Tag Archives: Protestantism

Why We Need Churches

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As we endure continued lockdowns, masks and church closings, a new consensus has arisen—“we don’t need a building to be a Church.  We don’t need a structure to be Catholic.”  I say new, but in truth it is old, half a millennium old.  It is simply the Protestant spirit rearing its ugly head once again.  Protestants don’t need a building because they aren’t, at least properly speaking, a Church.  Catholics on the other hand do need a building to be a Church and the fact that we don’t immediately recognize this truth shows how deeply infused the Church has become with this Protestant spirit.

All true religion requires the offering of a sacrifice to God.  St. Thomas even goes so far as to say that sacrifice is a precept of the natural law.  A true sacrifice begins with an inward act in which a man “should tender submission and honor…to that which is above man.”  But because man’s person is both interior and exterior, spirit and matter, his mode of offering inward acts of sacrifice must also include an outward expression.  “Hence it is a dictate of natural reason that man should use certain sensibles, by offering them to God in sign of the subjection and honor due to Him, like those who make certain offerings to their lord in recognition of his authority” (ST II-II, q.85, a.1).

This helps to explain the near universal phenomenon within ancient religions of every ritual act of worship including as a constitutive element sacrifice.  It also explains why the religion of the Old Testament portrays a continual groping for the perfect sacrifice that only finds its fulfillment in Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross.  Only in Him do we find a perfect fit between the interior and exterior acts; the perfect victim making the perfect sacrifice.  The New Adam sets the sacrificial standard and becomes mankind’s representative.  Through His representation, it remains for each man to re-present that sacrifice in order to make it his own.

Sacrifices must be offered from within a temple.  A temple is the dwelling place of God and the place where God and man meet.  The believer who is in a state of grace, that is one who has “put on Christ’ is one such meeting place enabling the man to offer a sacrifice to God.  For the Protestant and our Catholic friend who has no need of a church building, this is sufficient.  But for God, this is not yet sufficient.  To be “a Church”, that is the People of God, they must also offer a sacrifice. 

Making the People of God

What exactly makes the People of God a People?  Unlike the Jewish People who were united by blood, the Church is truly catholic, uniting men and women of many different races.  The Church then is a People because it is united by the Blood of Christ, the Blood poured out on Calvary and of which we partake in the Eucharist.  As Saint Paul says, it is “The bread which we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16-17).  It is the “bread that we break” that creates the communion that is the Church. 

The Eucharist is what makes the Church the Church.  Without it, there would be no Church because there would be nothing that unites us.  St Thomas says that the Eucharist is the cause of “Ecclesiastical unity, in which men are aggregated through this Sacrament; and in this respect it is called ‘Communion’ or Synaxis. For Damascene says that ‘it is called Communion because we communicate with Christ through it, both because we partake of His flesh and Godhead, and because we communicate with and are united to one another through it’” (ST III q.73, a.4). 

In commenting on St. Paul’s passage, Pope Benedict XVI says that “the Eucharist is instrumental in the process by which Christ builds Himself a Body and makes us into one single Bread, one single Body…It is the living process through which time and again, the Church’s activity of becoming the Church takes place…The Church is a Eucharistic fellowship.  She is not just a people: out of the many peoples of which she consists there is arising one people, through the one table that the Lord has spread for us all.”  If the Church were to cease making this living process which is the Eucharist manifest, then the Church would cease to be the Church. 

The sacrifice of the Eucharist needs a Temple in which it may be offered.  Therefore, the church is not “just a building”, but the fulfilment of the Jewish Temple and the sacrament of the Temple in Heaven.  It offers a real experience of Heaven, even if it “only” does so sacramentally.  So while the church building itself does not make us the Church, it is a necessary element for the formation of the Church.  In short, without churches in which the Eucharist is offered there would be no Catholic Church.      

Reason, Faith and the Angelic Doctor

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In his anti-theistic tome, The God Delusion, the champion of the New Atheists Richard Dawkins sets out to expose St. Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways as “vacuous”.  Unable to grasp any of the subtlety or even the gist of what St. Thomas was trying to argue, He instead reveals that he is out of his element.  What is particularly noteworthy however is that he launches his attack only after admitting his own hesitance to attack such an “eminent” thinker of St. Thomas.  This is one example among many atheists who stop to recognize the towering intellect of the Dumb Ox and are wont to point out that he is one of the greatest thinkers to have ever lived.  He is the pre-eminent Christian philosopher whose unique philosophy makes the Faith intelligible to Christians and non-Christians alike.  The Church has long recognized the value of his thought, even if the members have been guilty of forgetting it at times.  It was, according to Pope Leo XIII, “the chief and special glory of Thomas, one which he has shared with none of the Catholic Doctors, is that the Fathers of Trent [1545-1563] made it part of the order of conclave to lay upon the altar, together with sacred Scripture and the decrees of the supreme Pontiffs, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, whence to seek counsel, reason, and inspiration (Aeterni Patris, 22).  As the Church marks his feast day, it is a good time to revisit why it is important for us to study not just St. Thomas’ theology, but his philosophy as well.

We must first admit that the project of the Enlightenment, judging solely by its fruits, is a complete failure.  It is, at its core, a rejection of St. Thomas and his systematic integration of faith and reason, the foundation upon which medieval society was built.  Enlightenment thought is varied but at its core it takes what is ultimately an exaggerated view of human reason in which reason alone is the source of truth.  This viewpoint, dubbed as rationalism, exalts human reason to the point of setting faith aside. Faith no longer is a source of knowledge and science becomes the only means of certitude.  Errors always come in pairs.  The rejection of a whole field of knowledge in divine revelation leads to an error in over-correction called fideism.  This viewpoint denigrates human reason to the extent that divine revelation becomes the only source of knowledge.  

