely taking Protestantism to its logical conclusions. They do not even pretend that there is some “indispensable institution” which Terry still thinks there is. The PCA isn’t indispensable; it only came into existence in 1973. So, what is this indispensable institution of which Terry speaks? NAPARC? No. It is this supposed visible, catholic Church, which as I have shown in Why Protestantism has no “visible catholic Church” is nothing at all.⁷

In Protestantism, if I don’t like a denomination, I can simply start my own, or start my own congregation, or my own house church. In Protestantism ordination does not require apostolic succession; it requires only congregational approval. That is what ordination is in Protestantism, the permission by a congregation (or denomination) to serve as a minister in that congregation or denomination. That’s because one of the fundamental principles of Protestantism is the priesthood of all believers and the rejection of the sacrament of Holy Orders and apostolic succession. Any group of Christians therefore can lay hands on someone, and ‘ordain’ him or her. And the Reformed denominations are the products of just this sort of thing. So the supposed distinction in authority between pastor and laity is, in Protestantism, only a useful fiction. For this reason, there is no principled difference between the Barna Evangelicals who are less formal and structured, and Reformed Protestants, who maintain the illusion of pastoral authority.

Some Evangelicals are beginning to see that the Emperor has no clothes, that “visible catholic Church” language is just that, mere semantics. Though the collapse of ecclesiology in Evangelicalism is in appearance a movement away from Catholicism, yet it is a more transparent expression of Protestantism’s essence as such. And because self-understanding is crucial for ecumenical progress, in that respect the collapsing ecclesiology to which Terry refers might perhaps make possible a more fruitful dialogue between Protestants and the Catholic Church in the pursuit of unity and reconciliation.⁸

1. See “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority.”
2. See the article I co-wrote with Tom Brown, titled “Christ Founded a Visible Church.”
3. See the Catholic Encyclopedia article on “The Church for an explanation of the reason why only the Catholic Church possess the four marks of the Church listed in the Nicene Creed.
4. See, for example, the discussion starting at comment #100 in this thread.
5. Alister McGrath writes, “[I]t will be clear that the medieval period was astonishingly faithful to the teaching of Augustine on the question of the nature of justification, where the Reformers departed from it,” and then later he writes, “The Reformation understanding of the nature of justification – as opposed to its mode – must therefore be regarded as a genuine theological novum.” (Iustitia Dei, pp. 185-187.)
6. Again, see “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority.”
7. Regarding “small-c catholic,” there is no such thing as a “small-c catholic,” because there is no such thing as the “small-c catholic” Church. The term is an abstract concept, having no actual referent. It denies the visibility of the Church, as Tom and I argued in “Christ Founded a Visible Church,” and thus reduces the Church to an invisible entity to which even those in schism from the Church (e.g. Novatians, Donatists) could claim to be in full communion. Anyone can claim to be in full communion with an invisible entity. So this ["small-c catholic"] is a useful (though deceptive) term for schismatics and heretics, to make it seem that they are in full communion and orthodox, when in fact they have departed from the Catholic Church Christ founded, and rejected the faith she believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God.
8. See “Trueman and Prolegomena to How would Protestants know when to return?”

Leonardo De Chirico is a Protestant lecturer in theology at IFED (Istituto di Formazione Evangelica e Documentazione) in Padova, Italy. He edits the theological journal Studi di teologia. He also worked in Italy for twelve years as a Reformed Baptist church planter. Over the past few months Leonardo has posted a series of articles called “The Vatican Files” on the well-known Reformed website Reformation21.org, interacting with twenty-first century Catholicism. Much of the content of these articles is explanatory, and I agree with a good deal of what he says. Here I focus on only a few of his criticisms of Catholic teaching, in his most recent article in the series.

In his most recent article, “The Vatican Files N.4,” Leonardo writes about Pope Benedict’s 2010 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini. (All paragraph numbers from Verbum Domini are from this pdf document.)

Leonardo writes:

In this respect, Benedict XVI writes: “The Church lives in the certainty that her Lord, who spoke in the past, continues today to communicate his word in her living Tradition and in sacred Scripture. Indeed, the word of God given to us in sacred Scripture as an inspired testimony to revelation, together with the Church’s living Tradition, it constitutes the supreme rule of faith” (18). The Bible is upheld, but the Bible is always accompanied and surmounted by the wider, deeper, living tradition of the Church which is the present-day form of the Word. Amongst other things, this means that the Bible is not sufficient in itself to give access to the Word and is not the final norm for faith and practice. The Bible needs to be supplemented by the Catechism of the Catholic Church which is “a significant expression of the living Tradition of the Church and a sure norm for teaching the faith” (74).

Leonardo seems to think that according to the Catholic Church, the “living tradition” [rather than sacred Scripture] is “the present-day form” of the word of God. It is possible that I have misunderstood him here. But from the Catholic point of view, the present-day form of the word of God given to us through Christ is what it has been since the first century, namely, the word both preached and written, within the Church. In other words, the Catholic understanding is not that sacred Scripture was for the Church of some time past, whereas in the present-day we receive the word through “living tradition.” Rather, the Catholic understanding is that in the present day we receive the word of God as contained both in sacred Scripture and in the living tradition of the Church. The word of God revealed by Christ was first received by the early Christians as preached, and only later as preached and written. Sacred Scripture remains part of the “present-day form” of the word of God, but the full present-day form of the word of God is still contained in both Scripture and Tradition, preserved and handed down by the Church as the divinely appointed steward to which this word was entrusted.

A bit later in the article Leonardo writes:

According to VD [Verbum Domini], Scripture must never be read on one’s own. Reading must be always an “ecclesial experience”, i.e. something done in communion with the Church. The issue at stake is not only methodological, as if private readings were to be replaced by study groups at a parish level presided over by a priest, but also hermeneutical. “An authentic interpretation of the Bible must always be in harmony with the faith of the Catholic Church” (30). Reading the Bible needs to be an exercise done in accordance with the institutional church, both in its forms and outcomes. Apparently, there is much wisdom in these statements, especially considering the real risks of fancy, individualistic, awkward interpretations by isolated readers of the Bible.

Leonardo refers to the notion that “Scripture must never be read on one’s own.” There he is drawing from paragraph 30 of Verbum Domini, which reads:

Saint Jerome recalls that we can never read Scripture simply on our own. We come up against too many closed doors and we slip too easily into error. The Bible was written by the People of God for the People of God, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Only in this communion with the People of God can we truly enter as a “we” into the heart of the truth that God himself wishes to convey to us. Jerome, for whom “ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ”, states that the ecclesial dimension of biblical interpretation is not a requirement imposed from without: the Book is the very voice of the pilgrim People of God, and only within the faith of this People are we, so to speak, attuned to understand sacred Scripture. An authentic interpretation of the Bible must always be in harmony with the faith of the Catholic Church. He thus wrote to a priest: “Remain firmly attached to the traditional doctrine that you have been taught, so that you may exhort according to sound doctrine and confound those who contradict it”. (Verbum Domini, 30)

The notion that Scripture “must never be read on one’s own” is not forbidding private study or private meditation on Scripture, as though Scripture can rightly be read only in the physical or liturgical company of other Catholics. The idea is that even when we read the Bible in the privacy of our own home or in the solitude of a desert retreat, we should read it as informed by the Tradition handed down in the Church, so that we read it and meditate on it with the mind of Christ as it as been more deeply revealed in His Church by the Holy Spirit through the living Tradition. Otherwise, it would be very easy to misinterpret Scripture, and fall into heretical error.

Leonardo then writes:

Yet, there is something missing here. For a Church that has forbidden for centuries the reading of the Bible in vernacular languages, it is at least unfortunate that not a single word of repentance is offered. For a Church that has prevented the people from having access to the Bible until fifty years ago, it is at least puzzling that not a single word is spent to underline the Church’s need for self-correction and vigilance.

Leonardo expects an apology for something that did not happen. See chapter 11 of Henry Graham’s Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church.

Leonardo continues:

Moreover, if reading the Bible must always be done under the rule of the institution, what happens if the institution itself is caught in error, heresy or apostasy? How does the Spirit correct a sinful church if not by the biblical Word? In the history of the Church, the teaching of the Bible had to sometimes be played against the institutional church and against its consensus. Only a self-proclaimed indefectible Church can ask total submission to “the watchful eye of the sacred magisterium” (45) without having a final, ultimate bar. Here at stake is the question: Who has the final word? The Bible or the RC Church? Since the Church is “the home of the word” (52), VD responds: the latter!

The first thing to say is that Leonardo’s criticism of the Catholic doctrine concerning interpreting Scripture in the Church presupposes the Protestant theological paradigm. It presupposes some form of ecclesial deism according to which the Church could formally fall into false doctrine, and need correction from some prophetic person’s re-discovery of the right interpretation of Scripture. But if the Church is indefectible, then this criticism begs the question, i.e. presupposes precisely what is in question between Catholics and Protestants. If the Church could define as dogmas what are actually heresies, and it belonged to each individual interpreter to judge for himself between the orthodox dogmas and the heretical dogmas, there would be no reason to submit to the Catholic Magisterium, because in that case each individual interpreter of Scripture would have more interpretive authority than does the Magisterium. There is no point in criticizing one paradigm by way of some presupposition intrinsic to (and specific to) another paradigm. To do so is equivalent to asserting the truth of one’s own paradigm. To compare paradigms, one must use criteria common to both paradigms, viewing the available evidence from the perspectives of both paradigms.

The second thing to say is that Leonardo’s criticism here raises a dilemma for Protestantism. On the one hand, Protestants like Keith Mathison claim that Scripture should be interpreted according to the tradition which provides the rule of faith. (See “Keith Mathison’s Reply.”) But on the other hand, Protestants like Leonardo De Chirico claim that Scripture must be allowed to correct tradition and the Church. On the one hand, if the elements of tradition are to be accepted or rejected according to their agreement or disagreement with the individual’s interpretation of Scripture, then tradition cannot function as that normative interpretive context through which Scripture is to be rightly interpreted, because that would reduce ‘tradition’ to whatever conforms to the individual’s interpretation of Scripture. But on the other hand, if the elements of tradition have normative authority and provide the necessary interpretive context in which and according to which Scripture is to be interpreted rightly, then the elements of tradition are not subject to acceptance or rejection by each individual interpreter of Scripture. Either tradition and the Church are authoritative, in which case they ought to govern the individual’s determination of which interpretations of Scripture are orthodox and which are heretical, or, if individuals have the authority to judge tradition and the Church according to the standard of their own interpretation of Scripture, then tradition and the Church are not authoritative, and Protestantism’s sola scriptura reduces to solo scriptura, for reasons Neal and I explained in “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority.”

Next, Leonardo writes:

Fourthly and finally, the liturgical context of a proper approach to Scripture. Reading the Bible as an ecclesial experience means that it needs to occur in a liturgical context set forth by the RC Church. “The privileged place for the prayerful reading of sacred Scripture is the liturgy, and particularly the Eucharist, in which, as we celebrate the Body and Blood of Christ in the sacrament, the word itself is present and at work in our midst” (86). The hearing of God’s Word is fruitful when certain conditions are present: the administration of the Eucharist (54) and other sacraments (61), the Liturgy of the Hours (62), the practice of gaining indulgences (87), and recital of the Holy Rosary (88). According to VD, the Bible can never be alone, but must always be surrounded by ecclesiastical paraphernalia which inform, direct and govern Biblical reading and interpretation. In so doing, the Bible is never free to guide the Church, but always conditioned by some extra-biblical practices of the Church.

When Protestants are confronted with the problems of biblicism and “solo scriptura,” they tend to respond like Keith Mathison does by appealing to the authority of tradition and the Church. (See “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority.” See also Scot McKnight’s discussion of Christian Smith’s recent book The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, [Brazos Press, 2011].) But at the same time, when confronted with the authority of tradition and the Church, they respond like Leonardo does here by claiming that such authority prevents the Bible from being “free” to guide the Church or correct tradition. And this shows that Protestantism is trying to stand in an impossible middle position. It wants the primacy of the authority of the individual’s interpretation of Scripture so that individuals may correct both tradition and the Church according to the standard of their own interpretation of Scripture. At the same time, it wants to avoid the individualistic and fragmentary implications of biblicism and solo scriptura, and submit to the authority of the Church and tradition. The problem, however, is that these two positions are logically incompatible, and so Protestantism cannot have it both ways. As Protestants realize this, they either move toward the individualism of emergentism and do-it-yourself-religion, or they turn toward “paleo-orthodoxy” and become Catholic or Orthodox.

In his closing paragraph, Leonardo writes:

The papal pronouncement encourages the reading of the Bible and this is good news. The fundamental question remains: Whose word is the Verbum Domini? The Bible’s and/or the Church’s?

From a Catholic point of view, there is no either/or, but a both/and. If, as Verbum Domini teaches, Scripture is rightly understood only within the divinely established community to whom it was entrusted, then the word of God is located both in Scripture and in the Church, not as two separate sources of the word of God, but as two principles that function together, along with sacred Tradition, that we may hear and rightly understand God’s word. For this reason, the Catechism teaches:

“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)

According to the Catholic paradigm, Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium are like a three-legged stool; none functions rightly without the others. By contrast, the “or” in Leonardo’s “and/or” question refers to a paradigm in which Scripture and the Church function independently, not as one. Only if Scripture functions rightly independently of the Church can the individual justifiably appeal to his own interpretation of Scripture to judge the Church and the tradition. Only if Scripture functions rightly independently of the Church does a question like “The Bible’s or the Church’s?” make sense. These two paradigms explain the two conceptions of the act of faith, as described by the late Fr. Neuhaus in an article titled “That They May Be One:”

[T]here are two kinds of Christians: those whom I would call ecclesiological Christians, and those for whom being a Christian is primarily, if not exclusively, a matter of individual decision. There are those for whom the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church is one act of faith. And those for whom the act of faith in Christ is the act of faith, and the act of faith in the Church, if there is one, is secondary, or tertiary, or somewhere down the line.

The Ascension

Protestant dogma insists that Sola Scriptura is an article of faith.¹ By its own criteria, articles of faith must be established by divine revelation. In the words of Zacharius Ursinus (d. 1583), author of the Heidelberg Catechism, “The doctrine of the church has God for its author . . . whilst the various religious systems of sectarists have been invented by men.”² It is strange, then, that the Protestant apology for this article of faith rests almost entirely on an alleged logical inference, and not from the direct witness of divine revelation. The syllogism runs as follows:

1) We need a final authority,

2) Scripture, because of its unique attributes, is the best candidate,

3) Therefore, Scripture is the final authority.

This syllogism is found again and again, in various forms, throughout the history of Reformed dogmatics. The Dutch theologian Leonard van Rijssen, for example, argued simply, “From these attributes of Scripture it follows that it is a canon and norm of the things to be believed.” According to Richard Muller, Rijssen understood Scripture’s canonical authority “as a deduction, not directly from divinity or divine authority but from several attributes of Scripture.”³ Rijssen’s argument was not unique. Luther and Calvin both suggest it. Others, like Musculus, Polanus, Turrentin, Hyperius, and Vermigli, teach it more explicitly.⁴

We can and should debate these premises of this syllogism, since they are not self-evident, but even if we grant them for the sake of argument, does this syllogism meet the Ursinus test? Can it demonstrate that sola scriptura is an article of faith, revealed by God?

The Catholic position has always been that Christ did give explicit instructions concerning the transmission of the Christian faith. We are not left to inferences, deductions, and “funny, internal feelings.” He gave us the Church. What follows below is a brief survey of some of the Biblical and historical evidence for this claim.

