Catholic and Protestant

 

The Anglican Church is both Catholic and Protestant, although the liberalism that has become far too prevalent in the Church in both England and North America is neither Catholic nor Protestant nor, for that matter, Christian, but is rather a revisionist theology that borrows Christian terms and redefines them to fit the ideas of the post-Christian secularism that “Western Civilization” adapted after ceasing to be Christendom.  While orthodox Anglicans of both high and low varieties are usually okay with the expression “Reformed Catholic” some Anglo-Catholics are as allergic to the term Protestant as some evangelical Anglicans, those who share some traits of what I call Hyper-Protestantism, are of the term Catholic.

 

I maintain that we ought to embrace both words, albeit with the caveat that they are properly defined.

 

“Protestant” requires the most definition. It has become a rather vague term, designating any ecclesiastical group not in fellowship with the Roman See except those who parted ways with Rome prior to the sixteenth century like the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox or whose breech with Rome was based on new innovations Rome introduced after the Council of Trent like the Old Catholics.  Used this way, it conveys little to nothing in the way of positive information about what these groups believe.  For the term to be meaningful rather than useless it needs to be defined in a way that identifies beliefs that all Protestant groups hold in common.  This requires that it be less inclusive than is the current norm.

 

The words that we would most naturally use as substitutes for “Protestant” come with their own sets of difficulties, however.  “Reformed,” while it sounds better to the ear than “Protestant” and taken literally is a precise statement of what we mean when we say the Anglican Church is Protestant, that is, that is has undergone a “Reformation”, comes with a problem that is the opposite of that attached to “Protestant.”  It is too precise.  Especially when it is spelled with a capital R, it identifies a specific ecclesiastical tradition, that which emerged from the Reformation in Switzerland and as a theological term it indicates the system associated with the Reformed Church, and in particular the interpretation of predestination adapted at the Synod of Dort.  While a sort of Calvinism was probably the predominant theology among Anglican clergy of the last half of the sixteenth century and there was an attempt to enshrine this in the official theology of the Church by appending the Lambeth Articles to the Articles of Religion this attempt ultimately failed because it went against the overall spirit of the first Elizabethan era which was to avoid committing the Church to either side in the disputes between the mainstream traditions of the continental Reformation.  This meant that the slight slant towards the Swiss Reformed tradition that had been introduced late in the reforms under Edward VI was removed by the reforms under Elizabeth I. Examples of this can be seen in the revision of the Articles of Religion into the current Thirty-Nine from the Edwardian Forty-Two and the dropping of the black rubric from the Elizabethan editions of the Book of Common Prayer.

 

In the sixteenth century “Protestant” was largely a term of abuse used by the Roman See and its adherents for the Reformers and their followers.  Their own preferred self-designation was “evangelical” but as with the term “Reformed” little would be gained by substituting this for “Protestant.”  By the twentieth century, especially in North America, this term had come to have a rather different set of connotations than in the sixteenth century.  It has connotations of pietism, puritanism, revivalism and an approach to religion centred on personal experience of the type that the sixteenth century Magisterial Reformers would most likely have denounced as the enthusiasm and extremism associated with those they dubbed Schwärmerei.  Alternately it can suggest a revised version of fundamentalism that is less separatist (good) but also far more willing to compromise on the infallible authority of Scripture (bad). 

 

There is also the problem that the self-application of this term by the sixteenth century Reformers and their followers was based on the mistaken idea that they had recovered a Gospel that the Church had lost.  The Gospel is clearly identified in the New Testament as the message that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of eyewitnesses.  It is at the heart of the faith confessed in both the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds as well as the Athanasian Symbol, along with the basic truths that identify the Christ proclaimed in the Gospel (that there is one God, Who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that the Son, while remaining fully God, became truly Man, by taking unto Himself a whole human nature through His miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost and birth of the Virgin Mary).  It was never lost by the Church.  If the Reformers recovered anything it was the Pauline doctrine of justification, but this is not the Gospel.  The Pauline doctrine of justification – that it is by faith and not by works, or as the Reformers put it, by faith alone – is a doctrine about the Gospel, but it is not the Gospel itself.  The Gospel is Christocentric – it is about Jesus Christ. Justification by faith and not works is anthropocentric – it is about us, and how we receive the benefit of what the Gospel proclaims.  To claim that justification by faith alone is itself the Gospel is to place us rather than Jesus Christ at the centre of the Gospel.

 

Rather than abandon it for these alternatives, it makes more sense to retain “Protestant” with a proper definition.  The definition need include no more than two positive affirmations of belief.  The first is that the Bible as God’s written Word is the authoritative standard of truth to which the Church’s doctrine and tradition must conform.  The second is that the salvation which Jesus Christ accomplished for us in the events proclaimed in the Gospel is in all of its aspects given to us freely as a gift which we receive by faith rather than by our works.  

 

“Catholic”, as stated, requires less definition.  This is the ancient term – the first recorded use of it is in the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch who was martyred early in the second century – that designated the whole Church as distinguished from the Church in a specific location (the Church in Rome, the Church in Galatia, and so forth).  It is the Greek word for whole – which is also the root from which the English word whole is derived – with the prefix kata attached as an intensifier.  In addition to designating the whole Church, the early Christians used it to distinguish the true faith from heresy.  This is how the term is used in the Athanasian Symbol, in, for example, its first statement “Whosoever would be saved needeth before all things to hold fast the Catholic Faith.”  Used this way, it is basically synonymous with orthodox, but note that the usage of Catholic as orthodox is derived from the meaning of Catholic as whole.  The Catholic faith, the orthodox faith, does not include doctrines that are particular to one place or one time, but is the faith confessed by the whole Church of Christ.  As. St. Vincent of Lerins famously put it is the faith confessed “everywhere, in all times, and by all.”

