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.”

Mike Hsu

I’m grateful for Mike’s interaction with my article, because I believe that entering into dialogue is a first step toward attaining that unity Christ prayed that His followers would enjoy. At the same time, I would like to clear up a misunderstanding, and explain why a call to seek to establish a “united ecclesial structure” from one that does not already exist is problematic.

I agree that Christians should seek for “united hearts,” if that means to be united in love for Christ, and thereby in love for one another for Christ’s sake. But just as we cannot love what we do not know, so the foundation of charity between believers is unity of faith. St. Peter wrote, “Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.” (1 Peter 1:22) And Pope Leo XIII wrote, “But how can hearts be united in perfect Charity where minds do not agree in Faith?”¹ Our capacity for loving one another deeply from the heart as fellow servants of Christ depends on together obeying and sharing the truth from Christ and about Christ. The more a fellow Christian believes that I deny some essential of faith, or believes that I affirm something heretical, the less we are capable of having hearts united in agape. So the pursuit of “united hearts” requires the pursuit of the “one faith” (Eph. 4:5) that has been handed down from the Apostles. But pursuing the one faith by which we can be united in heart requires pursuing a unified ecclesial structure, because otherwise there are as many interpretations as there are interpreters. Therefore, without ever sacrificing truth for unity, all Christians should be pursuing not only unity of faith but also a united ecclesial structure. To deny that would be to abandon altogether the concept of schism as an evil.² Affirming the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds involves affirming the unity and catholicity of the Church, and so recognizing the sinfulness of schism, and thus the necessity of pursuing and preserving structural unity in one body. No denomination limited to a certain geography or certain ethnicity, and not a member of a worldwide organization can claim to be “catholic,” and therefore can claim to be the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church Christ founded.³

Denying the obligation to pursue visible unity with other Christians would require giving up the claim to believe in a visible Church, whether universal or local.⁴ That is because to deny our obligation to pursue a united ecclesial structure with other Christians is likewise to deny our obligation to belong to a local visible church.⁵ Claiming that we must belong to a local visible church but that visible churches need not belong to a universal ecclesial structure would be ad hoc and therefore self-refuting. The ad hoc nature of man-made denominations ‘disallowing’ do-it-yourself church’ is not lost on the emergent generation.⁶ All the reasons one could provide for the necessity of the visibility and structure of the local Church equally support the necessity of the visibility and structure of the universal Church. For these reasons I’ll take as a given that we agree that all Christians ought to be pursuing a unified ecclesial structure, each without ever denying what he believes to be true, or in any other way going against his conscience. The point in question, therefore, is whether the unified ecclesial structure all Christians ought to be pursuing must already exist now.

The reason why the visible ecclesial unity toward which Protestant-Catholic reunion is ordered must already be present can be found in “Pentecost, Babel, and the Ecumenical Imperative.” By his own efforts man can effect only a man-made unity ordered to earthly, temporal ends. Unity of this sort is not in itself evil, nor is the pursuit of such unity in itself evil. Natural virtues are not evil, and neither is the man-made peace that results from peace-treaties, human alliances, human compacts, man-made clubs, organizations, corporations, or other such agreements or societies. But the sort of peace and unity achieved in those cases is not a supernatural peace or a supernatural unity. They are each instances of a merely natural peace and natural unity.⁷

By contrast, the peace of God surpasses all human comprehension (Philippians 4:7). Jesus, speaking to His Apostles, said, “My peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give to you.” (John 14:27) Christ’s peace is not a natural peace that can be established by men. Because this peace surpasses human comprehension, it cannot be established by mere men, according to the natural power of men. Christ’s peace is a supernatural peace that comes only from Him. St. Paul teaches that we are called into one body to be ruled by this supernatural peace in Christ’s mystical Body, i.e. the Church. (1 Cor 12) He writes, “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body.” (Col 3:15) The presence of this peace in His Body is not an accident, because Christ Himself “is our peace,” (Eph. 2:14) and by His Spirit we enter into Christ’s peace through union with Him in His mystical Body.⁸ The unity of the Spirit (Eph 4:3) is a participation in the peace of Christ, through sharing in His Holy Spirit who animates His Body, the Church.

The Dilemma

For this reason, seeking to establish a visible ecclesial structure, while presuming that the visible ecclesial structure Christ established does not exist, entails a dilemma. Either Christ endowed His Church with a unified ecclesial structure that was later lost, and which mere men are seeking to reestablish, or Christ did not endow His Church with a unified ecclesial structure, and ecumenically minded men seeking to establish a visible ecclesial structure are seeking to establish something beyond what Christ intended. Let’s consider each horn separately.

Horn A: On one horn of the dilemma is the claim that Christ endowed His Church with a unified ecclesial structure that was later lost, and which mere men now seek to reestablish. If that unified ecclesial structure was essential to Christ’s Church, then adopting this horn obviously presupposes ecclesial deism, because it requires believing that Christ allowed something essential to His Church to be lost, and this entails that the Church herself was lost. Moreover, because it affirms the responsibility of all Christians to pursue the realization of a unified ecclesial structure, it either attributes to mere men the ability to establish a supernatural unity, or it treats the sort of unity Christ established in His Church as a merely natural unity that men can establish themselves. The former notion entails an ecclesial pelagianism,⁹ while the latter notion implicitly denies the unique deity of Christ, by treating the Church He founded as a merely natural society on the same level as any other human society formed by mere men, rather than as a supernatural society which is Christ’s Mystical Body of which He is the Head.

On the other hand, the notion that the unified ecclesial structure Christ established was only a kind of extraneous decoration, nice to have but not essential, is deeply problematic. It treats the unity of the Church’s governing and teaching authority as a mere adornment that is not part of the Church’s nature, but as something that can be removed without any injury to the Church’s life. However, the unity of the governing and teaching authority is essential for the very existence of a divinely established governing and teaching authority. If the Church’s governing and teaching authority could be divided into various competing factions, none having more authority than the others, there would cease to be a governing and teaching authority in the Church.¹⁰ So for this reason this position reduces to a kind of biblicism (i.e. solo scriptura), in which each individual retains ultimate magisterial authority for himself.¹¹

This notion that the unified ecclesial structure is not essential to the Church reduces the Church to something that is in essence invisible, and accidentally visible only when the Church happens to possess a unified ecclesial structure, perhaps only at the very beginning of her history. As a result, schism would never be intrinsically wrong. Whenever any Christian disagreed with any other Christians, he could legitimately separate from them and form a different sect, so long as he held no bitterness in his heart. And therefore this notion undermines the very prospect of pursuing a unified ecclesial structure, since such a structure would be entirely devoid of authority, and entirely conditional on unanimous consent among all Christians, something that both common sense and Church history indicate does not happen. Without mutual recognition of divinely established magisterial authority, there are almost as many opinions as there are persons.

Not only that, but whatever unified ecclesial structure men would establish would not be a restablishment of the Church Christ founded. Whatever new institution ecumenically minded Christians established would be a numerically different institution from the one Christ founded, i.e. it would be an altogether new institution that had never before existed. It would therefore not be a divine institution (i.e. one founded by Christ) nor would Christ be its Head, nor would the Holy Spirit be its animating principle. It would be merely a man-made institution. The future unified ecclesial structure intended by Protestants seeking visible ecclesial unity can be a divine institution only if it is the very same divine institution that the incarnate Christ Himself founded during His time on earth, and which was born on the day of Pentecost. And that means that ecumenically minded Protestants seeking a supernatural unified ecclesial structure are in fact, even if unaware of this truth, seeking the same unified ecclesial structure Christ founded and which has existed in unbroken continuity to this day.

For all these reasons, the notion that Christ endowed His Church with a unified ecclesial structure that was later lost, and which mere men can reestablish, is deeply problematic.

Horn B: On the other horn of the dilemma is the notion that Christ did not endow His Church with a unified ecclesial structure, but now all Christians ought to strive to establish a unified ecclesial structure. The primary problem with this notion is that in seeking to establish a unified ecclesial structure for the “one holy catholic Church,” ecumenically minded Christians would be seeking to establish something beyond what Christ Himself intended or instituted when He established His Church. In that case, if Christ did not found a body with a unified ecclesial structure, then to seek to bring all Christians into a body with a structural unity is a form of “outdoing Christ,” that is, it seeks to go beyond the unity that Christ Himself saw fit to establish in His Church by imposing on what He founded as a merely invisible entity a visible unity He Himself did not see fit to establish. But seeking to outdo the omniscient, omnipotent God involves no small hubris. Claiming to worship Christ as God, while seeking to outdo Him in the establishment of ecclesial unity, is likewise no small performative contradiction, and undermines the claim to be following Christ as God.¹²

Someone might claim that Christ secretly instructed His Apostles to pass along a message through the generations, instructing them to wait until the third millennium to establish a visible ecclesial structure. But the notion that Christ established His Church only as an invisible unity while secretly transmitting the instruction that His disciples should someday (in the third millennium) upgrade the unity of the Church to visible structural unity is a kind of gnosticism. It requires believing in some secret tradition that has not been recorded or developed by any Church Father. Such a claim deserves no further consideration.

This horn of the dilemma faces a further undesirable consequence. Any attempt to build a man-made catholic (i.e. universal) ‘Church,’ rather than being reconciled to the Catholic Church Christ founded, would be the religious equivalent of attempting to restart the building of the Tower of Babel. As I explained in “Pentecost, Babel, and the Ecumenical Imperative,” an attempt by man to form a universal Church is not essentially different from the mission of the Antichrist, who seeks to replace the Church Christ founded with a universal Church founded by man, and thus (despite the appearances) ordered ultimately to the worship of man.

Therefore, the notion that Christ did not endow His Church with a unified ecclesial structure but that we all ought now to establish a unified ecclesial structure, is also problematic.