The Final Authority Established by Christ: the Teaching Church

All Christians agree that Jesus Christ is the ultimate authority. During his earthly ministry, He was the Final Authority. His authority superseded the Old Testament, human reason, Jewish Tradition, and the power of the state. But after His ascension, He did not leave us without direction. Before He ascended, He made provisions for a continuing doctrinal authority.

Jesus commissioned his apostles to teach with authority:

Jesus told his disciples, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:18-20)

Jesus sent his apostles to teach, and promised to remain with them. Many passages of Scripture show that Christ’s authority accompanied their teaching:

• “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” (John 20:21)
• “Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.” (Luke 10:16)
• “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matt. 16:18; Matt. 18:18)

These texts answer our question. Christ did give us a rule of faith before His ascension. He gave us the teaching of the apostles. It is important to note that Christ never mentions the writings of the apostles. He gave them no command to write, and never restricted their authority to the written word. His authority attached to their persons and their teaching.

The Apostles Appointed Successors to Teach with Authority

Protestants usually admit that the apostles taught with authority. They deny that the apostles transmitted this authority to their successors. However, Scripture and history refute them.

Scripture:

• “They appointed presbyters for them in each church.” (Acts 14:23)
• [Paul to Titus] “For this reason I left you in Crete so that you might . . . appoint presbyters in every town, as I directed you.” (Titus 1:5)
• [Paul to Timothy] “And what you heard from me through many witnesses entrust to faithful people who will have the ability to teach others as well.” (2 Timothy 2:2)
• “For a bishop as God’s steward must . . . be able both to exhort with sound doctrine and to refute opponents.” (Titus 1:7-9)

These texts show clearly that the apostles appointed the bishops and priests (presbyters) who took over the leadership of the infant church. They also show that leaders were 1) stewards of the Gospel, 2) given authority to teach and refute false doctrine, 3) ordered to entrust this charge to others.

History:

The earliest sources outside the New Testament attest the belief that the apostles appointed successors who continued to teach with authority.

• The First Epistle of Clement, c. 42 (written sometime between A.D. 70-96): “Christ therefore was sent forth by God and the apostles by Christ . . . [T]hey [the apostles] appointed the first fruits [of their labours], having first proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterwards believe.”
• St. Ignatius to the Ephesians, (between A.D. 98-117): “For we ought to receive every one whom the Master of the house sends to be over His household, as we would do Him that sent him. It is manifest, therefore, that we should look upon the bishop even as we would upon the Lord Himself.”

The Earliest Christians Confirm the Authority Established by Christ

Doctrinal controversy struck Christianity in the second-century church. The Gnostics taught esoteric doctrines, and claimed to be the inheritors of secret wisdom passed down from the apostles. They also appealed to the Scriptures. The Church Father Tertullian (ca. 160-ca.220) responded to their claims and offered one of the earliest and clearest statements of authority established by Christ.

From this, therefore, do we draw up our rule. Since the Lord Jesus Christ sent the apostles to preach, (our rule is) that no others ought to be received as preachers than those whom Christ appointed . . . Now, what that was which they preached — in other words, what it was which Christ revealed to them — can, as I must here likewise prescribe, properly be proved in no other way than by those very churches which the apostles founded in person. (Prescription against Heretics, 21).

Conclusion

The heart of the Protestant apologetic for sola scriptura is not the teaching of Christ, but the alleged failure of the Church’s magisterial authority. Consider Luther’s famous argument at Leipzig: Councils can err; therefore Scripture is the final authority. The Protestant position infers canonical authority from inspiration. But this is not a valid inference. God can inspire a text without intending that text to serve as a final authority for all matters doctrinal.

I am well aware that Protestants will dispute the Catholic understanding of the texts I have cited. This is not threatening, and we should have a lively discussion about what they mean. What Protestants must concede, however, is that Catholics attempt to ground their doctrine of authority on the teaching of Christ and the apostles. They do not resort to tenuous logical inferences. Can Protestant apologists do the same?⁵

1. Cf. Westminster Confession, I.1-10.
2. The Commentary of Dr. Zacharius Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. G.W. Williard, 2^nd edition (Columbus: Scott & Bascom, 1852), 3.
3. Rijssen, Summ. Theol., II.xv. Cited in Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 2: Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 409.
4. See Muller, Post-Reformation, 357-409. I also find it suggested by Keith Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2001), .262-265.
5. My special thanks to Fr. Lambert Greenan, O.P., the inspiration for this article.

The list of quotations below is by no means an exhaustive list of references to the seat of Peter, let alone to the ecclesial authority of St. Peter and his successors. But these quotations include some of the more important and revealing early references to the seat of Peter.

Outline
A. Second Century
B. Third Century
C. Fourth Century
D. Fifth Century
E. Sixth Century

A. Second Century

Muratorian Fragment (AD 180-200)

The Pastor [i.e. "The Shepherd of Hermas"], moreover, did Hermas write very recently in our times in the city of Rome, while his brother bishop Pius sat in the chair of the Church of Rome. And therefore it also ought to be read; but it cannot be made public in the Church to the people, nor placed among the prophets, as their number is complete, nor among the apostles to the end of time. (Muratorian Fragment)

B. Third Century

Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 225), wrote the following in this Prescription Against Heretics, around AD 200:

Come now, if you would indulge a better curiosity in the business of your salvation, run through the apostolic Churches in which the very thrones [cathedrae] of the Apostles remain still in place; in which their own authentic writings are read, giving sound to the voice and recalling the faces of each. Achaia is near you, so you have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi. If you can cross into Asia, you have Ephesus. But if you are near to Italy, you have Rome, whence also our authority derives. How happy is that Church, on which Apostles poured out their whole doctrine along with their blood, where Peter endured a passion like that of the Lord, where Paul was crowned in a death like John’s [the Baptist], where the Apostle John, after being immersed in boiling oil and suffering no hurt, was exiled to an island.” (The Prescription Against Heretics, 36)

Sometime between AD 212 and 219, already a Montantist but revealing nonetheless, Tertullian wrote the following:

But further, if Christ reproves the scribes and Pharisees, sitting in the official chair of Moses, but not doing what they taught, what kind of (supposition) is it that He Himself withal should set upon His own official chair men who were mindful rather to enjoin — (but) not likewise to practise — sanctity of the flesh, which (sanctity) He had in all ways recommended to their teaching and practising? (On Monogamy, 8)

Tertullian, though already separated from the Catholic Church, argues that Christ would not have set upon His own official chair men who would be like the Pharisees who sat on the seat of Moses, saying one thing yet doing another. Tertullian’s argument aside, what is telling is his reference to Christ’s official chair, as a seat of teaching authority in the Church.

In AD 251, St. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage wrote:

“There is one God and one Christ, and one Church, and one Chair founded on the Rock [Peter] by the voice of the Lord [et cathedra una super Petrum Domini uoce fundata]. It is not possible to set up another altar or another priesthood besides that one altar and that one priesthood. Whoever gathers elsewhere, scatters.” (Epistle 39 (43))

About that same year St. Cyprian wrote:

“The Lord says to Peter: ‘I say to you,’ He says, ‘that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it. And to you I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatever things you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth, they shall be loosed also in heaven.’ And again He says to him after His resurrection: ‘Feed my sheep.’ On him He builds the Church, and to him He gives the command to feed the sheep; and although He assigns a like power to all the Apostles, yet He founded a single chair, and He established by His own authority a source and an intrinsic reason for that unity. Indeed, the others were that also which Peter was; but a primacy is given to Peter whereby it is made clear that there is but one Church and one chair. So too, all are shepherds, and the flock is shown to be one, fed by all the Apostles in single-minded accord. If someone does not hold fast to this unity of Peter, can he imagine that he still holds the faith? If he desert the chair of Peter upon whom the Church was built, can he still be confident that he is in the Church?” (Treatise on the Unity of the Catholic Church, 1st edition) ¹

Concerning the Novatian schism, led by the antipope Novatian, St. Cyprian writes (AD 251-3)

You wrote, moreover, for me to transmit a copy of those same letters to [Pope] Cornelius our colleague, so that he might lay aside all anxiety, and know at once that you held communion with him, that is, with the Catholic Church. … Moreover, Cornelius was made bishop by the judgment of God and of His Christ, by the testimony of almost all the clergy, by the suffrage of the people who were then present, and by the assembly of ancient priests and good men, when no one had been made so before him, when the place of Fabian, that is, when the place of Peter and the degree of the sacerdotal throne was vacant; which being occupied by the will of God, and established by the consent of all of us, whosoever now wishes to become a bishop, must needs be made from without; and he cannot have the ordination of the Church who does not hold the unity of the Church. Whoever he may be, although greatly boasting about himself, and claiming very much for himself, he is profane, he is an alien, he is without. And as after the first there cannot be a second, whosoever is made after one who ought to be alone, is not second to him, but is in fact none at all.

Then afterwards, when he had undertaken the episcopate, not obtained by solicitation nor by extortion, but by the will of God who makes priests; what a virtue there was in the very undertaking of his episcopate, what strength of mind, what firmness of faith — a thing that we ought with simple heart both thoroughly to look into and to praise — that he intrepidly sat at Rome in the sacerdotal chair at that time when a tyrant, odious to God’s priests, was threatening things that can, and cannot be spoken, inasmuch as he would much more patiently and tolerantly hear that a rival prince was raised up against himself than that a priest of God was established at Rome. (Letter 51)

St. Cyprian is very explicit that Christ made St. Peter the ground (or foundation or basis) of the unity of the Church. In giving to St. Peter a primacy, Christ gave to the Church a gift, a means by which to preserve her unity. Otherwise at the first schism there would be no objective way to determine where the Church is, for each faction would seemingly have equal claim to be the continuation of the Church. Christ did not set up the Church so that all of her members must have graduate degrees in theology in order to determine where is the Church, as if even then there would be unity.

St. Cyprian continues, in AD 252, still writing about the Novatian schism:

For neither have heresies arisen, nor have schisms originated, from any other source than from this, that God’s priest is not obeyed; nor do they consider that there is one person for the time priest in the Church, and for the time judge in the stead of Christ; whom, if, according to divine teaching, the whole fraternity should obey, no one would stir up anything against the college of priests; no one, after the divine judgment, after the suffrage of the people, after the consent of the co-bishops, would make himself a judge, not now of the bishop, but of God. No one would rend the Church by a division of the unity of Christ. No one, pleasing himself, and swelling with arrogance, would found a new heresy, separate and without, unless any one be of such sacrilegious daring and abandoned mind, as to think that a priest is made without God’s judgment, when the Lord says in His Gospel, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them does not fall to the ground without the will of your Father.” (Matt. 10:29) [...]

Nevertheless, Peter, upon whom by the same Lord the Church had been built, speaking one for all, and answering with the voice of the Church, says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we believe, and are sure that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God: ” (Matt. 15:13) signifying, doubtless, and showing that those who departed from Christ perished by their own fault, yet that the Church which believes on Christ, and holds that which it has once learned, never departs from Him at all, and that those are the Church who remain in the house of God; but that, on the other hand, they are not the plantation planted by God the Father, whom we see not to be established with the stability of wheat, but blown about like chaff by the breath of the enemy scattering them, of whom John also in his epistle says, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, no doubt they would have continued with us.” (1 Jn. 2:19) [...]

With a false bishop appointed for themselves by heretics, they dare even to set sail and carry letters from schismatics and blasphemers to the chair of Peter and to the principal Church, in which sacerdotal unity has its source; nor did they take thought that these are Romans, whose faith was praised by the preaching Apostle, and among whom it is not possible for perfidy to have entrance.” (Epistle 54, 14)

Notice that for St. Cyprian, the unity of the bishops and priests has its source not only as a past event but as a present grounding or principle in the chair of Peter.

Again, between 251-53, St. Cyprian writes:

But what sort of a thing is this, that, because Novatian dares to do this thing, we are to think that we must not do it! What then? Because Novatian also usurps the honour of the priestly throne, ought we therefore to renounce our throne? Or because Novatian endeavours wrongfully to set up an altar and to offer sacrifices, does it behoove us to cease from our altar and sacrifices, lest we should appear to be celebrating the same or like things with him? Utterly vain and foolish is it, that because Novatian arrogates to himself outside the Church the image of the truth, we should forsake the truth of the Church. … For first of all the Lord gave that power to Peter, upon whom He built the Church, and whence He appointed and showed the source of unity — the power, namely, that whatsoever he loosed on earth should be loosed in heaven. And after the resurrection, also, He speaks to the apostles, saying, “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you. And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and says, unto them, Receive the Holy Ghost: whosesoever sins you remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins you retain, they are retained.” Whence we perceive that only they who are set over the Church and established in the Gospel law, and in the ordinance of the Lord, are allowed to baptize and to give remission of sins; but that without, nothing can either be bound or loosed, where there is none who can either bind or loose anything.(Epistle 72)

And during this same time (251-253) he writes:

For if she [the Church] is with Novatian, she was not with [Pope] Cornelius. But if she was with Cornelius, who succeeded the bishop Fabian by lawful ordination, and whom, beside the honour of the priesthood, the Lord glorified also with martyrdom, [then] Novatian is not in the Church; nor can he be reckoned as a bishop, who, succeeding to no one, and despising the evangelical and apostolic tradition, sprang from himself. For he who has not been ordained in the Church can neither have nor hold to the Church in any way. … But if the flock is one, how can he be numbered among the flock who is not in the number of the flock? Or how can he be esteemed a pastor, who — while the true shepherd remains and presides over the Church of God by successive ordination — succeeding to no one, and beginning from himself, becomes a stranger and a profane person, an enemy of the Lord’s peace and of the divine unity, not dwelling in the house of God, that is, in the Church of God, in which none dwell except they are of one heart and one mind, since the Holy Spirit speaks in the Psalms, and says, “It is God who makes men to dwell of one mind in a house.” … But that they [i.e. the Novatians] are said to have the same God the Father as we, to know the same Christ the Son, the same Holy Spirit, can be of no avail to such as these. For even Korah, Dathan, and Abiram knew the same God as did the priest Aaron and Moses. And yet those men had not made a schism, nor had gone out abroad, and in opposition to God’s priests rebelled shamelessly and with hostility; but this these men [i.e. the Novatians] are now doing who divide the Church, and, as rebels against the peace and unity of Christ, attempt to establish a throne for themselves, and to assume the primacy, and to claim the right of baptizing and of offering [i.e. the Eucharistic sacrifice]. (Epistle 75)

A few years later, in AD 256, when St. Stephen was pope, some of the African bishops were claiming that those persons who had been baptized while in a heresy, needed still to be baptized upon wishing to be received into the Catholic Church, because, according to these bishops, those first baptisms were invalid. St. Cyprian himself held this position and argued for it against Pope St. Stephen, who determined that such persons ought not to be re-baptized, because even though they were baptized while in a heresy, and the baptism was therefore illicit, nevertheless such baptisms were valid.²

Firmilian, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, wrote to St. Cyprian in AD 256 regarding Pope Stephen, saying the following:

[H]e who so boasts of the place of his episcopate, and contends that he holds the succession from Peter, on whom the foundations of the Church were laid, should introduce many other rocks and establish new buildings of many churches; maintaining that there is baptism in them by his authority. For they who are baptized, doubtless, fill up the number of the Church. But he who approves their baptism maintains, of those baptized, that the Church is also with them. Nor does he understand that the truth of the Christian Rock is overshadowed, and in some measure abolished, by him when he thus betrays and deserts unity. The apostle acknowledges that the Jews, although blinded by ignorance, and bound by the grossest wickedness, have yet a zeal for God. Stephen, who announces that he holds by succession the throne of Peter, is stirred with no zeal against heretics, when he concedes to them, not a moderate, but the very greatest power of grace: so far as to say and assert that, by the sacrament of baptism, the filth of the old man is washed away by them, that they pardon the former mortal sins, that they make sons of God by heavenly regeneration, and renew to eternal life by the sanctification of the divine laver. … For while you think that all may be excommunicated by you, you have excommunicated yourself alone from all; and not even the precepts of an apostle have been able to mould you to the rule of truth and peace. (Epistle 74)³

Of course Firmilian is claiming that Pope St. Stephen is wrong about re-baptizing heretics. But not only does Pope St. Stephen turn out to have been right, but Firmilian’s letter reveals the way in which Pope St. Stephen conceived of the role and authority of the office signified by the chair of St. Peter.

