Arian controversy and Pope Liberius/church authority

The following is an extended quote from comment 173 found here: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/11/how-the-church-won-an-interview-with-jason-stellman/#comment-40497

You’ve been making a great deal out of Pope Liberius’ excommunication of Athanasius. But there is universal agreement in the written sources we have that that act was performed under duress, and was rescinded by Liberius as soon as that duress lessened. See, e.g., the account given here. The evidence indicates that Liberius was orthodox, not Arian, and that he temporarily acted otherwise only out of weakness–just as, e.g., St. Peter had so acted when he refused to eat with Gentiles and was rebuked by St. Paul for that. Even Athanasius knew the score and so refused to accept the excommunication’s validity. Given also that excommunications have never been thought to be infallible, Liberius’ of Athanasius has no doctrinal relevance.

From a doctrinally relevant standpoint, the decades-long Arian controversy was not settled by Theodosius’ imposition of Nicene orthodoxy in the 370s. Nobody at the time could know that Theodosius was not going to be replaced by yet another Arian emperor who would have tried to enforce Arianism again. That indeed was to happen more than once–even over a century later, when Boethius was imprisoned by an Arian emperor. What quelled the controversy over time was the fact that everybody knew that the Church of Rome, the pre-eminent church, opposed the heresy. It is true, of course, that Athanasius and the Nicenes appealed to Scripture and Tradition. But so did the Arians, and so do most heretics. That’s because any Christian theology must do so if it is to have any plausibility, or even relevance. But if such disputes could be settled by reason alone, there would be no need for ecclesiastical authority to settle them. Yet that’s how this one and many others were settled, for the very good reason that, absent such authority, everything in theology–including and especially the status and meaning of Scripture–remains a matter of opinion.

That holds, of course, for your own appeals to Scripture. If the Church is not infallible when teaching with her full authority, then no human agency is, and hence your own theology, like everybody else’s, would be just an opinion. Indeed, the traditional doctrine that the biblical canon consists of such-and-such divinely inspired books would itself be just an opinion. What we need is not more opinions, but a principled way to distinguish divine revelation from human opinion, and thus orthodoxy from heresy. Your approach supplies no such distinction. The Catholic approach does.

from comment 174 dealing with some of the same things and expanding to addressing more questions from a previous comment:

I have to admit I’m a little puzzled by what looks to me like a certain reductionism in your approach to the ecclesiological-epistemological question. Catholics very much agree with you that apostolic succession is not on its own a sufficient condition for the preservation of the fullness of orthodox Christian faith and life. We do, however, believe it is a necessary condition, and while you suggest that it “surely is part and parcel of the FOFAD” and that it is “good and important,” you nonetheless argue, in effect, that it can be replaced by appeal to Scripture and the Apostolic Fathers, coupled with a judgment of the fruits of those who claim to preserve and hand on the Apostolic Faith. If, on the other hand, you don’t think it can be replaced, being as it is “part and parcel of the FOFAD,” I’ll ask again who your bishop is.

I agree that discernment of fruits is an important part of the Christian life, but I do not think it plays the role in discerning orthodoxy that you think it does. Already in the third century, Origen, preaching to the faithful in Caesarea, warns of the demons’ shrewdness in clothing the heretics in virtue, so as the more easily to allure their listeners, and in trying to cause orthodox preachers to stumble, the more easily to discredit their message (Homily on Ezekiel 7.3). Note, too, how St John Chrysostom interprets the passage on false prophets that you have highlighted, in Homily on Matthew 23.8. Certainly there are wolves in sheep’s clothing in the Church, and certainly we must be on our guard against them.

Some historical footnotes (though I see now that Mike Liccione has beaten me to the punch here):

First, you said to Ray that Pope Liberius was against St Athanasius before he was for him. But this isn’t quite accurate. Liberius was originally for Athanasius and, while his lapse in exile himself is probably one of the key reasons he was never raised to the altars, it’s not clear that he was ever actually against Athanasius. Take note of Athanasius’s own report of Liberius’s lapse:

But Liberius after he had been in banishment two years gave way, and from fear of threatened death subscribed. Yet even this only shows their violent conduct, and the hatred of Liberius against the heresy, and his support of Athanasius, so long as he was suffered to exercise a free choice. For that which men are forced by torture to do contrary to their first judgment, ought not to be considered the willing deed of those who are in fear, but rather of their tormentors. They however attempted everything in support of their heresy, while the people in every Church, preserving the faith which they had learnt, waited for the return of their teachers, and condemned the Antichristian heresy, and all avoid it, as they would a serpent.

Historia Arianorum 5.41 (NPNF trans.)

If you think I’m missing something here, please provide some documentation, preferably from primary sources, but failing that secondary will do.

