This paradoxical statement is not for shock purposes-it is wholly and entirely true. As one who is in communion with Rome via an Eastern Catholic Church, I find this to be an inevitable conclusion. Because my home parish has its origins in the Slavic people who lived around the Carpathian mountains, I appreciate the beauty of the East, for it is a beauty that I share in my daily prayer life on a personal level and at a Church level. A good portion of those who worship at my parish are ethnically descendants of the Orthodox who regained communion with Rome. This came after excommunications and ill will were put aside in the interest of unity and through an acknowledgment of the ministry of Peter that is given to the Pope of Rome. These dear people who were brave enough to put aside bitterness and seek to regain communion have a story and it must be told, never to be forgotten. There have been many historical tragedies of Churches ransacked and seized on both sides of the Catholic/Orthodox schism, and there has been much oppression of the Eastern Catholics by ungodly Communistic governments, but to recount these events with the purpose of stirring up anger would lose the vision of Our Lord’s. This vision has sought, is seeking, and shall ever seek oneness between His children. On the other hand, to recount the vision of union and a love that transcended the hatred and differences between East and West, this is a story that is ever upon my mind.

I have many friends and acquaintances who have seen the fractured world of Protestantism and have said, “Enough!” They have left their former Protestant abode for Eastern Orthodoxy, because it is a safe haven from the opinions of men each left to interpret the Bible on their own. But to many of us who are or were Protestants, we look on the outside and see that Catholics claim Tradition, Copts claim Tradition, Eastern Orthodox claim Tradition, Armenian Orthodox claim Tradition, et cetera et cetera. It is a fact that brings me to tears, that there are successors of the Apostles who are not in full communion with one another. And we as the faithful are suffering for this disunity. The crucial question to ask is-how should we view this disunion? Are we supposed to cast our lots with the most doctrinal bishops? And if so, who are they? If that were the case, how different would our adherence to Tradition really be, in contrast to Protestantism?

Let us consider the vision of the Catholic and compare it to those Eastern Brethren who share the same ultimate episcopacy but do not share the same chalice. We know that our Churches share the view that Christ left a visible Church, with Bishops leading the charge in the same vein as the Apostles. But we know that each group has an overall different view on the status of each other. It is never redundant to restate what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say about the Churches with whom she is not in communion.

1399 The Eastern churches that are not in full communion with the Catholic Church celebrate the Eucharist with great love. “These Churches, although separated from us, yet possess true sacraments, above all – by apostolic succession – the priesthood and the Eucharist, whereby they are still joined to us in closest intimacy.” A certain communion in sacris, and so in the Eucharist, “given suitable circumstances and the approval of Church authority, is not merely possible but is encouraged.”238¹

One way of describing the Catholic view of holy orders is that it is an indelible mark, as Tim Troutman’s recent full length article stated. While the term “indelible” may sound medieval and mechanistic, there is a thread of understanding the sacraments in a similar way in the East as well as in the West. The Donatist controversy is one example, where the Church saw that the Donatists were too strict in demanding rebaptism of those who had fallen away. Other sources of patristic thought saw this to be the case. It evokes a stronger view of the sacraments that is ultimately objective. This objectivity is at the heart of the Christian sacramental practice, something that neither sin nor schism can erase. This view is so powerful (an atomic bomb, as my homage to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove points out) that it transcends our lack of full communion with one another. The disagreements over primacy and jurisdictions did lead to schism, but they did not lead to a destruction of Holy Orders. This maintains the fullness of sacramental life with God in Orthodoxy, even though on a horizontal level we are fragmented from one another. It goes to the point of saying that if Church authorities were to approve of it, Orthodox could receive the Eucharist from Catholics and vice versa. Holy Orders is so powerful that it transcends the differing views on the papacy. It reminds me of a story that I was told by my godfather prior to my conversion. I quote one account of it from the New York Times:

During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

Whether this is an apocryphal story or not, this understanding of Holy Orders permeates the Catholic view both of herself and of those Churches who have not maintained communion with the Pope. It is so powerful that even those bishops who do not esteem us can ultimately be bestowed with just as much majesty and honor as we would give to our own bishops who have communion with the Pope of Rome, the first among equals. I have had the pleasure to greet Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America with a kiss on the hand, and that kiss was given with just as much fervor as I would give to a bishop with whom I am in communion. That is because I love the Orthodox too much to be Orthodox. Orthodoxy’s opposition to communion with Rome comes from circumstances both tragic and sad. But the often untold story that brings the title of this article to mind is the fact that at many points in history, Orthodoxy’s opposition to Rome has brought her to turn in on Herself. When the various and complex tragedies that led to schism between East and West unfolded, the majority of Orthodox adopted the idea that the mystery of Holy Orders is not indelible. A door was thus opened up that led to not only less love for Rome, but many times less love for Orthodoxy itself. Orthodoxy ties valid holy orders to both Apostolic Succession and Orthodoxy. This does sound like a higher standard that should lead to more purity, but what does Orthodoxy mean exactly? As you may imagine, there are varying answers to this question of what it takes to be fully Orthodox. And so, in many senses this “higher” standard actually lowers the love that one can have for the servants of God, the Bishops and those faithful in communion with them. One can end up only esteeming those bishops who are pure in one’s estimation as having the fullness of sacramental life.

A clear example of this can be seen in the life of the priest Fr. Seraphim Rose, who has fallen asleep in the Lord and is receiving the sort of veneration that could lead to an eventual canonization. Even at his conversion, we read that there was a gaping sacramental question that is still in many respects unresolved today. That is, when one enters into Tradition via Orthodoxy, if one was formerly a Protestant who was baptized as a Protestant, is rebaptism necessary? It is interesting because Fr. Seraphim was himself not baptized, having converted via Protestantism; however, his own practice was to rebaptize those who were not baptized via an Orthodox Church.

Throughout his life, Fr. Seraphim fought for what he called “true Orthodoxy”, which was in contrast to other groups–some of which (in his opinion) were too zealous for Orthodoxy and others were not zealous enough. In the case of those groups who Fr. Seraphim had wished would be more open, there was given the term “super-correct”. From his biography we read about the “super-correct”–they went so far as to call for rebaptism of canonical Orthodox believers who wanted communion with his Orthodox Jurisdiction-the Russian Orthodox Church that was not in communion with the Moscow Patriarchate (most widely known as ROCOR). In thinking about this struggle, Fr. Seraphim wrote:

“I know for myself that if I would have to sit down and think out for myself exactly which shade of ‘zealotry’ is the ‘correct’ one today-I will lose all peace of mind and be constantly preoccupied with questions of breaking communion, of how this will seem to others, of ‘what will the Greeks think’ (and which Greeks?), and ‘what will the Metropolitan think?”²

The deep issue here is not the particulars of whether Orthodox who are rebaptizing other Christians (Orthodox or not) are right or wrong. And in point of fact, the Russian Orthodox Church is more united today than it was then-as of 2007, ROCOR is back under the Moscow Patriarchate. Instead, I would argue that the underlying issue is Holy Orders, and the principles that provide the Orthodox Churches with a sense of who is Orthodox.
Later in the biography, Fr. Seraphim is quoted further on the struggles that he faced in reflecting on the disunity that he faced as an Orthodox believer.

“Throughout the year”, he wrote, “we have heard news of disharmony in the Church. In one monastery (Jordanville) the monks say ‘we are sheep without a shepherd’-and yet what would they do if the Abbot suddenly became stern and demanding in order to produce oneness of soul? In another monastery (Boston) there seems to be oneness of soul, but the impression is that it is not too deep and it is too dependent on ‘opinions’-opinions of the holiness of the Abbot, or the rightness of the monastery’s theology (and the wrongness of everyone else’s), of the superiority of ‘Greek’ to ‘Russian,’ etc. And everywhere-in parishes, in families and small groups-there burst out animosities for no apparent reason, and the best and meekest people are subjected to persecutions.
“Where is the cause to be found of this universal phenomenon today? Are true leaders vanishing in the Church? Or are the followers refusing their trust to those who could become leaders? Both things, of course, are happening, and in general the love of many is growing cold, and both leadership and trust are collapsing in a world based on revolutionary brashness and self-centeredness.
“What is the answer? To gain a position of leadership and compel obedience?-Impossible in today’s world. To offer blind obedience to some leader, preferably a ‘charismatic’ one?-Extremely dangerous; many people follow Fr. Panteleimon of Boston in this way, and the end of it looks disastrous, producing disharmony and friction on the way.
“To practice love, trust and life according to the Holy Fathers in the small circle where one is-there seems to be no other way to solve the ‘spiritual crisis’ of today which expresses itself in the absence of oneness of soul and mind. If one finds the mind of the Fathers, then one will be at one with the others who find it also. This is much better than just following what so-and-so says, taking on faith that he is somehow infallible. But how difficult it seems to find the mind of the Fathers! How many disagreements there are with others equally sincere! Or is this because we have not searched long or deeply enough?
“May God give us the answer to this agonizing question!”³

When I read this part of the biography, I was moved to great sadness for what the Orthodox faithful have suffered in trying to find unity and purity. There are many issues surrounding these problems, but again in my mind a key one is the predominant Orthodox view of Holy Orders. When Holy Orders are not indelible, there is a shifting perspective as to who is holy and who is Orthodox, even to the point of judging within Orthodoxy, not to mention Catholicism. Fr. Seraphim’s emphasis on finding the “mind of the Fathers” sounds wonderful (and it is truly the ultimate answer to all problems in the world), but of course his opponents would have said that they were doing the same thing. This shifting perspective sadly shares the subjectivity and individualism of Protestantism, as individuals or groups end up making different conclusions about the source of the Church when the standards are anything but Apostolic Succession.

Flying in stark contrast to this view of the Church is the view offered by Catholicism. This view holds that despite the flaws in our ordained leaders and those in communion with them, there is a gift of grace that cannot be wiped away. It is so powerful that despite the fact that some Orthodox would not esteem a Catholic as living in grace (Fr. Seraphim Rose himself wrote much against Catholicism, for example), the Catholic can turn the other cheek and stand upon Holy Orders, thanking God for the grace that comes to the Orthodox Churches. Please note that I wrote “can”–tragic failures of Catholics to appreciate Orthodox do not speak to our principles, but because of those principles I will say it again: I love the Orthodox too much to be Orthodox.