C. Fourth Century

Poem Against the Marcionites (prior to AD 325):

In this chair in which he himself had sat, Peter, in mighty Rome, commanded Linus, the first elected, to sit down . . .

The Council of Serdica (343-344) in what is today Sophia, Bulgaria concluded the summary of the acts of the synod by writing to the bishop of Rome with these words:

“For this will seem to be best and most fitting indeed, if the priests from each and every province refer to the head, that is, to the chair of Peter the Apostle.” (Denzinger, 57e)⁴

St. Athanasius, the famous defender of Nicene orthodoxy, wrote the following around AD 358:

Thus from the first they [i.e. the Arians] spared not even Liberius, Bishop of Rome, but extended their fury even to those parts; they respected not his bishopric, because it was an Apostolical throne; they felt no reverence for Rome, because she is the Metropolis of Romania ; they remembered not that formerly in their letters they had spoken of her Bishops as Apostolical men. But confounding all things together, they at once forgot everything, and cared only to show their zeal in behalf of impiety. When they perceived that he was an orthodox man and hated the Arian heresy, and earnestly endeavoured to persuade all persons to renounce and withdraw from it, these impious men reasoned thus with themselves: ‘If we can persuade Liberius, we shall soon prevail over all.’ (History of the Arians, Part V)

St. Optatus of Milevisu, bishop of Milevis in Africa, in a work begun in AD 367 writes:

For it was not Caecilian who went forth from Majorinus, your father’s father, but it was Majorinus who deserted Caecilian; nor was it Caecilian who separated himself from the Chair of Peter, or from the Chair of Cyprian l but Majorinus, on whose Chair you sit, a Chair which had no existence before Majorinus himself. … Victor would not have been able, had he been asked where he sat, to show that anyone had been there before him, nor could he have pointed out that he possessed any Cathedra save the Cathedra of pestilence, for pestilence sends down its victims, destroyed by diseases, to the regions of Hell which are known to have their gates gates against which we read that Peter received the saving Keys, Peter, that is to say, the first of our line, to whom it was said by Christ:

To thee will I give the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and these keys the gates of Hell shall not overcome.

How is it, then, that you strive to usurp for yourselves the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, you who, with your arguments, and audacious sacrilege, war against the Chair of Peter? … For it has been proved that we are in the Holy Catholic Church, who have too the Creed of the Trinity; and it has been shown that, through the Chair of Peter which is ours through it the other Endowments also belong to us. … Will you be able to prove that the Chair of Peter is a lie and the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, which were granted him by Christ, with which we are in communion? (The work of St. Optatus)

Between AD 384 and 387 St. Optatus wrote the following:

“But you cannot deny that you know that the episcopal seat was established first in the city of Rome by Peter and that in it sat Peter, the head of all the apostles, wherefore he is called Cephas, the one chair in which unity is maintained by all. Neither do other Apostles proceed individually on their own; and anyone who would set up another chair in opposition to that single chair would, by that very fact, be a schismatic and a sinner. It was Peter, then, who first occupied that chair, the foremost of his endowed gifts. He was succeeded by Linus, Linus was succeeded by Clement, Clement by Anencletus, Anencletus by Evaristus, Evaristus by Eleutherus, Eleutherus by Xystus, Xystus by Telesphorus, Telesphorus by Hyginus, Hyginus by Anicetus, Anicetus by Pius, Pius by Soter, Soter by Alexander, Alexander by Victor, Victor by Zephyrinus, Zephyrinus by Callistus, Callistus by Urban, Urban by Pontianus, Pontianus by Anterus, Anterus by Fabian, Fabian by Cornelius, Cornelius by Lucius, Lucius by Stephen, Stephen by Xystus, Xystus by Dionysius, Dionysius by Felix, Felix by Marcellinus, Marcellinus by Eusebius, Eusebius by Melchiades, Melchiades by Sylvester, Sylvester by Mark, Mark by Julius, Julius by Liberius, Liberius by Damasus, Damasus by Siricius, our present incumbent. I but ask you to recall the origins of your chair, you who wish to claim for yourselves the title of holy Church.” (De Schismate Donatistarum)

St. Optatus shows that schism is defined in relation to the chair of St. Peter, because Christ made Peter the head of the Apostles.⁵

Pope St. Damasus, in the year AD 382, wrote the following:

The holy Roman Church has been placed at the forefront not by the conciliar decisions of other Churches, but has received the primacy by the evangelic voice of our Lord and Savior, who says: Your are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it; and I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you shall have bound on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you shall have loosed on earth shall be loosed in heaven. … The most blessed Apostle Paul, who contended and was crowned with a glorious death along with Peter in the City of Rome in the time of Caesar Nero — not at a different time, as the heretics prattle, but at one and the same time and on one and the same day: and they equally consecrated the above-mentioned holy Roman Church to Christ the Lord; and by their own presence and by their venerable triumph they set it at the forefront over the others of all the cities of the whole world. The first see, therefore, is that of Peter the Apostle, that of the Roman Church, which has neither stain nor blemish nor anything like it.” (The Decree of Damasus)

The term “See” comes from the Latin sedes, meaning ‘chair.’ This reference to the “first see” is in this way a reference to the primary chair. And this is also the origin of the term ‘Apostolic See,’ which refers to the Chair of the Apostle and the particular Church at Rome.⁶

St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, and the one who baptized St. Augustine, wrote the following in AD 388:

You said to Peter when he excused himself from having his feet washed by You: “If I wash not your feet, you will have no part with Me.” (John 13:8) What fellowship, then, can they [i.e. the Novatians] have with You, who receive not the keys of the kingdom of heaven, saying that they ought not to remit sins? And this confession is indeed rightly made by them, for they have not the succession of Peter, who hold not the chair of Peter, which they rend by wicked schism; and this, too, they do, wickedly denying that sins can be forgiven even in the Church, whereas it was said to Peter: “I will give unto you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven.” (Concerning Repentance, Book 1, 7:33)

St. John Chrysostom, a priest at Antioch for twelve years before becoming bishop of Constantinople in 398, wrote about the difference in authority between the episcopal chair of St. James in Jerusalem and the chair of St. Peter in Rome:

And why, having passed by the others, does He [Jesus] speak with Peter on these matters? He [Peter] was the chosen one of the Apostles, the mouth of the disciples, the leader of the band; on this account also Paul went up upon a time to enquire of him rather than the others. And at the same time to show him that he must now be of good cheer, since the denial was done away, Jesus puts into his hands the chief authority among the brethren…. And if any should say, ‘How then did James receive the chair at Jerusalem?’ I would make this reply, that He appointed Peter teacher, not of the chair [of Jerusalem], but of the world…. For he [Peter] who then did not dare to question Jesus, but committed the office to another, was even entrusted with the chief authority over the brethren, and not only does not commit to another what relates to himself, but himself now puts a question to his Master concerning another. (Homily 88 on the Gospel of John)

St. Jerome, in AD 376 wrote:

“Since the East, shattered as it is by the long-standing feuds, subsisting between its peoples, is bit by bit tearing into shreds the seamless vest of the Lord…. I think it my duty to consult the chair of Peter…. My words are spoken to the successor of the fisherman, to the disciple of the cross. As I follow no leader save Christ, so I communicate with none but your blessedness, that is with the chair of Peter. For this, I know, is the rock on which the church is built! This is the house where alone the paschal lamb can be rightly eaten. This is the ark of Noah, and he who is not found in it shall perish when the flood prevails…. He that gathers not with you scatters…. If you think fit enact a decree; and then I shall not hesitate to speak of three hypostases. Order a new creed to supersede the Nicene; and then, whether we are Arians or orthodox, one confession will do for us all…. I beg you also to signify with whom I am to communicate at Antioch. Not, I hope, with the Campenses; for they — with their allies the heretics of Tarsus — only desire communion with you to preach with greater authority their traditional doctrine of three hypostases.(Letter 15 to Pope St. Damasus)

In that same year he wrote the following in a letter to Pope St. Damasus:

The untiring foe follows me closely, and the assaults that I suffer in the desert are severer than ever. For the Arian frenzy raves, and the powers of the world support it. The church is rent into three factions, and each of these is eager to seize me for its own. The influence of the monks is of long standing, and it is directed against me. I meantime keep crying: “He who clings to the chair of Peter is accepted by me.” Meletius, Vitalis, and Paulinus all profess to cleave to you, and I could believe the assertion if it were made by one of them only. As it is, either two of them or else all three are guilty of falsehood. Therefore I implore your blessedness, by our Lord’s cross and passion, those necessary glories of our faith, as you hold an apostolic office, to give an apostolic decision. Only tell me by letter with whom I am to communicate in Syria, and I will pray for you that you may sit in judgment enthroned with the twelve; Matthew 19:28 that when you grow old, like Peter, you may be girded not by yourself but by another, John 21:18 and that, like Paul, you may be made a citizen of the heavenly kingdom. (Letter 16 to Pope Damasus)

Between 392 and 393 St. Jerome wrote:

Simon Peter the son of John, from the village of Bethsaida in the province of Galilee, brother of Andrew the apostle, and himself chief of the apostles, after having been bishop of the church of Antioch and having preached to the Dispersion — the believers in circumcision, in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia — pushed on to Rome in the second year of Claudius to overthrow Simon Magus, and held the sacerdotal chair there for twenty-five years until the last, that is the fourteenth, year of Nero. At his hands he received the crown of martyrdom being nailed to the cross with his head towards the ground and his feet raised on high, asserting that he was unworthy to be crucified in the same manner as his Lord. He wrote two epistles which are called Catholic, the second of which, on account of its difference from the first in style, is considered by many not to be by him. Then too the Gospel according to Mark, who was his disciple and interpreter, is ascribed to him. … Buried at Rome in the Vatican near the triumphal way he is venerated by the whole world. […]

Novatianus, presbyter of Rome, attempted to usurp the sacerdotal chair occupied by [Pope] Cornelius, and established the dogma of the Novatians, or as they are called in Greek, the Cathari, by refusing to receive penitent apostates. (De Viris Illustribus, 1, 70)⁷

Later, in AD 414, he wrote in a letter to Demetrias:

I think, therefore, that I ought to warn you, in all kindness and affection, to hold fast the faith of the saintly [Pope] Innocent, the spiritual son of [Pope] Anastasius and his successor in the apostolic see; and not to receive any foreign doctrine, however wise and discerning you may take yourself to be. (Letter 130)

St. Jerome affirmed the role of the chair of Peter in preserving and grounding the unity of the Church. The church in Syria was at that time divided into three factions, and St. Jerome turned to the visible head of the Church (the bishop occupying St. Peter’s chair) to determine which of the factions was part of the true Church, and which were schisms from the true Church. He clearly understand that Christ had foreseen that the Church needed a visible head in order not to provide an occasion for schism. For St. Jerome, the unity of the Church was not based on a continuous miracle operating against nature. Even nature teaches us that where there is no visible head, there will be no end of quarreling and divisions, to the point of disintegration. That is why Christ established a visible head, to provide a principium unitatis (principle of unity) for the Church. To be in communion with that rock upon which the Church is built, is to be in full union with the Church. To spurn that rock is to be in schism.

D. Fifth Century

Pope St. Innocent I, writing to St. Jerome in AD 417, says the following:

The spectacle of these terrible evils has so thoroughly roused us that we have hastened to put forth the authority of the apostolic see to repress the plague in all its manifestations; but as your letters name no individuals and bring no specific charges, there is no one at present against whom we can proceed. But we do all that we can; we sympathize deeply with you. And if you will lay a clear and unambiguous accusation against any persons in particular we will appoint suitable judges to try their cases; or if you, our highly esteemed son, think that it is needful for us to take yet graver and more urgent action, we shall not be slow to do so. Meantime we have written to our brother bishop John [bishop of Jerusalem] advising him to act more considerately, so that nothing may occur in the church committed to him which it is his duty to foresee and to prevent, and that nothing may happen which may subsequently prove a source of trouble to him. (Letter 136)

In the same year, he wrote to the bishops of Africa:

In seeking the things of God . . . preserving the examples of ancient tradition . . . you have strengthened … the vigor of your religion with true reason, for you have acknowledged that judgment is to be referred to us, and have shown that you know what is owed to the Apostolic See, since all of us placed in this position desire to follow the Apostle, from whom the episcopate itself and all the authority of this name have emerged. Following him we know how to condemn evils just as well as how to approve praiseworthy things. Take this as an example, guarding with your sacerdotal office the practices of the fathers you resolve that they must not be trampled upon, because they made their decisions not by human, but by divine judgment, so that they thought that nothing whatever, although it concerned separated and remote provinces, should be concluded, unless it first came to the attention of this See, so that what was a just proclamation might be confirmed by the total authority of this See, and from this source (just as all waters proceed from their natal fountain and through diverse regions of the whole world remain pure liquids of an uncorrupted source), the other churches might assume what [they ought] to teach, whom they ought to wash, those whom the water worthy of clean bodies would shun as though defiled with filth incapable of being cleansed.” (Letter to the Council of Carthage, as quoted in Chapman, Studies on the Early Papacy, pp. 146-147. )

Pope St. Boniface, the bishop of Rome from 418 through 422, wrote the following to Rufus, bishop of Thessaly on March 11, 422:

To the Synod [of Corinth] … we have directed such writings that all the brethren may know . . . that there must be no withdrawal from our judgment. For it has never been allowed that that be discussed again which has once been decided by the Apostolic See.” (Epistle 13, cited in Giles, Documents Illustrating Papal Authority, pp. 229-230.)⁸

St. Augustine points to the chair of St. Peter as one of the things that keeps him in the Catholic Church. He writes in AD 396:

“There are many other things which most justly keep me in [the Catholic Church's] bosom. The consent of peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after His resurrection, gave it in charge to feed His sheep, down to the present episcopate. And so, lastly, does the name itself of Catholic, which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained; so that, though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house. Such then in number and importance are the precious ties belonging to the Christian name which keep a believer in the Catholic Church …no one shall move me from the faith which binds my mind with ties so many and so strong to the Christian religion…. For my part I should not believe the gospel except the authority of the Catholic Church moved me. So when those on whose authority I have consented to believe in the gospel tell me not to believe in Manichæus, how can I but consent? Take your choice. If you say, Believe the Catholics: their advice to me is to put no faith in you; so that, believing them, I am precluded from believing you — If you say, Do not believe the Catholics: you cannot fairly use the gospel in bringing me to faith in Manichæus; for it was at the command of the Catholics that I believed the gospel.” (Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus, 4-5)

In the following year (i.e. AD 397), St. Augustine wrote:

[B]ecause [the bishop of Carthage] saw himself united by letters of communion both to the Roman Church, in which the primacy (principality/supremacy) of an apostolic chair [apostolicae cathedrae principatus] has always flourished, and to all other lands from which Africa itself received the gospel, and was prepared to defend himself before these Churches if his adversaries attempted to cause an alienation of them from him. (Letter 43)

In the year 400, St Augustine wrote:

For if the lineal succession of bishops is to be taken into account, with how much more certainty and benefit to the Church do we reckon back till we reach Peter himself, to whom, as bearing in a figure the whole Church, the Lord said: “Upon this rock will I build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it!” (Matt. 16:18) The successor of Peter was Linus, and his successors in unbroken continuity were these: — Clement, Anacletus, Evaristus, Alexander, Sixtus, Telesphorus, Iginus, Anicetus, Pius, Soter, Eleutherius, Victor, Zephirinus, Calixtus, Urbanus, Pontianus, Antherus, Fabianus, Cornelius, Lucius, Stephanus, Xystus, Dionysius, Felix, Eutychianus, Gaius, Marcellinus, Marcellus, Eusebius, Miltiades, Sylvester, Marcus, Julius, Liberius, Damasus, and Siricius, whose successor is the present Bishop Anastasius. In this order of succession no Donatist bishop is found. But, reversing the natural course of things, the Donatists sent to Rome from Africa an ordained bishop, who, putting himself at the head of a few Africans in the great metropolis, gave some notoriety to the name of “mountain men,” or Cutzupits, by which they were known.