So both horns of the dilemma are untenable. The only remaining possibility is that Christ endowed His Church with a unified ecclesial structure that has never been lost, and therefore that the full visible reunion of Christians now separated by schism involves a return to that same continuing Catholic Church.¹³ And that entails that the goal of ecumenical reunion is an ecumenism of return. As St. Jerome said, “We must abide in that Church, which was founded by the Apostles, and endures to this day.”¹⁴ Pope Pius XI similarly writes:

[T]he union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. …

Furthermore, in this one Church of Christ no man can be or remain who does not accept, recognize and obey the authority and supremacy of Peter and his legitimate successors. Did not the ancestors of those who are now entangled in the errors of Photius and the [Protestant] Reformers, obey the Bishop of Rome, the chief shepherd of souls? Alas their children left the home of their fathers, but it did not fall to the ground and perish for ever, for it was supported by God. Let them therefore return to their common Father, who, forgetting the insults previously heaped on the Apostolic See, will receive them in the most loving fashion. For if, as they continually state, they long to be united with Us and ours, why do they not hasten to enter the Church, “the Mother and mistress of all Christ’s faithful”? Let them hear Lactantius (c. 250 – c. 325) crying out: “The Catholic Church is alone in keeping the true worship. This is the fount of truth, this the house of Faith, this the temple of God: if any man enter not here, or if any man go forth from it, he is a stranger to the hope of life and salvation. Let none delude himself with obstinate wrangling. For life and salvation are here concerned, which will be lost and entirely destroyed, unless their interests are carefully and assiduously kept in mind.”¹⁵

Let, therefore, the separated children draw nigh to the Apostolic See, set up in the City which Peter and Paul, the Princes of the Apostles, consecrated by their blood; to that See, We repeat, which is “the root and womb whence the Church of God springs,” not with the intention and the hope that “the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth” will cast aside the integrity of the faith and tolerate their errors, but, on the contrary, that they themselves submit to its teaching and government. Would that it were Our happy lot to do that which so many of Our predecessors could not, to embrace with fatherly affection those children, whose unhappy separation from Us We now bewail. Would that God our Savior, “Who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth,” would hear us when We humbly beg that He would deign to recall all who stray to the unity of the Church!”¹⁶

To the ears of many Protestants, such words are sectarian and arrogant. Yet if ‘sectarianism’ is simply defined as the claim that the body to which one belongs is the Church Christ founded, then assuming that ‘sectarianism’ [so defined] is always wrong presupposes either that Christ never founded a visible Church or that, having done so, at some point He allowed it to fall out of existence. Either way, such an assumption is not theologically neutral; it assumes precisely what is in question between Protestants and Catholics, namely, either that Christ did not found a visible Church,¹⁷ or that if He did, some kind of ecclesial deism is true. The person making this assumption has placed himself in an epistemic position in which he cannot come to discover whether Christ did in fact found a visible Church against which the gates of hell shall not prevail. In his mind he has already ruled out the very possibility, by assuming that such a thing would be sectarian, and that sectarianism is always wrong.

Nor is it arrogant to claim to be what one actually is. Hence the notion that claiming to be the Church Christ founded is ipso facto arrogant likewise presupposes that there is no body which is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church Christ founded, just as the notion that claiming to be the Son of God is ipso facto arrogant presupposes that there is no Son of God. So the charge that claiming to be the Church Christ founded is arrogant is a question-begging charge, i.e. it assumes precisely what is in question.

I certainly welcome the call among ecumenically minded Protestants for “united hearts” and a “united ecclesial structure.” What I have done here is show why the pursuit of a “united ecclesial structure” in an ecumenism of non-return faces an intractable dilemma. The solution to that dilemma is an ecumenism of return.¹⁸

May the peace of Christ rule in our hearts, and unite our hearts in the one body to which we have been called in Christ.

1. Praeclara Gratulationis Publicae.
2. See “Michael Horton on Schism as Heresy.”
3. On ‘catholicity’ as a mark of the Church see comment #21 in the “Collapsing Ecclesiology” thread.
4. cf. Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter XXV.2.
5. See Baptist pastor Mark Dever’s comments on the importance of being part of a local church.
6. See A Reflection on PCA Pastor Terry Johnson’s “Our Collapsing Ecclesiology,”.
7. For a helpful explanation of the natural/supernatural distinction, see “Nature, Grace, and Man’s Supernatural End: Feingold, Kline, and Clark” or see Lawrence Feingold’s The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters.
8. See Mystici Corporis Christi.
9. Pelagianism is the notion that without grace man can attain the supernatural end which is heaven. Ecclesial pelagianism is the notion that mere men can establish a supernatural society.
10. See “Philosophy and the Papacy.”
11. Cf. “Solo Scripture, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority.”
12. I first wrote about this horn of the dilemma in 2007, as I explained in “Institutional Unity and Outdoing Christ.”
13. This is why Protestantism by its origins is oriented not to the future establishment of a new Catholic Church, but to a return to the Catholic Church; see “Reformation Sunday 2011: How Would Protestants Know When to Return?”
14. Quoted in the Catholic Encyclopedia article titled “Apostolicity.”
15. Divine Institutes IV.30.
16. Mortalium Animos, 10-12.
17. “Christ Founded a Visible Church.”
18. See, for example, “Reformation Sunday 2011: How Would Protestants Know When to Return?.”

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.

Michael Horton is the editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation, co-host of the White Horse Inn radio program, and the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California. Recently on the White Horse Inn blog Michael Horton wrote about the nature of schism.

He wrote a post titled “Have Denominations Had Their Day?,” in which he responded to a post by Christianity Today contributor Ed Stetzer titled “Do Denominations Matter?.” Stetzer thinks that denominations are important for pragmatic reasons, namely, that by working together Christians can accomplish much more than by working alone. Horton agrees that denominations matter, but not merely because working together is more efficient or useful. Horton writes:

Scripture’s focus is on what God is doing rather than on what we are doing. The Triune God is saving sinners through preaching and sacrament. There is “one holy catholic and apostolic church” not because individual believers realized that they could more effectively reach the world and accomplish their goals in tandem. Rather, this church exists because of the Father’s eternal election of a people, the Son’s mediation and saving work for them, and the Spirit’s work of uniting them to Christ through the gospel. We are recipients of a kingdom; the Father is the builder, by his Son and Spirit, through the Word.

Therefore, there really is one church—catholic, spread throughout the world yet united in one Lord, one faith, one baptism—even though its visible shape right now seems to speak against it. Same thing with the holiness of the church: holy in Christ, it is nevertheless “simultaneously justified and sinful.”

Horton’s point is that there is only “one holy catholic and apostolic Church” not because Christians thought it would be more useful and effective to work together, but because “of the Father’s eternal election of a people, the Son’s mediation and saving work for them, and the Spirit’s work of uniting them to Christ through the gospel.” However, merely electing, redeeming and [covenantally] uniting persons to Christ does not entail the existence of a Church; it merely entails the existence of persons elected, redeemed and united to Christ. So Hortons’s “Therefore, there really is one church-catholic” does not follow. (See “Why Protestantism has no “visible catholic Church”.”) Christ did something in addition to offering Himself on the cross, and sending His Spirit; He founded a Church, and gave its keys to St. Peter. Cf. Mt. 16:18-19.¹ Because Horton’s conclusion does not follow, this makes Horton’s claim irrelevant to the question of denominations. If by “church-catholic” Horton simply means all the elect, this has no implications regarding whether there should be only one denomination, many denominations, or no denominations.

In his statement Horton makes use of the Lutheran/Reformed notion of simul iustus et peccator [simultaneously justified and sinful] to defend his claim that “there really is one church—catholic, spread throughout the world yet united in one Lord, one faith, one baptism—even though its visible shape right now seems to speak against it.” In other words, just as in Reformed soteriology a believer is perfectly justified by extra nos imputation even while that person remains full of wickedness and eternally damnable sins, so in Reformed ecclesiology the “church-catholic” is perfectly united spiritually and invisibly even while visibly divided into thousands of factions.

The problem with the claim of simul iustus et peccator is that it makes God capable of self-deception or schizophrenia, as I have explained elsewhere.² It also allows us to believe a falsehood, by appealing to the power of God to declare to be true what is simultaneously in fact not true. But that would not be a power on God’s part; that would be a weakness, i.e. an inability to speak only the truth. Moreover, this position devalues and dismisses the physical and material actions of men, and of sects, since the only thing that counts is the invisible and spiritual. What follows from this position is that sin in our heart and body does not matter (i.e. does not affect our salvation in any way), because in no way does it detract from God’s immutable forensic declaration proleptically revealing His declaration concerning us on the Day of Judgment. Of course this theology stipulates that good fruit should follow, just like it stipulates that visible unity should follow. But no length or severity of visible division falsifies the posited invisible union, because according to this ecclesiology visible union is not essential to the invisible [covenantal] union with Christ all believers possess, just as according to this soteriology holiness of life is not essential to the invisible forensic extra nos justification enjoyed by all believers.

For this reason, this position entails that schisms between believers are not in themselves sinful or evil, because they do not detract from the invisible unity between Christ and every believer; they only (sometimes) hurt the Christian cause in the pragmatic ways Stetzer notes. According to this notion, the truth is in the invisible realm of the divine declaration, even when the condition in the material, visible world is exactly the opposite. The same nominalism that leads to a gnostic conception of justification leads likewise to a gnostic ecclesiogy in which the visible and material is unimportant and ultimately irrelevant. Because merely electing, redeeming and [covenantally] uniting persons to Christ does not entail the existence of a Church, what Horton refers to as the “church-catholic” is impervious to any condition on earth, nor does this ecclesiology entail any condition on earth, so long as one or more persons are [covenantally] united to Christ.

But I wanted to understand how Horton conceives the “church-catholic” to be both one and united, and yet visibly divided. His statement reduced the unity of the Church to something purely invisible. So on his blog I asked him the following the question:

You say that the catholic Church is united (in certain respects) even though “its visible shape now seems to speak against it.” It seems to me that one could look at the present situation and see not a problem with the Church’s “visible shape,” (as though the problem is only a problem between branches within the Church) but rather *schisms from* the visible Church, as were the Donatists in the fourth century. So, what is it, exactly, in your opinion, that distinguishes a *branch within* the catholic Church, from a *schism from* the catholic Church? That is, how does one rightly determine whether a particular denomination is a *branch within* the Church, or a *schism from* the Church?

Michael then replied:

With our confessions, I’d say that this is determined by proclamation of the true gospel and the administration of the sacraments according to Christ’s institution. While no church exhibits these marks with complete purity, bodies that reject the gospel or anything essential to it and substitute their own dogmas, duties, and discipline for Christ’s institution have separated themselves from the visible Church.

I appreciate his reply, but I think it reveals a fundamental flaw in Reformed [and Protestant] ecclesiology. Horton’s reply defines schism from the Church as synonymous with heresy, and in this way eliminates the very possibility of schism from the Church [in the traditional sense of schism from as treated in the Church Fathers]. For the traditional sense of schism from the Church, see, for example, what the fourth century bishop St. Optatus says about schism in “St. Optatus on Schism and the Bishop of Rome.” Similarly, St. Jerome wrote:

Between heresy and schism there is this difference, that heresy perverts dogma, while schism, by rebellion against the bishop, separates from the Church. Nevertheless there is no schism which does not trump up a heresy to justify its departure from the Church. (In Ep. ad Tit., iii, 10)

In St. Augustine’s work titled “Of Faith and the Creed” which he delivered to the bishops assembled at the Council of Hippo-Regius in AD 393, which was the “general assembly of the North African Church,” he wrote the following:

Inasmuch, I repeat, as this is the case, we believe also in The Holy Church, [intending thereby] assuredly the Catholic. For both heretics and schismatics style their congregations churches. But heretics, in holding false opinions regarding God, do injury to the faith itself; while schismatics, on the other hand, in wicked separations break off from brotherly charity, although they may believe just what we believe. Wherefore neither do the heretics belong to the Church catholic, which loves God; nor do the schismatics form a part of the same, inasmuch as it loves the neighbor, and consequently readily forgives the neighbor’s sins, because it prays that forgiveness may be extended to itself by Him who has reconciled us to Himself, doing away with all past things, and calling us to a new life. And until we reach the perfection of this new life, we cannot be without sins. Nevertheless it is a matter of consequence of what sort those sins may be. (Of Faith and the Creed, 10)³

To the best of my knowledge, St. Optatus, St. Jerome, St. Augustine and all the Church Fathers who wrote about schism wrote about schism from as something conceptually distinct from heresy. Yes, any schism from the Church would invariably fall into some heresy, at least in order to justify its schism from the Church. But, nevertheless, schism from the Church referred to a particular Church’s (or smaller group’s) visible break in communion with the Catholic Church (even where that particular Church or group had not embraced any heresy), whereas ‘heresy’ always referred to a departure from the Apostolic faith, even if communion had not yet been visibly broken.