Second, and more importantly, in the quotation that you cite, St Athanasius’s appeal to “Apostolic Tradition” is not reducible to appeal to the texts of the Apostolic Fathers, though such texts certainly figure into the appeal. The contrast is not between “the Faith” and “apostolic succession.” Bishops on both sides—the case never having been, strictly speaking, Athanasius contra mundum—had apostolic succession. It’s between “the Faith” (which is inseparable from the sacramental form of paradosis) and “the places,” i.e., the actual church buildings. Now, obviously, church buildings, on a Catholic/Orthodox understanding, are not “just” buildings. They have been consecrated by the people of God, set aside for public divine cult. But I’ve never heard anyone arguing that the buildings as such have anything to do with the preservation of orthodoxy! So, no, St Athanasius could not rightly be accused of resorting to private interpretation of Scripture and the AF.

Next, I’d like to say something about your comment that the crisis of the late fourth century came about because “the church was reaping what it had sowed earlier in its novel alliance with the political Roman Empire.” There may be some truth to that, but that strikes me as too sweeping and simple a judgment. I do not find anything in the New Testament that clearly envisions the possibility of a time when the Church would have any kind of direct influence on the State. That means that the questions that will have to be asked are not going to have pat, cut-and-dried answers when they actually arise in history. What do you do when Caesar is a Christian, and what does Caesar do? There can be no doubt, in my view, that the situation beginning in the early fourth century was a genuinely new historical situation for the Church to deal with, and the Church needed to figure out how to understand this new situation. (It wouldn’t be the last. There have been many other unprecedented historical contingencies with which the Church has had to deal. Think of the Enlightenment, the rise of nation-states, the emergence of democracy, etc. And now—heaven help us!—the pope has reportedly gotten a twitter account.) Eusebius gave voice to the great temptation to overreach in reading the movements of Providence and to ascribe messianic attributes to the Emperor. I think St Augustine’s City of God is a rather helpful and balanced antidote.

Simply condemning any cooperation between Church and State is way too facile. Are we not to pray and hope for the conversion of public leaders? And are they not to bring the gospel to bear in how they govern the secular order? Let’s be clear: this is not to underwrite every theocratic kook who thinks he’s serving Jesus. This is just to point out that the situation in the fourth century—and in every subsequent century of Christendom, eastern and western—is more complex than I think most people realize. The challenges were different in the East and the West, but I don’t think the history of either lung of the Church, politically speaking, is rightly characterized either with triumphalism or with contempt (the latter, obviously, being the flavor of the week in popular accounts of ecclesiastical history).

That’s why your nostalgia for the late first and early second centuries rings hollow to me. Those Fathers were responding to the situations and needs of their times and representing the Apostolic Faith in their own context. So were the Apologists who followed them. So were the Fathers of the third and fourth centuries. I very heartily commend your love for the AF and the clarity of their witness on certain points, and I agree that their writings have a lot to offer for Catholic and Protestants to consider together (unless, of course, those Protestants find TF Torrance as convincing as you find Justo Gonzalez, but that’s the academic magisterium for you!) But I don’t think it works to just push the “cliff” back from sometime around the turn of the second century (or earlier, if you agree with Torrance’s reading of 1 Clement) to the middle of the second century, or even the beginning of the fourth. That’s to make the faith into a fossil whose DNA can be analyzed and replicated (yeah, like inJurassic Park). But the faith isn’t a fossil. It’s the life of a living, breathing Subject, the Church. That isn’t to canonize the Church’s every historical moment, but it is to affirm that Christ has been faithful to His promises, and the Holy Spirit has preserved the fullness of the FOFAD in the Catholic Church. Primitivism is a non-starter. Jesus didn’t give us a timeless set of blueprints from which men of goodwill are supposed to found churches on their own initiative. He gave us the Church.

Right-ho: onward.

What would happen to all those who have abandoned the CC if they saw the church actively repent from its worldliness, selling all to follow after Christ? What would happen if the church took a first step by melting the Papal golden throne, dissolving the Vatican-State, giving the proceeds to the poor, going above and beyond what it is doing for the needy?

The defection of huge numbers of Catholics in recent decades is a massive tragedy. I pray daily for ex-Catholics. And I pray that I may not be the cause of anyone leaving the Church.

I know that things like the papal throne can be a stumbling block to some, and that does seem to me to be worthy of careful consideration. But, for what it’s worth, here’s how I view it, myself. The papal throne, like all material adornments in the Church—sacred vessels, vestments, buildings, etc.—are signs of the splendor of the spiritual gifts God has given to the Church, a faint reflection of the glory of the Jerusalem above. Since, the Pope of Rome tends immediately to raise so many hackles, I’ll illustrate this with an appeal elsewhere. I’m reminded of the recent enthronement of the new Coptic pope, His Holiness Tawadros II. All that cloth of gold! What does that mean to the Copts, undergoing all that persecution? Does it mean that their Church is out of touch with the poor and their leaders obsessed with their own glory? I don’t think so. I think they see that as a sign of the glory of their Christian faith, the same faith they cling to when suffering indignity and violence for the sake of the Name.