Now, even although some traditor had in the course of these centuries, through inadvertence, obtained a place in that order of bishops, reaching from Peter himself to Anastasius, who now occupies that see — this fact would do no harm to the Church and to Christians having no share in the guilt of another; for the Lord, providing against such a case, says, concerning officers in the Church who are wicked: “All whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.” (Matt. 23:3) Thus the stability of the hope of the faithful is secured, inasmuch as being fixed, not in man, but in the Lord, it never can be swept away by the raging of impious schism; whereas they themselves are swept away who read in the Holy Scriptures the names of churches to which the apostles wrote, and in which they have no bishop. For what could more clearly prove their perversity and their folly, than their saying to their clergy, when they read these letters, “Peace be with you,” at the very time that they are themselves disjoined from the peace of those churches to which the letters were originally written? (Letter 53)

In his Answer to Petilian the Donatist (400-401), we find the following exchange between Petilian and St. Augustine:

Petilianus said: “If you wretched men claim for yourselves a seat, as we said before, you assuredly have that one of which the prophet and psalmist David speaks as being the seat of the scornful. For to you it is rightly left, seeing that the holy cannot sit therein.”

Augustine answered: Here again you do not see that this is no kind of argument, but empty abuse. For this is what I said a little while ago, You utter the words of the law, but take no heed against whom you utter them; just as the devil uttered the words of the law, but failed to perceive to whom he uttered them. He wished to thrust down our Head, who was presently to ascend on high; but you wish to reduce to a small fraction the body of that same Head which is dispersed throughout the entire world. Certainly you yourself said a little time before that we know the law, and speak in legal terms, but blush in our deeds. Thus much indeed you say without a proof of anything; but even though you were to prove it of some men, you would not be entitled to assert it of these others. However, if all men throughout all the world were of the character which you most vainly charge them with, what has the chair done to you of the Roman Church, in which Peter sat, and which Anastasius fills today; or the chair of the Church of Jerusalem, in which James once sat, and in which John sits today, with which we are united in catholic unity, and from which you have severed yourselves by your mad fury? Why do you call the apostolic chair a seat of the scornful? If it is on account of the men whom you believe to use the words of the law without performing it, do you find that our Lord Jesus Christ was moved by the Pharisees, of whom He says, “They say, and do not,” to do any despite to the seat in which they sat? Did He not commend the seat of Moses, and maintain the honor of the seat, while He convicted those that sat in it? For He says, “They sit in Moses’ seat: all therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.” (Matt. 23:2-3) If you were to think of these things, you would not, on account of men whom you calumniate, do despite to the apostolic seat, in which you have no share. But what else is conduct like yours but ignorance of what to say, combined with want of power to abstain from evil-speaking? [...]

But if you [i.e. Donatatists] are really men like this, how much better and how much more in accordance with truth do we act in not baptizing after you [i.e. in your manner], as neither was it right that those whom I have mentioned should be circumcised after the worst of Pharisees! Furthermore, when such men sit in the seat of Moses, for which the Lord preserved its due honor, why do you blaspheme the apostolic chair on account of men whom, justly or unjustly, you compare with these? (Answer to Petilian the Donatist, Book II, c. 51)

St. Augustine writes the following to Pope Sixtus in AD 418:

Wherefore, my venerable lord, and holy brother worthy of being received in the love of Christ, although you render a most excellent service when you thus write on this subject to brethren before whom the adversaries are wont to boast themselves of your being their friend, nevertheless, there remains upon you the yet greater duty of seeing not only that those be punished with wholesome severity who dare to prate more openly their declaration of that error, most dangerously hostile to the Christian name, but also that with pastoral vigilance, on behalf of the weaker and simpler sheep of the Lord, most strenuous precautions be used against those who more covertly, indeed, and timidly, but perseveringly, and in whispers, as it were, teach this error, “creeping into houses,” as the apostle says, and doing with practised impiety all those other things which are mentioned immediately afterwards in that passage. (2 Tim.3:6) Nor ought those to be overlooked who under the restraint of fear hide their sentiments under the most profound silence, yet have not ceased to cherish the same perverse opinions as before. For some of their party might be known to you before that pestilence was denounced by the most explicit condemnation of the apostolic see, whom you perceive to have now become suddenly silent; nor can it be ascertained whether they have been really cured of it. (Letter 191)

Between 419-20, St. Augustine wrote the following:

The new-fangled Pelagian heretics have been most justly condemned by the authority of catholic councils and of the Apostolic See. (On the Soul and its Origin, Bk II, 17)

Between 420 and 421, St. Augustine wrote:

For who does not see in what degree Cœlestius was bound by the interrogations of your holy predecessor and by the answers of Cœlestius, whereby he professed that he consented to the letters of Pope Innocent, and fastened by a most wholesome chain, so as not to dare any further to maintain that the original sin of infants is not put away in baptism? Because these are the words of the venerable Bishop Innocent concerning this matter to the Carthaginian Council: “For once,” he said, “he bore free will; but, using his advantage inconsiderately, and falling into the depths of apostasy, he was overwhelmed, and found no way whereby he could rise from thence; and, deceived for ever by his liberty, he would have lain under the oppression of this ruin, if the advent of Christ had not subsequently for his grace delivered him, and, by the purification of a new regeneration, purged all past sin by the washing of His baptism.” What could be more clear or more manifest than that judgment of the Apostolical See? (Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, Bk II)

In a letter to Pope Caelestine, St. Augustine writes the following in AD 423:

First of all I congratulate you that our Lord God has, as we have heard, established you in the illustrious chair which you occupy without any division among His people. (Letter 209)

In AD 426, St. Augustine wrote:

Now Pelagius was either afraid or ashamed to avow this to be his own opinion before you; although his disciple experienced neither a qualm nor a blush in openly professing it to be his, without any obscure subterfuges, in presence of the Apostolic See. … The venerable Pope Zosimus, keeping in view this deprecatory preamble, dealt with the man, puffed up as he was with the blasts of false doctrine, so as that he should condemn all the objectionable points which had been alleged against him by the deacon Paulinus, and that he should yield his assent to the rescript of the Apostolic See which had been issued by his predecessor of sacred memory. The accused man, however, refused to condemn the objections raised by the deacon, yet he did not dare to hold out against the letter of the blessed Pope Innocent; indeed, he went so far as to “promise that he would condemn all the points which the Apostolic See condemned.” … This being the case, you of course feel that episcopal councils, and the Apostolic See, and the whole Roman Church, and the Roman Empire itself, which by God’s gracious favour has become Christian, has been most righteously moved against the authors of this wicked error, until they repent and escape from the snares of the devil…. But I would have you carefully observe the way in which Pelagius endeavoured by deception to overreach even the judgment of the bishop of the Apostolic See on this very question of the baptism of infants. He sent a letter to Rome to Pope Innocent of blessed memory; and when it found him not in the flesh, it was handed to the holy Pope Zosimus, and by him directed to us. (On the Grace of Christ, and on Original Sin, Bk II, 19)

To fellow bishop Auxilius, St. Augustine writes in an undated letter:

I desire with the Lord’s help to use the necessary measures in our Council, and, if it be necessary, to write to the Apostolic See; that, by a unanimous authoritative decision of all, we may have the course which ought to be followed in these cases determined and established. (Letter 250)

In an undated sermon, St. Augustine writes:

For already have two councils on this question [i.e. Pelagianism] been sent to the Apostolic see; and rescripts also have come from thence. The cause is finished. [causa finita est]; would that the error may sometime be brought to an end as well! [Utinam aliquando finiatur error] (Sermon 81 on the New Testament)

On August 11, 431, Pope Celestine wrote to St. Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, delegating him with authority to preside over the Council of Ephesus, saying:

… If he, Nestorius, persist, an open sentence must be passed on him, for a wound, when it affects the whole body, must be cut away at once. … And so, appropriating to yourself the authority of our See, and using our position, you will execute our sentence with exact severity, that either he shall within ten days, counted from the day of your notice, condemn in writing this wicked assertion of his, and shall give assurance that he will hold, concerning the birth of Christ our God, the faith which the Romans, and the church of your holiness, and the universal religion holds; or if he will not do this (your holiness having at once provided for that church) he will know that he is in every way removed from our body. (Pope Celestine, Epistle 11, cited in Giles, pp. 240-41)

At the Council of Ephesus (431) in which Nestorius was condemned, the papal legates said the following:

Philip the presbyter and legate of the Apostolic See said: There is no doubt, and in fact it has been known in all ages, that the holy and most blessed Peter, prince (ἔξαρχος) and head of the Apostles, pillar of the faith, and foundation (θεμέλιος) of the Catholic Church, received the keys of the kingdom from our Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour and Redeemer of the human race, and that to him was given the power of loosing and binding sins: who down even to today and forever both lives and judges in his successors. The holy and most blessed pope Cœlestine, according to due order, is his successor and holds his place, and us he sent to supply his place in this holy synod, which the most humane and Christian Emperors have commanded to assemble, bearing in mind and continually watching over the Catholic faith. For they both have kept and are now keeping intact the apostolic doctrine handed down to them from their most pious and humane grandfathers and fathers of holy memory down to the present time, etc.

Arcadius the most reverend bishop and legate of the Apostolic See said: Nestorius has brought us great sorrow….And since of his own accord he has made himself an alien and an exile from us, we following the sanctions handed down from the beginning by the holy Apostles, and by the Catholic Church (for they taught what they had received from our Lord Jesus Christ), also following the types (τύποις) of Cœlestine, most holy pope of the Apostolic See, who has condescended to send us as his executors of this business, and also following the decrees of the holy Synod [we give this as our conclusion]: Let Nestorius know that he is deprived of all episcopal dignity, and is an alien from the whole Church and from the communion of all its priests.

Projectus, bishop and legate of the Roman Church said: Most clearly from the reading, etc….Moreover I also, by my authority as legate of the holy Apostolic See, define, being with my brethren an executor (ἐκβιβαστὴς) of the aforesaid sentence, that the beforenamed Nestorius is an enemy of the truth, a corrupter of the faith, and as guilty of the things of which he was accused, has been removed from the grade of Episcopal honour, and moreover from the communion of all orthodox priests. (Council of Ephesus, AD 431)

St. Vincent of Lerins, three years later in AD 434, wrote the following:

For it has always been the case in the Church, that the more a man is under the influence of religion, so much the more prompt is he to oppose innovations. Examples there are without number: but to be brief, we will take one, and that, in preference to others, from the Apostolic See, so that it may be clearer than day to every one with how great energy, with how great zeal, with how great earnestness, the blessed successors of the blessed apostles have constantly defended the integrity of the religion which they have once received.

Once on a time then, Agripinnus, bishop of Carthage, of venerable memory, held the doctrine — and he was the first who held it — that Baptism ought to be repeated, contrary to the divine canon, contrary to the rule of the universal Church, contrary to the customs and institutions of our ancestors. This innovation drew after it such an amount of evil, that it not only gave an example of sacrilege to heretics of all sorts, but proved an occasion of error to certain Catholics even.

When then all men protested against the novelty, and the priesthood everywhere, each as his zeal prompted him, opposed it, Pope Stephen of blessed memory, Prelate of the Apostolic See, in conjunction indeed with his colleagues but yet himself the foremost, withstood it, thinking it right, I doubt not, that as he exceeded all others in the authority of his place, so he should also in the devotion of his faith. In fine, in an epistle sent at the time to Africa, he laid down this rule: “Let there be no innovation — nothing but what has been handed down.” For that holy and prudent man well knew that true piety admits no other rule than that whatsoever things have been faithfully received from our fathers the same are to be faithfully consigned to our children; and that it is our duty, not to lead religion whither we would, but rather to follow religion whither it leads; and that it is the part of Christian modesty and gravity not to hand down our own beliefs or observances to those who come after us, but to preserve and keep what we have received from those who went before us. (Commonitorium, 6)

The Church history Sozomen (c. 370 – d. after 439), of Palestine, wrote the following concerning the activities of St. Athanasius in relation to Pope Juilus (pope from AD 337-52):

Athanasius, on leaving Alexandria, had fled to Rome. Paul, bishop of Constantinople, Marcellus, bishop of Ancyra, and Asclepas, bishop of Gaza, repaired thither at the same time. Asclepas, who was opposed to the Arians and had therefore been deposed, after having been accused by some of the heterodox of having thrown down an altar; Quintianus had been appointed in his stead over the Church of Gaza. Lucius also, bishop of Adrianople, who had been deposed from the church under his care on another charge, was dwelling at this period in Rome. The Roman bishop, on learning the accusation against each individual, and on finding that they held the same sentiments about the Nicæan dogmas, admitted them to communion as of like orthodoxy; and as the care [oversight - kedemonia] for all was fitting to the dignity of his see, he restored them all to their own churches. He wrote to the bishops of the East, and rebuked them for having judged these bishops unjustly, and for harassing the Churches by abandoning the Nicæan doctrines. He summoned a few among them to appear before him on an appointed day, in order to account to him for the sentence they had passed, and threatened to bear with them no longer, unless they would cease to make innovations. This was the tenor of his letters. Athanasius and Paul were reinstated in their respective sees, and forwarded the letter of Julius to the bishops of the East. … The bishops of Egypt, having sent a declaration in writing that these allegations were false, and Julius having been apprised that Athanasius was far from being in safety in Egypt, sent for him to his own city. He replied at the same time to the letter of the bishops who were convened at Antioch, for just then he happened to have received their epistle, and accused them of having clandestinely introduced innovations contrary to the dogmas of the Nicene council, and of having violated the laws of the Church, by neglecting to invite him to join their Synod; for he alleged that there is a sacerdotal canon which declares that whatever is enacted contrary to the judgment of the bishop of Rome is null.” (Ecclesiastical History, Bk III)

Elsewhere the next book he wrote:

This event was, no doubt, ordained by God, that the seat of Peter might not be dishonored by the occupancy of two bishops; for such an arrangement is a sign of discord, and is foreign to ecclesiastical law. (Ecclesiastical History, Bk IV,15)

Pope St. Leo the Great, who was pope from 440 through 461, wrote the following in the year AD 443:

Leo, bishop of the city of Rome, to all the bishops appointed in Campania, Picenum, Etruria, and all the provinces, greeting in the Lord. … All such persons [men who have married a widow, or a divorced woman], therefore, who have been admitted [to the priesthood] we order to be put out of their offices in the church and from the title of priest by the authority of the Apostolic See: for they will have no claim to that for which they were not eligible, on account of the obstacle in question: and we specially claim for ourselves the duty of settling this, that if any of these irregularities have been committed, they may be corrected and may not be allowed to occur again, and that no excuse may arise from ignorance: although it has never been allowed a priest to be ignorant of what has been laid down by the rules of the canons. (Letter 4)

Pope St. Leo the Great, around the year AD 446, wrote the following:

The connection of the whole body makes all alike healthy, all alike beautiful: and this connection requires the unanimity indeed of the whole body, but it especially demands harmony among the priests. And though they have a common dignity, yet they have not uniform rank; inasmuch as even among the blessed Apostles, notwithstanding the similarity of their honourable estate, there was a certain distinction of power, and while the election of them all was equal, yet it was given to one to take the lead of the rest. From which model has arisen a distinction between bishops also, and by an important ordinance it has been provided that every one should not claim everything for himself: but that there should be in each province one whose opinion should have the priority among the brethren: and again that certain whose appointment is in the greater cities should undertake a fuller responsibility, through whom the care of the universal Church should converge towards Peter’s one seat, and nothing anywhere should be separated from its head. Let not him then who knows he has been set over certain others take it ill that some one has been set over him, but let him himself render the obedience which he demands of them. (Letter 14 of Pope Leo I to Anastasius, Bishop of Thessalonica).