So, it seems to me that Michael has departed from the Church Fathers in this respect, by defining schism from the Church as heresy, and thus eliminating from his ecclesiology the possibility of schism from the Church [in the traditional sense of schism from]. And when schism from the Church is defined out of existence, one loses the possibility of recognizing whether one (or anyone else) is in schism from the Church; it becomes a meaningless question, a question that evokes a blank face, or an attempt to translate the question into the only definition of ‘schism’ one knows, namely, a question about heresy, which is then answered with an assurance that one is holding on to the biblical gospel and sacraments, and therefore that one is surely not in schism from the Church.

When terms in the Tradition are redefined in a way that replaces (rather than develops) the essence of their meaning, then not only does this lead to ecumenical difficulties, but it also leads communities who adopt these redefinitions to a different way of seeing, in this case, a way of seeing in which schism from is not even conceptually visible. By redefining schism from the Church as heresy, the community that adopts this redefinition essentially goes blind to schism from the Church and to the very possibility of schism from the Church.

What has happened, when a fundamental patristic concept is no longer even accessible or intelligible? This concept of schism from the Church dropped out of Protestant theology because the justification of the Protestant departure from the Catholic Church required an underlying radical change in ecclesiology, from an essentially visible catholic Church to an essentially invisible catholic Church with local visible expressions. This concept of schism from the Church is therefore no longer available (and has to be redefined as heresy to cover the semantic hole its absence would leave) in Protestant ecclesiology because the conjunction of (a) the denial of the ministerial priesthood and Holy Orders and (b) the denial of an essentially unified divinely established visible principle of unity entails that the Church is not essentially visible, and therefore that visible unity is not essential to her. But schism from the Church is impossible unless the Church has visible unity. Hence the Protestant move from a visible Church ecclesiology to an invisible Church ecclesiology (even though the language of ‘visible Church’ is retained by Reformed persons) eliminated conceptually the very possibility of schism from the Church, and thus required redefining schism from as just a synonym for heresy.

For this reason, even if Horton wanted to hold to the possibility of schism from the Church by claiming that the visible Church is, say, NAPARC (or some other association of Reformed denominations), he could not do so. That is because if some denominations which held to the same doctrines affirmed by NAPARC denominations were not in communion with NAPARC denominations, nothing would make those denomination the ones in schism from the Church, rather than the other way around. Without a divinely established visible principle of unity that serves as the defining point of reference for the location of the Church, schism from the Church must be redefined as “not holding to [my interpretation of Scripture regarding what is] the gospel and [my interpretation of Scripture regarding what are] the sacraments.” For Catholics, by contrast, that divinely established principle of unity is St. Peter to whom Christ entrusted the keys of the Kingdom, as St. Ambrose said: “Where Peter is, there is the Church.”⁴

Moreover, to justify redefining schism from as heresy, one must assume that all the early Church Fathers who addressed schism from the Church were deeply mistaken, having departed from the Apostolic faith regarding the nature of schism from the Church. In that sense, to justify departing from the Church Fathers regarding the nature of schism from the Church, one must presuppose some form of ecclesial deism. Otherwise, if in their teaching concerning schism from the Church, the Church Fathers were faithfully preserving and defending the Apostolic faith they had received, those who are now redefining schism from as heresy are departing from the Apostolic faith, and thus ironically (given their own their definition of ‘schism’) in that respect separating themselves from the visible Church.

1. See “Christ Founded a Visible Church.”
2. See comment #83 in the “Habitual Sin and the Grace of the Sacraments” post.
3. There St. Augustine implicitly distinguishes between mortal and venial sins. No believer on earth avoids all venial sin, but no one can be at the same time both in mortal sin and in a state of grace.
4. For the role of St. Peter as the Church’s principle of unity see “The Chair of St. Peter.”

The School of Athens
Raphael (1509)

In order to explain the role of Plato’s Republic in helping me become more open to the Catholic understanding of St. Peter’s unique office in the Church, I need to lay out the broader line of reasoning to which it contributed. That line of reasoning was as follows:

First, it is reasonable to expect that Christ, being God and therefore all-wise, would establish for His Church the best form of government, not a form of government faulty in some respect. That does not mean that the government that Christ established for His Church would never err, only that the form of this government would be the best one.

Second, the best form of government is one that is capable of preserving the unity of the society it governs. Consider how important unity is to the existence and continuation of a society. Plato writes:

Is there any greater evil for a polis than that which splits it and makes it many instead of one; or any greater good than that which binds it together and makes it a unity? (Republic, 462a9-b2)

Why is there no greater good for a society than its unity, and no greater evil than that which divides it? In other words, how is unity related to goodness? In order to answer that question, we need to consider the metaphysical relation between being and unity and goodness.

These three (and two more that I am not discussing) are called transcendentals, because they can be said of all categories of being. Consider the relation of being and goodness. The Manicheans had taught that there were two fundamental principles or sources of all things: a purely good deity called “the Father of Greatness,” and a purely evil deity called the “King of Darkness.” Neither deity was omnipotent, or created by the other. In this way the Manichean system was fundamentally dualistic. St. Augustine, drawing from the insights of the neo-Platonic tradition, argued against the Manicheans that evil is fundamentally a privation of good, not a parallel principle to good.¹ Moreover, in this way the Manichean system fundamentally separated being and goodness, allowing for the possibility of a being having no goodness, i.e. a being that is purely evil.

St. Augustine argued against this, showing that because of the perfect unity of God, from whom all things that exist have their being and their goodness, goodness and being cannot be separated. Wherever there is being, there is goodness. Therefore, there can be no being that is purely evil. It follows that evil is not only a privation of goodness, but also a privation of being. St. Thomas says more about this in Summa Theologica I Q.5 a.1, where he answers the question “Whether goodness differs really from being?”

Having considered the relation of being and goodness, notice the implications for the relation of being and unity. In Summa Theologica I Q. 11 a.1, St. Thomas writes:

“Nothing which exists is not in some way one,” which would be false if “one” were an addition to “being,” in the sense of limiting it. Therefore “one” is not an addition to “being.”

I answer that, “One” does not add any reality to “being”; but is only a negation of division; for “one” means undivided “being.” This is the very reason why “one” is the same as “being.” Now every being is either simple or compound. But what is simple is undivided, both actually and potentially. Whereas what is compound, has not being whilst its parts are divided, but after they make up and compose it. Hence it is manifest that the being of anything consists in undivision; and hence it is that everything guards its unity as it guards its being.²

Seeing that being, unity and goodness are related in this way, as co-referential, it follows that wherever there is a privation of unity, there is a privation of goodness.³ But a privation of goodness is what evil is, as discussed above. Therefore privation of unity is evil, and the greater the privation of unity, the greater the evil. Likewise, the greater the unity of a thing in the fulfillment of its telos, the greater its goodness, all other things being equal. This explains why according to Plato there is no greater good for a society than its unity, and no greater evil than that which divides it, because unity and goodness are related in this way.

Third, given that Christ would not leave His Church with a faulty form of government, and given that there is no greater evil for a polis than that which splits it and makes it many instead of one, and no greater good than that which binds it together and makes it a unity, it follows that Christ would establish His Church with a government that by its very form would preserve the unity of the Church and protect it from division (i.e. schism), between the time of His Ascension and His future return in glory.

So what form of government, by its very form, preserves the unity of a society, and protects it from division? The answer is a government that is itself indivisible, that is, a government in which one person has a primacy of authority.

In Book VIII of Plato’s Republic, he describes a descent from the highest/best form of government (aristocracy, i.e. rule by the best) to the lowest/worst form of government (tyranny). This descent from aristocracy to tyranny passes through three intermediate forms of government:

Aristocracy
Timocracy
Oligarchy
Democracy
[anarchy]
Tyranny

It is not Plato’s purpose in Book VIII of the Republic to focus explicitly on unity. And it is easy to misunderstand what he is saying here, especially if we are not attentive to what he means by his terms. For example, he is not criticizing democracy in the sense of rule by the people, but rather democracy in the sense of rule by people of a certain moral character. For Plato, monarchy, as opposed to tyranny, would be a form of aristocracy, defined as rule by the wise and virtuous. But there is clearly something in this devolution of polities (from aristocracy to tyranny) that moves away from unity toward disunity, until finally out of the utter disunity of anarchy, there arises the occasion for tyranny, the perverse form of monarchy.

We can draw from Plato’s explication of these forms of government that all other things being equal, a unified form of government is a better government, because it is most capable of preserving the unity of the governed. And that form of government that is intrinsically most capable of being unified and preserving unity is that in which the highest political authority belongs to a single individual at a time. This is precisely why countries do not have multiple presidents at the same time, and companies do not have multiple CEOs at the same time, and Protestant congregations does not have multiple head pastors at the same time. Both natural societies and man-made societies require unified leadership. In Scripture we find that there are heads of families. The Church herself is described as “God’s household” (1 Timothy 3:15; Ephesians 2:19), the “family of believers” (Galatians 6:10) and the “family of God” (1 Peter 4:17). Hence it would be odd if this family (i.e. the Church) did not also have a primary visible head for its government. A body with multiple heads is divided (and potentially divisible) in a way that a body with one head is not.⁴ So we should expect there to be a visible head for the visible society which is the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church” Christ founded.⁵

Aristotle presents a similar evaluation of the various forms of government in his Nicomachean Ethics VIII.10. (He discusses this also in his Politics.) In the Nicomachean Ethics he argues that tyranny is the contrary form of kingship (i.e. virtuous monarchy).

Kingship: corrupt form is Tyranny
Aristocracy: corrupt form is Oligarchy
Timocracy: corrupt form is Democracy

St. Thomas also discusses this in his work On Kingship, and at Summa Theologica I-II Q. 105 a.1, where the question is “Whether the Old Law enjoined fitting precepts concerning rulers?” There St. Thomas argues that the best form of government is one that provides the benefits of each of the other forms of government, through their mutual integration. Hence he argues that the best government should be partly democratic, in that all persons should take some share in the government, because there is a peace and stability intrinsic to the democratic form of government. He also argues that the best form of government should be partly aristocratic, in that those who know more about how best to rule should serve in the various ruling capacities. And he also argues that the best form of government should be partly monarchical, in that there should be a primacy of authority held by one person, because having one head provides for unity.