 

“Protestant” and “Catholic”, so defined, should not be thought to be at odds with each other.  A Catholicism that is defined by what is believed and practiced by the whole Church, in all times and places, rather than what may be particular in one place and time, will not include such things as mandatory celibacy for clergy, restricting Communion to one kind for the laity, an intermediate state for the faithful prior to the Final Judgement that resembles hell except in that it is temporary, supererogatory works and a treasury of merit, indulgences and dispensations, that are innovations of the Roman Church from after when she and the Churches of the four ancient Patriarchs of the East broke fellowship with each other at the end of the first Christian millennium.  These things have never been part of the faith and practice of the Eastern Churches.  The Protestantism that rejects these on the grounds of their being unscriptural is not rejecting anything that can truly be said to be Catholic.  That having been said, there are ideas commonly thought to be “Protestant” that are at odds with Catholicism properly defined.  Examples of these include a) the idea that the true “Church” is not an organized community/society but an aggregate term for speaking of all people who considered as individuals are Christian believers, b) the idea that ecclesiastical government (episcopal, Presbyterian, congregational) is adiopha rather than of Apostolic provenance, c) the idea that when Holy Communion is said to be an anamnesis or memorial of the Lord’s death this means a depiction in the present of an event in the past rather than the means given to us by grace whereby we partake in time of the Lord’s sacrifice which has been taken out of time and into eternity by His offering of Himself in the Tabernacle built not with hands in Heaven, d) the idea that baptism, the sacrament of entry under the New Covenant corresponding with circumcision under the Old, unlike the New Covenant itself is less inclusive rather than more and should therefore be withheld from the infants of Christian parents, and e) that when the Son of God “was made flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father)” so that He could say to St. Philip “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” this did not effect a fundamental change from when God said to Israel through Moses under the Old Covenant “ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the LORD spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire.”  Just as none of the beliefs and practices that Rome introduced after the Schism and which Protestantism rejected is truly Catholic, so none of these ideas that conflict with what is truly Catholic should be considered essential to what is truly Protestant.  That all of them are wrong is demonstrable from the Scriptures.[1]

 

Rather than picking “Protestant” or “Catholic” to describe our Church, orthodox Anglicans should embrace both terms, defining “Protestant” so as to include the supreme authority of Scripture and the freeness of the gift of Christ’s salvation received by faith[2] but to exclude ideas that conflict with what is truly Catholic in that it belongs to the faith and practice of the whole Church since the earliest times and defining “Catholic” so as to include what belongs to the faith and practice of the whole Church from the earliest times but to exclude those distinctly Roman errors rightly excised from our English Church in the Reformation.

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[1] That a) is wrong is evident from both the Greek word for Church, ekklesia, which denotes a group that has met or assembled, and from how the New Testament uses the word – it is always a visible community of Christian believers, never just a convenient way of speaking of X, Y, and Z Christians, regardless of whether they have ever met.   With regards to b), the episcopal polity is clearly of Apostolic provenance in the New Testament – the Apostles themselves, along with those invited to share in their governance such as SS Timothy and Titus, are the bishops in the sense of the governors of the Church, presiding as the top tier of a ministry which like that of the Old Testament Church has three tiers, the middle being that of the presbyters and the lower tier the deacons.  That the Apostles were the governors and the New Testament was written while they were still alive is the reason the word bishop had not yet become the official designation of the governors and is sometimes used of presbyters.  This is a seer/prophet matter and does not negate the New Testament’s clear testimony to the Apostolic provenance of the ecclesiastical government found in all ancient Churches prior to the sixteenth century.  With regards to c), look up every occurrence of anamnesis in the Bible, LXX Old Testament and New Testament.   In none of these does it mean something intended to call something from the past to our mental recollection.  That Christ died in time, but took His sacrifice out of time and into eternity by offering it in the Heavenly Tabernacle is a key theme of the epistle to the Hebrews.  With regards to d), that baptism takes the place of circumcision can be demonstrated from Colossians 2:11-13 and that the New Covenant is more inclusive than the Old is rather the point of Christ’s commission to take His Gospel and baptize all nations, as well as of St. Paul’s frequent comments about the Old Testament Law, which distinguished Israel from other nations, being removed as a “wall of partition” between them.  That infants, circumcised on the eight day under the Old Covenant, would not be excluded from baptism under the New, is the only reasonable inference from this and is basically explicitly stated by the Lord when He rebuked His disciples from not allowing the infants to be brought to Him.  The words quoted from St. John’s Gospel in e) ought to be sufficient to rebut it.  Obviously the Incarnation changed everything.  The arguments that St. John of Damascus and St. Theodore the Studite advanced against the iconoclasts and which won out in the seventh ecumenical council were built firmly upon the foundation of the Incarnation.  While Christians who adopt iconoclasm like to think they are walking in the footsteps of King Josiah and that Christians who reject their iconoclasm are tainted with pagan idolatry, in reality the iconoclasts have adopted a position typical of monotheistic religions that reject the Incarnation.

[2] When Dr. Luther said that justification is by “faith alone”, by “alone” he excluded only what St. Paul had already excluded in Romans and Galatians, our own works, and for the very reason St. Paul gives for excluding these in Romans 4, that if it were by works it would be a wage paid to us rather than a gift freely given.  Faith is the hand by which we receives the freely given grace of God and in this function it is indeed alone in that nothing else we do can either do this instead of faith or alongside faith.  This does not exclude the sacraments as means of grace, as ought to be evident from what Dr. Luther, Calvin, and our own Anglican formularies have to say about them.  In the giving of a gift, two hands are always involved, the hand of the recipient and the hand of the giver.  The sacraments are the hand of the Giver working through the means of His Church.  Nor does it say anything about any other function of faith, such as its being one of the three elements of basic Christian character alongside hope and Christian love.  Nor is it some sort of ontological statement.  This adequately answers any reasonable objection someone might try to make to it on the grounds of theology that is actually Catholic.  When Rome anathematized it in the Council of Trent, and the Eastern Church rejected it as found in the Confession of Cyril I Lucaris, what they rejected was the idea that someone can gain acceptance before God by getting all of his intellectual ducks lined up properly while living however he pleases. This, however, is not what Dr. Luther meant but is rather a form of salvation by works in which visible outward works have been replaced by invisible inner works.  The Protestant doctrine can only be properly understood as speaking of faith as the hand that receives the gift of salvation.  That salvation is a gift we receive rather than something we earn or achieve for ourselves is a Catholic truth that both the Roman and Eastern Churches traditionally affirm, a fact one needs only look at the early history of the struggles against the rigorist schismatics the Donatists and Novatians and against the heresy of Pelagius to discover, but it had become badly obscured, especially at the popular level, in the Roman Church by the end of the fifteenth century.