Pope St. Leo, to the bishop of Aquileia:

Let them [i.e. the Pelagians] by their public confession condemn the authors of this presumptuous error and renounce all that the universal Church has repudiated in their doctrine: and let them announce by full and open statements, signed by their own hand, that they embrace and entirely approve of all the synodal decrees which the authority of the Apostolic See has ratified to the rooting out of this heresy. (Letter 1)

Pope St. Leo, writing in July of 445:

To the beloved brothers, the whole body of bishops of the province of Vienne, Leo, bishop of Rome. Our Lord Jesus Christ, Saviour of mankind, instituted the observance of the Divine religion which He wished by the grace of God to shed its brightness upon all nations and all peoples …. But the Lord desired that the sacrament of this gift should pertain to all the Apostles in such a way that it might be found principally in the most blessed Peter, the highest of all the Apostles. And He wanted His gifts to flow into the entire body from Peter himself, as if from the head, in such a way that anyone who had dared to separate himself from the solidarity of Peter would realize that he was himself no longer a sharer in the divine mystery…. The Apostolic See — out of reverence for it, I mean, — has on countless occasions been reported to in consultation by bishops even of your province. And through the appeal of various cases to this see, decisions already made have been either revoked or confirmed, as dictated by long-standing custom. (Letter 10)

Pope St. Leo wrote to the Council of Chalcedon in 451:

I had indeed prayed, dearly beloved, on behalf of my dear colleagues that all the Lord’s priests would persist in united devotion to the Catholic Faith, and that no one would be misled by favour or fear of secular powers into departure from the way of Truth; but because many things often occur to produce penitence and God’s mercy transcends the faults of delinquents, and vengeance is postponed in order that reformation may have place, we must make much of our most merciful prince’s piously intentioned Council, in which he has desired your holy brotherhood to assemble for the purpose of destroying the snares of the devil and restoring the peace of the Church, so far respecting the rights and dignity of the most blessed Apostle Peter as to invite us too by letter to vouchsafe our presence at your venerable Synod. That indeed is not permitted either by the needs of the times or by any precedent. Yet in these brethren, that is Paschasinus and Lucentius, bishops, Boniface and Basil, presbyters, who have been deputed by the Apostolic See, let your brotherhood reckon that I am presiding at the Synod; for my presence is not withdrawn from you, who am now represented by my vicars, and have this long time been really with you in the proclaiming of the Catholic Faith: so that you who cannot help knowing what we believe in accordance with ancient tradition, cannot doubt what we desire. (Letter 93)

Theodoret, (c. 393 – 457) a native of Antioch, and bishop of Cyrus: wrote the following letter to Pope Leo about AD 449:

To Leo, bishop of Rome. If Paul, the herald of the Truth, the trumpet of the Holy Ghost, had recourse to the great Peter, in order to obtain a decision from him for those at Antioch who were disputing about living by the Law, much more do we small and humble folk run to the Apostolic See to get healing from you for the sores of the churches. For it is fitting that you should in all things have the pre-eminence, seeing that your See possesses many peculiar privileges. For other cities get a name for size or beauty or population, and some that are devoid of these advantages are compensated by certain spiritual gifts: but your city has the fullest abundance of good things from the Giver of all good. For she is of all cities the greatest and most famous, the mistress of the world and teeming with population. And besides this she has created an empire which is still predominant and has imposed her own name upon her subjects. But her chief decoration is her Faith, to which the Divine Apostle is a sure witness when he exclaims “your faith is proclaimed in all the world;” (Rom 1:8) and if immediately after receiving the seeds of the saving Gospel she bore such a weight of wondrous fruit, what words are sufficient to express the piety which is now found in her? She has, too, the tombs of our common fathers and teachers of the Truth, Peter and Paul , to illumine the souls of the faithful. And this blessed and divine pair arose indeed in the East, and shed its rays in all directions, but voluntarily underwent the sunset of life in the West, from whence now it illumines the whole world. These have rendered your See so glorious: this is the chief of all your goods. And their See is still blest by the light of their God’s presence, seeing that therein He has placed your Holiness to shed abroad the rays of the one true Faith. (Letter 52)

Theodoret, in a letter to the presbyter Renatus, writes:

This most holy See [Rome] has preserved the supremacy over all Churches on the earth, for one especial reason among many others; to wit, that it has remained intact from the defilement of heresy. No one has ever sat on that Chair, who has taught heretical doctrine; rather that See has ever preserved unstained the Apostolic grace. (Letter 116)

Bishops Ceretius, Salonius and Veranus, in a letter to Pope St. Leo, concerning his “Tome,” which he wrote in 449:

Moreover we, who specially belong to you, are filled with a great and unspeakable delight, because this special statement of your teaching is so highly regarded wherever the Churches meet together, that the unanimous opinion is expressed that the primacy of the Apostolic See is rightfully there assigned, from whence the oracles of the Apostolic Spirit still receive their interpretations. (Letter 68)

St. Peter Chrysologus (c. 400 – 450), a Greek and bishop of Ravenna, in a letter to Eutyches [an archimandrite of a monastery outside the walls of Constantinople, where he ruled over three hundred monks] about AD 449, wrote the following:

We exhort you in every respect, humble brother, to heed obediently what has been written by the Most Blessed Pope of the City of Rome; for Blessed Peter, who lives and presides in his own see, provides the truth of faith to those who seek it. For we, by reason of our pursuit of peace and faith, cannot try cases on the faith without the consent of the Bishop of the City of Rome” (Letter to Eutyches).

The bishops of the Council of Chalcedon wrote the following to Pope St. Leo in AD 451:

We have ratified also the canon of the 150 holy Fathers who met at Constantinople in the time of the great Theodosius of holy memory [i.e. AD 381], which ordains that after your most holy and Apostolic See, the See of Constantinople shall take precedence, being placed second: for we are persuaded that with your usual care for others you have often extended that Apostolic prestige which belongs to you, to the church in Constantinople also, by virtue of your great disinterestedness in sharing all your own good things with your spiritual kinsfolk. Accordingly vouchsafe most holy and blessed father to accept as your own wish, and as conducing to good government the things which we have resolved on for the removal of all confusion and the confirmation of church order. For your holiness’ delegates, the most pious bishops Paschasinus and Lucentius, and with them the right Godly presbyter Boniface, attempted vehemently to resist these decisions, from a strong desire that this good work also should start from your foresight, in order that the establishment of good order as well as of the Faith should be put to your account. (Letter 98)⁹

E. Sixth Century

Pope St. Hormisdas, who was bishop of Rome from AD 514 through 523, wrote the following:

Our first safety is to guard the rule of the right faith and to deviate in no wise from the ordinances of the Fathers; because we cannot pass over the statement of our Lord Jesus Christ who said: “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church” . . . [Matt 16:18] These [words] which were spoken, are proved by the effects of the deeds, because in the Apostolic See the Catholic religion has always been preserved without stain. Desiring not to be separated from this hope and faith and following the ordinances of the Fathers, we anathematize all heresies, especially the heretic Nestorius, who at one time was bishop of the city of Constantinople …. Similarly anathematizing both Eutyches and Dioscorus of Alexandria …. We condemn, too, and anathematize Acacius, formerly bishop of Constantinople, who was condemned by the Apostolic See …. No less do we condemn Peter of Antioch with his followers …. Moreover, we accept and approve all the letters of the blessed Leo the Pope, which he wrote regarding the Christian religion, just as we said before, following the Apostolic See in all things, and extolling all its ordinances. And therefore, I hope that I may merit to be in the one communion with you, which the Apostolic See proclaims, in which there is the whole and the true and the perfect solidity of the Christian religion, promising that in the future the names of those separated from the communion of the Catholic Church, that is, those not agreeing with the Apostolic See, shall not be read during the sacred mysteries. (Cited from Denzinger 171-2)

Pelagius I, the bishop of Rome from 556 to 561, wrote the following:

… the Church was founded by Christ our Lord upon the chief of the Apostles, so that the gates of hell might not be able to prevail against it…. If you had read this, where did you believe the Church to be outside of him [the Pope] in whom alone are clearly all the apostolic sees? To whom in like measure as to him, who had received the keys, has the power of binding and of loosing been granted? ( )

Pope St. Gregory the Great, who was pope from 540 to 604, wrote the following to John, the bishop of Syracuse:

For as to what they say about the Church of Constantinople, who can doubt that it is subject to the Apostolic See, as both the most pious lord the emperor and our brother the bishop of that city continually acknowledge? Yet, if this or any other Church has anything that is good, I am prepared in what is good to imitate even my inferiors, while prohibiting them from things unlawful. For he is foolish who thinks himself first in such a way as to scorn to learn whatever good things he may see. (Registrum Epistolarum Bk IX, Letter 12)

In another letter to Bishop John, Pope St. Gregory writes:

And it is exceedingly doubtful whether he says such things to us sincerely, or in fact because he is being attacked by his fellow bishops: for, as to his saying that he is subject to the Apostolic See, if any fault is found in bishops, I know not what bishop is not subject to it. But when no fault requires it to be otherwise, all according to the principle of humility are equal. (Registrum Epistolarum Bk IX, Letter 59)

In a letter to Eulogius, bishop of Alexandria, Pope St. Gregory writes:

Gregory to Eulogius, Bishop of Alexandria.

Your most sweet Holiness has spoken much in your letter to me about the chair of Saint Peter, Prince of the apostles, saying that he himself now sits on it in the persons of his successors. And indeed I acknowledge myself to be unworthy, not only in the dignity of such as preside, but even in the number of such as stand. But I gladly accepted all that has been said, in that he has spoken to me about Peter’s chair who occupies Peter’s chair. And, though special honour to myself in no wise delights me, yet I greatly rejoiced because you, most holy ones, have given to yourselves what you have bestowed upon me. For who can be ignorant that holy Church has been made firm in the solidity of the Prince of the apostles, who derived his name from the firmness of his mind, so as to be called Petrus from petra. And to him it is said by the voice of the Truth, To you I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 16:19). And again it is said to him, And when you are converted, strengthen your brethren (xxii. 32). And once more, Simon, son of Jonas, do you love Me? Feed my sheep (John 21:17). Wherefore though there are many apostles, yet with regard to the principality itself the See of the Prince of the apostles alone has grown strong in authority, which in three places is the See of one. For he himself exalted the See in which he deigned even to rest and end the present life. He himself adorned the See [i.e. Alexandria] to which he sent his disciple as evangelist. He himself established the See [i.e. Antioch] in which, though he was to leave it, he sat for seven years. Since then it is the See of one, and one See, over which by Divine authority three bishops now preside, whatever good I hear of you, this I impute to myself. If you believe anything good of me, impute this to your merits, since we are one in Him Who says, That they all may be one, as You, Father, art in me, and I in you that they also may be one in us John 17:21. (Letter to Eulogius, bishop of Alexandria)

The testimony of the tradition we find in the Fathers and other early writers indicates a deepening awareness of the significance and authority of St. Peter’s chair, especially in grounding and preserving the fidelity and unity of the Church. But some conception of the authority of this chair seems to have been present even from the second century. And the clearest and most developed conception of this authority seems to have been in the particular Church of Rome, and especially in her bishops. At the same time, there is no comparable set of patristic quotations in which it is claimed that the chair of St. Peter did not hold such authority. So the inquirer is then faced with a dilemma that in a certain respect parallels that each of us faces regarding Christ’s own claims concerning Himself.¹⁰ Either the Church at Rome almost immediately fell into serious error regarding her own eccesial authority and role in relation to the universal Church, and though various bishops at times disagreed with her decisions (e.g. St. Cyprian), no one ‘corrected’ her claim concerning her own authority until the time of Photius in the ninth century, or during all those centuries (and to the present) she was truly what she always claimed to be. The former option leaves us with the paradox that the Apostolic seat widely believed to be the touchstone of orthodoxy in every respect for hundreds of years, was terribly wrong about its own identity, and therefore unsuited to be anyone’s touchstone of orthodoxy. In this way, we are left either with some form of ecclesial deism, or the unavoidable conclusion that the Catholic Church, consisting of all those particular Churches throughout the world in full communion with the episcopal successor of St. Peter in the Apostolic See, is the Church Christ founded, and over which, by His promise, the gates of hell shall not prevail.

St. Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.” (John 6:68) Christ, in response, made these same words apply to St. Peter, by making St. Peter the principium unitatis of the Church. If we were to turn away from St. Peter, to whom should we go? What other visible ecclesial authority has been given St. Peter’s authority and charism? Likewise, if we wish to see all Christians united in full visible unity, we must do so by entering into communion with the one who by Christ’s authorization is the rightful occupant of the chair of St. Peter.

St. Peter and all holy Apostles, pray for us, that we may be one in truth, in sacraments, and in loving obedience to our rightful shepherds. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

1. There is another version of this text, which appears to have been written a few years later, when St. Cyprian was disputing with Pope St. Stephen regarding the re-baptism of heretics. That version can be read here. Dom John Chapman, in the second chapter of his book titled Studies on the Early Papacy, provides good reasons to believe that both versions were written by St. Cyprian. See here.
2. This same question arose again in the following century with respect to the Donatist schism.
3. In his 69th Epistle, St.Cyprian writes, “But if he cannot give the Holy Spirit, because he that is appointed without [i.e. outside the Church] is not endowed with the Holy Spirit, he cannot baptize those who come; since both baptism is one and the Holy Spirit is one, and the Church founded by Christ the Lord upon Peter, by a source and principle of unity, is one also. Hence it results, that since with them all things are futile and false, nothing of that which they have done ought to be approved by us.”
4. And you [Pope Julius], most dearly loved brother, though absent from us in body, were present in mind concordant, and will . . . For this will be seen to be best, and by far the most befitting thing, if to the head, that is to the see of the Apostle Peter, the priests of the Lord report from every one of the provinces” (Fragment 2 ex opere Historico [ex Epistle Sardic. Concil. Ad Julium [before 367 AD]
5. That definition of schism is very similar to what we see today in the Catechism of the Catholic Church; see CCC 2089.
6. Cf. Holy See.
7. About that same time, in AD 393, St. Jerome wrote:

   The Church was founded upon Peter: although elsewhere the same is attributed to all the Apostles, and they all receive the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the strength of the Church depends upon them all alike, yet one among the twelve is chosen so that when a head has been appointed, there may be no occasion for schism.” (Against Jovianus, Bk I)

8. On that same day, Pope St. Boniface wrote the following letter to the bishops of Thessaly:

   The universal ordering of the Church at its birth took its origin from the office of blessed Peter, in which is found both directing power and its supreme authority. From him as from a source, at the time when our religion was in the stage of growth, all churches received their common order. This much is shown by the injunctions of the council of Nicea, since it did not venture to make a decree in his regard, recognizing that nothing could be added to his dignity: in fact it knew that all had been assigned to him by the word of the Lord. So it is clear that this church is to all churches throughout the world as the head is to the members, and that whoever separates himself from it becomes an exile from the Christian religion, since he ceases to belong to its fellowship.” (Epistle 14, to the bishops of Thessaly, cited in Giles, p. 230.)