Earlier in the Summa, St. Thomas had addressed the question “Whether the world is governed by one?” He answered:

We must of necessity say that the world is governed by one. For since the end of the government of the world is that which is essentially good, which is the greatest good; the government of the world must be the best kind of government. Now the best government is the government by one. The reason of this is that government is nothing but the directing of the things governed to the end; which consists in some good. But unity belongs to the idea of goodness, as Boethius proves (De Consol. iii, 11) from this, that, as all things desire good, so do they desire unity; without which they would cease to exist. For a thing so far exists as it is one. Whence we observe that things resist division, as far as they can; and the dissolution of a thing arises from defect therein. Therefore the intention of a ruler over a multitude is unity, or peace. Now the proper cause of unity is one. For it is clear that several cannot be the cause of unity or concord, except so far as they are united. Furthermore, what is one in itself is a more apt and a better cause of unity than several things united. Therefore a multitude is better governed by one than by several. From this it follows that the government of the world, being the best form of government, must be by one. This is expressed by the Philosopher [Aristotle] (Metaphysics. xii, Did. xi, 10): “Things refuse to be ill governed; and multiplicity of authorities is a bad thing, therefore there should be one ruler.” (Summa Theologica I Q. 103, a.3.)

The gist of his argument here is that the end (i.e. purpose) of the world is the greatest good, and therefore the government of the world must be the best kind of government in order to guide it to that greatest good which is its end, because the purpose of government is to direct the governed to their end. But the greatest good must include unity and peace, because of the co-referential relation of goodness and unity, as explained above. Therefore the best kind of government must be ordered to the unity and peace of the governed. However, the proper cause of unity and concord must itself be united, for nothing can give what it does not have. But what is one in itself is more suited to causing unity than what is several, since the former has unity intrinsically, while the latter only per accidens. As he says elsewhere, “Several are said to be united according as they come closer to being one. So one man rules better than several who come near being one.” This echoes Homer’s claim that “it is not good to have a rule of many” (Iliad II 204), where each is equal in authority and there is no one higher in authority. Therefore, a multitude is better governed by one than by several, since one ruler is more suited to bringing the ruled to the unity and concord which is their end. And therefore from these premises it follows that “the government of the world, being the best form of government, must be by one.”

What was fascinating to me about this argument (both in the Summa and in On Kingship) is that the term ‘world’ could be replaced by the term ‘church.’ The world is a natural society, but the Church is a supernatural society, and is therefore likewise ordered to the greatest good. Moreover, the Church is a visible society.⁶ So if St. Thomas’ argument provides good reason to believe that the world is governed by one, then it also in the say way provides good reason to believe that the Church is best governed by a single visible leader.

In his work On Kingship St. Thomas offered a similar argument for the thesis that monarchy is the most natural and suitable form of government. Here is a selection from his argument:

[W]e must now inquire what is better for a province or a city: whether to be ruled by one man or by many. This question may be considered first from the viewpoint of the purpose of government. The aim of any ruler should be directed towards securing the welfare of that which he undertakes to rule. The duty of the pilot, for instance, is to preserve his ship amidst the perils of the sea and to bring it unharmed to the port of safety. Now the welfare and safety of a multitude formed into a society lies in the preservation of its unity, which is called peace. If this is removed, the benefit of social life is lost and, moreover, the multitude in its disagreement becomes a burden to itself. The chief concern of the ruler of a multitude, therefore, is to procure the unity of peace. It is not even legitimate for him to deliberate whether he shall establish peace in the multitude subject to him, just as a physician does not deliberate whether he shall heal the sick man encharged to him, for no one should deliberate about an end which he is obliged to seek, but only about the means to attain that end. Wherefore the Apostle, having commended the unity of the faithful people, says: “Be ye careful to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:3). Thus, the more efficacious a government is in keeping the unity of peace, the more useful it will be. For we call that more useful which leads more directly to the end. Now it is manifest that what is itself one can more efficaciously bring about unity than several–just as the most efficacious cause of heat is that which is by its nature hot. Therefore the rule of one man is more useful than the rule of many.

Furthermore, it is evident that several persons could by no means preserve the stability of the community if they totally disagreed. For union is necessary among them if they are to rule at all: several men, for instance, could not pull a ship in one direction unless joined together in some fashion. Now several are said to be united according as they come closer to being one. So one man rules better than several who come near being one.

Again, whatever is in accord with nature is best, for in all things nature does what is best. Now, every natural governance is governance by one. In the multitude of bodily members there is one which is the principal mover, namely, the heart; and among the powers of the soul one power presides as chief, namely, the reason. Among bees there is one king bee and in the whole universe there is One God, Maker and Ruler of all things. And there is a reason for this. Every multitude is derived from unity. Wherefore, if artificial things are an imitation of natural things and a work of art is better according as it attains a closer likeness to what is in nature, it follows that it is best for a human multitude to be ruled by one person.

This is also evident from experience. For provinces or cities which are not ruled by one person are torn with dissensions and tossed about without peace, so that the complaint seems to be fulfilled which the Lord uttered through the Prophet: “Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard” (Jer 12:10). On the other hand, provinces and cities which are ruled under one king enjoy peace, flourish in justice, and delight in prosperity. Hence, the Lord by His prophets promises to His people as a great reward that He will give them one head and that “one Prince will be in the midst of them” (Ezek 34:24; Jer 30:21). (On Kingship to the King of Cyprus [De Regno Ad Regem Cypri], translated by Gerald B. Phelan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1949) pp. 11-13.)

The welfare of the governed society depends upon the preservation of its unity, which is called peace. But the chief concern of the governor of a society must be the welfare of the governed society, and therefore must include the pursuit and preservation of that society’s unity and peace. The more effective a government is at keeping the unity of peace, the better that government is, all other things being equal. And since what is itself one can more efficaciously keep the unity of peace than can what is itself several, therefore the rule of one man is better than the rule of man, all other things being equal. According to St. Thomas even nature teaches us that governance by one is best, and he provides various examples. And in man-made societies, this same principle applies, as experience itself teaches us. Cities or provinces not ruled by one person are “torn with dissensions and tossed about without peace.” But provinces and cities having a form of government in which one person rules, enjoy peace, all other things being equal. In short, nature and experience teach that the rule of one man is more capable than rule by many of preserving the peace and unity necessary for the welfare of any society.

Fourth, given what we have seen above, we should expect Christ to have established for the Church an enduring office for her government, an office occupied by one person at a time, one which is invested with the highest governing authority, for the sake of the peace and unity of the Church. And St. Cyprian (Bishop of Carthage, d. 258) confirms that the Petrine office has that very role, as the source and principle of visible ecclesial unity. (See “St. Cyprian on the Unity of the Catholic Church.”) And so does St. Optatus (see “St. Optatus on Schism and the Bishop of Rome.”) In fact we see this notion over and over in the Church Fathers, in their repeated reference to the role of the Chair of St. Peter. (See my post titled “The Chair of St. Peter.”) Here’s one example, from St. Jerome. He writes:

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 Jovinianus 1.26)

The notion in the Church Fathers that one of the Apostles was chosen by Christ to be head, so that there would be no occasion for schism intrinsic to the form of ecclesial government, is what we would expect if Plato and Aristotle and Boethius and St. Thomas were right about the nature of the best form of government as one that includes a unified head, and if Christ did not fail to provide His Church with the best form of government. By contrast, an ecclesiology in which each person has highest interpretive authority for himself, and is thus essentially his own pope, goes against what reason itself teaches us regarding what is required for the peace and unity of a society. It is the ecclesial equivalent of what Plato referred to as political anarchy. In this way, the arguments from philosophy concerning the best form of government helped make me more open to the hypothesis that the evidence for the papacy I saw in the Church Fathers was not a symptom of ecclesial deism, but was the development of something that Christ Himself had established in Matthew 16 when He changed Simon’s name to “Peter,” promised to build His Church on this Rock, and gave to him the keys of the Kingdom, which is the Church.

Christ Handing the Keys to St. Peter
Pietro Perugino (1481-82)

(This is an updated version of an essay I wrote in April of 2008.)

1. Note well that a ‘privation’ of good is not merely an absence of good, but an absence of a good where a good ought to be.
2. For additional explication of the relation between goodness, unity, and being, see also Book III of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, from page 89 to page 93.
3. Again, a ‘privation’ here is not merely an absence, but an absence of unity where unity ought to be, according to the teleology of a nature.
4. One need only think of the mythical Hydra. I am not denying the potential dangers of monarchy; I am only seeking here to show which form of government is most intrinsically united and therefore most capable of uniting and preserving the unity of the governed. The potential dangers of monarchy do not remove the need for a unified visible head of a visible society, in order to preserve the unity of that society. Even nature teaches that no society can function as a unity without a unified head. We can expect that if Christ established a visible Church, and if for the reasons explained in this post this Church needs a unified visible head, then Christ would establish some way of preserving that visible head such that this visible head preserves the faith entrusted to the Church by the Apostles.
5. See “Christ Founded a Visible Church.”
6. Ibid.

Recently I had the pleasure of coming across an article entitled “Christ’s Test of our Orthodoxy” on Ordained Servant, a Journal published by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I was a member of this denomination for six years, and the title immediately caught my attention. Pastor Jack W. Sawyer’s article can be read here.

So many times on Called to Communion we have rightly spoken to the areas in which we differ from our Reformed Brethren, from which we have in a sacramental sense have broken the ties which have bound us. The issues that divide us are important, that is true. But in so many ways, as former Reformed Christians who have become Catholics, we acknowledge the light and goodness, the beauty and truth, that is found within the Reformed Protestant circles from which we left. And so with the spirit of thankfulness for what we still hold in common with Reformed Believers, I want to focus on Pastor Sawyer’s article on Christ’s Test of our Orthodoxy.

He introduces his position on what Christ’s test for our Orthodoxy is by discussing what may be obvious tests of orthodoxy, but moves to the words of Our Lord Himself. In what is not too surprising for those who know the texts of the Gospels in our heads, he moves to a point which may be surprising to our experience in our own hearts. By discussing the words of Christ which speak of people knowing we are His disciples by our love for one another, he makes this comment:

Here Jesus declares that observable love between believers is to be the hallmark of the Christian community. It is to be considered the definitive mark of genuine Christianity, a certifying badge of discipleship. When outsiders observe a Christian community, according to Jesus, they are to see a beautiful, Christ-like love evidenced in the various relationships. Thus, as they observe the Christian community’s marriages, families, friendships, or gatherings, this signature mark is to stand out as the prominent atmosphere of all the relational exchanges.

After stating the hallmark of Christian life and community, Pastor Sawyer moves to his conclusion in the article with some words of practical advice. How do we reflect the heart of Christ in a world of fractured Christians? His suggestions are insightful, and in my estimation, reflect the heart of a God who holds Love to be preeminent, of a God who is Love Himself.

Similarly, I wonder what might become of a session’s ministry if it maintained a deliberate record of, at least, remaining sincerely concerned and cordial to the most challenging people that leave its church? What if these elders saw every such circumstance as a providential opportunity to demonstrate Christ-like, cross-like love toward such sheep? What if this session firmly held its doctrinal convictions—amid all such encounters—yet it also determined that agreeing to disagree, wisely and lovingly, was also just as central a matter of Christian orthodoxy?