The Bible and the Church Part One: A False Opposition

In an Anglican Facebook group, the same one that I mentioned in the introduction to my last essay, I recently saw the question posed of whether the Bible gave us the Church or the Church gave us the Bible.  These alternatives were presented in such a way as to make clear the underlying assumption that they are mutually exclusive and that it must be one or the other.  Anyone fortunate enough to have studied under the late Dr. Chuck Nichols will remember how fond he was of posing questions like this then answering them with “yes.”  I was very much tempted to follow his example but instead replied by saying that both positions are wrong, that the right way of looking at it is that God gave us both the Bible and the Church.  In thinking more about it I realized that rather than having recourse to an undefined “we” a better way of wording it would have been to say that God gave the Bible to the Church.  Since this was yet another Protestant versus Catholic dispute among orthodox Anglicans who for some reason or another are unwilling to accept that the Anglican Church is both Protestant and Catholic, but a different kind of Protestant from 5-point Calvinist Presbyterians and Baptists and a different kind of Catholic from the followers of the Patriarch of Rome, this answer would probably not have satisfied either side although it ought to satisfy both.  Either side can accept the wording, depending upon how the word Church is defined.   If Church is defined as a synonym for the word “Christians” then the Protestants would have no problem with “God gave the Bible to the Church.”  If Church is defined more narrowly as the society of Christian faith founded by Jesus Christ through His Apostles and continued to the present day under the leadership of the three-fold ministry established in the Apostolic era then the Catholics would have no problem with “God gave the Bible to the Church.”  As to the question of which definition of “Church” is the right one, in Dr. Nichols’ memory I shall give the answer “yes.”

 

Both the Bible and the Church possess authority.  These authorities differ in kind rather than degree so it is pointless to argue about which is the higher authority.  Both derive their different types of authority directly from God rather than the one from the other.  The Bible’s authority comes directly from God because the Bible is the written Word of God.  When you read the Bible or hear it read what you are reading or hearing is God speaking.  The Bible is the written Word of God, not because the Church says it is or somehow made it to be so but because the Holy Ghost inspired its human writers, not just in the sense in which we say Shakespeare was inspired, but in the sense that the words they wrote were not just their words but God’s words as well.  This is not just the Protestant view of the Bible.  The Roman Catholic Church officially declares this to be its view of the Bible in its Catechism, indeed, it even uses the “fundamentalist” language of the Bible being “without error.” (1)  The Eastern Orthodox view of the Bible, whatever David Bentley Hart might have to say about it, is no different.  Liberals in each of these ecclesiastical groups reject this view of the Bible, but this is because liberalism is unbelief wearing a thin guise of faith and so their defection does not take away from the Scriptures as the written Word of God being the common view of Christians.  The point, however, is that the Bible’s authority comes from the fact that it is God speaking, the written Word of God, and that it is God Himself and not the Church that makes it such.

 

The Church, however, also gets her authority directly from God.  When it comes to Church authority, we can speak either of the authority of the Church, that is to say, authority vested in the Church as a whole, organic, society, or we can speak of authority in the Church, which is the authority exercised in that society by the Apostolic ministerial leadership that Christ established.  The distinction is not hard and absolute because for the most part the authority of the collective body is exercised through the ministerial leadership in the body.  Those who erroneously think that the King of all creation, the King of Kings, established His Church as a type of democratic republic, think, equally erroneously, that authority in the Church is delegated to the ministers from the larger body.  This is clearly not what is depicted in the Scriptural history of the Gospels and the book of Acts.  This same Scriptural history testifies to the Church’s receiving her authority directly from God.  God the Son commissioned the Apostles before His Ascension, God the Holy Spirit descended upon them and empowered them on the first Whitsunday, and they exercised this authority and power long before the New Testament which testifies to all this is written.  

 

The Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 is a key event when it comes to grasping this.  The Council took place around the year 50 AD, almost two decades after the events of the Gospel and the birth of the Christian Church.  While the Gospel of St. Matthew was probably written already at this point in time, at least in the Hebrew or Aramaic form attested to by the Church Fathers, (2) and possibly St. Mark’s Gospel as well, the only book of the New Testament about which we can say with anything like certainty that it predated the Council is the epistle of St. James.  This is because St. James writes in that epistle as if the Church was a Jewish body that had yet to experience any significant influx of Gentile converts.  It was the first such influx that generated the controversy that the Council of Jerusalem, over which St. James presided, convened to address.  It is therefore extremely unlikely that St. James wrote the epistle after the Council.  All of St. Paul’s epistles were written after the Council, however.  Chronologically his first epistle was 1 Thessalonians which was written in his second missionary journey at some point in the time period covered by the seventeenth chapter of Acts. The book of Acts itself was obviously written in the ‘60s because it ends with the arrival of St. Paul in Rome which took place around the year 60.  St Luke wrote his Gospel first but probably just prior to writing Acts and so that Gospel can be dated to the late 50’s or early 60’s.  The epistle of St. Jude seems to have been written around the same time as St. Peter’s second epistle which was written shortly before his death around the year 67.  St. John’s writings were the last of the New Testament books to be written, traditionally ascribed to the very end of the Apostle’s ministry in the last decade of the first century.  The bulk of the New Testament was written after the Council of Jerusalem and most of it at least a decade later.