And so, it is the Catholic vision of the Church that most fully preserves respect and love for all Apostolic Churches. It is a broader view that leaves the mandates of either/or, and is open to a more complex ecclesiology that at times will emphasize both/and, which is true of its views on other doctrines such as the teachings on the relationship between faith and works. The Catholic view holds Her own sacraments to be valid, but She also holds the various Orthodox Churches to have the full sacramental life. Thus, there is a principled sacramental basis for saying that the Catholic loves the Orthodox too much to be Orthodox. Again I stress that not all Catholics do this–but our catechisms and councils beg us to do so. I am also not saying that there are no Orthodox who share this vision-I am thankful for those Orthodox who have spoken out in support of this thinking such as Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev of the Moscow Patriarchate. But in Catholicism there is an authoritative, principled basis for a mutual respect of the successors of the Apostles that springs from this view of Holy Orders. In relegating the Bishop of Rome and those in communion with him to something lower, there is a sense in which Orthodoxy has lowered Herself at the same time, tragically. May Our Lord raise us all through a growth in appreciation for His fellow children, each other. Through this appreciation, I pray that this fractionation would end and end soon, via a stronger love for Orthodoxy that comes from a stronger love of the mystery of Holy Orders. As for me, in my evaluation of Tradition, it is not that I did not see the Tradition in Orthodoxy. It was due to my love for the Orthodox that I entered into communion with the Popes throughout the ages through Catholicism. Our love for Orthodoxy provides a principled way for us to not only hear the call from above that is communion with God; it is a call that beseeches us to end the horizontal divisions amongst the Churches. May we all answer that call, to the best of our ability.

1. Catechism of the Catholic Church
2. Father Seraphim Rose-His Life and Works, Hieromonk Damascene
3. Father Seraphim Rose-His Life and Works, Hieromonk Damascene

Portrait of Young John Calvin
Unknown Flemish artist
Espace Ami Lullin of the Bibliothèque de Genève

I once heard a Protestant pastor preach a “Church History” sermon. He began with Christ and the apostles, dashed through the book of Acts, skipped over the Catholic Middle Ages and leaped directly to Wittenberg, 1517. From Luther he hopped to the English revivalist John Wesley, crossed the Atlantic to the American revivals and slid home to his own Church, Birmingham, Alabama, early 1990s. Cheers and singing followed him to the plate. The congregation loved it.

I loved it, too. I grew up in an Evangelical Church in the 1970s immersed in the myth of the Reformation. I was sure that my Church preached the gospel, which we received, unsullied, from the Reformers. After college, I earned a doctorate in Church history so I could flesh out the story and prove to all the poor Catholics that they were in the wrong Church. I never imagined my own founder, the Protestant Reformer John Calvin, would point me to the Catholic faith.

I was raised a Presbyterian, the Church that prides itself on Calvinist origins, but I didn’t care much about denominations. My Church practiced a pared-down, Bible-focused, born-again spirituality shared by most Evangelicals. I went to a Christian college and then a seminary where I found the same attitude. Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Charismatics worshiped and studied side-by-side, all committed to the Bible but at odds on how to interpret it. But our differences didn’t bother us. Disagreements over sacraments, Church structures, and authority were less important to us than a personal relationship with Christ and fighting the Catholic Church. This is how we understood our common debt to the Reformation.

When I finished seminary, I moved on to Ph.D. studies in Reformation history. My focus was on John Calvin (1509-1564), the French Reformer who made Geneva, Switzerland into a model Protestant city. I chose Calvin not just because of my Presbyterian background, but because most American Protestants have some relationship to him. The English Puritans, the Pilgrim Fathers, Jonathan Edwards and the “Great Awakening” – all drew on Calvin and then strongly influenced American religion. My college and seminary professors portrayed Calvin as a master theologian, our theologian. I thought that if I could master Calvin, I would really know the faith.

Strangely, mastering Calvin didn’t lead me anywhere I expected. To begin with, I decided that I really didn’t like Calvin. I found him proud, judgmental and unyielding. But more importantly, I discovered that Calvin upset my Evangelical view of history. I had always assumed a perfect continuity between the Early Church, the Reformation and my Church. The more I studied Calvin, however, the more foreign he seemed, the less like Protestants today. This, in turn, caused me to question the whole Evangelical storyline: Early Church – Reformation – Evangelical Christianity, with one seamless thread running straight from one to the other. But what if Evangelicals really weren’t faithful to Calvin and the Reformation? The seamless thread breaks. And if it could break once, between the Reformation and today, why not sooner, between the Early Church and the Reformation? Was I really sure the thread had held even that far?

Calvin shocked me by rejecting key elements of my Evangelical tradition. Born-again spirituality, private interpretation of Scripture, a broad-minded approach to denominations – Calvin opposed them all. I discovered that his concerns were vastly different, more institutional, even more Catholic. Although he rejected the authority of Rome, there were things about the Catholic faith he never thought about leaving. He took for granted that the Church should have an interpretive authority, a sacramental liturgy and a single, unified faith.

These discoveries faced me with important questions. Why should Calvin treat these “Catholic things” with such seriousness? Was he right in thinking them so important? And if so, was he justified in leaving the Catholic Church? What did these discoveries teach me about Protestantism? How could my Church claim Calvin as a founder, and yet stray so far from his views? Was the whole Protestant way of doing theology doomed to confusion and inconsistency?

Understanding the Calvinist Reformation

Calvin was a second-generation Reformer, twenty-six years younger than Martin Luther (1483-1546). This meant that by the time he encountered the Reformation, it had already split into factions. In Calvin’s native France, there was no royal support for Protestantism and no unified leadership. Lawyers, humanists, intellectuals, artisans and craftsman read Luther’s writings, as well as the Scriptures, and adapted whatever they liked.

This variety struck Calvin as a recipe for disaster. He was a lawyer by training, and always hated any kind of social disorder. In 1549, he wrote a short work (Advertissement contre l’astrologie) in which he complained about this Protestant diversity:

Every state [of life] has its own Gospel, which they forge for themselves according to their appetites, so that there is as great a diversity between the Gospel of the court, and the Gospel of the justices and lawyers, and the Gospel of merchants, as there is between coins of different denominations.

I began to grasp the difference between Calvin and his descendants when I discovered his hatred of this theological diversity. Calvin was drawn to Luther’s theology, but he complained about the “crass multitude” and the “vulgar plebs” who turned Luther’s doctrine into an excuse for disorder. He wrote his first major work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), in part to address this problem.

Calvin got an opportunity to put his plans into action when he moved to Geneva, Switzerland. He first joined the Reformation in Geneva in 1537, when the city had only recently embraced Protestantism. Calvin, who had already begun to write and publish on theology, was unsatisfied with their work. Geneva had abolished the Mass, kicked out the Catholic clergy, and professed loyalty to the Bible, but Calvin wanted to go further. His first request to the city council was to impose a common confession of faith (written by Calvin) and to force all citizens to affirm it.

Calvin’s most important contribution to Geneva was the establishment of the Consistory – a sort of ecclesiastical court- to judge the moral and theological purity of his parishioners. He also persuaded the council to enforce a set of “Ecclesiastical Ordinances” that defined the authority of the Church, stated the religious obligations of the laity, and imposed an official liturgy. Church attendance was mandatory. Contradicting the ministers was outlawed as blasphemy. Calvin’s Institutes would eventually be declared official doctrine.

Calvin’s lifelong goal was to gain the right to excommunicate “unworthy” Church members. The city council finally granted this power in 1555 when French immigration and local scandal tipped the electorate in his favor. Calvin wielded it frequently. According to historian William Monter, one in fifteen citizens was summoned before the Consistory between 1559 and 1569, and up to one in twenty five was actually excommunicated.¹ Calvin used this power to enforce his single vision of Christianity and to punish dissent.

A Calvinist Discovers John Calvin

I studied Calvin for years before the real significance of what I was learning began to sink in. But I finally realized that Calvin, with his passion for order and authority, was fundamentally at odds with the individualist spirit of my Evangelical tradition. Nothing brought this home to me with more clarity than his fight with the former Carmelite monk, Jerome Bolsec.

In 1551, Bolsec, a physician and convert to Protestantism, entered Geneva and attended a lecture on theology. The topic was Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, the teaching that God predetermines the eternal fate of every soul. Bolsec, who believed firmly in “Scripture alone” and “faith alone,” did not like what he heard. He thought it made God into a tyrant. When he stood up to challenge Calvin’s views, he was arrested and imprisoned.

What makes Bolsec’s case interesting is that it quickly evolved into a referendum on Church authority and the interpretation of Scripture. Bolsec, just like most Evangelicals today, argued that he was a Christian, that he had the Holy Spirit and that, therefore, he had as much right as Calvin to interpret the Bible. He promised to recant if Calvin would only prove his doctrine from the Scriptures. But Calvin would have none of it. He ridiculed Bolsec as a trouble maker (Bolsec generated a fair amount of public sympathy), rejected his appeal to Scripture, and called on the council to be harsh. He wrote privately to a friend that he wished Bolsec were “rotting in a ditch.”²

What most Evangelicals today don’t realize is that Calvin never endorsed private or lay interpretation of the Bible. While he rejected Rome’s claim to authority, he made striking claims for his own authority. He taught that the “Reformed” pastors were successors to the prophets and apostles, entrusted with the task of authoritative interpretation of the Scriptures. He insisted that laypeople should suspend judgment on difficult matters and “hold unity with the Church.”³

Calvin took very seriously the obligation of the laity to submit and obey. “Contradicting the ministers” was one of the most common reasons to be called before the Consistory and penalties could be severe. One image in particular sticks in my mind. April, 1546. Pierre Ameaux, a citizen of Geneva, was forced to crawl to the door of the Bishop’s residence, with his head uncovered and a torch in his hand. He begged the forgiveness of God, of the ministers and of the city council. His crime? He contradicted the preaching of Calvin. The council, at Calvin’s urging, had decreed Ameaux’s public humiliation as punishment.

Ameaux was not alone. Throughout the 1540s and 1550s, Geneva’s city council repeatedly outlawed speaking against the ministers or their theology. Furthermore, when Calvin gained the right to excommunicate, he did not hesitate to use it against this “blasphemy.” Evangelicals today, unaccustomed to the use of excommunication, may underestimate the severity of the penalty, but Calvin understood it in the most severe terms. He repeatedly taught that the excommunicated were “estranged from the Church, and thus, from Christ.”⁴

If Calvin’s ideas on Church authority were a surprise to me, his thoughts on the sacraments were shocking. Unlike Evangelicals, who treat the theology of the sacraments as one of the “non-essentials,” Calvin thought they were of the utmost importance. In fact, he taught that a proper understanding of the Eucharist was necessary for salvation. This was the thesis of his very first theological treatise in French (Petit traicté de la Sainte Cène, 1541). Frustrated by Protestant disagreement over the Eucharist, Calvin wrote the text in an attempt to unify the movement around one single doctrine.