None of these things, of course, are essential to the Faith. But they are meant to be worshipful responses to the extravagance of God’s love for us. Such decorations and signs of honor should not be the occasion of pride, but a token of the love that burns in our hearts for our Lord and of the glory we want to bestow on him. The honors we pay to prelates of Holy Church should be referred to the one High Priest in whose office they participate by grace. (This last point is something that reforming Saints like Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and John of the Cross understood very well, as have all true reformers of the Church.) I don’t believe that care for the poor and adornment of churches are inherently opposed, but I think I stand quite squarely on Catholic teaching when I say that such adornment is rendered vain and useless if it is not preceded by, coupled with, and followed by love of and support for Christ’s poor. The papal throne and other papal regalia in particular, I might add, are rendered beautiful, at least to my eyes, when they are occupied, as they are today, by a Successor of the Fisherman who pastors his Master’s flock in a spirit of humble leadership and personal penance.

As for the political status of the Vatican, it certainly could be changed or abolished. I don’t personally think that would be wise at this point in history: the Vatican city-state makes a lot of sense to me at the present moment in history as a contingent arrangement for preserving the libertas ecclesiae. But who knows what Providence will arrange in the future?

When it comes to care for the poor, I am proud of the Church’s many charitable activities. But, certainly, we can always do more for the poor. That’s a timely reminder during this penitential season of Advent.

What would happen if the church relieved of their duties the pastors and bishops guilty of sexual abuse and covering up the abuse, and joined the EO in allowing their priests to marry ( think of Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus Sr and Nona), while not refusing celibacy to anyone who would prefer that? The anger in the catholic community over such is still smoldering and its for a reason, they feel that their silence can be bought.

Each of these issues is worthy of discussion, but I don’t accept the implication that they are causally linked, popular though that linkage may be in the popular mind.

The sex-abuse scandals—by which I refer both to the fact of sexual abuse perpetrated by clergy and to its cover-up in the hierarchy—are a very painful self-inflicted wound. I know. I feel the pain of it every day. What you’ve suggested here, that guilty parties be dismissed, is very sensible. On the ground, as anyone knows who has done any research on the issue beyond the sneers of the New York Times, concrete situations are often complex, and the policies the Church adopts cannot be characterized by sweeping “zero-tolerance” legalism. While such an approach tends to appease on-lookers, it rarely serves justice. With that caveat in place, I imagine that you and I largely agree on this matter.

Priestly as well as episcopal continence (as opposed to celibacy) is well attested in the ancient Church well before Pope Siricius’s 386 decretal. On this matter, I recommend Stefan Heid’s Celibacy in the Early Church.

By the by, the Eastern Orthodox certainly do not permit men in major orders to marry; they allow married men to be ordained (to the diaconate and presbyterate). Once ordained, a man may not marry. Maybe that was a slip of your keyboard, but it is an important distinction.

You will say, you are being ridiculous…

SS, I’d be dishonest if I didn’t admit that it’s grating to be told what I will say. I may not agree with everything you’ve said, but I don’t find much if any of it “ridiculous.” I hope the seriousness of my responses makes that clear.

you know when you say “what you’re really asking us is stop being catholics”, it immediately makes me think of the spouse in the middle of a counseling session, who upon hearing the grievances of the other, patiently and tearfully brought to the table, simply responds stoically with arms crossed: “You are asking me to be someone I am not. I YAM who I YAM! . ” :-)

The fact that something I said makes you think of something bad, doesn’t show that what I said is false. At any rate, I didn’t say and haven’t said that everything you’ve suggested amounts to asking us not to be Catholics. What I said in #152 was, “insofar as you ask Catholics to dispense with things that we believe to be of divine institution […] you are in effect asking us […] to stop being Catholics.” By “insofar as,” I meant “to the extent that,” and no more. Now, if you are in fact asking us not to be Catholics—specifically, by asking us to believe that the Catholic Church has erred in her definitive teaching in matters of faith and morals—that’s fine. We ask Protestants not to be Protestants all the time, after all! But you should recognize and own that fact. Suppose you’re right, and my posture is not one of living fidelity to our blessed Lord, but of toddler-like stubbornness. You still ought to admit that you are asking me to be something I’m currently not! However it may look to you from ecclesial no-man’s land, I am not free to redefine what it means to be a Catholic.

But is there any admission on your end that part of what is taught in the CC today and part of the praxis cannot be found in the FOFAD?

