Many Protestants (particularly evangelicals) date
the downfall of the early Church at 313, with the conversion of
the Roman emperor Constantine and the subsequent "paganization"
of institutional Christianity. Others will place this alleged calamitous
event around 440, with the beginning of the papal reign of Pope
St. Leo the Great, who - in the eyes of many Protestant historians
- was the first pope in the full-blown jurisdictional sense (however
that is defined by these same historians). Still another school
of thought believes that the derailing of the young Christian Church
occurred soon after the last Apostle's death and the cessation of
the writing of New Testament books, around the year 100, or else
sometime during the course of the second century A.D. at the latest.
This whole endeavor to date the "apostasy"
of institutional, historic Christianity strongly reminds me of arbitrary
attempts to maintain that human life or personhood in the womb begins
at a time other than conception, which is clearly the determinative
biological event. It simply can't be done with any logical or historiographical
rigor. The Church, like a human soul and body in the womb, organically
develops from the beginning in a gradual, consistent fashion, and
it is altogether futile to try and assign a date to its supposed
demise. Like the preborn child, the essence is there from the first.
Intuitively sensing this, I myself took a more complex,
nuanced view that the ostensible "Church" was truly Christian
all through this period, down through the early Middle Ages, up
to the period of the Inquisition and Crusades (roughly 1100-1500),
at which time it did, however, lose much of its integrity and moral
authority, if not the title and claim "Christian" altogether.
I was reluctant to go the whole way and deny that Catholicism was
Christian, because I knew too much about what it had always taught
on the "central doctrines" of Christianity, such as the
Trinity and all the Christological doctrines, and its indispensable
role in preserving both medieval culture and the Bible itself. To
deny Christian status to Catholicism at any point of its development
would be to cut off the limb on which Protestantism sits: in effect,
this would logically reduce to a very curious and self-defeating
standpoint that Christianity is not an historical religion by its
very nature.
Rather, I believed that the Catholic Church had
"passed the baton," so to speak, to the Protestants in
the sixteenth century, who succeeded in reforming the Church universal.
In other words, I held to an "organic" conception of Church
history, somewhat like the Protestant Church historian Philip Schaff,
and many Reformed, Anglican and Lutheran theologians and historians,
whereby Protestantism was a legitimate development of, heir to,
and legatee of, historic Catholicism. Henceforth, in my thinking,
Protestantism became the superior and more "biblical"
form of Christianity, since the Catholic Church had "obviously"
compromised itself both morally and theologically with its reactionary
and extremely harsh, "un-ecumenical" Council of Trent
in the sixteenth century.
This was the background of my ecclesiological thinking
when, in early 1990, I began to moderate an ecumenical discussion
group in my home. A friend of mine, John McAlpine, whom I had met
in the pro-life movement, and with whom I enjoyed conversing, stunned
me one night when he claimed that the Catholic Church had never
contradicted itself in any of its dogmas. This, to me, was self-evidently
incredible and a priori implausible, and so I embarked immediately
on a research project designed to debunk once and for all this far-fetched
notion that any Christian body could even claim infallibility, let
alone actually possess it.
During the course of this study, I gleefully discovered
many of the standard "anti-infallibility" works, which
are cited again and again: the Anglican George Salmon's The Infallibility
of the Church (originally 1890), Johann von Dollinger's Letters
of Janus and Letters of Quirinus (1869-1870) and Hans Kung's Infallible?:
An Inquiry (1971). Salmon's work has been refuted decisively twice,
by B.C. Butler, in his The Church and Infallibility: A Reply to
the Abridged "Salmon", and also in a series of articles
in The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, in 1901 and 1902 (1)
Yet Protestant polemicists Norman Geisler and Ralph
MacKenzie still claimed in 1995, in a major critique of Catholicism,
Roman Catholics and Evangelicals: Agreements and Differences, (2)
that Salmon's book has "never really been answered by the Catholic
Church." I was amused recently by the accusation of a prominent
professional anti-Catholic, that I must have never been familiar
with the best Protestant arguments against infallibility and Catholicism
in general - hence my eventual conversion on flimsy grounds! The
truth was quite otherwise: the above works are the cream of the
crop of this particular line of thought, as evidenced by Geisler
and MacKenzie's citation of both Salmon and Kung as "witnesses"
for their case (3). And the Church historian Dollinger's heretical
opinions are also often utilized by Eastern Orthodox polemicists
as arguments against papal infallibility. I know this well as a
result of my own ongoing dialogues with Orthodox Christians over
the Internet.
George Salmon revealed in his book his profoundly
biased ignorance not only concerning papal infallibility, but also
with regard to even the basics of the development of doctrine:
Romish advocates . . . are now content to exchange
tradition, which their predecessors had made the basis of their
system, for this new foundation of development . . . The theory
of development is, in short, an attempt to enable men, beaten off
the platform of history, to hang on to it by the eyelids . . . The
old theory was that the teaching of the Church had never varied.