Evangelicals are used to finding assurance in their “personal relationship with Christ,” and not through membership in any Church or participation in any ritual. Calvin, however, taught that the Eucharist provides “undoubted assurance of eternal life.”⁵ And while Calvin stopped short of the Catholic, or even the Lutheran, understanding of the Eucharist, he still retained a doctrine of the Real Presence. He taught that the Eucharist provides a “true and substantial partaking of the body and blood of the Lord” and he rejected the notion that communicants receive “the Spirit only, omitting flesh and blood.”⁶.

Calvin understood baptism in much the same way. He never taught the Evangelical doctrine that one is “born again” through personal conversion. Instead, he associated regeneration with baptism and taught that to neglect baptism was to refuse salvation. He also allowed no diversity over the manner of its reception. Anabaptists in Geneva (those who practiced adult baptism) were jailed and forced to repent. Calvin taught that Anabaptists, by refusing the sacrament to their children, had placed themselves outside the faith.

Calvin once persuaded an Anabaptist named Herman to enter the Reformed Church. His description of the event leaves no doubt about the difference between Calvin and the modern Evangelical. Calvin wrote:

Herman has, if I am not mistaken, in good faith returned to the fellowship of the Church. He has confessed that outside the Church there is no salvation, and that the true Church is with us. Therefore, it was defection when he belonged to a sect separated from it.⁷

Evangelicals don’t understand this type of language. They are accustomed to treating “the Church” as a purely spiritual reality, represented across denominations or wherever “true believers” are gathered. This was not Calvin’s view. His was “the true Church,” marked off by infant baptism, outside of which there was no salvation.

Making Sense of Evangelicalism

Studying Calvin raised important questions about my Evangelical identity. How could I reject as unimportant issues that my own founder considered essential? I had blithely and confidently dismissed baptism, Eucharist, and the Church itself as “merely symbolic,” “purely spiritual” or, ultimately, unnecessary. In seminary, too, I found an environment where professors disagreed entirely over these issues and no one cared! With no final court of appeal, we had devolved into a “lowest common denominator” theology.

Church history taught me that this attitude was a recent development. John Calvin had high expectations for the unity and catholicity of the faith, and for the centrality of Church and sacrament. But Calvinism couldn’t deliver it. Outside of Geneva, without the force of the state to impose one version, Calvinism itself splintered into factions. In her book Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism, historian Janice Knight details how the process unfolded very early in American Calvinism. ⁸

It is not surprising that by the eighteenth century, leading Calvinist Churchmen on both sides of the Atlantic had given up on the quest for complete unity. One new approach was to stress the subjective experience of “new birth” (itself a novel doctrine of Puritan origins) as the only necessary concern. The famous revivalist George Whitefield typified this view, going so far as to insist that Christ did not want agreement in other matters. He said:

It was best to preach the new birth, and the power of godliness, and not to insist so much on the form: for people would never be brought to one mind as to that; nor did Jesus Christ ever intend it.⁹

Since the eighteenth century, Calvinism has devolved more and more into a narrow set of questions about the nature of salvation. Indeed, in most people’s minds the word Calvinism implies only the doctrine of predestination. Calvin himself has become mainly a shadowy symbol, a myth that Evangelicals call upon only to support a spurious claim to historical continuity.

The greatest irony in my historical research was realizing that Evangelicalism, far from being the direct descendant of Calvin, actually represents the failure of Calvinism. Whereas Calvin spent his life in the quest for doctrinal unity, modern Evangelicalism is rooted in the rejection of that quest. Historian Alister McGrath notes that the term “Evangelical,” which has circulated in Christianity for centuries, took on its peculiar modern sense only in the twentieth century, with the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals (1942). This society was formed to allow coordinated public action on the part of disparate groups that agreed on “the new birth,” but disagreed on just about everything else.¹⁰

A Calvinist Discovers Catholicism

I grew up believing that Evangelicalism was “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” I learned from Protestant Church history that it was hardly older than Whitefield, and certainly not the faith of the Protestant Reformers. What to do? Should I go back to the sixteenth century and become an authentic Calvinist? I already knew that Calvin himself, for all his insistence on unity and authority, had been unable to deliver the goods. His own followers descended into anarchy and individualism.

I realized instead that Calvin was part of the problem. He had insisted on the importance of unity and authority, but had rejected any rational or consistent basis for that authority. He knew that Scripture totally alone, Scripture interpreted by each individual conscience, was a recipe for disaster. But his own claim to authority was perfectly arbitrary. Whenever he was challenged, he simply appealed to his own conscience, or to his subjective experience, but he denied that right to Bolsec and others. As a result, Calvin became proud and censorious, brutal with his enemies, and intolerant of dissent. In all my reading of Calvin, I don’t recall him ever apologizing for a mistake or admitting an error.

It eventually occurred to me that Calvin’s attitude contrasted sharply with what I had found in the greatest Catholic theologians. Many of them were saints, recognized for their heroic charity and humility. Furthermore, I knew from reading them, especially St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Francis de Sales, that they denied any personal authority to define doctrine. They deferred willingly, even joyfully, to the authority of Pope and council. They could maintain the biblical ideal of doctrinal unity (1 Corinthians 1:10), without claiming to be the source of that unity.

These saints also challenged the stereotypes about Catholics that I had grown up with. Evangelicals frequently assert that they are the only ones to have “a personal relationship with Christ.” Catholics, with their rituals and institutions, are supposed to be alienated from Christ and Scripture. I found instead men and women who were single-minded in their devotion to Christ and inebriated with His grace.

The Catholic theologian who had the greatest impact on me was undoubtedly St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430). All of my life, I heard the claim that “the Early Church” had been Protestant and Evangelical. My seminary professors and even Calvin and Luther always pointed to St. Augustine as their great Early Church hero. When I finally dug into Augustine, however, I discovered a thorough-going Catholicism. Augustine loved Scripture and spoke profoundly about God’s grace, but he understood these in the fully Catholic sense. Augustine destroyed the final piece of my Evangelical view of history.

In the end, I began to see that everything good about Evangelicalism was already present in the Catholic Church – the warmth and devotion of Evangelical spirituality, the love of Scripture and even, to some extent, the Evangelical tolerance for diversity. Catholicism has always tolerated schools of thought, various theologies and different liturgies. But unlike Evangelicalism, the Catholic Church has a logical and consistent way to distinguish the essential from the non-essential. The Church’s Magisterium, established by Christ (Matthew 16:18; Matthew 28:18-20), has provided that source of unity that Calvin sought to replace.

One of the most satisfying things about my discovery of the Catholic Church is that it fully satisfied my desire for historical rootedness. I began to study history believing in that continuity of faith and trying desperately to find it. Even when I thought I had found it in the Reformation, I still had to contend with the enormous gulf of the Catholic Middle Ages. Now, thanks to what Calvin taught me, there are no more missing links. On November 16, 2003 I finally embraced the faith “once for all delivered to the Saints.” I entered the Catholic Church.

1. “The Consistory of Geneva, 1559-1569,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 38 (1976): 467-484.
2. Letter to Madame de Cany, 1552.
3. Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960: 3.2.3, 4.3.4.
4. Institutes 4.12.9.
5. Institutes 4.17.32.
6. Institutes 4.17.17; 4.17.19.
7. Letters of John Calvin, trans. M. Gilchrist, ed. J.Bonnet, New York: Burt Franklin, 1972, I: 110-111.
8. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.
9. Cited in Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys. Downers Grove: IVP, 2003, 14.
10. Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995, 17-23.

“But as the old Confusion of tongues was laudable, when men who were of one language in wickedness and impiety, even as some now venture to be, were building the Tower; (Genesis 11:7) for by the confusion of their language the unity of their intention was broken up, and their undertaking destroyed; so much more worthy of praise is the present miraculous one. For being poured from One Spirit upon many men, it brings them again into harmony.” (St. Gregory of Nazianzen, Oration 41)

Pentecost (1308-11)
Duccio di Buoninsegna
Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena

Tomorrow we celebrate the feast of Pentecost. But no one can truly rejoice in this feast without knowing the great good that has been bestowed upon us on this day. And that great good cannot be rightly understood apart from recalling an incident that took place long ago on the plain of Shinar, where men attempted to build a tower up to the heavens. “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name; lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” (Gen. 11:4) These descendants of Noah sought in their pride to establish a unified society which, by means of technology would allow them to live in the iniquity of those before the flood, but immune from the divine punishment of another flood.

Here we see clearly the first indication of what St. Augustine would describe later as the “city of man” as opposed to the “city of God.” According to Jewish tradition it was Nimrod who organized and oversaw the building of the tower of Babel.¹ Nimrod is in this respect a prototype of the Antichrist, the ruler of the city of man, i.e. those who seek to live as if man is God.² (Gen 10:8-10) Nimrod and those following him wanted to build a city and a tower, to make a name for themselves in order to preserve their man-made unity, to exalt themselves to heaven while living in opposition to God. God saw that when so unified, the city of man would be capable of whatever evil it purposed to do. Just as He had mercifully driven man out of the garden of Eden to prevent him from eating of the Tree of Life and so living forever in his sinful condition, so also at Babel God acted mercifully in confusing man’s language, to prevent the city of man from carrying out the great evils it would do if united together in opposition to God. God delayed judgment of the city of man to allow man to repent.³ By confusing the language of the men at Babel, He separated and scattered the city of man into various races, languages, cultures, and lands, and thereby limited its capacity for evil and destruction.

Tower of Babel

But God’s redemptive purpose was not merely to prevent man from falling into greater evil; He also set out to restore to man the true unity he enjoyed in Eden, a fellowship in the Divine Trinity. Only by this communion with the Divine Persons can men be truly united to each other; the true unity of men with men only comes about as a participation in the divine unity of the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity.⁴ In preparation for this true society coming down from Heaven, God called Abraham out of Ur, and began to form a people in which He Himself would come to men as a man. Finally, in the fullness of time, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law.⁵ After His death and resurrection, but before His ascension into Heaven, He commissioned His Apostles to “make disciples of all the nations,” going “even to the remotest part of the earth,” to “every nation and tribe and tongue and people.”⁶ Yet He told them to wait for what the Father had promised, the gift of the Holy Spirit.⁷

Fifty days after His resurrection, and ten days after his ascension, while they were in the upper room, there was a noise like a rushing wind that filled the whole house where they were sitting, and tongues of fire rested on their heads, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and by the enabling of the Holy Spirit they began speaking in other languages which they had not known.⁸ There, in Jerusalem, were men from every nation under heaven, and they all heard the Apostles speaking in their own language of the mighty deeds of God. On that day, three thousand heard, believed and were baptized. On Pentecost, the Church was born.

