A Protestant Considers the Catholic Magisterium

[Denise]

A Protestant Considers the Catholic Magisterium

January-February 2017
By David Hartman

In September 1989, the Rev. David Hartman was the Minister of the Olive Branch Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Norge, Virginia.

Ed. Note: This article originally appeared in our September 1989 issue (volume LVI, number 7) and is presented here unabridged. Copyright © 1989.

“The Church of Jesus Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally One.” This bold declaration was made not by a Catholic — in which case it would be unexceptional — but by Thomas Campbell, a minister of the Old-Light Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterian Church. In 1809 Campbell left his richly titled denomination behind to begin a movement that he thought would unify the broken and dismembered Body of Christ. His legacy is the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a Protestant denomination of which I am a minister. His legacy is also the Churches of Christ — not to mention the Christian Churches and the Church­es of Christ of North America, also known among those of us in the Campbellite tradition as the In­dependents. So much for Campbell’s contribution to the unity of the Church.

I confess: I envy those of you readers who are Catholics. You seem to have learned one of the great secrets in life, which is how to make a wheel for the long haul, and not feel compelled to rein­vent some 28,000 of them, which, according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of World Christianity, is how many identifiable Protestant denominations and sects have been established since Martin Luther wasted a good nail posting his 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg Chapel. What you have go­ing for you, among many other things, is your Mag­isterium — your Church’s teaching authority — and I don’t think that all of you appreciate it as much as you should. So allow me, a Protestant with his nose pressed up against the Catholic windowpane, to tell you about the party you’ve got going on in­side. Maybe I’ll make you feel better about being a Catholic, in the same way that Hans Küng, God bless his heart, has tried to make me feel better about being a Protestant.

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It was the personal conviction of the well-intentioned Thomas Campbell that the dismembered Body of Christ could be brought together if all hu­man-made and divisive creeds were discarded and the New Testament adopted as the sole authority of the Church. “No creed but Christ” became the rallying cry of the Campbellite movement. The problem, as John Leith notes in Creeds of the Churches, is that
Christianity has always been a “creedal” religion in that it has always been theo­logical…involving men in theological reflection and calling them to declara­tions of faith. A nontheological Christianity has simply never endured, although such has been attempted…. In the long run, organizational necessities demon­strate the need for creeds, and organizational integrity requires some kind of creedal subscription.

Another failing was that Campbell, like most Protestants, made the Bible, particularly the New Testament, the sole source of Christian authority. Sola scriptura is a fine principle if the Scriptures are simply and certifiably the textus receptus of the Holy Spirit and if the answers therein exhaust all the possible questions. But the New Testament, splendid and inspired though it is, does not answer all questions. It bears remembering that the Church predates the New Testament, and that the New Testament itself is a product of the Church. When the Holy Spirit fell upon the Apostles at Pentecost, the purpose was to give birth to the Church, not to deliver a manuscript. It was the Church that took on the task of establishing the New Testament can­on; the Church that, among all the multiplicity of documents available, separated the inspired wheat from the uninspired chaff; the Church that had the obligation to proclaim that which was true about the Jesus Christ of history and reject or correct that which was not.

This last point — “the Jesus Christ of history” — is a vitally important one. One of the primary reasons for a New Testament canon was to enable believers to know what the true apostolic legacy was — and proclaiming that which is true requires that it be differentiated from that which is false, or, put another way, heretical. For example, in the apostolic era, the Docetists declared that they, too, were followers of Christ. After all, they believed that Jesus was the Son of God; what other confes­sion could be required? Fair enough, a contempo­rary Protestant might say; the Docetists have ob­viously grasped the main point of the faith, and are therefore Christian. But the Docetic belief in the Sonship of Jesus was accompanied by a belief that all flesh was irredeemably evil. No problem there, either, the accommodating Protestant might say; we’re open-minded enough to tolerate little anthro­pological eccentricities. But carry the Docetic conviction to its logical conclusion: Since Jesus was the Son of God, and God is Spirit, and all flesh is irredeemably evil, then ipso facto Jesus was no more than a spirit himself, and the person the Apostles walked and talked with and knew as Jesus was only a finely honed mirage — a mirage, incidentally, devoid of pain on the Cross. Now, ask again: Were the Docetists Christians?