St. Thomas and the Pursuit of Wisdom

Although not the only Christian philosopher in the history of the Church, St. Thomas was the most successful precisely because of his love for wisdom.  In this way he was the true philosophe.  Wisdom consists of the right ordering of things in relation to man’s end and St. Thomas knew that the path to wisdom comes from both above and below.  Philosophy starts with what is visible and ascends to what is invisible.  Theology, or “faith seeking understanding” starts from above by using divine revelation and puts ordering to all things according to the divinely revealed End, God Himself.  Even if faith is the higher and more certain of the two, resting as it does on the authority of God Who can neither deceive nor be deceived, faith and reason end up in the same place.  One ascends and the other descends, but there can never be any conflict between the two.

What St. Thomas offers us is the most complete school of thought that enables this meeting of the minds to occur.  This school, from which we draw the term Scholasticism, successfully “unites the forces of revelation and reason” and remains “the invincible bulwark of the faith” prompting Pope Leo XIII to command that “carefully selected teachers endeavor to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over others” (AP, 29, 31). 

The reason why this connection between Scholasticism and Catholicism must remain intact becomes readily apparent when we examine the role that philosophy plays in theology.  A quick survey of the Church’s battles against the great heresies reveals that there is always a philosophical error attached to each of them.  The Arian heresy was defeated using a metaphysical and anthropological solution that distinguished between nature and person.  The Protestant heresy’s disdain for Scholasticism led to its ready adoption of nominalism and the ultimate rejection of the Sacraments, Sanctifying Grace and the gift of Faith.  What this shows is that while philosophy cannot prove revelation, it can defend it.  But not just philosophy in general, but Scholasticism in particular.  Scholasticism may not be the only means of doing so, but it is the most thorough explanation of the reasonableness of the Church’s teaching.  As St. John Paul II put it, “[A]lthough he made much of the supernatural character of faith, the Angelic Doctor did not overlook the importance of its reasonableness; indeed he was able to plumb the depths and explain the meaning of this reasonableness” (Fides et Ratio, 43).

Nothing but Straw?

Before closing, there is one further point that St. Thomas teaches us.  By all accounts, near the end of his life, St. Thomas had a mystical encounter with Christ that left him completely unmotivated to continue his prolific writing.  When asked by one of his fellow Dominicans why he was no longer writing, he told him “all that I have written is straw.”  Some interpret this to mean that he thought all of his theological and philosophical writings were useless.  But this should not be interpreted as a judgment upon his work, but upon the science of theology as a whole.  Neither philosophy nor theology can ever bring us to the direct vision of God, they are but straw compared to that.  But that doesn’t make them useless, but invaluable when we see “dimly, as in a mirror” (1 Cor 13:12).  Think of a man who lives only in the darkness of night and sees only by the moon.  The moon is but a reflection of the sun, telling the man of the sun, but once day appears the moon is but straw compared to the luminosity of the sun itself.  So too the work of St. Thomas is a bright enough light that draws us to the Sun of Justice.

In closing we must make one last point.  Right thinking always leads to right action.  It was the clarity of thought that made St. Thomas Aquinas act like a saint.  He knew the Truth and it set him free.  Please God, that through his intercession and a thorough study of his teachings, we might likewise follow.

Protestantism and the Motives of Credibility

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In investigating how we come to Faith, we discussed how the key step in the journey from natural faith to supernatural faith is to have “reasons to believe” that God has authentically spoken.    These external proofs of Revelation, when combined with the internal light of the Holy Spirit, help to formulate the content of faith.  The Church calls these reasons to believe motives of credibility (CCC 56) and enumerates three of them: prophecy, miracles and growth.  Only the Catholic Church bears all three of these stamps of authenticity, proving that she is the voice of God.  But these motives of credibility can also be applied in the opposite direction; not only are they signs of authenticity, but their lack is a sign that a given religion is false.

St. Francis de Sales, in his book The Catholic Controversy puts these motives of credibility to the test in refuting the authenticity of the Protestant Reformers.  He points out that throughout Salvation History, every ambassador for God carried with him a “letter of recommendation”.  This letter of recommendation comes in two forms, mediate and immediate. 

The mediate minister is the one who is commissioned by an already established authority and sent by one of God’s authentic ministers.  Scripture is replete with examples, but one will suffice to demonstrate the point.  When Elijah, who was God’s anointed, appointed Elisha as his successor, the latter became the authentic prophet and the voice of God among men through the imposition of his mantle (c.f. 1 Kings 19:16-21).  Likewise, Acts of the Apostles shows numerous cases in which the Apostles (or those who have been given authority by them) sending ministers out to speak in the name of the Church, the voice of God among men.

Someone who is sent immediately is one who received direct divine commission.  Again, we find numerous Scriptural examples including the aforementioned Elijah and the Apostles themselves.  In contrast to the mediate ministers, these immediate ministers must always carry with them two marks: prophecy and miracles.  They must be both prophesied and prophecy themselves.  The Apostles once again are the example par excellence through both being prophesied and prophesying themselves.  They also performed miracles making their message believable.  The interior movement of the Holy Spirit was met with external signs directing them to the true voice of God.

Applying the Principle to the Protestant Reformation

Once this principle is established, St. Francis de Sales applies it to the Protestant Reformers to see if they are truly God’s ambassadors.  It is readily apparent that the Reformers were not mediately appointed.  They rejected the authority of the Church and therefore to argue that they were sent by the Church would be nonsensical.  But what is often argued is that the Protestant Revolt was one from below and that it was the rank and file laity that sent them.  This viewpoint is historically debatable given that it was mostly imposed by princes, but even if we concede that it is true, then it is most certainly not Scriptural.