 

The Council of Jerusalem was not the first time the Apostles exercised the authority that Jesus Christ had given them in the Church.  They had exercised that authority, for example, to establish the order of deacons within the first year or so of the Church as recorded in the sixth chapter of Acts and to convert the existing office of presbyter (elder) into an order of ministry in the Church beneath themselves and above the deacons as attested by SS Paul and Barnabas ordaining such over the Churches they planted on their first missionary journey leading up to the events of the Council and by their association with the Apostles in the Council, thus completing the three tiers of ministry of the Christian Church corresponding to those of the Old Testament Church.  In the Council of Jerusalem, however, we find the Apostles, in council with their presbyters, exercising not merely their authority in the Church, but the authority of the Church, in order to settle a major controversy.  The controversy was over whether Gentile converts to Christianity had to also become Jews in order to become Christians.  After the fall of Jerusalem, 70 AD, the rabbinical leadership of those Jews who rejected Jesus as the Christ would redefine Judaism in such a way that a Jew who was baptized into the Christian faith ceased to be a Jew.  Clearly such rabbis were on the same wave length as the synagogue leaders who drove the Apostles and their converts out in the book of Acts.  In the century or so after the Council of Jerusalem the possibility of being both a Jew and a Christian was removed by the leadership of the Jewish side.  In 50 AD, however, two decades before the fall of Jerusalem, the Church had to contend with the question of whether her Gentile converts had to become Jews by being circumcised and agreeing to follow the ceremonial requirements of the Mosaic Law (the kosher dietary code, the Sabbath, etc.)  The controversy broke out first at Antioch, from where SS Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to consult the Apostles, who after hearing their case and the arguments of the other side, hotly debated the matter until St. Peter addressed them and made the case for the Gentiles not being made to become Jews based upon his account of the conversion of Cornelius the centurion and how that had been brought about and upon salvation being by grace rather than Law.  SS Paul and Barnabas then added their testimony about their ministry among the Gentiles to his and St. James, who as bishop of the Church of Jerusalem had presided over the council and in ruling spoke for the council and the whole Church, ruled against the Gentiles being made to become Jews.

 

St. James referenced the Scriptures in his ruling.  He quoted Amos 9:11-12, a Messianic prophecy in which the Gentile nations are said to be called by the name of the Lord.  When he instructed the Gentile Christians to abstain from the pollution of idols, fornication, and eating things strangled and blood, these prohibitions come from the moral Law (both tablets of the Ten Commandments are represented) and from the Noachic Covenant made with all mankind after the Deluge.  The purpose of these Scriptural references, however, was not to show that the Council had found the answer spelled out for them in the pages of the Old Testament.  The Council had not found their answer there because it was not there to be found, at least not in the way one would think it to be if certain extreme versions of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura were correct.  The Scriptural references are to show that the Council’s decision was in accordance with the Old Testament, in harmony with the Hebrew Scriptures, rather than contradictory to them or seeking to overturn them.

St. Paul in his epistles would provide a doctrinal foundation for the Church’s ruling on this matter.  The Mosaic Law had been a wall of separation between the Jews and the Gentiles.   Jesus Christ had nailed the Law to His cross and in His death had removed the wall, uniting Jews and Gentiles to each other and Himself in His one Body, the Church.  That Jews and Gentiles were to be united in this way had been a mystery in the previous age before Christ had come, but now that Christ has come it is revealed.  In the unity of the Church, on those external and ceremonial matters where the Law had previously separated Jews and Gentiles, liberty was now to reign.  These ideas are taught by St. Paul throughout his epistles.  The Church’s ruling in the Council of Jerusalem had preceded the writing of these epistles, however, and it did not include this sort of doctrinal explanation.

 

This illustrates how the authority that God has given the Church and the authority of the Bible with differs in kind.  The authority of both pertains to doctrine.  Doctrine comes in two basic kinds, doctrine regarding the faith, and doctrine regarding practice. Regardless of whether it consists of truths to be believed and confessed, or commandments to be followed or done, sound doctrine comes from God through revelation.  It is through the Scriptures that this revelation comes because the Scriptures are the very words of God which the Holy Ghost inspired the human writers to write.  This is the nature of Scriptural authority.  The truths about Christ removing the wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles and uniting them in one body were written by St. Paul in his epistles rather than declared by edict of the Church at the Council of Jerusalem because St. Paul was writing Scripture under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. 

 

This is not the nature of the authority given to the Church.  St. Jude speaks of the faith has having been “once delivered to the saints.” The faith, the body of truths which we believe and confess as Christians, was delivered to the Church by Jesus Christ in the days of the Apostles.  She was charged with safeguarding it which is the effect of St. Jude’s injunction to “earnestly contend” for it and so charged was vested with all the authority necessary to carry out this task. This includes the kind of authority on display in the Council of Jerusalem. 

 

A controversy had arisen.  It was a doctrinal dispute, having to do primarily with matters of practice although it also touched upon matters of faith particularly with regards to salvation.  The Church heard both sides, deliberated, and issued a judicial ruling.  While her ruling was not taken from the Scriptures in the same sense it would have been as if the dispute had been about whether or not one is allowed to help himself to his neighbour’s belongings and the ruling of no was taken from Exodus 20:15 she did cite the Scriptures to show her ruling was in harmony with them.  Despite not being taken directly from the Scriptures, neither did her ruling add to the teachings of Scriptures in a revelatory way in the way St. Paul’s epistles later would. 