In order to get any traction in talking with Catholics, you’re going to have to distinguish between what has been definitively defined and what hasn’t. Yes, of course there may be such an admission on the Catholic end, in at least two ways. First, there are many aspects of praxis that fall under the rubric of discipline and are perfectly changeable, forming, as they do, no part of the deposit of faith. Second, there are surely plenty of things that get taught on the ground by Catholic priests and believed by the faithful that are false and contrary to the FOFAD as authentically expounded by the Magisterium. But no, there is no admission on our end that the Catholic Church has definitively taught error.

That distinction once in place, I hope you’ll find an answer to the inertia you’re worried about. What you seem to be suggesting is that the statement “some of the claims of the Catholic Church–specifically, the ones about her indefectibility–are false” is a precondition to dialogue. In that case, don’t be surprised when you get “crossed arms,” any more than you’d be surprised if that’s what you got when sitting down for a friendly dialogue with a Muslim and asking him to begin by admitting that parts of the Qur’an is false, or if he asked you to begin by admitting that Jesus was probably only a prophet. If you want our arms uncrossed (however much I feel the negativity of the image you’ve chosen, I’m sticking with it for the sake of discussion) on matters that the Church has pronounced on definitively, you’re going to have to show us that the Church’s claims about herself are wrong. We’re not going to presume it.

from comment 185 arguing further:

1. You wrote:

There’s a remarkable parallel between this insistence on what I would call sola infallibilis and the response of those who opposed John the Baptist at the beginning of his ministry. Anticipating their objection he says:

“Do not begin to say Abraham is our Father….” Implicit in those words, “Abraham is our Father” lies the very same presumption of infallibility which hardened the jews hearts against not only John the Baptist, but also the Messiah he pointed to. It was impossible for the jews to admit that they might have misunderstood Moses and the Law and turned it on its head. Why? Because by their understanding, infallibility was the guaranteed by product of their lineage and descent (of which apostolic succession is an echo).

I find it rather odd that you would argue for such a parallel. In many of my discussions with Protestants, they object to my claim that an infallible Magisterium is necessary for the Church on the ground that the Jews of the OT had divine revelation but neither claimed to have an infallible magisterium nor thought such a thing necessary! As a matter of fact, of course, your “parallel” rests on your own interpretation of some Jews’ reaction to John the Baptist. But that interpretation is not very cogent. For the Jews of that time were divided into Pharisees, Sadduccees, and Essenes, and those groups did not agree either on whether the prophetical and wisdom books were divinely inspired, or on how to interpret the sacred writings as a whole. If any had recognized an infallible human teaching authority amongst themselves, whether on the basis of descent from Abraham or otherwise, they would have said something to that effect and appealed to it. But there is no evidence of that in the sources.

2. You write:

Only God is infallible, in all possible uses/senses of the word. Peter was to be the custodian of His infallibility and rely on His grace through faith and humility (introduces himself as a bondservant of Christ, not as Pope in his epistle), which he did and as a matter of fact, he never claimed any infallibility of his own. Even if I grant you that he was the first Pope (Scriptural evidence does not suggest this at all, the EO have a better argument there), then he erred in his ‘doctrine’ that believers in Christ had to keep the ceremonial law as well (prior to his correction through the dream and the Cornelius event). And yet, despite this non trivial mistake, (which God corrected through Paul, the one ‘abnormally born’) God blessed subsequent generations of christians in manifold ways. Yes, the gates of hell shall not prevail against His church, but it is certainly not because of doctrinal infallibility, but rather wholly due to God’s mercy (Rom 9:16).

In that paragraph you commit two fallacies: false dichotomy and non-sequitur.

The false dichotomy is that between infallibility and mercy. Jesus’ opponents were wont to point out that only God forgives sins, a point which was true, and is in fact repeated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§ 1175). Yet Jesus said to his disciples: “Whose sins you shall forgive are forgiven them” (John 20:23). As God the Son, Jesus shared the divine prerogative of forgiveness with his authorized representatives, and in a wider sense with his followers as a whole, who are commanded to forgive one another. So if the Church and her members can and ought to share the divine prerogative of mercy, there is no reason to believe that she could not share in the divine prerogative of infallibility. After all, as Christians we are called to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). That is a mercy, and so are the divine gifts, such as infallibility, that come with it.

Your non-sequitur is that, because Peter sometimes erred and did not make a formal claim to infallibility, therefore he was not infallible under any conditions. If that were the case, then the Council of Jerusalem would have arrogating undue authority to itself when it said that “it seems to the Holy Spirit and to us” that Gentile converts were not bound to most of the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law. But in fact, it was exercising the authority Jesus gave to the Apostles to teach in God’s name. As part of the unfolding of divine revelation recounted in Acts, Peter had to learn the truth of what said council went on to rule. He learned it in part from a dream and in part from Paul. So while he was not infallible as a man, the council he presided over as acknowledged leader of the Apostles was exercising the divine prerogative of infallibility, and so therefore was he. Of course the issue between the Roman and Orthodox communions is whether the successor of Peter in the See of Rome can exercise that prerogative unilaterally, not just when gathered in council. But we’re never going to make progress in discussing that if you reject even the infallibility of the bishops, the successors of the Apostles, as a whole. If the Church is not infallible when expressing her faith at the highest level of authority, then as I’ve been saying, everything in theology is a just matter of provisional opinion. But that reflects the ecclesiology neither of the New Testament nor of the Orthodox–never mind of the Catholic Church.