When I read these words I could not help but think of my own life in leaving the OPC for the PCA, which was a story in itself, and the even more “dramatic” change of growing into full communion with the Catholic Church. There have been instances, as he points out, where those who have left the Presbyterian world of the OPC for other places, the Catholic Church not being the only destination. I do not want to rehash words that have been said to me and other former Calvinists, for they bring up painful moments. And truly, there have been and there will be cases of Catholics who have not continued to love those who have left the fold of the Catholic Church for Reformed Christianity and other places. There have been instances where calls for faithfulness verge on not following Our Lord’s words to forgive even seventy times seven in a day. And clearly relativism is not the solution. But the point is that Pastor Sawyer and others are making strong calls to keep loving one another after differences have been shared, to keep reaching out, even when roads diverge into different Christian communions. How can we learn from these mistakes of a lack of love for our former homes? How can we not cease to make a Call to Communion? He concludes with these words, which speak so well for themselves. As I read those words, I used them for my own spiritual reflection on my spiritual health. It reminded me of how much I am still thankful to God for my time as a Presbyterian, because the words that he wrote ring true in my ears, even to this very day.

In conclusion, all of us are remembered for something, and leaving spiritual legacy is something we do—whether good or bad, whether we like it or not. Is your orthodoxy of community as pure as your orthodoxy of doctrine? What are you currently well known for, and what do you want to be remembered for in the future? What is your church currently well known for, and what do you want it to be noted for in the future? Jesus’s will is crystal clear: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Amen, Pastor Sawyer. Amen.

While other early African bishops such as St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Cyprian of Carthage, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, and St. Augustine of Hippo are better known to Christians of our day, St. Optatus is another important African bishop and theologian in the early Church. He was influenced deeply by St. Cyprian, and in turn he influenced the thought of St. Augustine, who drew substantially from St. Optatus’s writings in his own efforts to reconcile the Donatists to the Catholic Church. St. Optatus remains theologically important in our day, by providing an early testimony to the nature of Catholic ecclesiology, especially regarding the unique ecclesial authority and role of the episcopal successor of St. Peter in Rome.

Milevus (El Milia, Algeria), where St. Optatus was Bishop

Outline
I. A Brief History of the Donatist Schism
II. How We Know Which Side Went Out from the Catholic Church
III. The Donatist Claim to be the Catholic Church
IV. The Catholic Rejoinder: The Successor of St. Peter holds the Keys
A. The Donatist Bishop in Rome does not hold the Keys
B. St. Peter and his Successors in Rome hold the Keys
V. Conclusion

I. A Brief History of the Donatist Schism

On May 24 we celebrated the feast day of St. Vincent of Lérins, who wrote his Commonitory in AD 434. St. Optatus wrote his work, Against the Donatists, approximately sixty years earlier. For this reason, Protestants willing to believe that St. Vincent and St. Augustine wrote before some ‘great apostasy’ have even more reason to accept the testimony of St. Optatus concerning the apostolic faith.

St. Optatus opens Against the Donatists by explaining that Christ gave one faith to His Church.¹ Moreover, before He ascended, writes St. Optatus, Christ gave His divine peace to His Apostles, willing it to be with His Church always. (John 14:27) This peace is a peace that the world does not have; it is to be exemplified in the Church Christ founded, for all the world to see. But, claims St. Optatus, the authors of the Donatist schism disturbed this peace.²

St. Optatus is writing in reply to a person name Parmenian. Parmenian was the third in the line of succession of the Donatist bishops of Carthage. The first Donatist bishop was Marjorinus, who was succeeded by Donatus, who was succeeded by Parmenian. Parmenian had just written a book against the Catholic Church; he wrote, according to St. Optatus, to “strike an undeserved blow at the Catholic Church.”³ This book prompted St. Optatus to write Against the Donatists in reply.

Before addressing the criticisms of Parmenian, St. Optatus first presents a brief history of the Donatist schism. The Donatist schism from the Catholic Church began in the year 311. In that year, Caecilian the deacon was chosen by the people of Carthage to take the chair of the previous bishop (Mensurius), and was ordained by Felix, bishop of Aptonga. Secundus, a bishop of a nearby city, subsequently came with other bishops, and declared the ordination of Caecilian to be invalid because, according to Secundus and company, Felix was a traditor.⁴ According to St. Optatus, however, the bishops accompanying Secundus had themselves “impiously betrayed the records of the law of God.” Among these were Donatus of Macula, Victor of Rusicca, Merinus of Tibilis, Donatus of Calama, Pupurius of Limata, and Menalius.⁵ St. Optatus describes the way by which these bishops started the Donatist schism, writing:

It was not long after this, that these very persons whom I have mentioned, … proceeded to Carthage, and there, although Caecilian was already the Bishop, made the Schism by consecrating Majorinus on whose Chair, Parmenian, you sit.⁶

Secundus and the bishops with him ordained a new bishop of Carthage, a man named Majorinus, who had been a lector under Caecelian’s deaconry. At that point there were (seemingly) simultaneously two [canonical] bishops of Carthage: Caecelian, and Majorinus. As the bishops associated with Majorinus continued to ordain other bishops not in communion with Caecelian, the Donatist schism spread. The matter was then brought before nineteen bishops at a council at Rome, headed by Pope Miltiades (pope from 311-314). St. Optatus describes the events of this council as follows:

Donatus brought forth his witnesses; they admitted that they had nothing of which they could accuse Caecilian. Caecilian was pronounced innocent by the sentence of all the above named Bishops; also by the sentence of Miltiades, by which the matter was closed, and judgement pronounced in these words:

Since it is certain that those who came with Donatus have failed to accuse Caecilian in accordance with their undertaking, and since it is also certain that Donatus has not proved him guilty on any count, I judge that, according to his deserts, he be maintained in the communion of the Church, continuing to hold his position unimpaired.

It is, therefore, sufficient, that Donatus was condemned by the verdict of so many Bishops, and that Caecilian was cleared by the judgement of so great an authority [i.e. the Pope].⁷

It is not insignificant that the dispute between Caecilian and the Donatists was brought to a council of bishops assembled at Rome, and that the verdict was pronounced by Pope Miltiades. This was the authoritative decision of the Catholic Church concerning the Donatist schism. But, as St. Optatus explains, a short time later Donatus returned to Carthage and in disobedience to the decision of the Holy See, refused to relinquish his claim to the episcopal Chair at Carthage.

St. Optatus recounts the history of the Donatist schism to show that the Catholic Church did not go out from the Donatists, but rather, that the Donatists went out from the Catholic Church. He writes:

The question is about a Division. Now in Africa, as in other parts of the world, the Church was One, before it was divided by those who consecrated Majorinus whose Chair you have inherited, and now occupy. We shall have to see who has remained in the root, with the whole world; who went forth; who sits on a second chair, which had no existence before the Schism; who has raised altar against altar; who has consecrated a Bishop when another was in undisturbed possession; who it is that lies under the judgement of John, the Apostle, when he declared that many Anti-Christs should go forth without, because they were not of us, for if they had been of us they would have remained with us. Therefore, he who was unwilling to remain with his brethren in unity has followed the heretics, and gone forth without, as an Anti-Christ.⁸

St. Optatus explains that prior to the Donatist schism, the Church was visibly one. So he proposes to determine which side came to be in schism from the Church by setting up a second episcopal chair (i.e. cathedra) where there was none before, by setting up a second altar [for the Eucharistic sacrifice] where there was none before, and by consecrating a Bishop when another Bishop was already in undisturbed possession of the episcopal office in that See. In this investigation St. Optatus seeks to show likewise which side has “remained in the root, with the whole [Christian] world.”⁹ According to St. Optatus, the party in schism from the Church lies under the judgment of the Apostle John, who wrote, “They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us.” (1 John 2:19) St. Optatus explains that according to the Apostle John, to separate from the Church through schism is to act as an Anti-Christ. St. Optatus knows that Parmenian cannot deny that schism is the supreme evil. St. Optatus writes:

Even you will not be by any means be able to deny that schism is the supreme evil [scisma summum malum esse].¹⁰

St. Optatus is not speaking of the sort of schism in which two Christian parties break fellowship with each other, but each party remains in communion with the rest of the Catholic Church. That sort of schism can only be short-lived, for reasons explained below. He is speaking about schism from the Church, the sort the Apostle John is referring to when he writes of persons that “went out from us.” (1 John 2:19) Concerning that sort of schism, St. Optatus writes:

But schism, after the bond of peace has been broken, is brought into existence through passion, is nourished by hatred, is strengthened by envy and dissensions, so that the Catholic Mother is abandoned, whilst her unfilial children go forth outside and separate themselves (as you have done) from the root of Mother Church — cut off by the shears of their hatred — and wickedly depart in rebellion.¹¹

In this sort of schism, the schismatic party does not remain in the Catholic Church, but abandons its Catholic Mother, separating itself from “the root of Mother Church.” Thus, this kind of schism is necessarily a form of “rebellion,” because it separates from that magisterial authority by which it was established and to which it therefore owes obedience and fealty.

II. How We Know Which Side Went Out from the Catholic Church

St. Optatus’s Against the Donatists is composed of seven books (see the table of contents). After laying out the history of the schism in Book One, he turns in Book Two to the question: “Which is the One True Catholic Church and Where is it to be Found?” In what may be the most important and revealing statement in the whole of his work, he writes:

For it was not Caecilian who went forth from Majorinus, your father’s father,¹² 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 — but Majorinus, on whose Chair you sit — a Chair which had no existence before Majorinus himself.¹³

How does St. Optatus show that the Catholic Church did not go out from the Donatists, but that the Donatists went out from the Catholic Church? He does so by way of the Chair of St. Peter. The bishop that remains in communion with the Chair of St. Peter in Rome is the bishop who has remained with the Catholic Church. In this particular case, the bishop of Carthage who had remained in communion with the bishop of Rome, was Caecilian and his episcopal successors in Carthage. The bishop who has broken communion with the Chair of St. Peter is the bishop who is in schism from the Catholic Church. Therefore the bishop in Carthage who had broken fellowship with the Chair of St. Peter in Rome, was the bishop in schism from the Catholic Church. In this way St. Optatus shows that because Majorinus and his episcopal successors (and all the laypeople who followed them) had broken fellowship with the Chair of St. Peter, therefore they were the ones who had gone out from the Catholic Church, and were presently in schism from the Church.