One of the primary purposes for Christ founding a Church is to undo the division of men against men, the divisions of the human family effected by sin. These divisions began when Adam sinned, but were manifest in a universal way at the Tower of Babel, that tower of man, initiated by men and built up by men. That tower is the paradigmatic referent of Psalm 127:1, “Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain.” Pentecost is the supernatural redemptive reversal of Babel, and this is why the Church is the anti-Babel.⁹ The purpose of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is to reverse that division by means of a divine ingathering. All the nations of the world are to stream into her doors, into one household, the household of faith.¹⁰ The Church is the house of the Lord, and because He builds this house, those who labor against it labor in vain.¹¹ This is the stone that “became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.”¹²

Apart from Christ man cannot form such a unity, though he thinks he can. But apart from Christ, man’s attempt to do so is the mission of the Antichrist, to form by the mere natural power of man, the whole of mankind into a universal social and political unity ordered to this world as man’s final end.¹³ By contrast, the Church that Christ founded is a supernatural unity, coming down from Heaven, in Christ, and by His Spirit, at Pentecost. And this is why this supernatural unity is the first of the four marks of the Church, specified in the Creed: “one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.” The Life of the Church is the supernatural Life of the Trinity, not from man, but from the God-man, and not ordered to natural earthly bliss, but to the supernatural end which is the very perfect and eternal communion of the Three Divine Persons.¹⁴

God wants all men to be united through being incorporated into the body of Christ, i.e. the Church.¹⁵ This is the supernatural peace that comes only through Christ, the peace that passes all [human] understanding.¹⁶ The gift of of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost was a reversal of God’s confusion of the language at the tower of Babel; the pouring out of the Spirit is the divinely ordained way of uniting men in one body, one Spirit, one hope, one faith, one baptism into one God.¹⁷ The true unification of man takes place only through Christ and the Holy Spirit and the Church. But godless men always seek a substitute for the divine. And the city of man continues to seek peace and unity through political, economic, technological and military means. Yet the city of man can never find true peace and unity through these means.

St. Augustine explains the relation between Pentecost and Babel, writing:

But lo, say the disciples to the Lord, we are told in what name we are to baptize; You have made us ministers, and hast said to us, “Go, baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Whither shall we go? Whither? Have you not heard? To Mine inheritance. You ask, Whither shall we go? To that which I bought with my blood. Whither then? To the nations, says He. I fancied that He said, Go, baptize the Africans in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Thanks be to God, the Lord has solved the question the dove has taught us. Thanks be to God, it was to the nations the apostles were sent; if to the nations, then to all tongues. The Holy Spirit signified this, being divided in the tongues, united in the dove. Here the tongues are divided, there the dove unites them. The tongues of the nations agreed, perhaps that of Africa alone disagreed. What can be more evident, my brethren? In the dove the unity, in the tongues the community of the nations. For once the tongues became discordant through pride, and then of one became many tongues. For after the flood certain proud men, as if endeavoring to fortify themselves against God, as if anything were high for God, or anything could give security to pride, raised a tower, apparently that they might not be destroyed by a flood, should there come one thereafter. For they had heard and considered that all iniquity was swept away by a flood; to abstain from iniquity they would not; they sought the height of a tower as a defense against a flood; they built a lofty tower. “God saw their pride, and frustrated their purpose by causing that they should not understand one another’s speech, and thus tongues became diverse through pride.” Genesis 11:1-9 If pride caused diversities of tongues, Christ’s humility has united these diversities in one. The Church is now bringing together what that tower had sundered. Of one tongue there were made many; marvel not: this was the doing of pride. Of many tongues there is made one; marvel not: this was the doing of charity.¹⁸

The mission of the Church is to go into all those nations and languages that were separated at Babel. This is the symbolism of the tongues of fire. By the Spirit of Christ, mankind, separated from God and from himself by sin, is brought into unity by entering into the supernatural society that is the Church. Just as pride was the source of the division of men at Babel, so the humility of Christ in condescending to become man, is the source of the charity by which men are restored to true unity.

Two years ago, on the feast of Pentecost, Pope Benedict XVI said:

Afterward, at the feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is shown through other signs: an impetuous wind, tongues of fire, and the apostles speaking all languages. This last one is a sign that the Spirit, who is charity and who fosters unity in diversity, has overcome the Babylonian Diaspora, fruit of the pride that separates men. From the first moment of its existence the Church spoke all languages, thanks to the power of the Holy Spirit and the tongues of fire, and lives in all cultures. It does not destroy the gifts or the history of a culture, rather it assumes them all in a great new unity, which reconciles unity with the multiplicity of forms.¹⁹

Grace does not destroy nature but perfects and elevates it, and so the natural diversity of men is not destroyed or obliterated by the Church, but is incorporated and raised up into the supernatural unity of the Spirit. St. Paul writes: “being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”²⁰ The “unity of the Spirit” is the unity that has been given to the Church by the Spirit on Pentecost. The Spirit transformed men who formerly quarreled about who would be greatest, into men who made themselves into each other’s servants, with all kindness and brotherly affection. In this way the Church reverses Babel, not by man’s own efforts, but by the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Body of Christ, pouring out charity into our hearts, to incorporate all men into that Body.²¹ As the power of the Spirit had overshadowed Mary when she conceived Jesus in her womb, so also on Pentecost the Holy Spirit fell once again on Mary and the Apostles, and they became for us Holy Mother Church, the Mother of all the living, i.e. those living with the supernatural Life of God.

But Pentecost did not end. Into that mystical Body “men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation” are to this day still being incorporated, by the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Church and her sacraments.²² The Church is in this way a sign to the world of man’s original social purpose, the harmonious union of all men. In the mystical Body of the Second Adam, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the fruits of the first Adam’s sin (i.e. division and strife and dissension and schism) are done away. Instead of murdering our brother as did Cain and the children of Cain, we now, incorporated into this mystical Body, are marked by the charity of laying down our lives for our brothers, as the Second Adam did for us.

Throughout the Church’s history since the first Pentecost, the schisms that have weakened the unity and strength of her voice to the world by adding many other competing voices, are in their effect like the curse of Babel that thwarted the builders of that tower. But in this case they are opposing not the tower of men, but the tower that God Himself is building.²³ The Church does not lose her supernatural unity when men form schisms from her. No man can break or destroy this supernatural unity. But as man through sin robs God of the glory He ought to have received, so schism from the Church robs the Church of the clarity of its witness to its supernatural origin and unity, like an eclipse that darkens the light of Christ to the world. Christ has established that by the witness of the Church’s supernatural unity in charity, the world will know that Christ came from God, and that those who love Christ are loved by the Father.²⁴ For this reason, the feast of Pentecost kindles in us not only tongues of evangelism to those who do not know of Christ, but also tongues of reconciliation with those in schism from us. Pentecost as the reversal of Babel calls us to pursue true peace and reunion with all those estranged from us; it lays upon us the ecumenical imperative.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love. Bring all Christians into full and visible unity in the Body of Christ. In nomine Patris et fillii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

1. According to this Jewish tradition it was Eber, the father of the Hebrews and the great-grandson of Shem, who refused to participate, and for this reason his language (Hebrew), which was the language spoken by Noah and all those before him, was not changed at Babel. (Gen 10:24-25; 11:14-17)
2. Man can truly live as God, but only in union with the God who for our sake and for our salvation, became man, Jesus Christ.
3. 2 Peter 3:9,15
4. Those not at peace with God cannot be at peace with one another.
5. Gal. 4:4
6. Matthew 28:20, Acts 1:8, Revelation 14:6
7. Acts 1:4
8. Acts 2:1-4.
9. This is why it is fitting that the Church is built on Rome, which Peter refers to as Babylon (2 Peter 5:13), and which is the natural kingdom taken over by Christ’s supernatural Kingdom, according to Daniel’s prophecy (Dan. 2). At the time Peter was writing, Rome, like the Babylon of old, was the locus of that same human attempt to unify man apart from God, just as Nimrod had sought to do.
10. “Now it will come about that in the last days the mountain of the house of the LORD will be established as the chief of the mountains, and will be raised above the hills; and all the nations will stream to it.” (Isaiah 2:2) Cf. Gal 6:10, Ephesians 2:19.
11. 2 Chron. 13:12, Acts 5:39.
12. Daniel 2:35
13. “The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, 676.
14. If the Church were founded by mere men, it would have earthly, natural happiness as its end. Heaven would merely be a return to an earthly paradise, without disease, suffering or death, on and on forever without end, grace without glory. But Heaven is infinitely beyond the natural happiness of paradise, as the Life of the Creator infinitely transcends the life of mere creatures. Heaven is the eternal inner Life and Happiness of the Triune God, into which we are graciously called to participate. To have Heaven as its end (i.e. its telos), the Church must have Heaven as its principle and source, which is why the Church must be founded by the God-man, Jesus Christ. This is why no society founded by mere men can be the Church. And this is why apostolic succession is essential to the Church, because only by apostolic succession is the activity of the Church the continuation and extension of the supernatural Life and mission of the incarnate Christ.
15. Gal 3:28; 1 Cor 12
16. Phil 4:7
17. Eph 4:4-5
18. St. Augustine, Tractate 6.10
19. Pope Benedict XVI, May 7, 2008, http://www.zenit.org/article-22523?l=english.
20. Ephesians 4:3
21. Romans 5:5
22. Revelations 5:9
23. To read an early second century description of the Church as the tower that God is building, see Book 1 of the Shepherd of Hermas.
24. John 17:21-23

Few Reformed theologians have spoken as candidly about the tragedy of denominationalism as Reformed Theological Seminary Professor, Dr. John Frame. ¹ Throughout Dr. Frame’s prolific writing career he has consistently spoken of the splintering of Protestant churches as a devastating sin that harms nearly every aspect of the Christian life.  In 1991 he devoted an entire book, Evangelical Reunion, to the mission of restoring Christian unity. Rather than treating the subject as merely academic, Dr. Frame writes as a man personally grieved over the crisis of denominationalism, yet also hopeful in God’s sovereign plan. I strongly recommend the book to both Catholics and Protestants alike.