3. Your argument about Liberius does not present a counterexample to the Catholic position. The Catholic Church has never held that popes will always do their jobs well. Not even Peter always did his job well. The Catholic Church has never taught that popes cannot be, personally, heretical–though there’s no evidence that Liberius was actually a heretic, as distinct from caving to pressure to act like one. Catholic doctrine entails only that popes will never use their authority to bind the Church to a doctrinal proposition that is false. Despite his failures, Liberius did not do that.

4. You write:

So if Ignatius equates the catholic church to the local church, how can one try and cover the wrongdoing by the Eastern Bishops as being irrelevant because they were not part of the true church? That only begs the question, aren’t you contradicting Ignatius?

The answer to your question is no, because the move you’re attributing to me is not a move I’ve made. The Eastern bishops were “part of the true Church,” because they had authentic apostolic succession. But the majority of them erred because they were Arian. Catholic doctrine does not hold that bishops can never err. It holds that the college of bishops as a whole is infallible when, in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, it sets forth a doctrine as binding on the whole Church. But that requires the free and authoritative concurrence of the Bishop of Rome.

5. Your last paragraph labors under the same false dichotomy I’ve already addressed. And it’s fatal to your position. For if no agency in the Church is divinely authorized to teach in God’s name, and thus empowered by God to teach infallibly, then one man’s “doctrinal purity” is another’s heresy, and nobody is authorized to say otherwise with any authority save their own opinion.

from 186:

You wrote:

“one which posits that infallibility is and should be the overriding concern in all theological endeavors”

No, infallibility is not the only concern in <b<all theological endeavors, but it is the fundamental and primary concern with respect to having a principled means of distinguishing orthodoxy from heterodoxy. That is a very specific theological concern – not the only one. This problem has not to do, firstly, with faithfully living out the truth (which is no doubt the ultimate purpose for *knowing* the truth). It has to do with deciding how that very truth which we are supposed to live-out can be recognized as such. It has to do with preserving “divine revelation” as something recognizable in the world – as distinct from human opinion – so that people can live the truth. The primary trouble I see with your position is that nothing you have said addresses our consistent argument that your proposal for grounding how the truth is to be known (as distinct from the equally important issue concerning how the truth is to be lived), logically undermines the very concept of divine revelation; putting in its place nothing less than private judgment – whether interpretive or moral or both.

You wrote:

There’s a remarkable parallel between this insistence on what I would call sola infallibilis and the response of those who opposed John the Baptist at the beginning of his ministry. Anticipating their objection he says:

“Do not begin to say Abraham is our Father….” Implicit in those words, “Abraham is our Father” lies the very same presumption of infallibility which hardened the jews hearts against not only John the Baptist, but also the Messiah he pointed to. It was impossible for the jews to admit that they might have misunderstood Moses and the Law and turned it on its head. Why? Because by their understanding, infallibility was the guaranteed by product of their lineage and descent (of which apostolic succession is an echo)

But here again you conflate living-the-truth with knowing it. The Jews did not think they wereinfallible due to their ethnic heritage, they though that their ethnic heritage, ipso facto, made them acceptable in God’s sight, such that John’s call to repentance need not apply to them. The issue had nothing to do with correct interpretation of the Mosaic Law (the truth as such). The problem was spiritual presumption. The proper analogy would be those Catholics who think that simply by being baptized or receiving the sacraments, (i.e. being sacramentalized) ipso facto entails that they are “okay” with God (“good Catholics”), while they are all the while far from Him in their hearts through embrace of mortal sin. That’s ritual presumption (a very dangerous thing indeed); but that is not relevant to the question of how one knows what the truth is that one should embrace (say concerning justification, or other crucially practical, yet fundamentally theological, matters).

You wrote:

“Now, this undercurrent is remarkably similar to the other side’s insistence on sola scriptura only that here one could say sola infallibilis (of course, this is implied) is in view”

Nope, Sola Scriptura (as well as your unique duo of scripture+AF’s) leaves the private individual as an authority unto himself, standing in judgment of true doctrine and/or the moral sufficiency of ecclesial authority. The Catholic approach requires that a man relinquish his theological autonomy, and submit to an authority other than himself.