Concerning this passage, the translator, Fr. Vassall-Phillips, writes:

The manner in which St. Optatus goes first to the See of Peter and only in the second place to the local See of Carthage in order to prove that the Donatists were in schism, is a fact of the greatest significance. It is quite clear that, in the eyes of Optatus, any bishop out of communion with the See of Rome was ipso facto schismatic. Otherwise, the reference to the Chair of Peter in this connection is utterly meaningless and unintelligble.”¹⁴

Of course, in the invisible church ecclesiology of contemporary Protestantism (where no Protestant denomination claims to be the Church Christ founded), there can be no such thing as schism from the Church, because every splitting of Christian communions is a mere ‘branching’ in which each party remains within “the small-c catholic Church.” (See “Branches or Schisms?“.) Thus from within the perspective of the invisible-church paradigm, every splitting of Christian communions, though perhaps temporarily lamentable, shortly becomes a cause of celebration, as God providentially transforms it into an increase in diversity in “the catholic Church.” In this invisible church ecclesiology of contemporary Protestantism, there is not even any conceptual space for the notion of schism from the Church Christ founded. St. Optatus’ speaking of schism from the universal Church, as an action distinct from apostasy from the Christian faith, does not even fit into the Protestant ecclesial paradigm.¹⁵

The translator notes that the Protestant ecclesiology according to which there is one [small-c] catholic Church in which many different religious bodies each holding a different set of doctrinal beliefs and not visibly unified are nevertheless assumed to be invisibly united, is an ecclesial ‘option’ of which St. Optatus is entirely unaware. The translator writes:

Evidently the idea of Comprehensiveness — that the One Church could be Catholic (Universal) in the sense of comprehending various kinds of religious bodies, varying in belief and without any external bond of union (cf . ii, 3) — never occurred to St. Optatus even as a possibility. Any branch theory in which the branches were separated from the trunk or from one another (cf. ii, 9 etc.) would have seemed to him unthinkable. He agrees with Parmenian in ruling it out ab initio.¹⁶

Both the Donatists and the Catholics would have entirely rejected an invisible-church ecclesiology. But their silence concerning that sort of ecclesiology shows that it was not even on their conceptual horizon. If “visible Catholic Church” ecclesiology had been a human innovation, as a result of ecclesial deism, it had so wiped out the ‘original’ apostolic “invisible Church” ecclesiology that by the fourth century, neither the Donatists nor the Catholics even conceived of it.¹⁷ To posit such a phenomenon by bumping up the alleged ‘great apostasy’ from the fifth century to the second century, is to take on all the implications described in “Ecclesial Deism.” And of course if “invisible Church” ecclesiology had been even a remote memory or a conceptual possibility, the Donatists would have seized on it, because in this way they could have avoided the charge of schism from the Church, by claiming to be a branch within the larger ‘small-c’ invisible catholic Church. And Sts. Optatus and Augustine would not have needed to concern themselves with the Donatist schism, laboring to bring them back into the Church, because they could have simply treated Donatism as a “branch within” the invisible, small-c catholic Church. But, invisible, “small-c catholic” ecclesiology would not be conceived for another twelve centuries, not entering the discussion until the sixteenth century.

III. The Donatist Claim to be the Catholic Church

We learn from St. Optatus that the Donatists claimed to have the keys of Peter, to be the one Church of Christ, and thus to deny that those outside of themselves could baptize or celebrate the Eucharist. Parmenian recognized that the one Church of Christ cannot be among all the heretics and schismatics, so he claimed that the Church of Christ was made up of the Donatists alone.¹⁸ St. Optatus writes to Parmenian:

Rightly hast thou closed the Garden to heretics; rightly hast thou claimed the Keys for Peter; rightly hast thou denied the right of cultivating the young trees to those who are certainly shut out from the garden and paradise of God; rightly hast thou withdrawn the Ring from those to whom it is not allowed to open the Fountain. But to you schismatics, although you are not in the Catholic Church, these things cannot be denied, since you have shared true Sacraments with us.¹⁹

Parmenian had claimed that the Keys of Peter belonged to the Donatists, and that they (i.e. the Donatists) were the Garden outside of which there were no sacraments and no means of eternal life. In order to claim that the Donatists were the Church, Parmenian had to claim that the Keys of St. Peter belonged to them. St. Optatus agrees with Parmenian that having the Keys of St. Peter is necessary in order to be the Church, but St. Optatus proceeds below to show that the Donatists do not have the Keys of St. Peter, and therefore are not the Church in which are found the sacraments of eternal life.

In order to prop up their claim to be the Catholic Church, the Donatists had an anti-pope, as it were, in the City of Rome, as a way of justifying their claim to possess the keys of St. Peter. At the time Parmenian wrote, the Catholic bishop in Rome was Pope St. Damasus (366-383), and the Donatist bishop in Rome was a man named Macrobius. St. Optatus writes, “But you allege that you too have some sort of a party in the City of Rome.”²⁰ So the task St. Optatus takes up in Book Two of Against the Donatists is showing that the Donatists are not the Catholic Church, but are in fact a schism from the Catholic Church, and that their anti-pope in Rome is in fact not the bearer of the Keys of St. Peter, but a kind of anti-pope.

IV. The Catholic Rejoinder: The Successor of St. Peter holds the Keys
A. The Donatist Bishop in Rome does not hold the Keys

St. Optatus writes to Parmenian:

But you allege that you too have some sort of a party in the City of Rome. It is a branch of your error growing out of a lie, not from the root of truth. In a word, were Macrobius to be asked where he sits in the City, will he be able to say on Peter’s Cathedra? I doubt whether he has even set eyes upon it, and schismatic that he is, he has not drawn nigh to Peter’s Shrine…. Behold, in Rome are the Shrines of the two Apostles [i.e. Sts. Peter and Paul]. Will you tell me whether he [i.e. Macrobius] has been able to approach them, or has offered Sacrifice in those places, where as is certain are these Shrines of the Saints.²¹

Though Macrobius is in Rome, he does not sit on St. Peter’s Chair, held by Pope St. Damasus. Nor, claims St. Optatus, has Macrobius ever offered the Sacrifice of the mass at the altars of the shrines of the Apostles Peter and Paul. The tombs of Sts. Peter and Paul had been Christian shrines since the first century, but Constantine had built structures over them in the early fourth century, and the Catholics of Rome celebrated mass at the altars over these tombs. St. Optatus supposes justifiably that Macrobius has never offered mass at these shrines, because they belong to the Catholics, with whom Macrobius has not been in communion. This subverts the Donatist claim to possess the Keys of Peter, since they do not even have possession or ritual access to the shrines of Sts. Peter and Paul. They cannot have the Keys of St. Peter if they are not even in communion with those who have succeeded from St. Peter in unbroken continuity.

Then St. Optatus shows that the line of Donatist bishops in Rome does not extend back to St. Peter, but began with Victor of Garba:

So it follows that your colleague Macrobius must confess that he sits where once sat Encolpius; and if Encolpius himself could be questioned, he would say that he sat where before him sat Bonifacius of Balla; and if Bonifacius could be asked, he would in his turn reply that he sat where Victor of Garba sat, whom some time ago your people sent from Africa to a few wanderers. How do you explain that your party has not been able to possess a Roman citizen as Bishop in Rome? How is it that in that City they were all Africans and strangers who are known to have succeeded one another? Is not craft here manifest? Is this not the spirit of faction the mother of schism?²²

St. Optatus explains that Victor of Garba, from whom Macrobius’ episcopal line takes its origin, was not a successor of St. Peter in Rome, but came to Rome in the fourth century, at the request of some African Christians living in Rome. Further evidence for this is found in the fact that no Roman citizens had occupied this Donatist line in Rome, but only Africans. St. Optatus then continues his explanation of the history of the Donatist party at Rome:

This Victor of Garba was sent first, I will not say as a stone into a fountain (for he could not ruffle the pure waters of the Catholic people), but because some Africans who belonged to your party, having gone to Rome, and wishing to live there, begged that someone should be sent from Africa to preside over their public worship. So Victor was sent to them. He was there as a son without a father, as a beginner without a master, as a disciple without a teacher, as a follower without a predecessor, as a lodger without a home, as a guest without a guest-house, as a shepherd without a flock, as a Bishop without a people. For neither flock nor people can that handful be termed, who amongst the forty and more Basilicas in Rome, had not one place in which to assemble.

Accordingly they closed up a cave outside the City with trellis-work, where they might have a meeting-house at once, and on account of this were called Mountaineers.

Since then, Claudian has succeeded to Lucian, Lucian to Macrobius, Macrobius to Encolpius, Encolpius to Boniface, Boniface to Victor. 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 [Ps. 1:1]; 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? ²³

As evidence that Victor of Garba was not the bishop of Rome, St. Optatus explains that in Rome, Victor had no place to worship. Of the forty or so Basilicas available in Rome in which to offer the Eucharistic sacrifice, none of them was available to Victor of Garba, because he was not in communion with the Apostolic See. Hence he made use of a cave outside Rome.

In addition, Victor could not have shown that he had an episcopal predecessor at Rome, or that he had any genuine Cathedra. Hence, claims St. Optatus, Victor had only the Cathedra of pestilence [Ps. 1:1], which leads to hell (Ps. 1:6). But for St. Optatus, St. Peter is the “first of our line,” i.e. the first in the line of Catholic bishops. And Christ promised to St. Peter that the gates of hell would not prevail over the Keys He gave to him, and hence over the one holding the keys. So St. Optatus makes an argument here to the effect that hell would never prevail over the authentic line from St. Peter, and that by setting up a second Chair in opposition to the Chair established by Christ through St. Peter, the Donatist not only “war against the Chair of Peter,” but set themselves on the very path to hell, dooming themselves to destruction by the indefectibility of the Keys held by St. Peter in the Catholic Church. To set up a second Chair in opposition to the Chair of St. Peter is to attempt to “usurp” an authority they do not have. Just as Satan arrogated to himself an authority he did not have, and so chose for himself the way to hell, so by arrogating to themselves the authority of the Keys Christ gave to St. Peter, the Donatists align themselves with the forces of hell and the end assigned to those forces. The conflict between Christ and Satan is expressed visibly in this age in the conflict between the one to whom Christ entrusted the Keys of the Kingdom, and the forces of hell that shall not prevail against the one bearing those Keys. By setting themselves up against the true holder of the Keys, and warring against the Chair of St. Peter, the Donatists thereby align themselves with the forces of hell, which Christ has assured us can never prevail over the Church, and are thus doomed to defeat and destruction.

B. St. Peter and his Successors in Rome hold the Keys

Who then, in St. Optatus’ time, holds the Keys of the Kingdom? Repeatedly St. Optatus declares that the one holding the Keys must receive them from St. Peter. First, he points out that among all the Apostles, only St. Peter received the Keys. He writes:

When He [i.e. Christ] praises One, He condemns the others because, besides the one which is the true Catholc Church, the others amongst the heretics are thought to be churches, but are not such. Thus He declares in the Canticle of Canticles (as we have already pointed out) that His Dove is One, and that she is also the chosen Spouse, and again a garden enclosed, and a fountain sealed up. Therefore none of the heretics possess either the Keys, which Peter alone received, or the Ring, with which we read that the Fountain has been sealed.²⁴

Later in the work he shows that St. Peter, the Head of the Apostles, was the first to occupy the Episcopal Cathedra in Rome, and that the purpose of this Cathedra was to preserve unity among all Christians, including even the other Apostles. He writes:

You cannot then deny that you do know that upon Peter first in the City of Rome was bestowed the Episcopal Cathedra, on which sat Peter, the Head of all the Apostles … that, in this one Cathedra, unity should be preserved by all [in qua unica Cathedra unitas ab omnibus servaretur], lest the other Apostles might claim each for himself separate Cathedras, so that he who should set up a second Cathedra against the unique Cathedra would already be a schismatic and a sinner. Well then, on the one Cathedra, which is the first of the Endowments, Peter was the first to sit.²⁵

According to St. Optatus, anyone who sets up a second Cathedra against the unique Cathedra of St. Peter in Rome, is by that very fact “a schismatic and a sinner.” Of course in addition to the bishops ordained by the other Apostles, there were many lines of bishops extending down from St. Peter. And though all bishops receive equally the sacramental office of bishop, only one line of bishops succeeding from St. Peter receives, in addition, the charism Christ bestowed uniquely on St. Peter, namely, stewardship of the Keys of the Kingdom. Only that line of bishops occupying the unique Cathedra established in Rome by St. Peter possesses this charism. And hence to set up another Cathedra in opposition to this unique Cathedra, is ipso facto to become a schismatic, because such an act takes to oneself an authority that none except the rightful occupant of that unique Cathedra possesses.