Dr. Frame’s clarity and honesty about the problem of denominationalism also provides common ground for Catholics and Reformed Christians to engage one another.  Both groups believe denominationalism is wrong.  Both groups believe Christ did not intend His Church to be splintered into countless sects.  Both groups believe Christ founded one Church.  Dr. Frame extends the common ground even further as he articulates the belief that Christ not only established one Church, but established one with visible and governmental unity. If we both believe that Christ established one Church and that denominationalism is false, we are left with the task of determining the error which has created denominationalism.

In Evangelical Reunion, and again in his more recent work, The Doctrine of the Christ Life, Dr. Frame puts the onus of guilt for beginning denominationalism on the Catholic Church.  At the same time, however, he articulates the position that neither corruption nor even false teaching justifies leaving a Church and starting a new one.² This raises an obvious question; how can Dr. Frame possibly justify the Reformers leaving the Catholic Church?  If neither sin nor false teaching is a reason for leaving any church, how can Protestants defend the actions of the men like John Calvin and Martin Luther?  Dr. Frame answers the question directly.  He writes:

The best justifications for starting a new Lutheran church, I think, were these: (1) the Roman Catholic Church was requiring, as a condition of membership in good standing, commission of sin, namely participation in what Luther came to regard as idolatry in the mass. (2) The church required as a qualification for teachers, subscription to a view of salvation which Luther believed was flawed at its very core.³

Based on Dr. Frame’s own teaching in The Doctrine of the Christian Life, his second reason must be dismissed, as he maintains that not even false teaching justifies leaving a Church.  We’re left with his first justification, that to be a member in good standing in the Catholic Church required “commission of sin.”

When I read this, that the Catholic Church required her members to sin, I was unsure of what sin Dr. Frame was referring to.  I emailed him for clarification and he kindly responded.  He wrote, “What was the sinful practice required by the Catholic Church? Violation of the second commandment in worshiping the host. The church had always required its members to attend mass. Luther could not attend in good conscience.”⁴ Ironically, this practice, normally referred to as Eucharistic adoration, was recently affirmed by the Lutheran Bishops in the Lutheran/Roman Catholic Joint Commission.⁵ Yet, Dr. Frame maintains that this practice is sin and thus justifies the Reformers in leaving the Church.

In taking this position, Dr. Frame sets himself against the great Doctors of the Faith. For example, in his commentary on the Psalms, St. Augustine writes:

It was in His flesh that Christ walked among us and it is His flesh that He has given us to eat for our salvation; but no one eats of this flesh without having first adored it . . . and not only do we not sin in thus adoring it, but we would be sinning if we did not do so.⁶

More importantly, however, Dr. Frame’s rejection of this practice forces him to reject the most natural reading of the Eucharistic passages in Holy Scripture. In each of the synoptic gospels, Jesus, holding the bread says, “This is my body.”⁷ In the gospel of John, Jesus commands his disciples to “eat his flesh and drink his blood.”⁸ Nothing, in any of these passages suggests that Jesus was speaking symbolically.  The Protestant interpretation, though not put this way, begins with the belief that Jesus couldn’t possibly have meant what it sounds like He meant.  In fact, the Protestant rejection of the true presence of Christ (the rationale for Eucharistic Adoration) isn’t exegetical at all; it’s simply rational.  As one of my friends, a PCA Pastor put it, “the Catholic belief that the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Jesus is insane!” True…it’s pretty wild, but it’s true to the text.  More importantly, the body and blood of our Savior are our only hope in life, as St. Augustine said; it would be sin not to worship the sacred Host.

Reformed Christians generally love St. Augustine. They also love John Frame.  Yet, one says we sin if we do not worship the Eucharist, the other says we sin if we do.  Who should be trusted?  The difference between these two beliefs is that one has been affirmed by the Catholic Church and the other has been rejected as heretical. ⁹ This is the same Catholic Church that rejected Arianism to the glory of Christ’s deity. The same Church that affirmed the reality of Christ’s humanity in the face of heretical docetism. The same Church that rejected the man-centered soteriology of Pelagius for the grace-centered theology of St. Augustine.  This Church maintains and safeguards the Apostolic deposit of faith. This is the goodness of Christ manifested in the world — the offer of being incorporated into His bride, the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

1. In the Preface of Evanglical Reunion, Frame writes, “By ‘denominationalism,’ I mean, sometimes (1) the very fact that the Christian church is split into many denominations, sometimes (2) the sinful attitudes and mentalities that lead to such splits and perpetuate them.”
2. He writes, “Remarkably, Scripture itself never says that believers should leave a church organization and form a new one because of false teaching. … But nowhere in the Old Testament, nor in Jesus’ teaching, does God command believers to abandon Israel and to form a new nation, church, or denomination. … As we have seen, there is doctrinal and practical corruption in the New Testament church as well. But again, the apostles do not call on believers to leave their churches and form new ones because of corruption.” (The Doctrine of the Christian Life. Phillipsburg, N.J.: P & R Pub., 2008. Print. Page, 431.)
3. “Evangelical Reunion – Preface.” The Works of John Frame and Vern Poythress. Web. 04 Apr. 2010. http://www.frame-poythress.org/frame_books/Evangelical_Reunion/Preface.html. Chapter 2.
4. Used with permission.
5. “Pro Unione Web Site – Full Text L-RC Eucharist.” Centro Pro Unione, Christian Unity and Ecumenical Research. Web. 08 Apr. 2010. <http://www.pro.urbe.it/dia-int/l-rc/doc/e_l-rc_eucharist.html>.
6. St. Augustine, Commentary on Psalm 98.
7. Matthew 26:26, Mark 14:22, Luke 22:19.
8. John 6:52.
9. Cf. Council of Trent Session XIII.5, Can. 6.

Throughout the past year on Called to Communion, the various blog posts and full-length articles by the contributors have been met with objections of various stripes and sizes. It has been a mixture of excitement, hope, prayer, frustration, and calls for mercy for me to read many of those posts and the dialogue that has followed-my hope is that this venture has led us all to grow in learning more about one another and where we come from in our understanding of the Christian Faith. One comment which I have observed that seems to be repeated with an ever-growing frequency by some of our Protestant readers goes something like this: “Well, you Catholics argue for X but so do the Eastern Orthodox!”

Be it Apostolic Succession, opposition to Solo/Sola Scriptura, a Canon that is based more on the Septuagint than the Hebrew Scriptures as collected in Jamnia, or what have you, it seems that the essence of this argument is that because other Christians apart from Catholics assert something about our faith, that something does not argue for the particular correctness of Catholicism. Well, yes and no.

Yes, Catholics adhere to X, and yes, so do other Christians of the Apostolic Churches. Does it then logically follow that the common voice of Catholics and the other Traditional Christian Churches should not be heeded? Not by any means. As I recall my own days of searching and wrestling with Tradition as contrasted to my former Reformed Protestant home, I knew that the variety of options before me did not make their common voice any less persuasive, or fearful to consider. I recall saying with much trepidation that God had clearly called me to become Catholic or some flavor of Orthodoxy (Eastern, Oriental, Coptic, Armenian, etc.). It was a huge change that I knew would come to my life, and while I did not know where I would end up exactly, I knew without a doubt that the arguments over Apostolic Succession had me needing to leave Protestantism.

And so I write this post in dedication to the ones who make this sort of argument–realize what you are saying when you say that the Orthodox Churches also advocate a particular doctrine being supported by the writers on Called to Communion. The Catholic and Orthodox Churches speak in unison about so many things. That we differ on important matters like the nature of the episcopacy, particularly the successor of Peter, is worthy of reflection for Catholics, Orthodox and those Protestants who see our common message. But despite our differences, we are so close. We make the same call to communion with the Church Fathers. We venerate the Holy Mother of Our God (on this note, I want to parenthetically state that devotion to the Blessed Virgin is more full and flowering in the East than the West in terms of during the liturgical services, but my point is that Protestants should feel less at home in an Orthodox or Eastern Catholic Parish than they would in a Roman Catholic service, if Marian devotion is troubling). We beseech our Lord and King to have mercy on the souls of those who have gone to their eternal Rest. We view some of God’s faithful saints who lived lives of exceptional holiness as those to whom we may call upon in prayers on earth. We see the laying on of hands from the Apostles and their successors as something integral to ordination. We proclaim that we partake of the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord in the Holy Eucharistic Mystery. We call upon Christ’s representative to hear our confessions of weakness and trust in his priestly prayer to absolve us of our sins, not through his own power, but through the grace of the ministry of Christ our high priest which has been passed down through that laying on of hands. We are anointed with oil for a fuller reception of the Holy Spirit in confirmation/chrismation. When we see our frailty of human illness, we are anointed again and partake of the body and the blood of Our Lord if possible, confident that the words of St. James will be true for us, and that any sins we have committed will be forgiven, again through the prayer of the elders who pray to God for us. We join ourselves to history with a liturgical calendar that reminds us of the rhythm of life. We fast on a regular basis. We see sacred art as a help and not some idolatrous hindrance to our spiritual life. In fact, we were together at an Ecumenical Council where iconoclasm was not only thought to be bad aesthetics–it was declared to be heresy.

Doctrinally, we do have our differences. But for my part as a Catholic, I am taught to thank God for the fullness of the sacraments that exist in Eastern Orthodox Churches that are not in communion with the Pope. In fact, as of the time of this writing, I have two good friends who are catechumens in the Antiochian Orthodox Church. When I have heard of their departure from Protestantism, I did not hesitate to express my joy at this growth in union with the Church that has existed since the time Our Lord’s ministry.

This joy is not something that I do of my own analysis or affections. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is even more joyful than me when it speaks of what we share in common with the Eastern Orthodox. Let’s examine two key points from its discussion of the Orthodox Churches.

838 “The Church knows that she is joined in many ways to the baptized who are honored by the name of Christian, but do not profess the Catholic faith in its entirety or have not preserved unity or communion under the successor of Peter.” Those “who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in a certain, although imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church.” With the Orthodox Churches, this communion is so profound “that it lacks little to attain the fullness that would permit a common celebration of the Lord’s Eucharist.”

And later in the Catechism we read:

1399 The Eastern churches that are not in full communion with the Catholic Church celebrate the Eucharist with great love. “These Churches, although separated from us, yet possess true sacraments, above all – by apostolic succession – the priesthood and the Eucharist, whereby they are still joined to us in closest intimacy.” A certain communion in sacris, and so in the Eucharist, “given suitable circumstances and the approval of Church authority, is not merely possible but is encouraged.”238

All of the sacraments that the Orthodox Churches celebrate are viewed by Catholics to be entirely valid. We are separated, yes, but we are united in sharing the holy mysteries. This may be something that some readers do not know. One friend of mine who left evangelicalism for Orthodoxy had no idea that we as Catholics accept all of the sacraments of the Orthodox, but yes, our affection goes beyond smiles. It goes to the center of our spiritual life in the Church. If I were on my deathbed and there were no Catholic priests around, I would beg an Orthodox priest to say the last rites to me, and I would be faithful to my devotion to the Pope as the Bishop who is first among equals.