One can begin to see why the Church, even in its infancy, was obliged to make some pretty sharp distinctions about the Truth, and why it felt compelled to resist heresy at every turn. Had the Docetists’ extraordinary belief about the irreconcilabil­ity of flesh and spirit gained ascendancy, it would have debased in one fell swoop the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection — in short, the whole meaning and purpose of God’s work in Jesus Christ. The prologue to John’s Gospel (“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” [1:14]) and Paul’s letter to the Galatians (“But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman” [4:4]) are, among other things, rebuttals of Docetic dogma. Thus the establishment of the New Testament canon represents a victory for what might be called “Christian orthodoxy” — i.e., the authentic legacy of the Christian faith as it had proceeded from Jesus Christ through the Apostles and beyond.

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There is a prevailing presumption throughout the New Testament that God’s person is love, but that God’s will is truth, and that to uphold and pro­claim the truth is to do God’s will. The establishment of the canon was a victory for truth. But it was not the final triumph. Heresy is a Hydra, and its many surviving and regenerating heads may be dormant for years after one has been lopped off. But in whom has the authority been vested to dis­cern the truth, and thereby know God’s will? The apostolic Church made a decision about that, too: Because in matters of doctrine — i.e., that which is true about the faith — God has invested ultimate authority in the Church itself, particularly in its conciliar manifestations (see the account of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 and Gal. 2:1-10), the Church in Council would possess both human competence and a receptivity to the movement of the Holy Spirit, and the Church, in exercising its mag­isterial authority, would be answerable to God alone.

Most of the Church’s doctrine has not been shaped in moments of serenity and quiet reflection, but rather when it has been challenged — and the Church has answered in order to save the soul of Christianity. For example, the New Testament does not give a final, definitive answer about the relationship of God the Father to Jesus Christ the Son — a point the perceptive Bishop Arius picked up on at the turn of the fourth century. Was the Son, as Arius insisted, a creature made by God and thus subject to change? If so, then Jesus Christ did not have full and accurate knowledge of God — was, in fact, something other than and less than God — and the Incarnation was not the full recon­ciliation between God and humanity that it seemed. There was a scriptural basis for Arius’s contention, for example: “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son but the Father only” (Mt. 24:36). But how could that be reconciled with, say, the Prologue of John’s Gospel: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God”? How could the New Testament itself resolve the issue since it was the New Testament that provided the ammunition for both Arius and his opponents? And if Arius was right — if Jesus was really only like God, then to what extent? Might someone else even more like God arise from, say, the sands of Arabia? If so, then Jesus Christ was only an interim, rather than a definitive, revelation of God; should someone else more like God appear, then the Christian faith would have to acknowledge that its quotient of revealed truth was less than that of the later arrivals.

Many Protestants today might have adopted the Emperor Constantine’s initial line — that the Arian controversy was merely a small and very in­significant word game. But ideas have consequences, because ideas fuel deeds. Political imperialists in Constantine’s Rome tended to be Arians — they could justify their expansionism by declaring that the Prince of Peace only ordained an interim ethic. Maybe the next, more definitive revelation of God would ride into Jerusalem on a warhorse instead of a donkey, with an army in his train instead of a motley crowd of civilians waving palms. If Arius was right, then the militarists could justify their ambitions by believing themselves to be on the crest of the next great wave of revelation. Why be con­strained by Jesus’ commandment to love one’s neighbor if that commandment was due at any time to be transcended by one even more divinely ordained?

“God is love,” okay; but suppose that was only part of the picture. What if God is love and conquest? Arius, who by most accounts was a gen­tle soul, would likely not have sanctified or endors­ed the ambitions of the imperialists; but if Arianism had triumphed as definitive Christian doctrine, there is no telling what Church-sanctioned horrors might have resulted.