Hebrews 7:7, “unquestionably, a lesser person is blessed by a greater” carries with it a corollary and that is that a lesser person cannot bless a greater person.  What this means practically is that the laity cannot ordain an ambassador for God.  Even if some of them were priests, sharing only in Apostolic Succession through their Bishop, they lacked the proper authority to act directly against those Bishops.  To say that Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were anointed by the people would contradict a fundamental tenet that the Reformers all had in common: sola scriptura.  Therefore, we cannot say that these same Reformers were mediately appointed.

This leaves us with the immediate option, namely, that they were appointed by God directly. These reformers were obviously not the first in the history of the Church to make claims against the Church.  Heretics almost continuous made similar claims and were all rejected in part because they lacked these two signs of credibility.   So then, if the Protestant Reformers were truly on a mission from God, then we should expect both prophecy and miracles.  Unfortunately, we find neither as Luther and company never performed any miracles nor were they either subjects or objects of prophecy.

This certainly deals a blow to their credibility and should have been enough for many people to reject them out of hand.  But they countered that they were not changing anything , but restoring it.  Anyone who has studied the history of the Church knows that this is a rather dubious claim at best.  But what is indubitable is that they did change one thing: the Priesthood.

Changing the Priesthood

We find two Scriptural examples of a change in the Priestly Office.  First, we have the Levitical Priesthood.  Moses instituted the Levitical priesthood through his brother Aaron (c.f. Ex 28) as a replacement for the original priesthood of the firstborn son of every family.  This changing of the Priesthood was accompanied by a changing of the law given on Sinai. The members of the tribe of Levi were set aside to offer sacrifices for the people, despite the fact that the entire people of God was a “kingdom of priests” (Ex 19:6).

Jesus, the new High Priest, instituted a new priesthood.  It was prophesied that there would be a new priesthood.  This new priesthood would cease to be a hereditary Levitical priesthood but would be of the order of Melchizedek.  This priesthood will never be replaced (c.f. Ps. 110).  To make the point clear, the Book of Hebrews explicitly lays out how Jesus’ priesthood was of the order of Melchizedek and was the replacement for the Levitical priesthood (c.f. Hebrews 7:11-28).  Its sacrifice (a priest by definition must have a sacrifice) is bread and wine (c.f. Gn 14:18-20).  Jesus anointed the Apostles as priests and commanded them to continue this sacrifice perpetually at the Last Supper.

Looked at in this light, we can clearly see then that the Protestant Revolutionaries instituted a new priesthood.  Gone was the Melchizedekian priesthood to be replaced by “the priesthood of all believers.”  Yet, unlike Moses and Jesus, they did not carry the divine letters of credit with them.  The Melchizedekian priesthood was to last forever so these “reformers” were not prophesied anywhere within the divine deposit of faith.  Nor did they perform any miracles.  Thus, we must conclude that they were operating under, at best, their own inspiration.   

Lacking the first two motives of credibility would be incriminating enough, but they also lack the third as well.  The reformers sowed disunity rather than unity, leading to over 200 different “churches” or denominations (the number 33,000 has been greatly exaggerated ).  Unity is evidence of God-protected and inspired institution while disunity is evidence of a man-made institution.  That is why the unity or “one-ness” of the Church remains a mark distinguishing it from all other ecclesial communities.

St. Francis de Sales spent much of his life battling the Protestant reformers, even being exiled from his See of Geneva.  But because of his grasp of Scripture, a love for the Church and a love for those who left the Church, he convinced many Protestants that he had the truth on his side.  We could all learn a valuable lesson from him.

Protestantism and Infant Baptism

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One of the more hotly contested issues between Protestants and Catholics is infant Baptism.  What makes this particular practice contentious is that it really gets to the heart of the fundamental differences between Catholicism and Protestantism by pitting Tradition and Sacramental Theology against two of the Solas, Scriptura and Fide.  Because it is a “test case” of sorts for tackling these differences overall, it is necessary to have a ready answer to this common objection.

Although we have discussed this before, it is helpful to reiterate something related to relationship between Scripture and Tradition, namely the principle of the Development of Doctrine,  Because Sacred Scripture is the Word of God written using the words of men, it cannot fully express the divine ideas that God is trying to convey, at least not explicitly.  Instead it can contain those ideas implicitly.  When those ideas meet different human minds in different times and places, there is development of doctrine in that all of those things found implicitly in the Sacred Word are made explicit. 

Infant Baptism and the Development of Doctrine

As it relates to the question at hand, we must admit that nowhere do we find in Scripture an explicit statement regarding the baptism of infants.  But this does not make it “unbiblical” because there are implicit mentions of it.  In the Gospel of Luke, we find that ““Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God’” (Luke 18:15–16).  If the Kingdom of God belongs to children also, the same Kingdom of God that “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.’” (Jn 3:5) then one could infer that infants too should be baptized.  That coupled with St. Paul’s explicit connection of baptism with circumcision (Col 2:11-12), a ritual that was performed on the 8th day after a child was born, would seem to suggest that infant baptism is not only permitted but also recommended. 

This highlights one of the problems with Sola Scriptura.  Because it does not permit any development of doctrine (at least in principle) then its adherents really can’t say anything about this and any number of topics.  Strictly speaking because the Bible does not say “thou shalt not baptize infants” then there is absolutely no basis for disputing the fact that Catholics do it.  To condemn it is to add to Scripture.