Having established the unique authority of the Chair of St. Peter in Rome, and its divinely established role as the visible principle of unity of the Catholic Church, St. Optatus then lays out the succession from St. Peter to the present pope in Rome (Pope St. Damasus [366-383] in the first edition, but Pope St. Siricius [384-399] in the second edition). He writes:

To Peter succeeded Linus, to Linus succeeded Clement, to Clement Anacletus, to Anacletus Evaristus, to Evaristus Sixtus, to Sixtus Telesphorus, to Telesphorus Hyginus, to Hyginus Anacetus, to Anacetus Pius, to Pius Soter, to Soter Alexander, to Alexander Victor, to Victor Zephyrinus, to Zephyrinus Calixtus, to Calixtus Urban, to Urban Pontianus, to Pontianus Anterus, to Anterus Fabian, to Fabian Cornelius, to Cornelius Lucius, to Lucius Stephen, to Stephen Sixtus; to Sixtus Dionysius, to Dionysius Felix, to Felix Marcellinus, to Marcellinus Eusebius, to Eusebius Miltiades, to Miltiades Silvester, to Silvester Marcus, to Marcus Julius, to Julius Liberius, to Liberius Damasus, to Damasus Siricius, who today is our colleague, with whom the whole world, through the intercourse of letters of peace, agrees with us in one bond of communion.

Now do you show the origins of your Cathedra, you who wish to claim the Holy Church for yourselves.²⁶

What is the significance of tracing the line of bishops in Rome from the Apostle Peter to the present pope? This tracing would have no purpose or significance if all bishops held equal stewardship of the Keys, or if St. Optatus believed that stewardship of the Keys ended with the death of St. Peter. Tracing the line of bishops in Rome from the time of St. Peter to St. Optatus’ own day has significance for his argument against the Donatists only if stewardship of the Keys belongs in a unique way to that line of bishops.²⁷ St. Optatus traces the line of bishops occupying the Cathedra in Rome from St. Peter down to his own time to explain why Pope St. Damasus is the present steward of those Keys, and that by setting up a Chair in opposition to Pope St. Damasus, the Donatists had put themselves in schism from the Church Christ founded, that is, from the Catholic Church.²⁸

What St. Optatus writes concerning the role of the successors of St. Peter with regard to the Keys of the Kingdom and the nature of schism from the Church, is re-affirmed by St. Augustine about twenty-seven years later, when he writes:

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.”²⁹

Later in Against the Donatists St. Optatus continues to make theologically significant references to St. Peter. He refers again to having shown that the Catholics possess the first Endowment of the Church, namely, the unique and authoritative Cathedra upon which St. Peter first sat, and which continues in the succession of bishops in Rome. He writes:

So, of the above-mentioned Endowments, the Cathedra is, as we have said, the first, which we have proved to be ours, through Peter, and which draws to itself the ANGEL — unless, perchance, you claim him for yourselves, and have him shut up somewhere or other.³⁰

A few pages later he states this again:

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.³¹

To be in communion with the bishop occupying the Chair of St. Peter is to be in the Catholic Church, and thus to possess in some sense all the gifts Christ bestowed on His Church. In both quotations he shows that the answer to the question “Where is the Holy Catholic Church?” is this: All those in communion with the Chair of St. Peter constitute the Holy Catholic Church. In this way St. Optatus provides the divinely established means by which to determine where is the Church, who is in schism from the Church, and what the Church does and does not teach.

On that same page he writes:

So — to answer you — we have shown what is heresy, and what is schism, and which is the Holy Church, and that of this Holy Church there has been constituted a Representative, and that the Catholic Church is the Church which is scattered over the whole world (of which we amongst others are members) and that her Endowments are with her everywhere.³²

According to St. Optatus, God has established a Representative of His Holy Church. What St. Optatus means by this is clear from everything that he has said up to this point. Because the Pope functions as the principle of unity by which we can know where is the Church, and which groups are in schism from the Church, he likewise functions as the Representative of the Church.³³

Toward the end of Against the Donatists, St. Optatus mentions the role of St. Peter three more times. He writes:

[F]or the sake of unity, blessed Peter (for whom it would have been enough if after his denial he had obtained pardon only) both deserved to be placed over all the Apostles, and alone received the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, which he was to communicate to the rest.³⁴

Here St. Optatus first teaches that St. Peter was given the Keys of the Kingdom for the sake of preserving unity in the Church. In giving St. Peter the Keys, he was in that respect placed “over all the Apostles,” for he “alone received the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.” But the other Apostles (and all other bishops) exercise the authority of the Keys through their communion with St. Peter and his successors. If they break communion with St. Peter and his successors, they forfeit their use of the authority of the Keys. This is why, according to St. Optatus, the Donatists do not have the keys of the Kingdom, because they have broken fellowship with the Catholic bishops, as shown by the fact that they have broken fellowship with the episcopal successor of St. Peter in Rome.

Next, St. Optatus writes:

Behold (as we have said above), when the others [i.e. the other Apostles] did not recognise he [i.e. St. Peter] alone recognised, when the others made no promises he alone promised, when the others did not deny once he alone denied and that three times, but yet, for the sake of unity, he was not to be separated from the number of the Apostles. From which we understand that all things were ordered by the Providence of the Saviour, that Peter should receive the Keys. The way of malice was stopped up, that the Apostles might not conceive in their minds that they were free to judge, and condemn with severity, him who had denied Christ. So many guiltless ones are standing upright, and the sinner receives the Keys, that the work of unity might receive its pattern. It was provided that the sinner should open for the guiltless, lest the guiltless might close [the gates] against sinners, and thus the unity which is necessary could not be.³⁵

St. Peter was uniquely chosen by God to recognize Christ as the divine Son. But St. Peter was also unique in that he denied Christ three times. Yet, for St. Optatus, this was according to God’s providence. By giving the Keys of the Kingdom to one who had denied Him three times, Christ “stopped up” the way of malice, by making it impossible for the Apostles to condemn severely a person who had denied Christ, since by divine institution they themselves were made subject to one who had denied Christ. In God’s providence, the sinner (i.e. St. Peter) “opens for the guiltless,” i.e. extends to the other Apostles who did not deny Christ the use of the Keys of the Kingdom, so that the guiltless (i.e. the Apostles who did not deny Christ) might not close the way of salvation against sinners, and thereby divide the unity of the Church.

In his final mention of St. Peter’s role, St. Optatus writes:

Now, to turn to the fact that you have thought fit to take upon yourself the character of Moses, who, as the Apostle Paul tells us, was opposed by Jamnes and
Mambres — if this be so, what is the truth, that may be found with you, which the Catholic Church opposes?

Or, what is there with us which you can prove to be a lie ? Is it that we are in one communion with the whole world ? Will you be able to prove that this is a lie? Is it that we keep and defend the true and one Creed ? Will you be able to prove that this is a lie? 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 ?³⁶

In his argument against the Donatists, St. Optatus here responds to Parmenian’s claim that to him [i.e. Parmenian] belongs the role of Moses, contending against Jamnes and Mambres [or Jambres], whom Parmenian thinks apparently represent Catholics contending against him. St. Optatus, for the sake of argument, accepts the analogy, and turns the argument back on Parmenian. His argument here to Parmenian is of the following sort:

If you really are in the character of Moses, and I am in the character of Jamnes and Mambres, then let’s see you win the contention between us. Let’s see you falsify a single Catholic doctrine, or prove that we (Catholics) are not in communion with the whole world, such that the term ‘Catholic’ does not rightly belong to us, but belongs more appropriately to you Donatists. Let’s see you convict us of not keeping and defending the one true Creed. Let’s see you prove that the Chair of St. Peter is a lie, and that the Keys of the Kingdom of heaven, with which we Catholics (but not you Donatists) are in communion, are a lie. You may claim to be in the character of Moses, but you cannot refute the Catholic Church or defend your position against the evidence I have raised against you. Since you cannot concede that Jamnes and Mambres got the best of Moses in debate, therefore, your claim to possess his role is an empty one that must be retracted, lest Moses be shamed or maligned.

V. Conclusion

In the face of such evidence, the only recourse for the Protestant who wishes to remain Protestant is to propose that on account of ecclesial deism, at some point prior to the time of St. Optatus, men had wrongfully and universally imposed a visible hierarchy on the Church, treating what Christ had established to be something invisible, as though it were something visible and essentially unified in a visible hierarchical structure. The Protestant who seeks to remain Protestant must propose that the essential unity of the hierarchy of the Church and the role of the Chair of St. Peter in that hierarchical unity, to which St. Optatus refers in his writings against the Donatists, are man-made constructs that were universally imposed on the Church at some point after the death of the Apostles and prior to the time of St. Optatus.

But as explained in the ecclesial deism article, proposing that there were universal corruptions and accretions in the early Church undermines the Protestant’s ability to appeal to the Church Fathers or to the Councils as having any authority whatsoever. And the necessary implication of that effect is solo scriptura.

That St. Optatus was a Catholic is shown not only in his understanding of the unique role of St. Peter and his episcopal successors as stewards of the Keys of the Kingdom, but in many other ways as well. The translator, Fr. Vassall-Phillips, writes:

St. Optatus affirms explicitly the truth of Baptismal Regeneration; again and again makes reference to the Sacrifice of the Altar; states the doctrine of the Real Presence in words that are incapable of any misunderstanding; insists on the sacredness of Holy Chrism; writes of the adornment of altars for the offering of the Sacrifice; refers to the ceremony of Exorcism before Baptism; appeals to deutero-canonical Books as to authentic Scripture; takes the continuance of Miracles in the Church for granted; and is quite express in his references to cloistered Virginity and the difference between the Commandments of God and Counsels of Perfection.”³⁷

The Protestant who wishes to remain Protestant, can accommodate such evidence only by resorting to ecclesial deism and advancing the date of the [posited] ‘great apostasy’ to some time before St. Optatus. But if St. Optatus is right that the successors of St. Peter in Rome hold the Keys of the Kingdom, then by Christ’s infallible promise the gates of hell shall never prevail over that line of succession. In that case, there could not be, and has never been, an apostasy in that line. And all who cleave to that line in full communion, participate in that divine promise, for there is the Holy Catholic Church Christ founded. That is the alternative paradigm to ecclesial deism.