 

The Church has no revelatory authority to add to the faith she has been entrusted with.  She can however exercise her judicial authority in safeguarding the faith to define it, and she has been called upon to do so time and again, especially in the centuries after Scriptural revelation had been completed in the first.  This includes identifying heresy as heresy, such as when she defined Arius’ doctrine (that there was a time when the Father was without the Son) as heresy.  It includes clarifying sound doctrine, such as when she issued the Definition of Chalcedon explaining that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, Who in the Incarnation added a complete and perfect human nature to Himself in such a way that He remained the one Person He had always been, but with two natures that retained their differences and distinctions, but were now in His Person indivisible and inseparable.  It also involves summarizing the truths that are de fide, of the faith in such a way that rejection places one outside the faith, such as was done in the Apostles’ and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds.  None of this added anything to the content of the Apostolic faith and we should be very grateful that the Church put this effort into contending for the faith rather than saying something to the effect of “eh, they have the Bible, that’s good enough, they don’t need us to do anything about it.”

 

The two types of authority clearly complement each other.  It is wrong to pit them against each other as is so often done by both sides in these “Protestant” vs. “Catholic” disputes.  Since they differ from each other in kind, it is also wrong to try and rank them as if the difference were one of degree.  Neither the Bible nor the Church gives the other to us.  God has given us the Christian faith.  The “us” to whom He has given the Christian faith is not merely “us” as individuals but also and even more so “us” as the community of faith that is the Church.  We, both as individual Christians and as the Church, have been charged with sharing the Christian faith with the world through evangelism.  The Church has been charged with keeping the faith with which she has been entrusted safe from error. To assist her in keeping this charge, God has given the Church the necessary tool of His own written Word, the Bible.  The Bible was primarily given to the Church as a society rather than Christians as individuals.  Protestantism tends to see it otherwise, but it was not until the eve of the Reformation that the printing industry developed the technology that would make it practical for every Christian to have a personal copy of the Bible.  Ancient Israel had received her Scriptures from God as a national community and in the time of Christ’s earthly ministry they were read, heard, and studied as such, or sung in the case of the Psalter, in the communities known as synagogues.  It was no different for the Christian Church when she inherited these Scriptures from Israel as her Old Testament and as the Apostolic teachings were written down and received by the Church as the New Testament that completed her Scriptures they were received as writings to be read and heard and studied as a community in just the same way.

 

In Part Two we shall look at the how the proper view that God has given the Bible to the Church relates to the question of how we know what belongs in the Bible.  This question is frequently raised by those arguing for the “Church gave us the Bible” position.  Usually when this question is raised in this way it is canon that is in view.  When the question is presented with a narrow focus on canon it becomes “which books belong in the Bible?”  Canon is not the only aspect to this question, however. There is also the matter of text.  The two largest examples will illustrate what I mean by this.  Do the long ending of St. Mark’s Gospel (16:8b-20) and the Pericope de Adultera (John 7:53-8:11) belong in the Bible or are they interpolations? They are found in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts as well as the ancient translations and in quotations by the Church Fathers but are missing from a couple of very old manuscripts.  Does the age of these manuscripts outweigh all the other evidence?  The question of text and the question of canon are two sides to the same question of what belongs in the Bible. We shall, Lord willing, see how the matters discussed in this essay inform the answer to this question in Part Two.

 

 (1)   Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II, 2^nd Edition (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), 107.

(2)   Eusebius of Caesarea, the “Christian Herodotus” or father of Church History said that St. Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew prior to leaving the Holy Land (Historia Ecclesiastica, 3.24.6).  This would date the Hebrew original to about a decade prior to the Council of Jerusalem.  There is a general Patristic consensus that St. Matthew’s was the first Gospel written  which is an excellent commentary on the worth or lack thereof of Modern scholarship which disagrees and says St. Mark wrote first.  There is also a Patristic consensus that St. Matthew’s Gospel was written in Hebrew – they may have meant Aramaic although St. Jerome who saw the original in the library of Caesarea (De Viris Illustribus, 3) would have recognized the difference – before being translated into Greek.  St. Irenaeus, however, said that both SS Peter and Paul were in Rome at the time of its composition (Adversus Haereses, 3.1.1) which would have be 60 AD or later.  Although St. Irenaeus was talking about the original Hebrew composition he could have gotten the time confused with that of the Greek composition. 

Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part Two – Evangelical and Catholic: Part Two of Part Two – Catholic

In the sixteenth century, the Reformers of the Magisterial Reformation, continental and English, did not identify their enemy, the Pope, his adherents, or his doctrines as “Catholic.”

In the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England, Article XXII uses the term “Romish” to describe the Doctrine “concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints” which it says is “a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.” Earlier, Article XIX declares that like other particular Churches (Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch are named), “the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.” The Church of Rome is never identified with the adjective “Catholic.” The word “Catholic” does not appear in the Articles at all, as a matter of fact, but Article VIII declares that “The Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’s Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of holy Scripture.” The first of these contains the affirmation “and I believe One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church” (1) The last affirms the affirmation “The Holy Catholick Church.” (2) The Athanasian Creed (3) or the Quicumque Vult begins by saying “Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith.” (4)

We find very much the same thing when we turn to the confessions of the Lutheran tradition. The Book of Concord (1580), which collects the most important Lutheran confessional statements in a single volume, begins with the aforementioned three ecumenical Creeds. These are followed by the Augsburg Confession, which was addressed to Emperor Charles V in 1530 AD. In this Confession the word “Catholic” first appears in Article XXI, “Of the Worship of the Saints”, not to identify the teaching and practices they opposed, but to say “This is about the Sum of our Doctrine, in which, as can be seen, there is nothing that varies from the Scriptures, or from the Church Catholic, or from the Church of Rome as known from its writers.” Apart from a citation of St. Augustine to the effect that Catholic bishops must not be submitted to if they teach contrary to the Scriptures, all other usages of “Catholic” in this Confession are of a similar nature, denying that the Lutherans have departed from the Catholic Church and Catholic faith. The same is true of the two uses of “Catholic” under the heading “Of Original Sin” in Philip Melanchthon’s Apology for the Augsburg Confession, the two uses under the heading “Of Love and the Fulfilling of the Law”, the two uses under the heading “Of Repentance”, the one use under “Of Ecclesiastical Order”, the one use under “Of Good Works”, and the one use under “Of the Mass.” The three uses under the heading “Of the Church” are simply affirmations of the Catholic Church in accordance with the Creeds. The three times the word “Catholic” appears in the Smalcald Articles, penned by Dr. Luther himself in 1537, it is to rebut the papacy’s claims to headship over the Catholic Church and its identification of the Catholic Church with its own followers. Philip Melanchthon does not use the word “Catholic” in the text of his “Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope” written in the same year as the Smalcald Articles, but it does appear once in an addendum by Johann Brenz, following the signatures, where he says that he has read all the Lutheran Confessional material to date and in his opinion they concur with both the Scriptures and “the belief of the true and genuine, Catholic Church.” In the remaining documents in the Book of Concord – Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms from the 1520, and the Formula of Concord, Epitome and Solid Declaration, from 1577, the word “Catholic” is conspicuous by its absence – “Christian” is substituted for it in citations of the Creed, but it is never used in a negative sense to refer to the papacy.