In contrast, the Catholic Catechism is clear that while our Reformed background is worthy of some admiration, it is simply not on the same ecclesial footing as the Orthodox Church.

1400 Ecclesial communities derived from the Reformation and separated from the Catholic Church, “have not preserved the proper reality of the Eucharistic mystery in its fullness, especially because of the absence of the sacrament of Holy Orders.”239 It is for this reason that, for the Catholic Church, Eucharistic intercommunion with these communities is not possible. However these ecclesial communities, “when they commemorate the Lord’s death and resurrection in the Holy Supper . . . profess that it signifies life in communion with Christ and await his coming in glory.”240

Here we read that there is a deficiency in the sacramental life of the Protestant ecclesial communities, as compared to that of the Orthodox Churches. The same words of closeness and sacramental fullness that were uttered regarding the Eastern Churches are not poured out by the councils and catechetical writers when thoughts turn to Protestantism. Forthcoming discussions here on Called to Communion will flesh out our understanding of the sacrament of Holy Orders, but for now I simply want to emphasize that Catholicism sees Orthodoxy as something far grander than Protestantism. Therefore, if one sees these arguments as a Protestant and feels called to communion vis a vis a conversion to Orthodoxy, this is not something that I as a Catholic bemoan. It is not a nudge in the right direction. Leaving Protestantism for Orthodoxy is to possess the fullness of sacramental life, despite not being in communion with Rome.

In a forthcoming post, I will explain the qualifications to my joy. But before qualifying my joy, I want to embrace and celebrate it. I thank God so much for my Orthodox brethren, and am truly happy to hear of God calling people to Himself through growth in the sacramental life that occurs when one leaves Protestantism for Orthodoxy.

May we all be faithful to His call to growth in faith, hope, and charity. May the divisions that scandalize the Lord and His Church end, so that they may no longer be causes for excuses to consider Tradition.

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In 2008, several of us who contribute here were involved in a Catholic Philosophy forum when Sean Patrick noted that most of us who were in the forum had previously been Reformed. Sean suggested that we start a group blog aimed at dialogue with a Reformed audience. Tom Brown, in the process of converting to the Catholic Church, about the same time, envisioned a site titled “Called to Communion” that would feature weighty articles published in careful sequence, as opposed to the sporadic nature of a blog. The goal was to encourage an in-depth consideration of these important theological issues. We married the two ideas, and the site as it stands now is the result.

Our early lead articles, such as this appreciation of Reformed Christianity, were well received and did not cause much debate. We wanted to focus initially on important issues where we felt we could establish some common ground. Our next set of articles were ecclesiological. Although they presented direct counter-claims to the Reformed position, there weren’t any notable refutations; none of the replies we received challenged the conclusions of the arguments. This was a bit discouraging, and as predicted, those same false assumptions which were refuted in the ecclesiological articles, mostly ecclesiological, continue to be the go-to arguments against our position for many of our regular interlocutors. e.g. We say, “You must read Scripture with the Church,” and they say, “We do,” but they continue to use “Church” in a different way, despite our earlier arguments against their concept of Church.

Certain readers have perceived some of us, particularly myself, as coming across cold and overly confident in our discussions. Part of this, no doubt, is due to personal shortcomings. But some of it, to be fair, is attributable to our culture of relativism. Though we do not speak for the Catholic Church, we represent her in a way. And the Catholic Church is a beacon heralding objective and knowable truth amid the stormy sea of relativism and skepticism in which we’re so accustomed to living, thinking, and unfortunately, worshiping.  To represent her faithfully is, on some level, to stand against the chaotic billows of society.   None of this is an excuse for poor tact (mea culpa), but as Dr. Liccione said in a recent discussion, the Catholic claim is extremely difficult to demonstrate to those caught in the grip of the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion.’ Moreover, one who truly believes in a visible Church established by Christ, when speaking of such, will always clash with another who has only a nominal conception of the same.

Our next set of articles focused on the authority of Scripture and was recently concluded by Tom Brown’s article on the Canon. Bryan Cross and Dr. Neal Judisch previously co-wrote a thorough refutation of Keith Mathison’s thesis regarding sola scriptura versus solo scriptura, which thesis has gained tremendous popularity in contemporary Reformed apologetics. Some readers attempted to contradict this article, but the rebuttals failed to show the arguments to be false. Taken as whole, the Protestant objectors didn’t quite know whether to agree with the argument and disagree with its implications, or to agree with its implications but disagree with the argument. Those in the second camp were the ones whose rebuttals were refuted in the lengthy combox.

We are preparing to close our first major round of lead articles with the next two: on holy orders and apostolic succession. These two will complete the general opening argument we have been making, that without an objective criteria for “Church” independent of personal interpretation of Scripture, an individual assumes for himself the full authority of the Christian magisterium. That is, the individual assumes the entirety of the authority which Catholics reserve to the successors of those appointed by Christ including the successor to St. Peter.

Regardless of how bad the situation in the Church gets, schism is never justified. Moving forward, we hope, against overwhelming odds, to heal that schism. These words I write are unwelcome to those who disagree, but I hope my readers can ask themselves a question that Bryan Cross once asked a denier of schism: “If Rome really were the Church, and you, as a Reformer, were actually in schism, how would you know it?” The Reformers have no answer except, “I would know it because Rome would be faithful to the Scriptures and I would be unfaithful.” But as Mathison stated, any appeal to Scripture is an appeal to private interpretation of Scripture. Therefore, the answer is really, “I would know it because Rome would agree with me.” This natural internalization of the faith is painfully difficult to avoid. “I know I’m a Christian” we reason with ourselves, “and I can’t have been deceived on the fundamentals of what it means to be Christian.” To honestly entertain the possibility that one, especially one advanced in age or ecclesial status, has inherited and acquiesced to an incomplete version of the faith, which is the center of their life, is something akin to fitting a camel through the eye of a needle.

With this difficult road ahead of us, that is, the road to unity, let us proceed in humility and with much prayer.

St Peter Martyr Altarpiece
Fra Angelico
1427-28
Museo di San Marco, Florence

The Aquinas Catechism

In the last year of his life, St. Thomas Aquinas preached a series of sermons during Lent in the city of Naples. According to a contemporary, almost the whole population of the city came daily to hear these sermons. Reginald de Piperno made careful transcripts of these sermons, which were aimed at providing a summary of the faith. In them, St. Thomas preached through the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Sacraments.

In his comments on the line of the Apostles’ Creed “the holy catholic Church,” St. Thomas briefly talks about the four marks of the Church (i.e. one, holy, catholic and apostolic) explicitly taught in the Nicene Creed. One of those four marks is unity. Regarding the unity of the Church, St. Thomas first says the following:

The unity of the Church

Of the first, it must be known that the Church is one. Although various heretics have founded various sects, they do not belong to the Church, since they are but so many divisions whereas the Church is one. Of her it is said: “One is My dove; My perfect one is but one.” (Song of Solomon 6:8)

Various heretics have founded sects, St. Thomas says, but these sects do not belong to the Church. They may very well have been founded by well-intentioned persons; perhaps none of these founders of sects thought they were heretics, or that they were making a schism. But, says St. Thomas, these sects do not belong to the Church. They were founded by mere men. The Church, by contrast, was founded by the incarnate God-man, Jesus Christ. Only by remaining in the Church Christ founded do we truly participate in the supernatural unity Christ imparted to His Church. The sects show that they are not united, by their many divisions. The Church, by contrast, cannot be divided; unity is one of the four essential marks of the Church, because the Church’s unity is Christ’s unity, and Christ cannot be divided. (1 Cor 1:13) Schismatics and dissenters can separate themselves from her in various ways, but they cannot divide her.

St. Thomas goes on to show the three-fold sources of unity in the Church, in the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. He says:

The unity of the Church arises from three sources:

(1) From the unity of faith. All Christians who are of the body of the Church believe the same doctrine. “I beseech you . . . that you all speak the same thing and that there be no schisms among you.” (1 Cor 1:10) And: “One Lord, one faith, one baptism;” (Eph 4:5)

(2) From the unity of hope. All are strengthened in one hope of arriving at eternal life. Hence, the Apostle says: “One body and one Spirit, as you are called in one hope of your calling;” (Eph 4:4)

(3) From the unity of charity. All are joined together in the love of God, and to each other in mutual love: “And the glory which Thou hast given Me, I have given them; that they may be one, as We also are one.” (John 17:22) It is clear that this is a true love when the members are solicitous for one another and sympathetic towards each other: “We may in all things grow up in Him who is the head, Christ. From whom the whole body, being compacted, and fitly joined together, by what every joint supplieth, according to the operation in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in charity.” (Eph 4:15,16) This is because each one ought to make use of the grace God grants him, and be of service to his neighbor.

No one ought to be indifferent to the Church, or allow himself to be cut off and expelled from it; for there is but one Church in which men are saved, just as outside of the ark of Noah no one could be saved.

This is the unity of the Body of Christ. First that we share the same faith, i.e. the same doctrine, and the same sacraments. We also share the same hope, i.e. the hope of eternal life, not merely everlasting existence, but a glorious union with God in which we enjoy the Beatific Vision and thus enter into His eternal life of perfect beatitude. Finally, we are joined together in the supernatural virtue called ‘charity’ (i.e. agape), by which we freely give ourselves in joyful sacrifice to Christ, serving each other for His sake, all working together to build up His Body, the Church. Persons in schisms or sects are not all working to build up the same Body. They work to build up their own schism or sect, even seeking to snatch away members from the true Body. This opposition is evidence that the persons involved are not all members of the same Body.

Summa Contra Gentiles

In Chapter 76 of Book IV of his Summa Contra Gentiles, St. Thomas gives further insight into the nature of the unity of the Church. First he explains why bishops are necessary to administer the Sacrament of Order, also called Holy Orders. He writes:

There must be some power of higher ministry in the Church to administer the Sacrament of Order; and this is the episcopal power, which, though not exceeding the power of the simple priest in the consecration of the Body of Christ, exceeds it in its dealings with the faithful. The presbyter’s power is derived from the episcopal; and whenever any action, rising above what is common and usual, has to be done upon the faithful people, that is reserved to bishops; and it is by episcopal authority that presbyters do what is committed to them; and in their ministry they make use of things consecrated by bishops, as in the Eucharist the chalice, altar-stone and palls.