9. Pope St. Leo wrote later, “But the bishops’ assents, which are opposed to the regulations of the holy canons composed at Nicæa in conjunction with your faithful Grace, we do not recognize, and by the blessed Apostle Peter’s authority we absolutely dis-annul in comprehensive terms.” (Letter 105)
10. See C.S. Lewis’ trilemma regarding Christ in his book Mere Christianity.

We will summarize the significance of each type of statement and add some light commentary where expedient. The appendix will contain a few brief responses to anticipated objections as well as some scholarly support for early Christian belief in this doctrine and suggestions for further reading.

I – Affirmation of Change During Consecration
II – Simple Identification of Consecrated Species as the Body and Blood
III – Demand of Extraordinary Reverence
IV – Appendix

Introduction

The claim that the Church fathers believed in Transubstantiation is not a claim that any particular father commanded a precise understanding of the doctrine as formulated by Trent. Any given Church father could no sooner express this doctrine precisely in its developed form than could any given ante-Nicene father express the Niceno-Constantinoplitan doctrine of the Trinity. Yet this does not mean either that they did not believe it, or even that it existed in mere “seed form.” The Nicene doctrine of the Trinity can be detected not only in the early Christian writings and in the New Testament, it is an unavoidable development. That is, anything other than the Niceno-Constantinopolitan doctrine of the Trinity would be contrary to the Tradition of the Church. Likewise, the affirmations that the fathers made about the Eucharist were not only compatible with Transubstantiation, they were incompatible with anything less.

I – Affirmation of Change

Statements that directly affirm a change in the species clearly indicate that the speaker believed in what we now call Transubstantiation. The word ‘transubstantiation’ comes from the Latin trans (across) and substantiare (substantiate). ² It simply means a change of substance. There are only two types of changes, substantial and not-substantial (i.e. accidental). That is to say, if a thing changes, it either changes into another substance (into another thing) or some non-essential feature of it changes. But if a non-essential feature of something changes, we continue to refer to it in the same way. When a man gets a hair cut, we continue calling him a man; but when a log is burnt, we begin calling it a pile of ash.

In some rare cases we do change a name for something after it undergoes an accidental change. But we only do this when the name is associated with the thing accidentally. Thus we no longer call a bachelor a bachelor after he marries (an accidental or relational change). We call him a husband. Yet the name “bachelor” is an accidental term in the first place. He is a man; he is accidentally a bachelor and later becomes accidentally a husband. Throughout the change he is referred to as a man, because that is what we call him in reference to his essence.

Now bread is not called “bread” accidentally but essentially. Therefore the only time it would be proper to call it something else is when it had changed (substantially) into something else. e.g. If we burnt it into a pile of ash, we would call it a pile of ash. We would not call it something other than bread if it only changed accidentally.

But the fathers spoke of the bread differently after the consecration. They referred to it as “the Body” which is compatible only with a substantial change. Therefore, when the fathers spoke of a change in the Eucharist, they were speaking of a substantial change. Since Transubstantiation simply means “substantial change,” they were speaking of what we now call Transubstantiation.

We will clearly see the concept of “substantial change” in the fathers below. Additionally, in AD 1079, nearly 500 years before the Reformation at the sixth council of Rome, Berengarius affirmed the following in an oath:

…the bread and wine which are placed on the altar are substantially changed into the true and proper and living flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, our Lord…³

The Fourth Lateran Council in AD 1215 also declared:

Jesus Christ, whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine; the bread (changed) into His body by the divine power of transubstantiation, and the wine into the blood…⁴

This was again confirmed by Pope Innocent III (AD 1208), the Second Council of Lyons (AD 1274), Pope Benedict XII (AD 1341), the Council of Constance (AD 1415), and the Council of Florence (AD 1439). ⁵ This shows that in denying Transubstantiation, the Protestants rejected centuries of official Church teaching. Later some Protestants claim to be rejecting only Trent’s declaration. But as we have already seen, there were official councils and documents that affirmed a substantial change in the sacrament long before Trent. Now let us examine the fathers to see whether or not they believed that the bread changed into something else during consecration or whether it remained the same.

For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by him, and by the change (transmutation) of which our blood and flesh is nurtured, is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus. – St. Justin Martyr First Apology 66

Notice that St. Justin does not merely affirm that the food (bread) has been changed, but that it had been changed specifically by the Eucharistic prayer. The change in species is related to the host independently of the communicant. There is no hint here, or elsewhere in the fathers, that it depended on anything but the power of the Holy Spirit working in the consecration. This rules out the heresy of receptionism.⁶

When, therefore, the mixed cup [wine and water] and the baked bread receives the Word of God and becomes the Eucharist, the body of Christ, and from these the substance of our flesh is increased and supported, how can they say that the flesh is not capable of receiving the gift of God, which is eternal life—flesh which is nourished by the body and blood of the Lord, and is in fact a member of him? – St. Irenaeus Against Heresies 5:3

For as the bread, which is produced from the earth, when it receives the invocation of God, is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly; so also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection to eternity. – Ibid. 4.18.5

We give thanks to the Creator of all, and, along with thanksgiving and prayer for the blessings we have received, we also eat the bread presented to us; and this bread becomes by prayer a sacred body, which sanctifies those who sincerely partake of it. – Origen Against Celsus 8:33

The bread and the wine of the Eucharist before the holy invocation of the adorable Trinity were simple bread and wine, but the invocation having been made, the bread becomes the body of Christ and the wine the blood of Christ. – St. Cyril of Jerusalem Catechetical Lectures 19:7

He once in Cana of Galilee, turned the water into wine, akin to blood, and is it incredible that He should have turned wine into blood? – Ibid. 22.2

St. Cyril goes on to explicitly profess what the Church is doing in the consecration, or rather, what God is doing in the consecration:

Then having sanctified ourselves by these spiritual Hymns, we beseech the merciful God to send forth His Holy Spirit upon the gifts lying before Him; that He may make the Bread the Body of Christ, and the Wine the Blood of Christ; for whatsoever the Holy Ghost has touched, is surely sanctified and changed. Ibid. 23.7

Now we, as often as we receive the Sacramental Elements, which by the mysterious efficacy of holy prayer are transformed into the Flesh and the Blood, ‘do show the Lord’s Death.’ – St. Ambrose On the Christian Faith 4, 10:125

We ought . . . not regard [the elements] merely as bread and cup, but as the body and blood of the Lord, into which they were transformed by the descent of the Holy Spirit. – Theodore of Mopsuestia Catechetical Homilies 5:1

He did not say, ‘This is the symbol of My Body, and this, of My Blood,’ but, what is set before us, but that it is transformed by means of the Eucharistic action into Flesh and Blood.” – Theodore of Mopsuestia Commentary on Matthew 26:26

Rightly then do we believe that the bread consecrated by the word of God has been changed [Gr., metapoieisthai] into the Body of God the Word. For that Body was bread in power, but it has been sanctified by the dwelling there of the Word, who pitched his tent in the flesh. The change that elevated to divine power the bread that had been transformed into that Body causes something similar now. In that case, the grace of the Word sanctified that Body whose material being came from bread and was, in a certain sense, bread itself. In this case, the bread “is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer”⁷, as the Apostle says, not becoming the Body of the Word through our eating but by being transformed [Gr., metapoiumenos] immediately into the body by means of the word, as the Word himself said, ‘This is my Body.’ …He shares himself with every believer through the Flesh whose material being [Gr., sustais] comes from bread and wine . . . in order to bring it about that, by communion with the Immortal, man may share in incorruption. He gives these things through the power of the blessing by which he transelements [Gr., metastoikeiosas] the nature of the visible things [to that of the Immortal]. – St. Gregory of Nyssa The Great Catechism 37

He [Jesus] disseminates Himself in every believer through that flesh, whose substance comes from bread and wine, blending Himself with the bodies of believers, to secure that, by this union with the immortal, man, too, may be a sharer in incorruption. – Ibid.

The bread again is at first common bread; but when the mystery sanctifies it, it is called and actually becomes the Body of Christ – St. Gregory of Nyssa Sermon on the Day of Lights or on The Baptism of Christ

You ought to know what you have received, what you are going to receive, and what you ought to receive daily. That Bread which you see on the altar, consecrated by the word of God, is the Body of Christ. That chalice, or rather, what the chalice holds, consecrated by the word of God, is the Blood of Christ. Through those accidents the Lord wished to entrust to us His Body and the Blood which He poured out for the remission of sins. – St. Augustine Sermons 227

St. Augustine here anticipates the developed form of the doctrine of Transubstantiation with surprising clarity. According to St. Thomas Aquinas many years later, the accidents of the bread and wine remain after Transubstantiation without a subject. (Summa 3.77.1) ⁸ It is through these “accidents” that the Lord’s Body and Blood are revealed to us. That is why we say that the Body and Blood are contained under the species of bread and wine. The bread and wine, as substances, no longer exist as they have been wholly converted into the precious Body and Blood. ⁹

The Lord Jesus wanted those whose eyes were held lest they should recognize him, to recognize Him in the breaking of the bread¹⁰. The faithful know what I am saying. They know Christ in the breaking of the bread. For not all bread, but only that which receives the blessing of Christ, becomes Christ’s Body.” – St. Augustine Sermons 234:2

It is not man that causes the things offered to become the Body and Blood of Christ, but he who was crucified for us, Christ himself. The priest, in the role of Christ, pronounces these words, but their power and grace are God’s. ‘This is my body,’ he says. This word transforms the things offered. – St. John Chrysostom Against the Judaizers 1.6

St. John Chrysostom explains that it is not the priest that effects the change; rather it is Christ Himself. This is why the claim that it amounts to a magician’s trick (or ‘monkey trick’ in the words of John Calvin) is false. It is not a trick but a miracle.

Far be it from me to censure the successors of the apostles, who with holy words consecrate the body of Christ, and who make us Christians. – St. Jerome Letter to Heliodorus

You will see the Levites bringing the loaves and a cup of wine, and placing them on the table. So long as the prayers and invocations have not yet been made, it is mere bread and a mere cup. But when the great and wonderous prayers have been recited, then the bread becomes the body and the cup the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ….When the great prayers and holy supplications are sent up, the Word descends on the bread and the cup, and it becomes His body. – St. Athanasius Sermon to the Newly Baptized

St. Athanasius, the great champion of Trinitarian orthodoxy, could not be any more explicit in affirming that a substantial change occurs at the consecration.

The following is a dialogue from Theodoret’s Eranistes on the subject of the miracle of consecration and the ‘change in nature’ it effects:

Eran.–You have opportunely introduced the subject of the divine mysteries for from it I shall be able to show you the change of the Lord’s body into another nature. Answer now to my questions.
Orth.–I will answer.
Eran.–What do you call the gift which is offered before the priestly invocation?
Orth.–It were wrong to say openly; perhaps some uninitiated are present.
Eran.–Let your answer be put enigmatically.
Orth.–Food of grain of such a sort.
Eran.–And how name we the other symbol?
Orth.–This name too is common, signifying species of drink.
Eran.–And after the consecration how do you name these?
Orth.–Christ’s body and Christ’s blood.
Eran.–And do yon believe that you partake of Christ’s body and blood?
Orth.–I do.”
- Theodoret of Cyrus Eranistes 2

Christ said indicating (the bread and wine): ‘This is My Body,’ and ‘This is My Blood,’ in order that you might not judge what you see to be a mere figure. The offerings, by the hidden power of God Almighty, are changed into Christ’s Body and Blood, and by receiving these we come to share in the life-giving and sanctifying efficacy of Christ. – St. Cyril of Alexandria Commentary on Matthew 26, 27

The body which is born of the holy Virgin is in truth body united with divinity, not that the body which was received up into the heavens descends, but that the bread itself and the wine are changed into God’s body and blood. But if you enquire how this happens, it is enough for you to learn that it was through the Holy Spirit, just as the Lord took on Himself flesh that subsisted in Him and was born of the holy Mother of God through the Spirit. And we know nothing further save that the Word of God is true and energises and is omnipotent, but the manner of this cannot be searched out. But one can put it well thus, that just as in nature the bread by the eating and the wine and the water by the drinking are changed into the body and blood of the eater and drinker, and do not become a different body from the former one, so the bread of the table and the wine and water are supernaturally changed by the invocation and presence of the Holy Spirit into the body and blood of Christ, and are not two but one and the same. – St. John of Damascus Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 4:13

St. John Damascene explains that Christ does not “come down” and hide Himself among the host as is often caricatured. The bread is assumed into His Body, that is, it is lifted up to His heavenly Body by a miracle which is analogically compared to the process by which ordinary food is assumed into the higher unity of a human being upon its consumption. In fact, non-miraculous transubstantiation (change of substance) occurs anytime we eat anything. Food is transformed into human beings by consumption and analogically, the bread is transformed into the Body of Christ by the miracle of the Eucharistic consecration.

II – Simple Identification of the Species

On the topic of the Eucharist, the Council of Trent declared:

If any one denieth, that, in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, are contained truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ; but saith that He is only therein as in a sign, or in figure, or virtue; let him be anathema. – Session 13, Canon I

The following quotations will show that the early fathers would not have been anathematized by this canon. At the same time, those modern Christians who deny Transubstantiation are, by their rejection of Christ’s substantial presence, at odds with this canon of the Catholic Church. As argued above, it is not enough to profess a belief in Christ’s presence in the reception of the Eucharist, even if it is professed to be a substantial presence. The Church fathers made little or no mention of the communion process in describing the Real Presence as we will see below. Christ’s presence does not depend on our reception or our faith. The significance of the simple identification statements is that they do not merely say Christ is present alongside the host, or within the host, or that He is present with us in receiving this sacrament. They explicitly affirm that this host is the Body of Christ.

The fathers affirmed that His presence was contained in the Body and Blood and such simple identification is consistent only with a host that had been substantially changed, i.e. a consecrated host. If the fathers were speaking (merely) in a symbolic manner, they would be able to call the bread the Body even before the consecration. That is, if nothing actually changed about the bread itself during the consecration, then it would not be wrong to call it the Body before the consecration. But we saw above that the fathers did change how they referred to the host after the consecration. Further, we will see below that the fathers consistently referred to the consecrated host as the Body and to the unconsecrated host as bread. This is not only consistent with Transubstantiation–it doesn’t make sense unless we affirm the doctrine. Finally, some fathers even explicitly denied that the term “Body” was a merely symbolic reference.