In the Reformed Church, Article XXVII of the Belgic Confession is entitled “The Holy Catholic Church” and begins by saying “We believe or confess one single Catholic or universal Church.” These are the only times the word “Catholic” appears in the Confession, which concludes its Article IX, “On the Trinity” by saying “And so, in this matter we willingly accept the three ecumenical creeds—the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian—as well as what the ancient fathers decided in agreement with them.”

It is quite evident that for the Magisterial Reformers “Catholic” and “Protestant” were not mutually exclusive terms, and “Catholic” has no negative overtones whatsoever. A rejection of the Roman Patriarch’s claims of exclusive title to the word “Catholic” for those in Communion with him was a key element of Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed theology in the sixteenth century.

This is a remarkable contrast with evangelical usage of the same term in our own day and age. I am using evangelical here, to refer to the subcategory of Protestants whose common identity is based primarily upon a shared experience of conversion which they identify with the new birth spoken of in the New Testament. The change in meaning of evangelical, from its sixteenth century definition based upon the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith to this new, experience-based, definition was the subject of Part One of Part Two. Seventy years ago, evangelicals by the experience-based definition, were all thought to be theologically conservative, at least by the scale that measures theological conservatism/liberalism by willingness to alter theological beliefs to accommodate the presuppositions of Modern rationalist and empiricist philosophy. This is no longer the case. Today, evangelicals include both self-identified fundamentalists, who are archconservatives by the standard of the aforementioned scale, and “liberal evangelicals.” (5) The vast majority of all types of evangelicals, however, now use the word “Catholic” to refer to the Roman Communion. Fundamentalists, railing against the Roman Communion as the “Whore of Babylon” will call it the “Catholic” Church. More liberal evangelicals, arguing for ecumenical dialogue to repair the breach of five centuries ago, will also speak of the Roman Communion as the “Catholic” Church. Conservative evangelical theologians, defending the Solas of the Reformation, usually now refer to the doctrines of transubstaniation, human merit, papal supremacy, etc. as being “Catholic.”

Some might say, and this is undoubtedly true up to a point, that this is the result of a cultural shift towards a paradigm of mutual respect, or at least lip service to the concept, that encourages calling other groups by their own preferred nomenclature. I have many criticisms that I could make about this seemingly innocuous cultural shift but they would be very extraneous to what I am discussing in this essay. My contention here is that whereas sixteenth century Magisterial evangelicalism refused to surrender “Catholic” to the Roman Communion because it regarded its own doctrines as consistent with the Catholic Faith and the traditions of the Holy Catholic Church, contemporary evangelicalism has been willing to surrender the term to the Roman Communion because it does not so regard itself as being Catholic. If both evangelicalisms have been correct in their self-assessment, sixteenth century Anglican/Lutheran/Reformed evangelicalism in its conviction that it was still Catholic, twentieth-twenty first century evangelicalism in its conviction that it is not, then this indicates that the evangelical movement has departed from the orthodoxy of the Reformation, especially its first tier.

With regards to the self-assessment of sixteenth century evangelicals, the Roman Communion, of course, accused them of breaking with Catholic tradition, the Catholic Faith, and the Catholic Church. The doctrine of “justification by faith alone”, that is, that man receives the righteousness of God offered in the Gospel through the sole instrument of believing in Jesus Christ and not by his own works since justification in the eyes of God is entirely a gracious gift of God and not something we earn, for example, the Roman Communion declared to be a novelty of Luther’s, that differed not just with late Medieval corruptions but with Catholic doctrine since the ancient days of the Church. Against their claim it can be observed that a) the doctrine of justification by faith without works was formulated as above by St. Paul himself in the very font of Catholic faith and tradition, the New Testament, and especially the fourth chapter of the epistle to – ironically – the Romans, b) no anathema was pronounced against the doctrine until the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which Council, despite the Roman Communion’s claims to the contrary, was certainly no ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church and lacked the authority thereof, and c) no similar anathema was ever pronounced by the Greek Communion, the theology of which has never included the elements of late Medieval Roman theology against which the Reformers asserted the Pauline doctrine so forcibly, i.e., human merit, the depository of supererogatory works, etc. (6)

In the Catholic tradition, that which had been taught and believed in the Church, from the time of the Apostles and Fathers downward, in all regions and all periods of time, the emphasis had been on sanctification. People are sinful. God is holy. A holy God cannot admit sin into His presence. Therefore, sanctification is necessary before a sinner can enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, in the full eschatological sense of that expression. A sinner, admitted into God’s holy presence without having his sinfulness removed and his nature restored from its fallen state to one of perfect holy righteousness, could experience God’s holy presence only as hell, and would make the Kingdom into hell for others by his very presence. Ergo sanctification is not optional but must necessarily be completed before one can be admitted to the Beatific Vision. (7)