This was the issue at hand when Constantine called the Church into Council. After extraordinary labor and anguish, the Council hammered out the singularly important Nicene Creed. In modern translation it asserts, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.” In short, the Church reaffirmed that Jesus Christ was the definitive Word of God; that he was fully God and fully human; that his teaching, life, death, and Resurrection were definitive, not interim, revelations from God. Militar­ists looking for sanctification for their conquests would have to look elsewhere than the Church.

While Nicaea was neither the first nor last place the Church would be obliged to define the faith, or protect it from ruination, its teaching vocation was well and truly established there. The Council at Nicaea provided definitive answers to some vitally im­portant questions. Who defined the meaning of faith in Jesus Christ? The Church. Which Church? There was only one, the living heir and successor of the ancient apostolic Church, and its name was Catholic. How did one know if one was really a Catholic? One confessed — and believed — the Nicene Creed. In short, the test of fellowship was confessional. In this the Church was heir to a creedal tradition that went all the way back to “A wandering Aramean was my father….”

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Since I’m starting to feel some twinges of residual Calvinist guilt about saying, “There was only one Church, and its name was Catholic,” I must here interpolate the standard Protestant disclaimer, which goes, “But we must never forget that there were some pretty terrible things done in the name of the Church back then.” And, as far as it goes, this is true. Whenever sinful humans are entrusted with a holy responsibility, and feel the full compulsion of that trust, awful things are liable to occur. The “total society” of the Middle Ages — i.e., the adumbration of secular rule by Catholic authority — was responsible for, among other things, the Crusades. (We Protestants know all about the Crusades, and we love to rub your noses in them.) But — and this is a key but — the Church was always aware of the depths of sin to which humans could sink, even humans invested with the authority of the Church. And more often than not, there were mechanisms in place whereby wrongs could be redressed and re­forms could be enacted. Even when those mechanisms failed, the Church knew that God placed limi­tations on the evil one man could do, even one who had ascended to the See of St. Peter. That was why a good medieval Catholic like Dante could consign Pope Nicholas III to hell (and anticipate the arrival of Boniface VIII and Clement V) and not face a whisper of persecution.

Even Martin Luther (who, lest it be forgotten, was originally one of the Catholic Church’s most devoted servants) knew of the Church’s ability to reform and, for several years, trusted in it; his belief in that ability culminated in 1520 with an appeal to Pope Leo X:

Living among the monsters of this age with whom I am now for the third year waging war, I am compelled to look up to you, Leo, most blessed father, and to think of you. Indeed, since you are occa­sionally regarded as the sole cause of my warfare, I cannot help thinking of you…. I have never alienated myself from Your Blessedness to such an extent that I should not with all my heart wish you and your see every blessing, for which I have besought God with earnest prayers to the best of my ability.

Luther’s trust was well placed. Leo was a broad­minded Pope, a friend of Erasmus, and sensi­tive to the need for reform. But by the time of the letter, Luther had already published his Address to the German Nobility, and the aroused barons, casting covetous eyes on Church holdings, were only too eager to co-opt his reform movement. For all his magnanimity, Leo could not rejoin what Luther had so guilelessly and unintentionally shattered. Nor is it putting too strong a point upon it to say that the Lutheran movement’s original and ongoing reliance upon the State was a contributing factor 400 years later to the passivity of the German churches in the face of Nazi malevolence. The me­dieval awareness that the Church was over and apart from the State was, with a few heroic exceptions like Bonhoeffer and Niemoeller, largely forgotten by Lutheran clerics. It had been largely forgotten because for at least 400 years the Lutheran Church had been neither over nor apart. Even for a Protestant preacher like me, it is hard to make an objec­tive case that the overall state of human affairs has been improved because of the Reformation and its aftermath. As the historian Paul Johnson has noted,

One of the great tragedies of human history — and the central tragedy of Christianity — is the break-up of the harmonious world-order which had evolved, in the Dark Ages, on a Christian basis. Men had agreed, or at least had appeared to agree, on an all-enveloping theory of society which not only aligned virtue with law and practice, but allotted to everyone in it precise, Christian-orientated tasks.