The phrases “one could infer” and “would seem to suggest” imply a certain amount of uncertainty.  Any uncertainty is quickly erased when we examine how the Biblical Revelation, especially regarding infant baptism, was received.  We hear of the practice of baptizing entire “households” in Scripture so that the practice of baptizing entire families, some of which presumably included infants, was common practice in the early Church.  At least, that is how the Church Fathers received the message from the Apostles themselves.  St. Irenaeus, who himself was likely baptized by St. Polycarp, a disciple of St. John mentions it as if it is a given in his Against Heresies (2:22).  Origen says that the tradition of “giving baptism even to infants was received from the Apostles” (Commentary on Romans, 5).  In fact, we do not have a single record of anyone in the first two Christian centuries objecting to infant baptism.

This practice however was not universal in the early Church and, in fact, most Baptisms were of adults.  We hear of a number of famous saints like Augustine and Jerome who despite having Christian parents, waited until they were adults.  What is clear though is that if at any point a child was in danger of death, they would be baptized immediately.  They all agreed that baptism was necessary for salvation and that it was the means b which all sins were forgiven.  What they did not agree upon however is what to do when someone sinned gravely after Baptism.  They were well aware of the Sacrament of Confession (see for example Didache, 15 ~AD60), but they did not know how many times someone could receive the Sacrament.  Was it once, twice, as many times as a person sins, or what?  There were rigorists (like Tertullian for example), especially in the 3rd and 4th Century, who thought you could go at most once.  Therefore, a practice of delaying Baptism began to become the norm. 

In other words, the development of the doctrine of infant baptism depended upon the development of the doctrine of Confession.  Once this was worked out, by the 5th Century however we see a concurrent movement towards infant baptism being the norm.  Those children that were baptized as infants would however have to answer for their faith.  The great Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem imply that these children are among his audience (c.f. Cat XV, 18).

Sola Fide and The Sacrament of Baptism

This leads to the second way in which this discussion acts as a” test case” in confronting the second sola, namely Sola Fide.  We must first admit that no one, until we get to the 16th Century ever believed in Sola Fide.  The Early Church on the other hand always believed that Baptism was necessary for salvation.  Just like Baptism, faith is, by all accounts, necessary for salvation.  It is the relationship between the two that is at the heart of this part of the discussion.   

Faith, for the Protestant, is always reflexive.  Whatever the believer believes is so.  If he believes he is saved, then he is saved.  If he believes he is forgiven, then he is forgiven.  If he believes that Communion really is the Body of Christ, then it is. If he believes then he shows that belief by being baptized.  In this construct there is no need for the Sacraments and they can safely be replaced by faith.  Faith, not the Sacraments, is the efficient cause of God’s actions.

This is problematic because faith then becomes a work by which we are saved. This is the ironic part of the discussion because it is usually the Catholic that is accused of a “works-based righteousness.”  But Catholics are very clear that salvation, and all the is necessary for achieving it, are pure gifts.  In other words, baptism from the Catholic viewpoint is not a sign of faith, but a cause of it.  Saving faith is not believing you are saved, but believing all that God has revealed.  It is baptism that infuses this habit into us and thus it is necessary if we are to be saved.  “It is,” St. Peter says, “baptism that saves you” (1Peter 3:21).

In conclusion, we can see that Infant Baptism carries with it a number of principles that are absolutely necessary to grasp if we are to advance the discussion of the differences between Protestants and Catholics.  It offers an example of how Scripture is often pitted against Tradition and Faith against the Sacraments.  Only by developing a proper understanding of the issue can we begin to talk about it.

Worshipping Like the Early Christians

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One of the ironies associated with the proliferation of Protestant sects is that it has been marked by a certain antiquarianism in which the various groups try to return the style of worship that marked the early Church.  Often lampooned as a “dude starting a church in his garage”, the number of “house churches” in various forms continues to multiply as they try to recapture the spirit of the early Christians.  But none of them can quite get it right, partly because in rejecting Tradition, they can find no touchpoint from which to launch their liturgical crusade.  Their nostalgic zeal is certainly laudable, but once we look closely at the early Church we find that the early Christians themselves would most certainly have shunned these new “house churches”.

According to Acts 2:42, early Christianity was anchored by two buoys: “the teachings of the Apostles and the breaking of the bread and the prayers.”  These two elements really formed a single whole such that they could not be put asunder.  Those who tried were branded heretics.  Writing in 107AD, on his way to be martyred in Rome, the disciple of John the Evangelist, St. Ignatius of Antioch told the Philadephians (4), “Take heed, then, to have but one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to the unity of His blood; one altar; as there is one bishop, along with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants: that so, whatsoever you do, you may do it according to [the will of] God.”  This theme of unity, founded on the connection to Apostolic teaching (one bishop) and the breaking of the bread (one Eucharist), is merely a recurring theme that started on that same day of Pentecost described in Acts.  We find it repeated in St. Clement of Rome’s letter to the Corinthians (c.f. Ch. 37, 44) and St. Paul’s first letter to that same church in Corinth (c.f. 1 Cor 10:17, 11:17-28).  These two anchors were exactly what set Christianity apart from Judaism in both belief and practice.