I take no pleasure in corruptible food or in the delights of this life. I want the bread of God, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, who is the seed of David; and for drink I want his Blood which is incorruptible love. -St. Ignatius to the Romans 7:3

They [those with heterodox opinions] abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which that Father, in his goodness, raised up again. – St. Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans 7:1

The Docetists denied that Christ had a physical Body. Naturally, they denied His metaphysical presence in the Eucharist. St. Ignatius is condemning their heresy. ¹¹

If the Lord were from other than the Father, how could he rightly take bread, which is of the same creation as our own, and confess it to be his body and affirm that the mixture in the cup is his blood? – St. Irenaeus Against Heresies 4:33–32

If Christ was speaking metaphorically, there would be no difficulty in explaining what St. Irenaeus was attempting to explain. Either St. Irenaeus had not considered the idea that Christ might be referring to the bread as His Body metaphorically, or he (Irenaeus) was taking it for granted that Jesus spoke literally. Since St. Irenaeus refrained from explaining the matter, it is clear that he was asking the question rhetorically and was taking it for granted that Christ spoke literally and that his readers would have already known this.

He has declared the cup, a part of creation, to be his own blood, from which he causes our blood to flow; and the bread, a part of creation, he has established as his own body, from which he gives increase unto our bodies. – Ibid. 5:2

‘And she [Wisdom] has furnished her table’¹² refers to his [Christ’s] honored and undefiled body and blood, which day by day are administered and offered sacrificially at the spiritual divine table, as a memorial of that first and ever-memorable table of the spiritual divine supper – St. Hippolytus Fragment from Commentary on Proverbs

It is not bread and wine that are offered as a memorial, but the actual Body and Blood.

Formerly, in an obscure way, there was manna for food; now, however, in full view, there is the true food, the flesh of the Word of God, as he himself says: ‘My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.’¹³ – Origen Homilies on Numbers 7:2

Among the early fathers, Origen and the Alexandrian tradition in general favored allegorical interpretations and leaned heavily in that direction. On several other occasions, Origen referred to the Eucharist as a symbol, as did his predecessor, St. Clement of Alexandria. Yet he also referred to it as the “true Body,” associating the Eucharist with John 6 where Jesus Himself explicitly affirmed the same.

After having spoken thus [at the Last Supper], the Lord rose up from the place where he had made the Passover and had given his body as food and his blood as drink, and he went with his disciples to the place where he was to be arrested. But he ate of his own body and drank of his own blood, while he was pondering on the dead. With his own hands the Lord presented his own body to be eaten, and before he was crucified he gave his blood as drink. – Aphraahat the Persian Sage Treatises 12:6

We speak in an absurd and godless manner about the divinity of Christ’s nature in us — unless we have learned it from Him. He Himself declares: ‘For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him’¹⁴. It is no longer permitted us to raise doubts about the true nature of the body and the blood, for, according to the statement of the Lord Himself as well as our faith, this is indeed flesh and blood. And these things that we receive bring it about that we are in Christ and Christ is in us. Is this not the truth? Those who deny that Jesus Christ is the true God are welcome to regard these words as false. He Himself, therefore, is in us through His flesh, and we are in Him, while that which we are with Him is in God. – St. Hilary of Poitiers The Trinity 8.14

It would not make sense to bring up the possibility of doubting the veracity of the Eucharist, were it only a symbol. It is not feasible to think that anyone ever doubted that the bread represented Christ’s Body. St. Hilary’s quotation is only intelligible if we assume He was speaking of the possibility of doubting that the consecrated bread is actually the Body. Furthermore, his addition of the word “indeed” so as to match our Lord’s words, would be intentionally deceitful and misleading were he not intending to convey the actual and simple identification of the consecrated host as Christ’s Body. No one adds “indeed” to something meant to be understood metaphorically.

Since then He Himself declared and said of the bread, ‘This is My Body,’ who shall dare to doubt any longer? And since He has Himself affirmed and said, ‘This is My Blood,’ who shall ever hesitate, saying, that it is not His Blood? – St. Cyril of Jerusalem Catechetical Lectures 22.1

Unfortunately there are many Christians today who dare to doubt it; and what’s worse, many of them profess to be in harmony with the early Church fathers on this issue.

Do not, therefore, regard the bread and wine as simply that; for they are, according to the Master’s declaration, the body and blood of Christ. Even though the senses suggest to you the other, let faith make you firm. Do not judge in this matter by taste, but be fully assured by the faith, not doubting that you have been deemed worthy of the body and blood of Christ. . . . [Since you are] fully convinced that the apparent bread is not bread, even though it is sensible to the taste, but the body of Christ, and that the apparent wine is not wine, even though the taste would have it so, . . . partake of that bread as something spiritual, and put a cheerful face on your soul” – Ibid. 22:6,9

Notice that St. Cyril does not merely state that the true Body is present among the bread in some mystical sense but that the apparent bread is actually not bread. The introduction of the sense experience into the question of identification clearly shows that he is meaning to identify the host with the Body.

Perhaps you may be saying, ‘I see something else; how can you assure me that I am receiving the body of Christ?’ It but remains for us to prove it. And how many are the examples we might use! . . . Christ is in that sacrament, because it is the body of Christ. – St. Ambrose The Mysteries 9:50, 58

Notice the order of the last sentence. According to St. Ambrose, we do not say it is Christ’s Body because Christ is in the sacrament; rather Christ is in the sacrament because it is Christ’s Body.

When [Christ] gave the bread he did not say, ‘This is the symbol of my body,’ but, ‘This is my body.’ In the same way, when he gave the cup of his blood he did not say, ‘This is the symbol of my blood,’ but, ‘This is my blood’; for he wanted us to look upon the [Eucharistic elements] after their reception of grace and the coming of the Holy Spirit not according to their nature, but receive them as they are, the body and blood of our Lord. – Theodore of Mopsuestia Catechetical Homilies 5:1

Here Theodore explicitly rejected a merely symbolic view of the Eucharist.

Christ was carried in his own hands when, referring to his own body, he said, ‘This is my body.’¹⁵ For he carried that body in his hands. – St. Augustine Explanations of the Psalms 33:1:10

What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the body of Christ and the chalice is the blood of Christ. – St. Augustine Sermons 272

It does not require faith to understand something as a symbol. It does require faith to assert that what appears to be bread is actually the Body of Christ. It would not have made sense for St. Augustine to demand that men believe (against their senses) that something was a symbol. If one wanted to object that perhaps St. Augustine was simply exhorting men to believe that Jesus was actually present along with the bread, he (the objector) would have to use another text as proof because here St. Augustine said explicitly that the bread is the Body, not that the Body is present along with the bread or in the ceremony.

When you see the Lord immolated and lying upon the altar, and the priest bent over that sacrifice praying, and all the people empurpled [made purple in coloring] by that precious blood, can you think that you are still among men and on earth? Or are you lifted up to heaven? – St. John Chrysostom On the Priesthood 3.4.177

According to St. John Chrysostom, Christ is literally present on the altar.

‘Because the Bread is one, we, the many, are in one Body’¹⁶. ‘Why do I say communion?’ he says; ‘for we are that very Body.’ What is the Bread? The Body of Christ! What do they become who are partakers therein? The Body of Christ! Not many bodies, but one Body. For just as the bread, consisting of many grains, is made one, and the grains are no longer evident, but still exist, though their distinction is not apparent in their conjunction; so too are we conjoined to each other and to Christ. For you are not nourished by one Body while someone else is nourished by another Body; rather, all are nourished by the same Body. – St. John Chrysostom Homily on the First Epistle to the Corinthians 24.2.4

When you see [the Body of Christ] lying on the altar, say to yourself, ‘Because of this Body I am no longer earth and ash, no longer a prisoner, but free. Because of this Body I hope for heaven, and I hope to receive the good things that are in heaven, immortal life, the lot of the angels, familiar conversation with Christ. This body, scourged and crucified, has not been fetched by death . . . . This is that Body which was blood-stained, which was pierced by a lance, and from which gushed forth those saving fountains, one of blood and the other of water [symbolizing the sacraments of Communion or the Eucharist and Baptism] , for the world.’ . . . This is the Body which He gave us, both to hold in reserve [for worship] and to eat, which was appropriate to intense love; for those whom we kiss with abandon we often even bite with our teeth. – Ibid. 24.4.7

Let us therefore in all respects put our faith in God and contradict Him in nothing, even if what is said seems to be contrary to our reasonings and to what we see. Let His word be of superior authority to reason and sight. This too be our practice in respect of the Mysteries [Sacrament of Eucharist or Communion], not looking upon what is laid before us, but taking heed also of His words. For words cannot deceive; but our senses are easily cheated. His word has never failed; our senses err most of the time.
When the word says, ‘This is my Body,’ be convinced of it and believe it, and look at it with the eyes of the mind. For Christ did not give us something tangible, but even in His tangible things all is intellectual. So too with Baptism: the gift is bestowed through what is a tangible thing, water, but what is accomplished is intellectually perceived: the birth and the renewal. If you were incorporeal He would have given you those incorporeal gifts naked; but since the soul is intertwined with the body, He hands over to you in tangible things, that which is perceived intellectually. How many now say, ‘I wish I could see His shape [Gr. ton tupon], His appearance, His garments, His scandals.’ Only look! You see Him! You touch Him. You eat Him. He had given to those who desire Him, not only to see Him and fix their teeth in His flesh, and to embrace Him and satisfy all their love. St. John Chrysostom Homily on Matthew 82.4

And not as common flesh do we receive it [the Eucharist]; God forbid: nor as of a man sanctified and associated with the Word according to the unity of worth, or as having a divine indwelling, but as truly the life-giving and very flesh of the Word himself. – Council of Ephesus, Session 1, Letter of St. Cyril to Nestorius

Notice that the third ecumenical council directly rejects the idea that the divine presence of Christ merely “indwells” in the Eucharist; rather the Eucharist “truly” is the “very flesh of the Word Himself.” This is incompatible with Reformed doctrine even while many Reformed Christians claim to accept the first four ecumenical councils. Notice, in case one would object that the context is reception, that St. Cyril is not talking about the act of reception, nor is there any reference to the reception as a cause of the Real Presence. His claim regards what is received rather than what happens when we receive. Objectively, what is received is the consecrated host, and this host is received as the true Body.

After the disciples had eaten the new and holy Bread, and when they understood by faith that they had eaten of Christ’s body, Christ went on to explain and to give them the whole Sacrament. He took and mixed a cup of wine. Then He blessed it, and signed it, and made it holy, declaring that it was His own Blood, which was about to be poured out . . . Christ commanded them to drink, and He explained to them that the cup which they were drinking was His own Blood: ‘This is truly My Blood, which is shed for all of you. Take, all of you, drink of this, because it is a new covenant in My Blood. As you have seen Me do, do you also in My memory. Whenever you are gathered together in My name in Churches everywhere, do what I have done, in memory of Me. Eat My Body, and drink My Blood, a covenant new and old. – St. Ephraim Homilies 4,4

According to St. Ephraim, the Eucharist was explained directly to the disciples by Christ Himself at the Last Supper. This is why the early Christians did not need to rely exclusively on the Scriptures to discern the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Indeed, the earliest Christians did not have access to the New Testament. This is the source of the Apostolic doctrine of Transubstantiation. The Church has always confessed the Eucharist to be the true Body because Christ had explained this to the Apostles, and the Apostles explained it to the Churches.

The bread and the wine are not merely figures of the body and blood of Christ (God forbid!) but the deified body of the Lord itself: for the Lord has said, ‘This is My body,’ not, this is a figure of My body: and ‘My blood,’ not, a figure of My blood. And on a previous occasion He had said to the Jews, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you. For My flesh is meat indeed and My blood is drink indeed. And again, He that eateth Me, shall live. – St. John of Damascus Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 4:13

Again, St. John Damascene rejected a merely figurative view of the Eucharistic species. Notice that he was not only rejecting memorialism. He was referring to the very bread and wine (that is, the species of bread and wine) when he said that they “are not merely figures.” He insisted, as we have seen consistently from the fathers, in identifying the consecrated hosts themselves as the Body and Blood. He also associated the Eucharist with John 6.

III – Extraordinary Reverence

A third type of statement shows that the Church fathers believed that extraordinary reverence, even adoration, should be given to the species itself. Of course, many Protestants who do not believe in Transubstantiation exhibit significant reverence for the act of communion but not for the species itself. The quotations below show that the early Church went beyond a mere respect for the communion rite. They hallowed and revered the consecrated host. Respect for the host would also be consistent with Consubstantiation but Consubstantiation is not consistent with adoration of the consecrated host.

In the context of the Eucharist, Tertullian explains the Tradition of the Church:

We take anxious care lest something of our Cup or Bread should fall upon the ground. – Tertullian The Crown 3:3-4

Similarly, Origen wrote:

You are accustomed to take part in the divine mysteries, so you know how, when you have received the body of the Lord, you reverently exercise every care lest a particle of it fall, and lest anything of the consecrated gift perish… how is it that you think neglecting the word of God a lesser crime than neglecting His body? – Origen Homilies on Exodus 13:3

And St. Cyprian of Carthage wrote:

He [Paul] threatens, moreover, the stubborn and forward, and denounces them, saying, ‘Whosoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily, is guilty of the body and blood of the Lord’¹⁷. All these warnings being scorned and contemned—[lapsed Christians will often take Communion] before their sin is expiated, before confession has been made of their crime, before their conscience has been purged by sacrifice and by the hand of the priest, before the offense of an angry and threatening Lord has been appeased, [and so] violence is done to his body and blood; and they sin now against their Lord more with their hand and mouth than when they denied their Lord. – St. Cyprian of Carthage On the Lapsed 15–16

Finally, St. Augustine wrote:

He walked here in the same flesh, and gave us the same flesh to be eaten unto salvation. But no one eats that flesh unless he first adores it; and thus it is discovered how such a footstool of the Lord’s feet is adored; and not only do we not sin by adoring, we do sin by not adoring. – St. Augustine Commentary on Psalms 98:9

St. Augustine affirmed that the Flesh we eat in the Eucharist is the same Flesh as when Christ walked the earth. Consequently, it is proper and right to adore it (the Eucharist). In fact, it is a sin not to adore it according to St. Augustine. But if the Eucharist had not actually been changed into the Flesh of Christ, it would be idolatry to adore it. Thus, either St. Augustine was advocating idolatry or he believed in Transubstantiation.

Approaching [the Eucharist] therefore, do not come forward with the palms of the hands outstretched nor with the fingers apart, but making the left [hand] a throne for the right since this hand is about to receive the King. Making the palm hollow, receive the Body of Christ, adding ‘Amen’. Then. carefully sanctifying the eyes by touching them with the holy Body, partake of it, ensuring that you do not mislay any of it. For if you mislay any, you would clearly suffer a loss, as it were, from one of your own limbs. Tell me, if anyone gave you gold-dust, would you not take hold of it with every possible care, ensuring that you do not mislay any of it or sustain any loss? So will you not be much more cautious to ensure that not a crumb falls away from that which is more precious than gold or precious stones?
Then, after you have partaken of the Body of Christ, come forward only for the cup of the Blood. Do not stretch out your hands but bow low as if making an act of obeisance and a profound act of veneration. Say ‘Amen’. and sanctify yourself by partaking of Christ’s Blood also. While the moisture is still on your lips, touch them with your hands and sanctify your eyes, your forehead, and all your other sensory organs. Finally, wait for the prayer and give thanks to God, who has deemed you worthy of such mysteries.- St. Cyril of Jerusalem Catechesis Mystagogica V, 11-22

Notice that St. Cyril demanded that the faithful approach with great reverence. This would be unfitting if they did not believe that the bread and wine had actually become the Body and Blood of the Lord. He, like St. Augustine, also exhorted adoration of the sacrament.