St. Thomas is saying here that with respect to the power to consecrate the Eucharist, the bishop has no greater power than does the priest. However, the presbyter’s (i.e. priest’s) power to consecrate the Eucharist is derived from the bishop’s power. It is by the bishop’s power, says St. Thomas, that presbyters “do what is committed to them.” They receive their power from the bishops; they also receive their commission from the bishops, and the sacred vessels they use have been consecrated by the bishops.

St. Thomas then gives three reasons why Christ established the Church to have one visible head. He writes:

1. Though populations are different in different dioceses and cities, still, as there is one Church, there must be one Christian people. As then in the spiritual people of one Church there is required one Bishop, who is Head of all that people; so in the whole Christian people it is requisite that there be one Head of the whole Church.

St. Thomas shows here that the requirement of one person as the visible head is a principle at every level of a society. Even though the universal Church is spread out all over the world, yet it is one society by the same principle of visible unity we find at every more particular level. Every parish has a priest, and if there is more than one priest, the other priests are his assistants. They do not all have equal authority, because that would lead to strife, conflict and division. Likewise, every diocese has a bishop who has charge over the priests in his diocese. If there is more than one bishop in a diocese, the others are auxillary bishops there to assist and serve the diocesan bishop, so that there is no cause for faction between them. Then St. Thomas points out that this need for a visible head at these local levels is no less present at the universal level. Just as the local Church requires a visible head, so the universal (i.e. catholic Church) requires a visible head. This visible head of the catholic Church supports and maintains the unity of the universal Church spread out throughout the whole world.

St. Thomas next provides a second reason:

2. One requisite of the unity of the Church is the agreement of all the faithful in faith. When questions of faith arise, the Church would be rent by diversity of judgments, were it not preserved in unity by the judgment of one. But in things necessary Christ is not wanting to His Church, which He has loved, and has shed His blood for it: since even of the Synagogue the Lord says: What is there that I ought further to have done for my vineyard and have not done it.? (Isai. v, 4.) We cannot doubt then that by the ordinance of Christ one man presides over the whole Church.

Here St. Thomas makes the following argument. The unity of the Church requires unity of faith (i.e. doctrine and sacraments). But when disputes about the faith arise, the Church would be torn apart into many schisms if there were not ultimately one person having the authority to adjudicate these disputes. Hence it is necessary for preserving the unity of the faith that there be one person presiding in the Church, having the authority to resolve such disputes. But Christ would not leave His Church without anything that is necessary for her preservation, since He has already shown that He is willing to shed all His blood for His Church. Therefore since such an office is necessary for the Church, and Christ would not fail to provide her with what is necessary, we cannot doubt that it is by Christ’s ordination that one man presides over the whole Church.

Lastly, St. Thomas provides a third reason:

3. None can doubt that the government of the Church is excellently well arranged, arranged as it is by Him through whom kings reign and lawgivers enact just things (Prov. viii, 15). But the best form of government for a multitude is to be governed by one: for the end of government is the peace and unity of its subjects: and one man is a more apt source of unity than many together.

The best form of government for a multitude is to governed by one. That is because the purpose of government is the peace and unity of the citizens governed. One man is better able to provide a unified course of direction than many leaders all with equal authority. This is why each country has one person as its governor at any given time, even if there are other governing bodies assisting and collaborating the individual leader. We all recognize the need for a unified head of government. This principle is no less true in the Church. The same God who ordered and arranged the natural requirements of governing cities and nations, is the same God who established and ordered His Church. St. Thomas is here implicitly making use of the principle that grace builds on nature. Just as the best form of government in the natural order requires a single visible head, so because grace builds on nature, the best form of government in the order of grace (i.e. the Church) likewise requires a single visible head. It would be arbitrary to acknowledge that a unified visible head is necessary at every level of the Church particular, but deny that a unified visible head is necessary at the level of the Church universal.

St. Thomas then anticipates and responds to two rather common Protestant objections, first, that the head of the universal Church is only Christ, and not a man whom Christ has appointed. He writes:

But if any will have it that the one Head and one Shepherd is Christ, as being the one Spouse of the one Church, his view is inadequate to the facts. For though clearly Christ Himself gives effect to the Sacraments of the Church, — He it is who baptizes, He forgives sins, He is the true Priest who has offered Himself on the altar of the cross, and by His power His Body is daily consecrated at our altars, — nevertheless, because He was not to be present in bodily shape with all His faithful, He chose ministers and would dispense His gifts to His faithful people through their hands. And by reason of the same future absence it was needful for Him to issue His commission to some one to take care of this universal Church in His stead. Hence He said to Peter before His Ascension, Feed my sheep (John xxi, 1) and before His Passion, Thou in thy turn confirm thy brethren (Luke xxii, 32); and to him alone He made the promise, To thee I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matt. xvi, 19).

St. Thomas shows that even though Christ is present in the sacraments of the Church, this sacramental presence is not adequate for the visible governance of the universal Church (as it is not adequate for visible governance of the local parish or diocese). This is why Christ set aside St. Peter, entrusted to him the keys of the Kingdom, and commissioned him to feed Christ’s sheep and strengthen his brethren. Because Christ, after His ascension is invisible in heaven, and because His sacramental presence is inadequate for the role of visible governance of the universal Church, therefore it was necessary that Christ choose one man to stand in His place as visible head of the universal Church, until His return.

St. Thomas then anticipates and responds to a second Protestant objection:

Nor can it be said that although He gave this dignity to Peter, it does not pass from Peter to others. For Christ instituted His Church to last to the end of the world, according to the text: He shall sit upon the throne of David and in his kingdom, to confirm and strengthen it in justice and judgment from henceforth, now, and for ever (Isai. ix, 7). Therefore, in constituting His ministers for the time, He intended their power to pass to posterity for the benefit of His Church to the end of the world, as He Himself says: Lo, I am with you to the end of the world (Matt. xxviii, 20).

The second objection is that the unique authority that Christ gave to St. Peter to be visible head of the universal Church, passed away with the death of St. Peter, and did not pass on to others who succeeded him. St. Thomas refutes that objection by showing that the need for such authority did not cease with the death of St. Peter, because Christ established His Church to endure until the end of the world.  Therefore Christ, knowing that the Church would continue long after the death of St. Peter, intended that the power He entrusted to St. Peter would pass on to his successors, “for the benefit of the Church to the end of the world.”

St. Thomas concludes:

Hereby is cast out the presumptuous error of some, who endeavour to withdraw themselves from obedience and subjection to Peter, not recognizing his successor, the Roman Pontiff, for the pastor of the Universal Church.

To reject obedience and subjection to St. Peter (and his successors) is to reject those persons who, by His authorization stand in His place, to govern His universal Church until He returns. Once a person recognizes that Christ entrusted this authority over the universal Church to St. Peter and his successors, he understands that to listen to St. Peter and his successors is to listen to Christ, and to reject St. Peter and his successors is to reject Christ.¹

Summa Theologica

In St. Thomas’ Summa Theologica we read the following:

Wherever there are several authorities directed to one purpose, there must needs be one universal authority over the particular authorities, because in all virtues and acts the order is according to the order of their ends (Ethic. i, 1,2). Now the common good is more Godlike than the particular good. Wherefore above the governing power which aims at a particular good there must be a universal governing power in respect of the common good, otherwise there would be no cohesion towards the one object. Hence since the whole Church is one body, it behooves, if this oneness is to be preserved, that there be a governing power in respect of the whole Church, above the episcopal power whereby each particular Church is governed, and this is the power of the Pope. Consequently those who deny this power are called schismatics as causing a division in the unity of the Church. Again, between a simple bishop and the Pope there are other degrees of rank corresponding to the degrees of union, in respect of which one congregation or community includes another; thus the community of a province includes the community of a city, and the community of a kingdom includes the community of one province, and the community of the whole world includes the community of one kingdom.²

The argument here is similar to what we saw in the Summa Contra Gentiles. The first point has to do with acts ordered to a single end. Whenever there are multiple authorities directed to one purpose, there must be a universal authority over these particular authorities, to order their acts toward one single end. Otherwise each authority will not be acting in unison with the other authorities. This is why armies have generals, and why there must be a commander-in-chief. If there is not a single unified leader of the army, then its various units will not be coordinated together to act in concer in one unified purpose and plan. Likewise, if there were not a visible governing authority for the universal Church, then the bishops of the various dioceses would likewise not be ordered in their actions toward one end in the visible Church. They would each be doing their own activity, according to their own plan and vision. But their actions would not be ordered toward one end, and so the universal Church would reduce to a collection of particular Churches. Just as without a commander-in-chief there would not be one army but as many armies as highest-ranking generals, so without a visible authority over the universal Church, there would not be one universal Church, but as many particular Churches as there are bishops.

According to St. Thomas, to deny the “power of the Pope,” is to make oneself a schismatic, by causing a division in the unity of the Church. The Church itself does not lose unity when a schism occurs; her unity is Christ’s unity. Rather, when a schism occurs, the Church loses the participation in her unity by the schismatic who separates himself from the authority of the Pope.

One other place in Aquinas’ Summa Theologica is notable for its implications regarding the unity of the Church. That is the section on the sin of schism. In Summa Theologica II-II Q.39 a.1, St. Thomas writes:

As Isidore says (Etym. viii, 3), schism takes its name “from being a scission of minds,” and scission is opposed to unity. Wherefore the sin of schism is one that is directly and essentially opposed to unity. For in the moral, as in the physical order, the species is not constituted by that which is accidental. Now, in the moral order, the essential is that which is intended, and that which results beside the intention, is, as it were, accidental. Hence the sin of schism is, properly speaking, a special sin, for the reason that the schismatic intends to sever himself from that unity which is the effect of charity: because charity unites not only one person to another with the bond of spiritual love, but also the whole Church in unity of spirit.

Accordingly schismatics properly so called are those who, willfully and intentionally separate themselves from the unity of the Church; for this is the chief unity, and the particular unity of several individuals among themselves is subordinate to the unity of the Church, even as the mutual adaptation of each member of a natural body is subordinate to the unity of the whole body. Now the unity of the Church consists in two things; namely, in the mutual connection or communion of the members of the Church, and again in the subordination of all the members of the Church to the one head, according to Colossians 2:18-19: “Puffed up by the sense of his flesh, and not holding the Head, from which the whole body, by joints and bands, being supplied with nourishment and compacted, groweth unto the increase of God.” Now this Head is Christ Himself, Whose viceregent in the Church is the Sovereign Pontiff. Wherefore schismatics are those who refuse to submit to the Sovereign Pontiff, and to hold communion with those members of the Church who acknowledge his supremacy.