Orderly Worship

The Church Fathers of the first and second centuries, those who still had “the voices of the Apostles echoing in their ears” firmly believed and taught that communal worship of God was to follow a certain form.  Anyone who has attempted to plod their way through Leviticus and Numbers would have to admit they had a point.  This certain form, “this reasonable worship”, was given to them by God because it was pleasing to Him (and thus sanctifying for them).  This orderly worship did not cease with the New Covenant (as the Last Supper shows us) but continued in a new form.  The call to order in worship is at the heart of St. Clement’s letter to the Corinthians as a response to their liturgical revolution.  He told them “We must do all things that the Lord told us to do at the stated times in proper order”(Letter to the Corinthians,40).  He who knew the Apostles personally firmly believed that the ordering of the liturgy was something revealed to the Apostles and therefore ought to be passed on.  It is this “proper order” that the various sects are trying to capture.

This spirit is praiseworthy even if, ultimately, they fail for reasons we shall see shortly.  Praiseworthy because most Protestants and many Catholics who want to hijack the liturgy see worship as a form of communal self-expression.  This attitude is entirely misguided.  As Pope Benedict XVI puts it, “real liturgy implies that God responds and reveals how we can worship Him.  In any form, liturgy includes some kind of ‘institution’.  It cannot spring from imagination, our own creativity—then it would remain just a cry in the dark or mere self-affirmation.”  Worship is always both reflective and formative of belief.  For God to reveal what to believe while at the same time leaving worship up to man is to risk losing revelation. 

To illustrate his point, Pope Benedict XVI uses the example of the golden calf.  He points out that there is really a subtle apostasy going on.  It is not that they are worshipping a false god, but that they have made their own image (something they were prohibited from doing) of the True God.  “The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God.  They want to bring Him down into their own world, into what they can see and understand.  Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one’s own world” (Spirit of the Liturgy, 22).  If we are to approach the unapproachable, then we must be given the path by which we might mount Jacob’s ladder.  This, my Catholic readers, is why you must never muck with the liturgy.  This my Protestant friends is why you should rethink the form of your “praise and worship” services.  How do you know they are acceptable to God?

The Early Mass

That being said, what did the first Christian worship services look like?  St. Justin Martyr, writing in the mid-second century, gives us an outline in two places in his First Apology (65,67).  Rather than quote it in full, we can look at it in outline form:

  1. Lessons from Scripture of indeterminant number
  2. Sermon
  3. Dismissal of Non-Christians and Prayers
  4. Kiss of Peace
  5. Offertory
  6. Eucharistic Prayer
  7. Memory of Passion including words of institution
  8. Great Amen
  9. Communion under Both Kinds (Deacons take to those absent)
  10. Collection for the Poor

Fr. Adrian Fortescue in his book, The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy, offers some details of each of the elements which are summarized below.  First, it is worth mentioning that at certain times, what they called the synaxis and we would call the Liturgy of the Word (elements 1-4) and the Liturgy of the Eucharist (5-10) would be celebrated at different times.  But it wasn’t long before it was a single celebration.  Because the Church thought it was always fitting to preach the Gospel, elements 1-4 were always open to anyone.  But once the community began to pray together, the non-Christians were dismissed.  This was done both out of reverence to the Eucharist and because to the uninitiated it would have been very difficult to understand and easy to mock. 

With very minor differences, mostly with respect to the Kiss of Peace, a Catholic of today would feel at home in such a liturgy.  Likewise a Catholic in the first Century would feel at home in ours.  There is a certain corollary that is attached to this and it is the fact that all the liturgies of the early Christians were marked by uniformity.  They looked the same whether you were in Rome, Antioch, Alexandria or Jerusalem.  And this was because they believed the form was directly from the Apostles.  There was nothing like a GIRM, but when we find liturgical manuals in the 4th Century from the various Churches they are almost identical even in the text of the prayers.  There is of course a practical reason for this.    The Church began in Jerusalem.  Every Church that was a missionary Church of Jerusalem would follow the rubrics of the Jerusalem Church.  By the middle of the 1st Century, every Church is connected directly to one of the four patriarchies—Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria.  If there is uniformity in those four then you would expect it to occur in all the missionary Churches as well.  As a young bishop succeeded an older bishop, he would be expected to follow the way the older bishop did things. 

There is a second aspect as well that follows from the desire for order.  The liturgy was uniform and orderly because it allowed for the laity to participate.  They knew when to respond and how.  They knew when it was time for the Great Amen and when it was time for Communion.  The Church Militant was a well-disciplined and well-practiced army.

Finally, just as in Israel, Scripture was first and foremost a liturgical book.  They drew many of the prayers and forms of those prayers directly from Scripture.  The early Christians, even those who were not literate, regularly imbibed Scripture in the liturgy and were far from ignorant.  This connection between Scripture and the Liturgy is often overlooked, even though down to our own day we are exposed to it throughout the Liturgy (and not just in the readings).

The Breaking of the Bread, what the Latin Church would later call the Mass, stood at the center of the Church’s early life.  This legacy, rather than covered in the dust of history, is found in the Mass of today, a fact that becomes obvious once we study the early Church.  

On Adding to Scripture

Church, Church Authority, Magisterium, Scripture, Theology,

The great 19th Century Catholic convert from Anglicanism, Blessed John Henry Newman, once pronounced that “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”  The Beati was describing his own path to the Catholic Church based on historical study.  But his point was not just that once you study the Church Fathers you will necessarily turn to Catholicism, but that there is an “utter incongruity between Protestantism and historical Christianity.”  He thought the “safest truth” in the centuries old debate between Catholic and Protestants is that “the Christianity of history is not Protestantism.”  A “safe truth” because the sola scriptura of Protestantism is, in principle, a rejection of history (which is just another word for Tradition) in favor of the Bible alone.  Protestantism turned Christians into a “people of the Book.”