You wrote:

“Even if I grant you that he was the first Pope (Scriptural evidence does not suggest this at all, the EO have a better argument there), then he erred in his ‘doctrine’ that believers in Christ had to keep the ceremonial law as well (prior to his correction through the dream and the Cornelius event)”

The EO position is quite inferior to the Catholic with respect to early documentary testimony concerning the reality and role of the Petrine Ministry (I am trading assertion for assertion here – though I believe it to be true). I encourage you to read the works on the historical grounds for the papacy listed in the library index on this site. Secondly, no Catholic teaches that a pope’s private theological views are protected from error by Christ: only those which he promulgates as binding upon the family of God in his role as head of the Church. Peter in no way promulgated a doctrine of ceremonial law observance. To the contrary, he righty kept faith with Jewish practice until God revealed to him otherwise. It is also (from a Catholic perspective) no accident that Peter was the one to whom God clarified the crucial issue at the time of the Church’s infancy.

You wrote:

“When one attempts to make a distinction between doctrinal infallibility and administrative infallibilty, to preserve oneself from the impact of doctrinal disagreements, one is inserting scholasticism into the deposit of the faith, when it was never there in the first place”

Nope, the recognized role and authority of the Successor-to-Peter is widely found within the patristic documentary evidence of the first 4 Christian centuries, and only compounds in weight in the centuries following: not a scholastic novelty. Have you done the research on this point? Again, please consider taking a peak at some of the works listed in the library index.

You wrote:

“St Clement writes in chapter 44 of his epistle to the Corinthinans . . . Clement was pleading for unity in the church”

Right, St. Clement wrote an authoritative, yet unsolicited, letter of instruction to the Corinthian Christians! Who did he think he was anyway, the Pope? And not long after Clement, Irenaeus attests to the primacy of Rome, followed by 3rd century fathers, then fourth century fathers, and fifth century fathers . . . and so on. See here for just a small sampling.

You have written a great deal about the need for humility, righteousness, etc: all things which any Catholic, and any scholastic would heartily affirm. Have you read what the scholastics have to say about the virtues and the life of grace? How much do you know about the life of a man like St. Thomas Aquinas – though an intellectual giant by any standard – yet, possibly one of the most humble Saints in Christian history. I could keep responding to each of your historical claims, but doing so just obscures the real seat of the problem. You present a historical situation: “But what about this pope or bishop who did this” or “What about this scripture which indicates how important holiness is”; and we counter with the Catholic response. Or you make blanket assertions to the effect that Catholic theological thinking is infected by a non-spiritual, dry, crusty rationalism which you associate with Scholasticism; as if clarity and precision in theological discourse were some how at odds with human virtue, true spirituality, etc. But that’s just throwing dust in the air and inviting absolutely interminable debates.

Let’s re-focus on the argument, which so far goes like this:

Catholics ask: “How are men and women to know what God has revealed to the human race through the sending of His son, as distinct from, and in the midst of, an ocean of human theological opinion”? To be very clear; no one is debating that the end-game – the thing of penultimate importance in the order of execution according to destination – is living the truth. But it is simply a fact that knowing the truth is first in the order of execution according to commencement (had to play a Scholastic riff :>)). One cannot live a truth which one does not know.

1.) Your initial response to the question concerning how the truth we are to live is known to be God’s truth – and not the theological guesswork of men – seems essentiality to be this: Each Christian must interpret scripture along with the AF’s, wherein even the selective AF criteria itself is adopted based on a still further private assessment that the AF’s personal holiness is uniquely worthy to serve as a source of doctrinal determination.

2.) We point out that this criteria reduces doctrinal truth – divine revelation – to the level of mere human opinion which is the very opposite of divine revelation, and the very source of confusion which divine revelation is – in theory – given by God to overcome. Accordingly, the possibility of distinguishing between orthodoxy and heterodoxy is negated – in principle – and we point out that this problem follows for your position regardless of whether or not Rome’s claims are true.

3.) You could respond to that very clear and concise logical objection by either: a.) pointing to some other alternative for grounding orthodoxy: or b.) offering some additional nuances or factors relative to your theory which you think might save it from the criticism we raise: or c.) you could simply admit that your theory has the implications for theology and divine revelation that we say it does, but then go on to argue why that’s not a big deal.

4.) Yet, instead, of answering our objections to your theory; you begin offering examples which you think undermine the Catholic approach – each of which we answer from a Catholic point of view. But the common factor in your objections – the thought that is doing the work is just this: “God could not (or at least would not) use a sinful man (or men) as an instrument(s) wherein He divinely ensures his orthodoxy under specific conditions; that is, protecting Him from error when teaching as head of the Church on behalf of the whole Church”. That some level of sin effectively obviates the possibility of God’s providential preservation of a man from teaching error: that’s the essential premise doing all the work.