The pope and his followers in the Roman Communion maintained that the Protestant emphasis on justification by faith apart from works amounted to a denial of everything in the previous paragraph and separated justification from sanctification. This, however, was a caricature of the Reformers’ doctrine. By saying that justification was the crediting to the believer of his faith as righteousness for the sake of Christ’s completed sacrifice and perfect merit alone and not as a reward for his own works, Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer had no intention of denying the necessity of sanctification or of maintaining that God justified sinners without committing to sanctify them. In St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, upon which they relied so heavily, the Apostle went on from teaching that all are sinners (chapters 2 and 3), who are credited with the righteousness of God revealed in the Gospel when they believe on the basis of Christ’s propitiatory death and apart from their works (chapter 4), to magnify God’s grace as being greater and more abundant than human sin (chapter 5), which is no excuse for sin because the union of believers with Christ in baptism unites us with Him in His death and resurrection so that we in His death have died to sin (chapter 6) and the Law, which due to our innate sinfulness, called “the flesh”, is powerless to produce the righteousness it commands (chapter 7), and should reckon ourselves to be alive to Christ in His resurrection and so serve Him in righteousness (chapter 6 again), and while this produces a situation where we struggle against ourselves in this life (end of chapter 7), all who belong to Christ have been given His Holy Spirit Who “quickens” our “dead members”, i.e., provides the power lacking in the Law, and we, with all of Creation, can look forward in a certain hope, to the day when God will indeed complete the work of restoration in us as He promised (chapter 8). The Reformers, by insisting that justification is first and is the foundation upon which sanctification is built rather than the other way around, as the Roman doctrine of a justification that rests in part on the works that are the fruit of sanctification would suggest, did not deny the Catholic tradition and its emphasis but rather, by going back ad fontes to the Pauline order in the source of that tradition, strengthened the tradition by correcting a late error.

What then of contemporary evangelicalism’s self-assessment that it is not “Catholic”?

In the sixteenth century evangelicalism was predominantly Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed, that is, the evangelicalism of Churches that had been reformed by the civil power, with no intention of separating from the Catholic Church, but only rejecting the errors and false practices of the Roman Patriarch who had usurped power far exceeding that granted him in the early centuries. Contemporary evangelicalism, however, is predominantly that of separatist sects, guilty of what has been condemned under the name “schism” since the earliest days of the Church, and which were condemned by the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation when they first appeared. Unlike the Magisterial Reformers, these sects did indeed see the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation as a break from the Catholic Faith and Church, because unlike the Magisterial Reformers, they saw the Catholic tradition as starting, not with the Apostles but with Constantine in the fourth century, and because, also unlike the Magisterial Reformers, they saw the errors of Rome as not being late Medieval, but as belonging to this tradition since the earliest days. This is the same interpretation of Church history held by all of the sects that evangelicals label as “cults”, which are generally anti-Trinitarian groups who have revived ancient heresies like Arianism (Russellism) and Valentinism (Mormonism). While the sects that are part of contemporary evangelicalism have not rejected orthodox Nicene Trinitarianism or Chalcedonian Christology, the contemporary movement has produced many leaders with very defective views of these doctrines. One very prominent evangelical author who passed away three years ago, criticized Charles Wesley’s marvelous hymn “And Can It Be” by suggesting that there are hints of Patripassionism in it, but in doing so crossed the line into Nestorianism. (8) The man who until 1989 was the leading evangelical “expert” on cults, thought of himself as an orthodox Trinitarian but denied the eternal sonship of Jesus Christ, i.e., the doctrine affirmed by all orthodox Christians in the part of the Nicene Creed that goes “the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all worlds…Begotten, not made.” A popular evangelical pastor, seminary president, author, and radio teacher, until about twenty years ago taught the same thing. (9)

We shall, Deus Vult, examine this further in Part Three of Part Two, the final section of Part Two of Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy, in which we shall look at how the predominance of the sectarian mindset in contemporary evangelicalism, as opposed to the sixteenth century evangelicalism, is related to the shift to an experience-based definition of the movement and the shift to following the Roman Communion’s practice of reserving the term Catholic for itself.


(1) This is how this phrase is rendered in the current Canadian edition of the Book of Common Prayer. Most previous editions of the Book of Common Prayer, including the 1662 Restoration edition that all subsequent editions have been based upon and the original 1549 edition omitted the second of the marks of the Church, “holy.” It is still absent in the edition used by the Church of England. According to the Right Reverend John Dowden, nineteenth century Bishop of Edinburgh this is probably due to critical studies of the Church Councils by Jacques Merlin, Peter Crabbe and Bartolomé Carranza published in the decades just prior to the first Book of Common Prayer which maintained that it was absent in the Greek original in the Acts of the Councils. (The Workmanship of the Prayerbook in its Literary and Liturgical Aspects, 1899, pp. 104-106). Whether or not this is the case, it most definitely belongs to the Greek and Latin, texti recepti, of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as recognized by the Eastern and Western Churches respectively. Whatever we might think of the hatchet job the Canadian edition of the BCP has made of the Coverdale Psalter, or the other, strictly stylistic, changes to this clause of the Creed (capitalizing the O in One and dropping the k from Catholick and Apostolick), the re-insertion of “Holy” is clearly an improvement over the 1662 edition.

(2) This is how it appears in all BCP editions of the baptismal Creed, thus, vide supra notwithstanding, the mark of holiness was not eliminated entirely with regards to the Church in the Anglican editions of the Creeds.

(3) Until the sixteenth century it was widely believed that this was written by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, the fourth century champion of Trinitarian orthodoxy against Arianism. Then the Dutch theologian Gerardus Vossius argued against this view in his Dissertationes Tres de Tribus Symbolis, Apostolico, Athanasiano et Constantinopolitano in 1642, maintaining that it was probably written in Gaul much later in the first millennium, possibly even the ninth century. In response to the spread of this view, Dr. Daniel Waterland, in a critical look at all of the then-extent manuscript evidence concerning it, argued that it was probably written by St. Hilary of Arles in the early fifth century, prior to the Nestorian controversy (A Critical History of the Athanasian Creed, 1723). Whatever the truth might be about the “Athanasian” it is obviously not properly a Creed in the same sense as the Apostles’ and Nicene, not being in the form of a confession of faith beginning with credo (or credimus) but of an exposition of the content of the faith found in one or both of the other Creeds.