Of course, Protestants will counter that this is the only way to protect against the corruption of God’s saving words.  Catholics have added to these words, something that is explicitly condemned in Scripture (Rev 22:18).  For Newman and for Catholics as a whole, they would plead guilty as charged.  Otherwise Scripture is doomed to become a dead letter.  But if it is “living and active” then to be living means, according to Newman, “to change, and to change often.”  In other words, Newman is not only defending what Catholics call “the development of doctrine” but is saying it is an absolutely necessary component of Christianity.

To come to this conclusion, Newman looks at the nature of ideas and the human mind.  Ideas when they pass before different human minds are considered under different aspects.  These different minds will draw different truths from these ideas.  So for an idea like “the sky is blue” two different minds may run along the tracks of different trains of thought and come to two different, though equally true, doctrines.  One may turn to the “color” of the sea and conclude that water is merely reflecting the sky.  Another may turn to the composition of the atmosphere and conclude that it filters light such that it turns the black of space into blue.  Living ideas, that is, ideas that are constantly “carried forward into the public throng” will constantly have new lights shed upon it.  Relevant to the point at hand, if Scripture presents ideas, and these ideas are living in the sense that they are consumed by public minds then you should expect that there be development.

A Bridge Too Far?

That last statement might seem like a bridge too far until we observe the behavior of Catholic and Protestant alike.  They argue about interpretation.  Neither side says “the Bible says this” and leaves it at that.  They argue about the meaning of what the Bible says.  The Biblical ideas meet two separate minds and two separate doctrines emerge.  It is inevitable.  In other words, if you even begin to argue about the interpretation of Scripture then you are already admitting the principle of development.  This is why I said that without development Scripture becomes a dead letter.  It simply says something like “Christ was born in Bethlehem” and says only that thing, not allowing us to draw any conclusions.  Scripture becomes collection of “God facts” of which we simply intellectually assent and then summarily ignore. 

Otherwise, once the ideas of Scripture pass before our minds, we will make judgments upon them and thus develop them in our minds.  Or, as Newman says, “it is characteristic of our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgment on the things which come before them. No sooner do we learn that we judge; we allow nothing to stand by itself.”  It is human nature for ideas to have consequences.  Divine ideas, spoken to man, are no different in this regard. 

All of us have had the experience of encountering a certain passage of Scripture and each time that we do realizing completely different things.  That is because no single term can exhaust all the contents of an idea.  This is especially true of God Who has the power to use an economy of words to convey more content than mere human words can.  As St. Justin Martyr said of Christ, “His sayings were short and concise; for He was not rhetorician but His word was the power of God.” 

Moving from Implicit to Explicit

Take for example Hebrews 11:6, what St. Thomas calls the credibilia—”But without faith it is impossible to please him, for anyone who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”  In this one sentence all Christian doctrine is contained implicitly.  Everything we believe, all that is in Scripture and Tradition, is connected to this waiting to be made explicit.

It is this movement from explicit to implicit that is described by the theory of the development of doctrine.  In truth Scripture leaves many important and vital questions unanswered.  In other words, Scripture is not wholly explicit.  There are always further implicit truths contained in every explication.  Newman uses the example of the fact that Baptism is necessary for the forgiveness of sins.  But what happens to those who sin after Baptism?  If that question is to be answered then there must be either additional revelation or development.  Our Lord Himself came to fulfill and not abolish the law and the prophets implying a rate of gradual growth in doctrine.  At what point can we say that growth ceased?  At Pentecost, at the Council of Jerusalem, on Patmos with John the Apostle, at Chalcedon when the Biblical Canon was closed, at Wittenberg, or what?

The development of doctrine itself is a biblical principle.  Christianity is not some esoteric philosophy but instead a historical religion.  The Bible itself reveals a plan of progressive revelation.  As an illustration Newman points to the seemingly unimportant meeting between Abraham and Melchizedek and the importance placed upon the ancient priest and his sacrifice of bread and wine in the Letter to the Hebrews.  Does this development cease in that letter or does it continue to progress down to our own day in the doctrine of the Eucharist? 

Once we establish that development is necessary then there is a strong antecedent argument in favor of an authority checking those developments.  To give Revelation without securing it against corruption is not to really have given it at all.  This is his argument in favor of the authority of the Catholic Church as the guardian and preserver of Revelation.  St. Paul and St. John show that heretics, like ravenous wolves, were active in the Church.  As the ideas of Scripture develop over time we should expect more heresies, not less, than the Apostles did. How can Revelation be protected without further doctrinal development, development that not only condemns but clarifies?  The moment you admit the development of doctrine, you must admit an authoritative Church. 

The question then, is not whether there will be development, but how to decipher between authentic development and corruption.  A living Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, is the only possibility for doing this.  After all, revelation that has been corrupted is not revelation at all.  It is lost to history.  And this is why Newman thought that Protestantism suffered not only from being unhistorical, but also untrue.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Bible, Church, Ecumenism, Magisterium, Redemption, Scripture, , , , ,

A mega-church pastor in Atlanta named Andy Stanley has written an article in Relevant magazine asking why Christians persist in protecting monuments to the Ten Commandments when, in truth, they no longer apply to us.  Although keeping up with the ramblings of various mega-church pastors could be a full-time job, this particular article merits attention because it is demonstrative of heresies in general and how they seem to persist, especially when believers are cut off from the preservative protection of the Catholic Church.

A native of Sinope in modern day Turkey, Marcion was a shipbuilder who rejected the Old Testament.  He desired to strip Christianity of anything Jewish and any connection to the Old Testament.  In his view, Christ came to undo the work of the Creator.  He even went so far as to produce his own set of Scriptures, removing the Old Testament along with any references to the Old Testament in the New Testament and any suggestions that we would be judged by God.  Within the plan of Divine Providence, Marcion of course moved the Church along by encouraging her to make explicit the role of the Old Testament in the life of the Church.