5.) But there are at least three problems with this premise:

a.) God has done something quite similar in the past, not only with respect to the biblical figures I mentioned in a prior post, but more profoundly through the instrumentality of the sinful biblical writers through whom the Holy Spirit inspired the sacred scriptures only while writing the sacred books. The gift of infallibility, wherein God protects the formal teaching of even sinful men so as to preserve scripture’s interpretation from error across time, is nothing less than the counterpart to the gift of inspiration by which God protects the writing of sinful men from error in producing the scriptures themselves.

b.) Most problematic of all, is that this position subtlety, but surely, enthrones individual autonomy and ego under the guise of championing “righteousness”. I don’t mean that you intend to be acting in such a way. I mean only to say that the logical/implicit result of your position – in fact – puts the individual in the position of ultimate arbiter concerning just what level of holiness must obtain in order to recognize some teacher’s doctrine as authoritative (and the interpretive subjectivism adds yet another subjective layer). Contrary to its humble and docile first impression, this position is far from an act of humility. The individual remains the arbiter of truth..

c.) Persons apparently very holy can, and have, taught error (Donatist and Montanist rigorists, etc).

So what would be helpful is this; rather than presenting examples of sinful popes or hierarchs (we Catholics are perfectly aware of their existence), or putting forward scriptures which call men to holiness (a call we Catholics fully acknowledge), could you please:

1.) Explain how our initial position concerning private interpretation of scripture and the AF’s (because you have privately determined them to be sufficiently holy), resolves the original question concerning how men can – in principle – know the difference between divine revelation and mere human theological opinion.

and

2.) Defend what I will call the “sufficient holiness” premise itself, which asserts that a subjective assessment of an adequate level of holiness is a necessary condition for recognizing any ecclesial authority’s doctrinal promulgation(s) as binding.

I truly do appreciate you willingness to sustain dialogue – especially in a Catholic venue; but I do hope we can center in on the real disagreement – even if we end up disagreeing.

Pax Christi,


from comment 201 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/11/how-the-church-won-an-interview-with-jason-stellman/#comment-40652

Regarding Mt. 7:15ff and 2 Pet 2:1, of course there will be (and are) false prophets, and we will know them by their fruits. But there is more than one way to be false. One way to be false is to be living in mortal sin, while at the same time verbally teaching the moral law and in one’s clerical office representing Christ. Another way to be false is to teach contrary to what Christ and the Apostles taught. The passage in Matthew and 2 Peter are not teaching that a bishop or priest in mortal sin ipso facto loses either holy orders or authority of office. The falsehood in view is “prophetic” falsehood, i.e. falsehood in the message taught. Some of the fruits by which we are to recognize “false prophets” are separation from the ancient Church, teaching contrary to the Church, and division among themselves. Your interpretation does not make the distinction between these two ways in which someone can be ‘false,’ and you are placing your interpretation of these passages over that of the Church and Tradition, and in that respect begging the question, i.e. presupposing precisely what is in question.


comment 207 below here:http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/11/how-the-church-won-an-interview-with-jason-stellman/#

I read through your comments, and thought I might add a few more observations, even at the risk of piling-on. The Church does not rationalize the sins of popes. Rather we do penance for them. Pointing out that the sins of a pope do not nullify the authority of his teaching or indicate that his teaching is not orthodox is not rationalizing his sins. When you say (in #175), “The argument that Pope Liberius must be excused for his excommunication of Athanasisus …” you are misunderstanding what the Catholics here have been saying. No one is saying that Pope Liberius ought to be morally excused for anything, although from an ethical point of view, there is no denying that a wrongdoing committed under torture or threat of torture is less culpable, ceteris paribus. Rather, the point is that the doctrine of papal infallibility as it is taught by the Church is fully compatible with popes saying or doing false things under duress.

In #189 you wrote:

You’re all pressing me for an infallible rule and I understand why. I have none, but that’s the entire point! I posit that a humble recognition of doctrinal and moral failure (by all, Catholics, EO and Protestants)

Here you, on the basis of your own [fallible] interpretation of Scripture, presume to know that there is some doctrinal failure in the Catholic Church. You use the language of humility, but how is it humble for one man, under no ecclesial authority whatsoever, and having no ecclesial authority himself, to presume to know better than the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church Christ founded, what is orthodox? That doesn’t seem to me like humility; it seems like just the opposite. Where is your humility when it comes to your belief that the Church cannot be infallible in certain respects, and that some of her doctrines are in error? Where is your fallibility and humility regarding your denial of the Catholic distinction between infallibility and peccability? Ironically, it seems as though you are treating these beliefs of yours as infallible, so much so that you call on Catholics to divest ourselves of the doctrine of infallibility, and acknowledge our “doctrinal failure.” You imply that if the Catholic Church believes and teaches that in certain respects she is divinely protected from error, she is not being humble. Regarding the notion that necessarily the Catholic Church’s claims about herself are arrogant, see the last three paragraphs of “Ecclesial Unity and Outdoing Christ: A Dilemma for the Ecumenism of Non-Return.”