We can learn something about the unity of the Church by studying the sin against that unity. Strictly speaking, says St. Thomas, the sin of schism is one in which the person willfully and intentionally separates himself from the unity of the Church.³ The person who does so in ignorance or unintentionally, is less culpable (if culpable). But the person who discovers himself to be in schism, even if born into that schism, is culpable if he does not seek to cease to be in schism. To willfully remove oneself from the unity of the Church, or to willfully remain in schism from the Church, is to sin against charity. As heresy is a sin against faith, so schism is a sin against the charity which “unites the whole Church in unity of spirit.”

What does it mean to be in schism? Some Christians think that so long as they love other Christians, they are therefore not in schism. But St. Thomas explains that the unity of the Church consists in two things: the mutual connection of the members of the Church, and the subordination of all the members to the Church’s visible head, who represents Christ. So there are two ways to be a schismatic, according to St. Thomas. One way is to refuse to hold communion with other members of the Church. The other way is to refuse to submit to the Sovereign Pontiff. Both forms of schism are sins against charity, for they both act against the charity by which the whole Church is held together in love.

Here we see the relation between authority and charity, described earlier this week in Jeremy Tate’s essay. Love and authority are not mutually exclusive. Rather, love for Christ is expressed by humbly subordinating ourselves to those with His authorization, especially the successor of the Apostle to whom Christ entrusted the keys of the Kingdom.

1. cf. Luke 10:16
2. Summa Theologica Supp. Q.40 a.6
3. Here we see an implicit distinction between formal schism (intentional, willful schism), and material schism, i.e. schism that is unintentional or done in ignorance.

The Bible is a source of unity, albeit an imperfect source of unity, if by ‘unity’ we mean ‘of one mind.’ To those of us who have spent time staring across the divide between the Reformed faith and Catholicism, it can seem that the magnitude of the differences in our beliefs cannot be overstated. Catholics have statues in their homes and kiss crosses. They pray to Saints, believing that the Saints can intercede on their behalf. They even pick favorite saints and venerate dead body parts. They have celibate Deacons, Priests, Bishops, Monseigneurs, Cardinals, Popes, Nuns, and Monks. They have 73 books in their Bible, and seven sacraments. Reformed Christians have the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster and Belgic Confessions, and the Canons of Dort. They believe in double predestination. They have very different kinds of Deacons, and have Ruling Elders, and married Teaching Elders or Pastors. They have Presbyteries or Classes, and General Assemblies or Synods. They have 66 books in their Bible, and two sacraments.

However, if we could step back a little from our internecine disagreements, we could see the unity of belief that does exist between us as Catholics and Reformed Christians. Unlike the Atheist, we believe in God. Unlike the Agnostic, we believe we know God. Unlike the Muslim or the Jew, we believe that Christ is the Son of God, having come to redeem mankind. Unlike the Mormon, we believe that Christ is one person of the Trinity, of the same essence as God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. We believe that God made all that is, that the Holy Spirit is working in the present age, and that the dead will rise again for a final judgment. We believe that the Bible is Divinely inspired, and free from error in all its parts.

I believe that we Christians have unity of mind on all of these points primarily because of the Bible. True, we often apply different hermeneutical methodologies to the Bible, and we also bring very differently shaded glasses. But these influences and even biases do not deprive the Bible completely of its objective instructive value, and certainly cannot refute the work of the Holy Spirit where He wills to work through our reading of Sacred Scripture. The more we draw to the Bible, the more we will remain steadfast in the great truths that Christians have been able to continue to share in spite of the divide of the Protestant Reformation.

But the Bible is not a source of ‘unity,’ if by unity we mean ‘of one essence.’ First, as my recent article, The Canon Question, discusses, we do not even have the same Bible. The Catholic Bible has seven extra books, as well as additions to other books. Many printings of Protestant Bibles, through the use of segregating lines and critical footnotes, call into serious question several pericopae within accepted New Testament books. Because of the Protestant belief that the Bible is our sole infallible teaching authority, Reformed Christians see the Catholic use of additional texts as an inclusion of fallible texts within what is supposedly infallible. Thus, the Bible is a cause of division between us right from the point of attempting to define the Bible’s scope.

Second, the Bible is not a source of essential unity between us because, as the Reformed faith rests on the doctrine of sola scriptura, the Bible remains on the fulcrum of the Protestant-Catholic division. The brokenness between Catholics and Reformed Christians is most visible in our not being in communion with each other. This act represents a deeper break of unity, our brokenness over the meaning and reality of the communion sacrifice, as well as our brokenness over the sacramental realities, and over the meaning of the ordained offices that confect them. Private interpretation of the Bible resulting from the doctrine of sola scriptura led to these and our other many points of fracture.  For this reason, I believe that the Bible is not a source of essential Christian unity.

I believe there is a way ahead for us–a way by which we can all see Sacred Scripture as the source of unity that it should be. Reformed Christians need to reflect upon the criterion they accept and allow to define their Biblical canon for them, and upon whom is the proper interpreter of Scripture. Catholics, on the other hand, need to improve their overall Biblical fluency, and their understanding of its authority relationship with the Church. Conversations between Catholics and Reformed Christians where all parties are well versed in Scripture can yield great fruit in both mutual understanding and Biblical understanding.

On this Seventh Day of the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, let us reflect on God’s promise to perfect his Bride the Church. May we be vessels of this process, and harbingers of Christian peace. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

The ante-Nicene Church was, from a political perspective, an illegal network that broke away from the tolerated Jewish religion. This underground status made Christian unity a true challenge. After the Edict of Milan in 313 AD when Christianity became legal, great strides were made towards liturgical and episcopal unity, but that unity developed and flourished from a foundation of unity which extends all the way back to the Jerusalem Church of Acts. I would like to examine three principles of unity in the early centuries of Christianity: government, liturgy, and doctrine.

Government
The Church, as the Scriptures explained, is a Body and therefore her unity is hierarchical. This episcopal unity is expressed most clearly in the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch and in St. Cyprian of Carthage, particularly in his treatise De Unitate. But this unity isn’t mere pragmatism; it is intrinsically related to the apostolic mission. Jesus commanded the apostles to “Do this in memory of Me” and also to “make disciples of all nations,” and in carrying out this mission, they appointed elders and overseers in the churches they planted. The early fathers then rightly saw the episcopal office as a key principle of sacramental unity. To be outside of the rightful bishop was to be outside of the altar of Christ. The mission of the Church was to offer the sacrifice of Eucharistia, and this was impossible outside of the rightful leaders who had been entrusted with the episcopacy.

Liturgy
Although Charlemagne made great strides towards this end, it wasn’t until the Council of Trent that liturgical uniformity dominated the face of the Western Church. One can only imagine what type of liturgical variance you would find in the ante-Nicene Church as you visited communities in different areas. As far as liturgical texts go, we have next to nothing from this period outside of Hippolytus so we are left to piece the early liturgy together as an archeologist constructs a dinosaur from incomplete fossils. This reconstruction is largely based on 4th century texts, and by the time these descriptive texts surface, several strands of liturgical tradition are in place. But we know that they all developed from a single liturgical tradition.

The existence of these differences does not indicate a lack of true liturgical unity. In fact, when St. Polycarp visited Rome, despite their lack of agreement, Pope Anicetus conceded the administration of the Eucharist to the Eastern bishop. This moving account is a powerful testimony of the liturgical unity even between East and West in the mid second century. St. Polycarp’s disciple, St. Irenaeus, is another liturgical bridge from East to West; moving from Asia Minor to Gaul where he was eventually installed as the bishop of Lyons.

The liturgy was normative for the Church in both action and belief. Lex orandi lex credendi; the prayer of the early Church informed her faith and vice versa. This faith of the Church, which logically precedes the faith of the individual who is united to it,¹ is built on the apostolic foundation. Thus, when the Christological controversies appeared, the Church looked, in part, to the unified source of her liturgical life. As scholars such as Pelikan have observed, she responded, “We’ve been worshiping Jesus this whole time, He must be God!”

It is clear that this liturgical unity resulted from an original unified source. It was not a “lowest common denominator” unity, nor was it an average of the different strands of tradition. This unity was not an alliance of churchmen; that is to say, most importantly, it was not manufactured by men.

Doctrine
The importance of doctrinal unity must not be overlooked. Again, we obviously begin with a wholly unified source (the apostolic teaching), but as generations passed, could the Church be self confident that she had retained it without error or corruption? St. Hegesippus believed so in the second century. En route to Rome, he made inquiries of many bishops and found them to be united in doctrine all over the Christian world. Tertullian, in his days as a Catholic, finds that only churches which were apostolic had the right to interpret the Scriptures, but younger churches, who were not founded by an apostle, were also called apostolic in virtue of their submission in unity to that same apostolic deposit.

The regula fidei, that which had been believed ‘everywhere and always,’ was a powerful unifying force in the early Church. Of course, this deposit must be understood in its correct context, i.e. informed by the divine liturgical life of the Church and in submission to the rightful leaders. Doctrine was a unifying force, but alone it could not suffice for the sacramental unity we see in the early Church.

Conclusion
We have seen that in spite of her challenges as an illegal institution, the ante-Nicene Church was strongly united for several important reasons. Even the sporadic persecution of the ante-Nicene Church was in some ways a catalyst to unity. In the dispute with Paul of Samosata, secular legislation began to play a significant role in Church uniformity, and this would be increasingly true at Nicaea and thereafter. But the ante-Nicene Church was sacramentally united before these developments solidified her ecclesiology. The Holy Spirit used all of these things to preserve the unity of the Church.

If we are to revive that sacramental unity enjoyed by our forefathers, it will only be through the vehicle for unity which Christ established. We will not study our way into unity, nor will we arrange our liturgies until they are similar enough. We cannot ignore enough doctrinal differences until we feel united, and we cannot draw up an arbitrary list of ‘essentials for salvation’ and pretend that this will suffice. This is all to say that if we are to be united once again, as the ante-Nicene Church was, it shall be achieved through the Church and not the university. Reunification will not be achieved by textual criticism or by commentary and far less by sentimentalism. It will be achieved by Christians on their knees before Christ’s altar.

1. CCC 1124 – http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p2s1c1a2.htm