St. Optatus, please pray for all those Christians in schism from Christ’s Church, that they may be happily restored to full visible communion. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen..

1. All pagination is from the translation by the Rev. O.R. Vassall-Phillips, (Longmans, Green, and Co.: London, 1917). That translation can be found in its entirety here.
2. Against the Donatists, p. 4.
3. Ibid. p. 9.
4. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Donatists explains the meaning of this term: “This word traditor became a technical expression to designate those who had given up the Sacred Books, and also those who had committed the worse crimes of delivering up the sacred vessels and even their own brethren.” St. Optatus shows later in his work that there was never any evidence that Felix was a traditor.
5. Ibid. p. 27.
6. Ibid. p. 29.
7. Ibid. pp. 47-49.
8. Ibid. pp. 30-31.
9. Ibid. p. 30.
10. Ibid. p. 39.
11. Ibid. p. 23.
12. By the phrase “your father’s father,” St. Optatus means the bishop who ordained the bishop who ordained you.
13. Ibid. pp. 20-21.
14. Ibid. p. 20.
15. That the Donatists had not committed apostasy is shown by the fact that the Catholics, including St. Optatus, continued to call them “brothers,” even though the Donatists refused to refer to the Catholics as brothers. (cf. Ibid. pp. 5-6.)
16. Ibid. p. 58.
17. And likewise, in the third century, neither the Novatians nor the Catholics thought of it during the Novatian schism.
18. cf. Ibid. p. 58.
19. Ibid. pp. 24-25.
20. Ibid. p. 70.
21. Ibid. pp. 70-71.
22. Ibid. p. 71.
23. Ibid. pp. 71-73.
24. Ibid. pp. 18-19.
25. Ibid. pp. 66-68.
26. Ibid. pp. 68-69.
27. St. Augustine likewise, in the year AD 400, traces only the bishops of Rome from St. Peter down to St. Anastasius (399-401) when he writes:

    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! Matthew 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. (Letter 53, chapter 1)

    St. Irenaeus had done the same in the latter part of the second century, in his Against Heresies III.3.3.

28. In the last sentence of the quotation, he challenges the Donatists to show the origins of their Cathedra, if they wish to claim be the Holy Church. This is very like what St. Irenaeus says:

    But [it is also necessary] to hold in suspicion others who depart from the primitive succession, and assemble themselves together in any place whatsoever . . . . But those who cleave asunder, and separate the unity of the Church, [shall] receive from God the same punishment as Jeroboam did. (Against Heresies IV.26.2)

    It also corresponds to the same test of apostolic succession Tertullian provides:

    But if there be any (heresies) which are bold enough to plant themselves in the midst of the apostolic age, that they may thereby seem to have been handed down by the apostles, because they existed in the time of the apostles, we can say: Let them produce the original records of their churches; let them unfold the roll of their bishops, running down in due succession from the beginning in such a manner that [that first bishop of theirs] bishop shall be able to show for his ordainer and predecessor some one of the apostles or of apostolic men,– a man, moreover, who continued steadfast with the apostles. For this is the manner in which the apostolic churches transmit their registers: as the church of Smyrna, which records that Polycarp was placed therein by John; as also the church of Rome, which makes Clement to have been ordained in like manner by Peter. In exactly the same way the other churches likewise exhibit (their several worthies), whom, as having been appointed to their episcopal places by apostles, they regard as transmitters of the apostolic seed. Let the heretics contrive something of the same kind. (Prescription Against Heretics, 32)

29. St. Augustine to the schismatic Donatists, A.D. 393, Patrologia Latina 43.30.
30. Against the Donatists p. 78.
31. Ibid. p. 86.
32. Ibid. p. 86.
33. Concerning this line, the translator writes,

    There can be no doubt that St. Optatus is here referring to St. Peter, or his successors in the See of Rome, as the Representative of the Church. This is made clear by the fact that he is giving a summary of the arguments which he has already brought forward in his book. Now amongst these arguments the representative character of St. Peter and of his Cathedra has, as we have just seen, taken a leading place. Again, no alternative explanation of Persona in this passage has ever been suggested. Further, it is well known that St. Augustine adopted this traditional view, and in several passages has written of St. Peter as representing the whole Catholic Church in his own person. ( Ibid. pp. 86-87.)

34. Ibid. p. 284.
35. Ibid. pp. 288-289.
36. Ibid. p. 294.
37. Ibid. pp. xi-xii.

Unity is not optional for the Body of Christ anymore than it is optional of our physical bodies. Those members which would take part in my life must partake of my bodily unity for if not found there, it shall not be found elsewhere. Those who would take part in the life of Christ must likewise join to that in which His life already exists in Bodily unity.

To have enough faith in Christ to follow the unity imperative is one thing; it is another altogether to maintain the hope that it shall indeed be realized. No doubt, this hope seems unreasonable; but as one famous journalist who achieved this very hope for himself said, hope is only useful when it is unreasonable.

Moreover, Aquinas follows Boethius in arguing that “unity belongs to the idea of goodness” because “a thing exists so far as it is one” and as St. Thomas explains, both goodness and unity are convertible with being. ² Thus, along with goodness and truth, unity is one of the ‘transcendentals’ because it is convertible with being. These transcendentals are simply being apprehended under different modes. This complements St. Augustine’s teaching that evil is not its own being but the corruption of being. All things, in so far as they exist, that is, in so far as they have being, are good and they exist in truth and unity.

Harmony or proportion is also closely related to unity. For harmony is a bringing together of two or more things into a unity while maintaining some aspect of their distinctive identity. Proportion is the perfect representation of another thing or conformity to some good. St. Thomas gives the example of the Son as the perfect image of the Father and thus said to be in perfect proportion. ³ Elsewhere he states that God is beautiful as being “the cause of the harmony and clarity of the universe.” ⁴ He also states that love, which is the most beautiful virtue, is “a certain harmony of the appetite with that which is apprehended as suitable.” ⁵

Unity and harmony, as qualities of beauty, can be understood when we consider the attractiveness of a complex piece of music (or any artwork) over something simple. All other things equal, the complexity makes the piece more beautiful. This is because the act of harmoniously incorporating additional forms and components into a greater unity approximates truth, beauty, and goodness. The unity of the Trinity is the perfect archetype of harmony and pure oneness (out of something like a plurality). A family is beautiful because of its unity; and a well ordered society is for the same reason. That is all to say that unity and harmony point to not just any truth, but to truth itself, God, as do all things beautiful.

The dissolution of a thing arises from a defect therein. Disunity is an evil because its end is the dissolution of a being in the same way that the end of sin is the dissolution of some good. The ugliness of disunity is evidenced by the pain that accompanies it. St. Thomas quotes St. Augustine saying, “what else is pain but a feeling of impatience of division or corruption?” ⁶ and goes on to say, “the good of each thing consists in a certain unity” in defense of his proposition that the desire for unity is a cause of sorrow.⁷

With all of these ideas considered, we followers of Christ ought to sorrow at the disunity of Christians and earnestly pray for the re-unification, the integration, of all Christians into one body: the Church. Unity is beautiful because it is good and Christ intended unity for His Church⁸ because it is His own body. Our theological differences notwithstanding, I hope that Christians of all backgrounds will join together during this week of prayer for Christian unity to petition the Holy Spirit to move on the hearts of men that we may be unified not only in spirit, but in body, that is, in Church.

1. Summa Theologica, 1.39.8
2. Ibid., 1.6.4; 2.36.3
3. Ibid., 1.39.8
4. Ibid., 2b.145.2. Aquinas is quoting Pseudo-Dionysius
5. Ibid., 2.29.1
6. De Lib. Arb. iii, 23
7. Summa Theologica 2.36.3
8. cf. John 17

“It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” (Isaiah 2:2-4)

The mountain of the house of the Lord is the Church, which God sets up supernaturally in the time of the fourth man-made kingdom, according to Daniel’s dream.¹ According to Isaiah this Kingdom of the Messiah is catholic (i.e. universal) in the sense that all the nations shall stream to it. Moreover, this Kingdom is visible, not only because people can go to it, but because it has a teaching authority that can issue the law, and the word of the Lord for the peoples of all the nations. In addition, not only does the Kingdom have the authority to judge disputes between individuals (cf. Matt 18:17, 1 Cor 6:1-6) it has the authority to judge between nations, such that they do not need to war against each other. Even the nations are each to be subject to the higher visible authority of Christ’s Church.

Regarding this, there are two possible opposing errors. One is the notion that man can bring about peace among the nations on his own, without Christ and without the Church. This is the error of the Antichrist.² The second error is the notion that Christ did not establish a visible Kingdom, or will do so only after He comes again. This is the Protestant error which denies that Christ founded a visible Church, and instead adopts an ecclesial docetism according to which in the present era Christ has founded only an invisible Church.³

Outside of the United Nations building in New York, is a sculpture titled “Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares” by Evgeniy Vuchetich. It was a gift from the USSR to the United Nations in 1959, and was obviously inspired by this passage in Isaiah. But when Isaiah speaks of beating swords into plowshares, he is speaking of the peace that follows the obedience of faith, as nations stream into the universal Church. He is not speaking of a peace that man gives himself apart from Christ, but of a peace that comes only from above, supernaturally; this grace comes to us through the Church and through the sacraments Christ has established in her. The beating of swords into plowshares in this way depends on the keys of the Kingdom, which Christ gave to Peter. (Matthew 16:19)

“Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares”	“Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter” Lorenzo Veneziano (1369)

This is one more reason why the schisms that divide Protestants, Orthodox and Catholics are all the more tragic, because they hinder the messianic purpose of the Church, by hiding from the world the unity Christ offers to all men through full communion with His Body, the Church. Peace on earth is not just inner peace within the individual; it is peace among and between the nations. And it comes from Christ, through His Church, as all the nations are gathered into the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church that He founded.

I was reminded of this recently by a scene in the film Joyeux Noël (see the video below), depicting an actual event that occurred on December 24, 1914, during World War I. Soldiers from Germany, Scotland, and France were in trenches so close together that they could hear each other talking. But on Christmas Eve, something happened that made them put down their guns, play soccer together, and even worship together, as they participated in a Latin liturgy. Obviously they were not all Catholics. But, even so, they still shared enough Christian heritage, culture and spirituality to recognize the importance of commemorating that sacred night.

This following scene is just a shadow, a dim reflection, of the supernatural unity that Christ has established in His Church, and into which He is now, in this present age, calling all the nations of the world.

“In thee shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” (Gen 12:3)

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” (John 1:5)

To all our readers, may you have a blessed Christmas, and may we all be instruments of His peace, as Christ through the Church continues to break down the walls that divide us, and bring all the nations into the communion of the Holy Trinity. (Eph 2:14)

1. 
   

   And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, nor shall its sovereignty be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand for ever; just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. (Dan. 2:44-45)

2. See “Pentecost, Babel, and the Ecumenical Imperative.”
3. See “Christ Founded a Visible> Church.”