The authority issue cannot be avoided, and you are not avoiding it. By claiming that the Catholic Church has doctrinal errors, and by stipulating conditions for an ecumenical council, you are presuming the equivalent of papal authority. And when you refer to yourself as “an insignificant and non pedigreed voice calling out in the blogosphere,” you imply that you have prophetic authority. But you have no “immediate mission.” See the section titled “The Mission of the Church” in St. Francis De Sales’s The Catholic Controversy.

Here at CTC we are committed to an ecumenism that does not involve compromising what any participant believes to be true. Instead it involves patient, charitable dialogue aimed at coming to agreement through a process of mutual understanding and persuasion concerning what is the truth. See one of our earliest posts, titled “Two Ecumenisms.”

Regarding the notion that the New Covenant magisterium is no more divinely protected from error than is the Old Covenant magisterium, see the section titled “The Contradiction of Pleading for Communion in what one Condemns as Idolatrous” in ““Too catholic to be Catholic?” A Response to Peter Leithart.”

In #175 you wrote:

When one attempts to make a distinction between doctrinal infallibility and administrative infallibilty, to preserve oneself from the impact of doctrinal disagreements, one is inserting scholasticism into the deposit of the faith, when it was never there in the first place. The minute you do that is the minute you break with your own: St Vincent of Lerins warns that doctrinal development should bear in kind, wheat bearing wheat, not moving away from the deposit of faith. One can produce verse after verse after verse which shows that the Apostolic Fathers had nothing of scholasticism and would have never tolerated such a distinction.

Of course this was just what the whole Donatist controversy was about. And both St. Optatus and St. Augustine (who wrote approximately ten anti-Donatist works) argued that sins on the part of the bishop do not take away Holy Orders or nullify the sacraments the bishop administers. So this alleged scholastic distinction was already there in the fourth century. But that’s because it was already there in the first century, having been taught explicitly by the Second Person of the Trinity, as K. Doran pointed out in comment #196, referring to Matthew 23. So the development St. Vincent describes, which I have written about in “The Commonitory of St. Vincent of Lérins, is precisely the development made explicit not only by the fourth century Church Fathers, but later by the Scholastics.

Also in #175 you wrote:

“Wheresoever the bishop appears let the people be, even as wheresoever Christ Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church”.

Catholic apologists attempt to equate the bishop as the pope in the above verse but this is a classic example of taking something out of context. The epistle is to the local church of Smyrna and its referring to the laity and bishop of that church. The bishop of Smyrna is Ignatius’ close friend the great Polycarp. For Ignatius the fullness of the catholic church is found at the local level , each church with a bishop is fully catholic as EO teaches. This is not to deny that the church at Rome was ‘first among equals.’ , it certainly was.

So if Ignatius equates the catholic church to the local church, how can one try and cover the wrongdoing by the Eastern Bishops as being irrelevant because they were not part of the true church?

The statement from St. Ignatius does not apply only to the pope, but to each bishop, and especially to the bishop of Rome. The Church would not be “catholic” if it were limited only to the local church. To be catholic, a local church must be in communion with the universal Church. Otherwise, it would be in schism. In his statement “Wheresoever the bishop appears …” St. Ignatius is not referring to schismatic bishops, but to Catholic bishops, i.e. bishops in communion with the universal (i.e. Catholic) Church. I have explained this a bit more in “St. Ignatius of Antioch on the Church.”

Your general notion that we should all return to the Apostolic Fathers presupposes that we (Catholics) have departed from them, or not developed authentically. I wonder how you think that presupposition avoids ecclesial deism.

You wrote:

Are we that weak as to say that the Holy Spirit cannot work through the conciliar process anymore

No, we are not. We believe that He has worked through all twenty-one ecumenical councils, which is why we accept their teaching as authoritative.

Where is our faith? It is in our admission of fallibility, that God’s infallibility is vindicated and triumphant.

To be consistent with your statement, you’ll need to embrace your own fallibility regarding your present denial of the Catholic Church’s doctrine of infallibility, and call this denial into question. With John S, I agree with your call to humility. But there are two caveats. First, I do not equate humility with unqualified fallibilism (i.e. skepticism) such that a Catholic not willing to deny a Catholic dogma is ipso facto not being humble. And second, if you are serious about humility and repentance, then the principle of getting one’s own house in order when it comes to calls to repentance and getting the log out of one’s own eye will require you to address the question of your own condition of [material] schism from the Church Christ founded. I fully understand that carefully searching out the Catholic question takes time, and most of us go through a period of theological and ecclesial limbo (!) during that process. But, nevertheless, a call to humility takes on credibility and persuasive power only when the one making it has shown the humility to submit willingly to divinely appointed authorities.