(4) The Canadian rendition is “WHOSOEVER would be saved / needeth before all things to hold fast the Catholic Faith.”

(5) Those who continue to identify as fundamentalists have maintained for the last sixty years or so, that the evangelicals who abandoned the fundamentalist label around the time of E. J. Carnell’s becoming president of Fuller Theological Seminary (1954), the founding of Christianity Today (1956) and the Billy Graham Madison Square Garden Crusade in the New York (1957) and in connection with these events, were even then taking a step towards a more liberal theology. In 1976 and 1984, Harold Lindsell and Francis Schaeffer would each argue from within the evangelical movement that a liberal form of evangelicalism had in fact developed. These works, The Battle for the Bible and The Great Evangelical Disaster respectively, were, as their titles suggest, polemical works intended to sound the alarm against this sort of compromise. The same phenomenon was discussed from a more detached, academic, perspective by George M. Marsden in Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (1995). Since then, segments of evangelicalism willing to adjust their theological beliefs to accommodate postmodernism and deconstructionism, and thus far more liberal than anything these previous writers could have imagined, have arisen.

(6) The closest the Eastern Church came to a “Council of Trent” was the Synod of Jerusalem, also known as the Synod of Bethlehem, in 1672. This Synod did not convene until over a century had passed since the Council of Trent had ended. Its Acts and Decrees are called the Confession of Dositheus, and while Decree XIII rejects sola fide, it is worded as an affirmation of positive belief and not as an anathema pronounced upon those who disagree. There are several anathemas in the Confession of Dositheus, most of these pertaining to practices with regards to icons, although the Calvinist doctrine of reprobation is also so anathematized. The Orthodox Synod and its Confession was not primarily a response to the Reformation, but to the Confession of Faith of Cyril Lucaris that had been published in Latin in Geneva in 1629. Cyril Lucaris, canonized by his own Communion shortly after his death in 1638, had been Patriarch of Constantinople, the highest rank in the Eastern Orthodox hierarchy although what it is to the Eastern Communion is closer to what the Archbishop of Canterbury is to the Anglican Communion than what the Pope is to the Roman. The Orthodox Church in this Synod, felt the need to respond to this Confession because it presented the Eastern Orthodox Faith as being Protestant, affirming, among other things, justification by faith alone and the Calvinist view of predestination. The Synod of Jerusalem distinguished between the Confession and its purported author, maintaining that it was a forgery. Differences of opinion persist about that matter to this day. G. A. Hadjiantoniou in his Protestant Patriarch: The Life of Cyril Lucaris (1572-1638) (1961), as is evident from the title, took the position that the Confession was genuine. At the very least, the Patriarch was far more sympathetic to Reformation doctrines than the representatives of Orthodoxy in 1672. This is the Cyril Lucaris who sent one of his priests, Metrophanes Kritopoulos, later Patriarch of Alexandria, to study at the Anglican University of Oxford, who became a friend and correspondent of the Right Reverend William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, and who gave Codex Alexandrinus (or A), the oldest uncial vellum manuscript of the Greek Bible, other than Vaticanus (B) and Sinaiticus (א), to King Charles I. Obviously, even if we take Hadjiantoniou’s position that the Confession was genuine, it would be a gross fallacy to argue that Cyril I rather than the Confession of Dositheus “speaks” for the Orthodox Church as a whole. Nevertheless, the facts that a) the Synod of Jerusalem was very late in the seventeenth century, b) that it was a response to the Confession rather than the Reformation itself, c) that the leading Patriarch of the Eastern Church for most of the first half of the seventeenth century was clearly on much better terms with Protestantism, and that d) there is no anathema on sola fide, demonstrate that it was not so certain in the minds of the East, that the Reformation doctrine was a break with the universal and Patristic tradition, as it was in the minds of those who represented the papacy in the Tridentine Council the previous century. It is also worth noting that the caricatures with which the Roman Communion dismisses the Reformation doctrine, such as that it separates justification from sanctification making it into a kind of paper transaction that creates a fictional righteousness, the Eastern Church traditionally levels at the Western tradition as a whole, from St. Augustine of Hippo onward, and including the papal doctrine as much as the Protestant.

(7) This is the kernel of truth which is to be found deeply hidden away within all the error of the Roman doctrine of Purgatory, rightly rejected by Protestants and the Eastern Church alike. Sanctification, at whatever state it is at when the believer dies, must be brought to completion before admission into God’s Heavenly Kingdom. This much is true, although there is nothing in Scripture or the tradition that is truly Catholic rather than distinctly Roman to support the idea that the process must take place over a very long period of time in a place assigned to that purpose, much less the thoroughly blasphemous notion that there is a treasury of supererogatory works (works above and beyond what God requires of us) that the saints have stored up which can be drawn upon to lessen one’s time there in return for a sum paid to the Roman Church.

(8) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2016/03/from-scylla-of-patripassianism-into.html

(9) Those who maintain that they hold to orthodox Trinitarianism – God is One in Being, but Three in Person, each Person of which is fully God – but reject Eternal Sonship, teach Incarnational Sonship, i.e., that Jesus as the Word was always God but became the Son in His Incarnation. The Holy Ghost, however, is clearly identified as the agent in the Incarnation in the nativity accounts of both St. Matthew and St. Luke. Incarnational Sonship, makes the Holy Ghost into Jesus’ Father. That erases the Personal distinction between the Father and the Holy Ghost, and reduces logically to the heresy of Sabellianism. I addressed this issue at great length here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/05/jesus-christ-eternal-son-of-god.html