The Law and Historical Christianity

Pastor Stanley and the second century ship builder are, in a very real sense, kindred spirits.  For truly, there is “nothing new under the sun” when it comes to heresies.  They are simply recycled throughout the ages.  That is why Blessed John Henry Newman’s maxim rings true—“to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”  Pastor Stanley’s error is not just theological but historical.  He claims that “the blended model began as early as the second century when church leaders essentially kidnapped the Jewish Scriptures and claimed them as their own.”  This is simply rehashing what Marcion said and he interprets the Church’s clarification as “kidnapping” the Jewish Scriptures.  In other words, he is saying that Marcion was right. 

Interestingly enough, many German Lutherans became Marcions under the Nazi regime for obvious reasons.  To be clear, Pastor Stanley is not suggesting anything like this (he does in fact condemn it).  But his doctrine necessarily leads to that no matter how unwittingly he proposes it.  This is the nature of heresies, they always lead to a dead, and sometimes even deadly, end.  Given enough time, what is implicit will always be made explicit.

The Law and the New Covenant

That is why it is instructive to cut off his error at its roots, especially because it is a common one.  In essence, his thesis comes at the end of his essay—“While Jesus was foreshadowed in the old covenant, he did not come to extend it. He came to fulfill it, put a bow on it, and establish something entirely new.”  The error really comes in equating the Old Covenant with the Law.  There was not a single “Old Covenant” but instead God made a series of covenants with man, beginning with Adam and ending with David, all of which culminated in the New Covenant that is sealed in Christ’s blood.  Nowhere in Scripture does it suggest that Jesus was “establishing something entirely new.”  The new wine and new wineskins are like the old wine and wineskins, even if they are new. 

The question, and it was one that the early Church had to wrestle with (c.f. Acts 10-20), was what role the Jewish law would play in this New Covenant.  That it was to play a role was clear when Our Lord said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” (Matthew 5:17-18).  For Pastor Stanley and many like him Jesus came precisely to destroy the Law.

St. Augustine in his famous treatise on the Sermon on the Mount said that to “not abolish the law but to fulfill it” can be taken in two ways, both of which are applicable to Christ’s words.  First to fulfill means to add what is lacking.  Augustine says, “he who adds what is lacking does not surely destroy what he finds, but rather confirms it by perfecting it.”  For Pastor Stanley, addition comes by way of subtraction.  You need only one commandment—“love one another as I have love you”— but he would have this commandment demolish the foundation of the Law rather than building on it.  No wonder he calls out Chick-fil-A for closing in observance of the Sabbath.  His one commandment says nothing of loving God, a commandment that surely requires more than keeping the Sabbath sacred but most certainly not its exclusion.

Christ also fulfilled the Law by doing everything that was in it.  He did this not just to show it was possible, but to make it possible for us as well.  In Christ, the impossible becomes possible.  Ethics becomes ethos as the Divine Stonemason moves the law from the stone of Sinai to the stone of our hearts.  The Ten Commandments cease mere laws, but prophesies.  Christians “shall keep the Sabbath” and “shall not kill, lie or steal.”

As further proof that Christ does not want to abolish the law, He devotes much of His Sermon on the Mount to how it will be fulfilled.  He does this by precisely using the Ten Commandments as the model.  “Moses said, but I say to you…”  So clearly He has no intention of abolishing the Ten Commandments.  But what about all the other Old Testament precepts?  Some of them, particularly the ceremonial aspects will find their fulfillment in the rites of the New Covenant.  Other precepts, especially some of the moral ones will remain in place.  Still, if we examine the issue honestly, there is still not enough guidance.  This reveals the larger error that Pastor Stanley makes and, unfortunately, many other Christians with him .

The aforementioned quote of Newman is really an indictment that Protestantism is not the Christianity of history.  Sola Scriptura necessitates that view because they are rejected a historical explication of Christian dogma in favor of one based solely on the Bible.  The problem with this however is that it is a dead Christianity because much of the Bible only makes Revelation implicit.  Which aspects of the Mosaic Law are binding and which are not is never explicitly told to the Biblical reader.  Instead what is implicit in Christ’s words must be made explicit.  This explication must happen under the guidance of the Church, led by the Holy Spirit “who guides us to all truth” through the Church.  Once a Protestant turns to the Church Fathers and sees the unbroken line of belief to what the Apostles taught, errors such as Pastor Stanley’s are never made.  Christ did not make something entirely new, he added the necessary ingredients to Judaism to make it Catholic.  But if you reject the Catholic Church outright then you necessarily will think He must have started something new.

Being closing we would be remiss in neglecting Pastor Stanley’s fundamental question as to why Christians should insist on the presence of monuments of the Ten Commandments instead of the Sermon on the Mount.  Perhaps Pastor Stanley’s suggestion is a little self-serving in that he is looking for a place to actually read and study it.  But in theory there is no particular reason why we could not use the Sermon on the Mount instead, although it is, admittedly, a little long.  But the Ten Commandments, especially in a post-Christian culture can be very effective for the same reason that God gave them first.  The law was given so that the people became aware of their inability to keep it and would cry out to God for redemption.  Sometimes the bad news is just as effective as the good news.