Additionally, the well known practice of the ante-Nicene Christians carrying the consecrated Eucharist to the sick and shut-in only makes sense given that the bread had become the Body. If not, it would suffice to eat any bread so long as one believed that he was consuming Christ. Rather, the early Christians even risked their lives to transport the Eucharist. This is consistent only with Transubstantiation. St. Hippolytus also warned those Christians who did reserve consecrated hosts to be careful lest it should be consumed by an unbeliever or even a mouse. ¹⁸

Finally, on a slightly different note, St. Ignatius of Antioch explains that only an ordained presbyter or bishop can consecrate the Eucharist.

Let that Eucharist be held valid which is offered by the bishop or by one to whom the bishop has committed this charge. – St. Ignatius of Antioch Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 8:1

If the Eucharist were a mere symbol, it would not make any sense whatsoever to talk about a “valid” Eucharist or an “invalid” Eucharist. It could still make sense to speak of an illicit Eucharist, but not of an invalid Eucharist. If the bread and wine only symbolized, and did not actually become the Body and Blood, then anyone anywhere could achieve the same thing (symbolize Christ’s Body) whether or not they were ordained. It might be the case that they were wrong in doing so, since they should have done it in the context of the Church, but nevertheless it would not be invalid. This is additional evidence that Transubstantiation was believed by the Church from her earliest days.

IV – Appendix

i – Objections

1. Is the doctrine of Transubstantiation dependent on Aristotlean metaphysics?

On the contrary, (then) Lutheran scholar, Jaroslav Pelikan writes:

The victory of orthodox Christian doctrine over classical thought was to some extent a Pyrrhic victory, for the theology that triumphed over Greek philosophy has continued to be shaped ever since by the language and the thought of classical metaphysics. For example, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 decreed that “in the sacrament of the altar… the bread is transubstantiated into the body [of Christ],and the wine into [his] blood,” and the Council of Trent declared in 1551 that the use of the term “transubstantiation” was “proper and appropriate.” Most of the theological expositions of the term “transubstantiation,” beginning already with those of the thirteenth century, have interpreted “substance” on the basis of the meaning given to this term by such classical discussions as that in the fifth book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics; transubstantiation, then, would appear to be tied to the acceptance of Aristotelian metaphysics or even of Aristotelian physics.

Yet the application of the term “substance” to the discussion of the Eucharistic presence antedates the rediscovery of Aristotle. In the ninth century, Ratramnus spoke of “substances visible but invisible,” and his opponent Radbertus declared that “out of the substance of bread and wine the same body and blood of Christ is mystically consecrated.” Even “transubstantiation” was used during the twelfth century in a nontechnical sense. Such evidence lends credence to the argument that the doctrine of transubstantiation, as codified by the decrees of the Fourth Lateran and Tridentine councils, did not canonize Aristotelian philosophy as indispensable to Christian doctrine.¹⁹

2. Does patristic reference to Eucharistic symbolism indicate disbelief in an actual change?

On the contrary, Catholics affirm that the Eucharist is also symbolic. Protestant historian Adolf Harnack helps explain the ancient mind on the topic of symbolism:

What we nowadays understand by “symbol” is a thing which is not that which it represents; at that time [antiquity] “symbol” denoted a thing which in some kind of way really is what it signifies.²⁰

The Fathers clearly teach the Real Presence of Christ, that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. Harnack’s explanation of the ancient understanding of what it means to be a symbol explains how the Fathers could believe that the Eucharist was truly the Body and Blood of Christ and also a symbol. However, the Eucharist is real in a way that other “symbolic” things are not (this is understood now and in antiquity). This shows the weakness of the argument that denies the reality of the sacrifice of the Eucharist by relegating the mystery to symbolism. Since the modern mind apprehends ‘symbolism’ to mean that something is not real, whereas the ancient mind did not, this argument is weak. That is, the patristic use of the word ‘symbol’ in reference to the Sacrament does not connote what the modern use of the term ‘symbol’ connotes to us. And because of this, the patristic use of the term ‘symbol’ to refer to the Eucharist does not imply that the Fathers thought of the Eucharist as “merely symbolic” à la Zwingli.

3. Do some patristic statements indicate that a particular father disbelieved in substantial change?

Even if it were shown that a Church father disbelieved in Transubstantiation, it would only prove that that particular father was in error on this point. As shown above, the Church authoritatively defined it as dogma on several occasions including no less than four ecumenical councils. Here are some example quotations that are sometimes used in an attempt to justify one’s disbelief in Transubstantiation:

And extending His hand, He gave them the bread which His right hand had made holy: ‘Take, all of you eat this, which My word has made holy. Do not regard as bread that which I have given you; but take, eat this Bread, and do not scatter the crumbs; for what I have called my Body, that it is indeed. One particle from its crumbs is able to sanctify thousands and thousands, and is sufficient to afford life to those who eat of it. Take, eat, because this is my Body, and whoever eats it in belief, entertaining no doubt of faith, because this is My Body, and whoever eats it in belief eats it in Fire and Spirit. But if any doubters eat of it, for him it will be only bread. And whoever eats in belief the Bread made holy in My name, if he be pure, he will be preserved in his purity; and if he be a sinner, he will be forgiven.’ But if anyone despise it or reject it or treat it with ignominy, it may be taken as a certainty that he treats with ignominy the Son, who called it and actually made it to be His Body. – St. Ephraim Homilies 4,4

One way to read the bolded phrase above is to claim that St. Ephraim believed that the consecrated host was really bread but that if you had faith, you could receive Christ. Thus, the doubters only receive bread because they do not have the faith to receive the Body. The problem with this way of reading the phrase is that he explicitly states in this same passage that it is the Body. Above, we quoted from this same passage showing that St. Ephraim went into great detail and used explicit language to affirm his belief that the bread truly becomes the Body. Since he clearly affirmed a substantial change, either we must conclude that he contradicted himself, or “for him it will be only bread” must be read in another way.

In fact, there is another feasible way to read this phrase. The phrase should be understood as referring to the effect of the sacrament rather than the sacrament itself. A believer receives the Body unto salvation, but the doubter does not receive any benefit; for him it has the same effect as would normal bread. Since this way is fully compatible with the rest of what St. Ephraim said and the other way is a contradiction, this is the more probable way of interpreting his statement.

Another one sometimes used is this quotation from St. Augustine:

They said therefore unto Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” For He had said to them, “Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for that which endureth unto eternal life.” “What shall we do?” they ask; by observing what, shall we be able to fulfill this precept? “Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He has sent.” This is then to eat the meat, not that which perisheth, but that which endureth unto eternal life. To what purpose dost thou make ready teeth and stomach? Believe, and thou hast eaten already.²¹

We have seen above that St. Augustine affirmed that the bread become the Body and that the communicants must adore it before receiving. So how is this quotation compatible with his other statements? St. Augustine is not denying Transubstantiation by affirming that we can receive Christ by faith. As St. Thomas Aquinas explained, there are two ways to receive Christ: spiritually and sacramentally. ²² To receive Him by faith is to receive Him spiritually, and to receive Him by consumption of the Eucharistic species is to receive Him sacramentally. Ideally, one would receive Christ in both ways at each communion. But in the case of the doubter above, he receives only sacramentally and does not receive spiritually because he lacks faith. St. Augustine in this passage is referring to the spiritual reception of Christ’s Body which is not opposed to the sacramental reception and far less does it disprove his belief in a substantial change in the Eucharist.

Two other quotations often used to argue against the historicity of Transubstantiation are from Pope Gelasius and Theodoret:

Surely the sacrament we take of the Lord´s body and blood is a divine thing, on account of which, and by the same we are made partakers of the divine nature; and yet the substance of the bread and wine does not cease to be. And certainly the image and similitude of Christ´s body and blood are celebrated in the action of the mysteries. – Pope Gelasius Tractatus de duabus naturis 14

You are caught in the net you have woven yourself. For even after the consecration the mystic symbols are not deprived of their own nature; they remain in their former substance figure and form; they are visible and tangible as they were before. But they are regarded as what they are become, and believed so to be, and are worshipped as being what they are believed to be. Compare then the image with the archetype, and you will see the likeness, for the type must be like the reality. For that body preserves its former form, figure, and limitation and in a word the substance of the body; but after the resurrection it has become immortal and superior to corruption; it has become worthy of a seat on the right hand; it is adored by every creature as being called the natural body of the Lord. – Theodoret, Dialogue II

On the contrary, W.R. Carson writes:

…it is assumed wrongly that by the words “nature” and “substance” the Fathers cited, writing centuries before heresies had made accurate definition and precise terminology necessary, intended to mean what the Tridentine Fathers meant by them. This is demonstrably untrue. The words ‘substance’ and ‘nature’ are synonymous with what at Trent were called the ‘species’ or ‘accidents.’ This is surely evident (a) from the context of the various passages, where a conversion (metabolen), to use Theodoret’s word, of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, is mentioned; (b) from the fact that they constantly and uniformly speak of such ‘nature’ and ‘substance’ as symbols; (c) from Leibnitz’ (a Protestant authority) well-known observation that the Fathers do not use these terms to express metaphysical notions.(53) (d) As regards Theodoret, from the confession of the Lutherans of Madgeburg that he is opposed to their doctrine and cannot be read with safety.(54) It should be added that the passages attributed to Theodoret and St. Gelasius occur in works that are considered spurious by many competent critics.²³

This list is not an exhaustive; more could be cited for and against the doctrine but this is representative and contains the majority of the strongest objections from patristic sources.

4. Does Transubstantiation undermine the true corporeality of Christ’s Body?

John Calvin erroneously claimed that the ubiquity of Christ’s presence on Catholic altars was impossible because it would undermine the true corporeal nature of Christ’s risen Body.

On the contrary, this is false because Christ is not present in the sacrament as a thing is present in a place. St. Thomas explained that here. ²⁴ That is, Christ is present metaphysically (or “after the manner of a substance”). It could also be said that He is present ‘supernaturally’ as opposed to ‘naturally.’ His Body is not subjected to physical laws and cannot be said to be present physically, insofar as ‘physically’ denotes that the thing belongs to the physical order in the way that ordinary physical objects do. ²⁵ Therefore, Transubstantiation is consistent with the true corporeality of Christ’s risen Body. ²⁶

5. Do the Eastern Orthodox reject Transubstantiation?

On the contrary, the Catholic Church affirms that the Eastern Churches have a valid Eucharist and that they have correct doctrine in respect to the Eucharist.²⁷ This is evidenced by the fact that there is an open invitation (on the side of the Catholic Church) for Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters to receive Catholic communion. This would be impossible were the Church to understand them as rejecting the essential elements of Transubstantiation.

6. Is Transubstantiation tantamount to cannibalism?

On the contrary, this objection assumes the error of reducing the Eucharistic reception to a purely physical process. In the Eucharist Christ is not received physically, but spiritually and sacramentally as explained above. Also see this post on the Real Presence and Cannibalism.

ii – Additional Reading

Council of Trent on the Eucharist

Fr. Al Kimel on Transubstantiation (Long but well worth the read.)

W. R. Carson – The Antiquity of the Doctrine of Transubstantiation

Books:

Eucharist, by Louis Bouyer
A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, by Abbot Vonier, Peter Kreeft, and Aidan Nichols
The Hidden Manna: A Theology of the Eucharist, by James T. O’Connor

Finally, Protestant historian J. N. D. Kelly writes:

Eucharistic teaching, it should be understood at the outset, was in general unquestioningly realist, i.e., the consecrated bread and wine were taken to be, and were treated and designated as, the Savior’s body and blood.²⁸

Hippolytus speaks of ‘the body and the blood’ through which the Church is saved, and Tertullian regularly describes the bread as ‘the Lord’s body.’ The converted pagan, he remarks, ‘feeds on the richness of the Lord’s body, that is, on the Eucharist.’ The realism of his theology comes to light in the argument, based on the intimate relation of body and soul, that just as in baptism the body is washed with water so that the soul may be cleansed, so in the Eucharist ‘the flesh feeds upon Christ’s body and blood so that the soul may be filled with God.’ Clearly his assumption is that the Savior’s body and blood are as real as the baptismal water. Cyprian’s attitude is similar. Lapsed Christians who claim communion without doing penance, he declares, ‘do violence to his body and blood, a sin more heinous against the Lord with their hands and mouths than when they denied him.’ Later he expatiates on the terrifying consequences of profaning the sacrament, and the stories he tells confirm that he took the Real Presence literally. ²⁹

In Conclusion, it is clear that the doctrine of Transubstantiation extends in concept to the earliest days of the Church, was upheld and affirmed by several popes and ecumenical councils, and was then rejected by Protestants in the sixteenth century. The patristic support is heavily on the side of the Catholic dogma.

1. Such a defense will be written in the future on Called to Communion.
2. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=transubstantiation&searchmode=none
3. As quoted by Denzinger Sources of Catholic Dogma, 355
4. Ibid., 430
5. Ibid., 424, 465, 544, 581, 698
6. See also Council of Trent, Session 13, Canon IV: “If any one saith, that, after the consecration is completed, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ are not in the admirable sacrament of the Eucharist, but (are there) only during the use, whilst it is being taken, and not either before or after; and that, in the hosts, or consecrated particles, which are reserved or which remain after communion, the true Body of the Lord remaineth not; let him be anathema.”
7. 1 Tim 4:5
8. There are strong reasons to believe this particular metaphysical nuance of the doctrine but the council of Trent did not directly canonize this Thomistic idea. In other words, there is some room for speculation on these grounds. One can accept Trent without affirming strict Aristotlean metaphysics. It should also be stated that Aristotle, for this very reason, would have rejected Transubstantiation as an impossibility since accidents cannot, according to him, exist without a subject. Ordinarily, St. Thomas would agree, but he considers this a uniquely miraculous event.
9. Council of Trent, Session 13, Canon II
10. Luke 24:16,30-35
11. See also Kelly, J.N.D., Early Christian Doctrines, pp. 197-198
12. Proverbs 9:2
13. John 6:55
14. John 6:56-57
15. Matthew 26:26
16. 1 Cor 10:17
17. 1 Corinthians 11:27
18. For more, see Chadwick, Henry The Early Church, pp. 262, 266
19. Pelikan, Jaroslav The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, p. 44; emphasis added.
20. Harnack, Adolf History of Dogma 1888, I. p. 397
21. NPNF1: Vol. VII, Tractates on John, Tractate 25, 12.
22. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 3.80.1
23. Carson, W. R. The Antiquity of the Doctrine of Transubstantiation which can be read online here.
24. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 3.76.5
25. Unfortunately, the modern mind often uses the word “physical” to denote that something is “actual” as if “physical” were the opposite of “imaginary” or “untrue.” This is due in large part to the influence of materialism on the modern way of thinking. But the term “physical” means that the aspect described is relegated to the physical world, i.e. to matter. This is clearly not true of the Real Presence of Christ; hence we say metaphysical rather than physical, supernatural rather than natural.
26. See also St. Gregory of Nyssa The Great Catechism, 37 in which he anticipated and explained the answer to Calvin’s objection.
27. This is not to say that there aren’t Eastern Orthodox Christians who deny the dogma.
28. Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines p. 440
29. Ibid., pp. 211-212