But, my Protestant colleagues might demur, what about the priceless freedom of belief? Did not the Church of the Dark Ages suppress that? Well, yes and no. What the Church suppressed was the proclamation of that which the Church considered antithetical to the Truth. The Church never suppressed that which it believed to be the Truth (cf. Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair). The proclivity of Protestantism for endless schisms occurs because the God-given mandate to decide what was true and what was heretical devolved from the Church, where it belonged, to the individual, who might or might not be competent to make such a judgment. Any individual with a grievance could follow the example of Garrison Keillor’s Mr. Cox, who heard a sermon on women’s slacks, “smelled the burning rubber of Error and stood up and marched.”

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If we Protestants were candid on this point, we would admit that the medieval Magisterium’s vocation to exalt truth or suppress heresy was not really so abhorrent. This is especially the case if, as in the controversy surrounding Arius, the triumph of heresy could have led to horror. (My friends in the ACLU might not agree with me here, but would it not have been infinitely better for humankind if Mein Kampf had been suppressed in 1925, assuming that that suppression could have precluded the rise of the Nazis and the subsequent murder of millions? And is there not a powerful ethical case to be made today for the suppression of, say, child pornography?) No, it is not so much the idea of suppressing heresy that Protestants find repugnant, but the application by the Church of severely punitive measures against those it deemed heretical. Of course, it bears remembering that the Church killed no heretic directly, but delivered him into the hands of the secular authorities; that retraction of the heresy, and the consequent lifting of the death sentence (the number of heretics actually killed was considerably smaller than the popular imagination assumes) was an option almost always available until the very end; and that the luckless Servetus could rightly challenge anyone who assum­ed that Reformers like Calvin would be any more tender to heretics than the Catholic Inquisitors were. Still, for all that, the idea of burning a human being to death is abhorrent, monstrous, and bar­baric. And certainly no decent person today would authorize or endorse the burning to death of an­other human being, which, of course, is why all 50 states have renounced the use of the electric chair as a means of execution, and why the American military arsenal no longer contains napalm or ther­monuclear weapons. We moderns are, after all, civilized people, unlike our benighted forebears. Of course.

An understandable revulsion against the Church’s severely punitive reaction to heresy has caused many modern Protestants (particularly the so-called “mainline” ones) largely to toss out the idea of heresy altogether, which, of course, also tosses out the idea that there is any such thing as ontological Truth. But a principled resistance to heresy no more leads ineluctably to burning at the stake than contemporary laws against horse theft ineluctably lead to hanging from a cottonwood tree and burial in Boot Hill. Obviously, today the Catholic Church opposes heresy without favoring the capital punishment of heretics.

Even though there are potentially agonizing consequences in acknowledging the sovereignty of the Church in matters of faith, there are also poten­tially agonizing consequences in declaring the sov­ereignty of individual conscience, and those conse­quences sometimes entail more than just schism. For example, it is axiomatic in the Disciples of Christ denomination that we do not have heresy trials. Because of our conviction that individuals are capable of interpreting the Scriptures for them­selves, and our concomitant conviction that congre­gational polity best preserves individual sovereign­ty in matters of faith, an ordained Disciple minister, over a period of 15 years, engaged in bogus healing services, baptized congregants in “the holy name of socialism,” and claimed he was the reincarnated Jesus. Disciples in positions of leadership who knew what he was doing — and plenty did — were precluded from taking actions against him because of our polity, our lack of a judicatory, and our de­nominational disinclination to invoke the label of “heretic.” The consequence of our denomination’s not so benign neglect toward an affiliated congre­gation was that Jim Jones was an ordained Disciple minister until he died, and the 900 human lives ex­tinguished in the holocaust of Jonestown were members of a Disciple congregation.

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I have a Catholic friend I once chided for the seeming immobility of Catholicism. We Disciples, I said, like to think of ourselves as being on the cutting edge of every new theological movement. By contrast, Catholicism seems so staid, so irrelevant, as intransigent as a tree stump. (Or a Rock.) My friend was unperturbed. “God’s people will always return to God,” he said.

Like a magnet drawing iron filings to itself, the Catholic Church can best help restore the broken Body of Christ by being that which God ordained it to be. Stand fast, Catholics. God’s people will always return to God.