Where We Got the Bible

Bible, Church Authority, Scripture, , , , ,

In an age marked by an exaggerated ecumenism, there is a tendency to paper over important differences that, once argued and resolved, could readily become a means of true unity.  Take for example the question of “how many books there are in the Bible?”  This question is not really one of personal faith, but historical fact.  Still it tends to be largely ignored because the facts are not really known on either side.  For this reason it is instructive for us to examine the history of the canon of Sacred Scripture.

To properly speak of a “canon” of Scripture, there are some necessary distinctions that need to be made.  First, the word canon is a theological term that was first used in the Fourth Century AD.  Prior to that the term Scriptures was used to distinguish those books that were inspired from those that were not.  This is important because, as Vatican I taught, the Church in recognizing the canon, was not bestowing inspiration upon certain books, but acknowledging that those books contained in the canon were inspired.  So properly speaking the Church did not “decide” the canon but merely recognized that the books contained in it were inspired and was tasked with preserving and protecting them.

Judaism and the “Canon” of the Old Testament

Second, there was no set canon within Judaism at the time of Our Lord.  Judaism was not a monolithic religion and different sects had different beliefs as to which books from the Hebrew Scriptures were inspired.  The Sadducees, for example, believed only that the five books of Moses were inspired (which is why Our Lord reprimands them for not knowing the Scriptures when they denied the resurrection in Mt 19).  The Pharisees on the other hand included other books, but disputed over the status of Ecclesiastes, Esther and the Song of Solomon.  The Essenes, the group from whom the Dead Sea Scrolls have been excavated, accepted even more, including some that are not found in any of the Christian Scriptures.

The point is that there was no accepted central authority within Judaism that could canonize the Scriptures.  This is one of the things that they thought the Messiah would do (c.f. John 4:25).  This dispute over which books were considered Scriptures lasted well into the second century and beyond.  This point is also important to consider because of a popular myth, perpetuated mainly by Protestants (especially Norman Geisler) that there was a Jewish council at Jamnia around the year 100 that closed the Jewish canon.  The end result was a canon of 22 books; the same set found in most Protestant Bibles.

If they did not recognize the Messiah whose role it was to discern the Scriptures, then by what authority could they have declared a fixed canon?  Furthermore, there is absolutely no historical evidence for such a formal council.  It appears that this was made up by H.E. Ryle as a defense of the Protestant subtraction of books from the Christian canon.  More on this in a moment.

What the Jews did begin to do, although in nothing like a formal way, was create a wall around their Scriptures in order to fend off the evangelization efforts of the Christians—Greek speaking and Greek Bible-reading Christians specifically.  So naturally one of the ways they would do this was to de-emphasize or even accept those books written in Greek.  It was for this reason that Christians, starting with St. Athanasius began making distinctions between what he referred to as “canonical” and what he called “other books.”  The “other books” were simply those books, that though considered to be inspired by the Christians, were not useful for evangelizing and argumentation with Jews.

How do we know that these books were considered inspired, even though not listed among Athanasius’ canon?  Because they were all approved to be used within the liturgy.  This is an important point that cannot be overlooked.  Books that were used in the liturgy were considered to be sacred and authentically the Word of God; lex orandi, lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of belief.  In an age where literacy was low encounters with the Scriptures happened regularly in the liturgy.  Even if they were not able to read, they were still well versed in the Word of God for this reason.

It was the usefulness of the two groups of Scriptures that led St. Jerome to wrongly make the canon-deuterocanon distinction, positing that the latter were not inspired.  This conflating of usefulness with inspiration was an error that persisted even into the Middle Ages.  There are no degrees of inspiration, it either is or it isn’t.  But there are degrees of usefulness.  It is clear that Genesis has greater use than Tobit, but that does not mean the latter is not inspired.  It was in light of this that the Church spoke definitively as to which books were canonical and could be read in the liturgy at the Council of Carthage in 418.  This same list, which included the so-called deuterocanonical books, was reaffirmed throughout the centuries including at the Council of Florence almost 80 years before Luther drove the nail into his 95 theses.  The “Counter Reformational” Council of Trent merely reaffirmed the list and declared it to be a belief that was to be definitively held.  A solemn declaration had become necessary because for the first time since the third Century someone had challenged the contents.

Luther’s Role

Martin Luther did not actually remove books from the Bible as is commonly thought.  To do so would have been far too radical.  What he did do though is revive the canon-deuterocanon distinction.  His German translation reformatted the Bible so that the books in question appeared in the back of the Old Testament texts. Eventually he labeled them Apocrypha, prefacing them with a note that these were“books which are not held equal to the holy Scriptures and yet are profitable and good to read.”  The logical question is why he would have included them in the Bible to begin with unless they were actually in the Bible.  Why not remove them altogether?  Instead he pulled a little bait and switch by a common heretical trick that remains down to our day—gradualism.

This highlights the difficulty with the “Jewish Council” defense or anything like it.  Why would you remove books from the Christian Bible based upon Jewish authority?  Given the choice between 1500 years of Christian practice and dubious Jewish authority, why would you choose the latter?  For Luther and his progeny that was a red herring.  Books, in his view, should be included in the Bible only insofar as they confirm his authority.  He is very clear about that.  At first he quoted the books of Wisdom and Sirach in his own apology against indulgences.  But when those books were shown to reveal other things he didn’t agree with, he did not argue but instead questioned their authority.

Blessed John Henry Newman once quipped that to be steeped in history is to cease to be Protestant.  While he meant that once we study the Church Fathers it becomes clear that they were Catholic.  But his dictum can be taken in a deeper sense in that once we study the history of the Bible we come to see that the Protestant position regarding the contents of Scripture is wrong.  For a group of Christians who believe only in the authority of Scripture this is highly problematic to say the least and Catholics in charity owe it to them to set the record straight.