(4)
Here Salmon is quixotically fighting a straw man
of his own making and seeking to sophistically force his readers
into the acceptance of a false and altogether logically unnecessary
dichotomy: that development of doctrine implies change in the essence
or substance of a doctrine and therefore is utterly contrary to
the claims of the Church to be the Guardian and Custodian of an
authoritative tradition of never-changing dogma. But this is emphatically
not the Catholic notion, nor that of Newman, to whom Salmon was
largely responding. Nor is it true that development was a "new"
theory introduced by Cardinal Newman into Catholicism, while the
"old theory" was otherwise. This is unanswerably proven
by the writing of St. Vincent of Lerins, one of the Church Fathers,
who died around 450 A.D., in his classic patristic exposition of
development, The Notebooks:
Will there, then, be no progress of religion in
the Church of Christ? Certainly there is, and the greatest . . .
But it is truly progress and not a change of faith. What is meant
by progress is that something is brought to an advancement within
itself; by change, something is transformed from one thing into
another. It is necessary, therefore, that understanding, knowledge
and wisdom grow and advance strongly and mightily . . . and this
must take place precisely within its own kind, that is, in the same
teaching, in the same meaning, and in the same opinion. The progress
of religion in souls is like the growth of bodies, which, in the
course of years, evolve and develop, but still remain what they
were . . . Although in the course of time something evolved from
those first seeds and has now expanded under careful cultivation,
nothing of the characteristics of the seeds is changed. Granted
that appearance, beauty and distinction has been added, still, the
same nature of each kind remains. (5)
St. Augustine (354-430), the greatest of the Church
Fathers, whom Protestants also greatly revere, expressed similar
sentiments in his City of God (16,2,1), and On the 54th Psalm (number
22), so this concept predated Newman by at least fourteen centuries,
Salmon's claims notwithstanding. George Salmon thus loses much credibility
as any sort of expert on Christian history, papal infallibility,
or development, for this and many other reasons, as demonstrated
by his Catholic critics. Yet Geisler and MacKenzie, while presenting
a fairly accurate picture of Newman's (and Catholic) development
themselves, state that Salmon's book is "a penetrating critique
of Newman's theory." (6)
It is beyond our purview here to examine the faulty
and jaundiced reasoning employed by the above-cited "anti-infallibility"
works, and my own ambitious and zealous adoption of them, in my
effort to refute the Catholic Church on historical grounds. Suffice
it to say that it is largely a matter of misunderstanding or misapplying
the true doctrine of infallibility, as defined dogmatically by the
First Vatican Council in 1870, or else a conveniently selective
and dishonest presentation of historical facts and patristic citations.
These practices run rampant throughout the current anti-Catholic
literature, and always have. And I, too, was guilty of it. Bias
has a way of blinding one to even basic logical errors.
The First Vatican Council of 1870 defined papal
infallibility as follows:
We teach and define that it is a dogma divinely
revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that
is, when, in discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of all
Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines
a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal
Church, is, by the divine assistance promised to him in Blessed
Peter, possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer
willed that His Church should be endowed in defining doctrine regarding
faith or morals; and that, therefore, such definitions of the Roman
Pontiff are of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church,
irreformable.
Thus, the conciliar definition was careful to limit
absolute infallibility to very specific and strict parameters, and
it is these which anti-Catholic polemicists almost always overlook
or distort when bringing to the table such famous examples of supposed
papal fallibility as Honorius, Vigilius and Liberius. None of them
succeed when subjected to the proper historical and logical scrutiny.
They only "work" when presented in isolation without the
Catholic counter-replies which reveal their utter inadequacy.
Furthermore, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965)
did not change this teaching in the slightest, despite the claims
of heterodox self-proclaimed "Catholics" and misinformed
non-Catholics and nominal, undereducated Catholics. Referring to
the decree on the Pope from Vatican I, the Council declared:
This teaching concerning the institution, the permanence,
the nature and import of the sacred primacy of the Roman Pontiff
and his infallible teaching office, the sacred synod proposes anew
to be firmly believed by all the faithful . . .
The college or body of bishops has for all that
no authority unless united with the Roman Pontiff, Peter's successor,
as its head, whose primatial authority, let it be added, over all,
whether pastors or faithful, remains in its integrity. For the Roman
Pontiff, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, namely, and
as pastor of the entire Church, has full, supreme and universal
power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise
unhindered. The order of bishops is the successor to the college
of the apostles in their role as teachers and pastors, and in it
the apostolic college is perpetuated. Together with their head,
the Supreme Pontiff, and never apart from him, they have supreme
and full authority over the Universal Church; but this power cannot
be exercised without the agreement of the Roman Pontiff. The Lord
made Peter alone the rock-foundation and the holder of the keys
of the Church (cf. Mt. 16:18-19) . . . (7)
Returning to my own intellectual and spiritual journey;
to give one example as an illustration of faulty "anti-Catholic"
reasoning: I quickly realized that the early Christians held a very
"high," literal view of the Eucharist (the Real Presence),
as does the Catholic Church today. The historical and patristic
evidence supporting this fact is so overwhelming that even the most
vehement opponents of the Catholic Church rarely seek to deny it.
But, undaunted, I stooped to the level of special pleading, in claiming
that St. Augustine, the greatest of the Fathers, adopted a symbolic
view of the Eucharist. I based this on his oft-stated notion of
the sacrament as "symbol" or "sign." I failed
to realize, however, that I was arbitrarily creating a false, logically
unnecessary dichotomy between the sign and the reality of the Eucharist,
for St. Augustine - when all his remarks on the subject are taken
into account - clearly accepted the Real Presence. The Eucharist
- for Augustine, and objectively speaking - is both sign and reality.
There simply is no contradiction.
A cursory glance at Scripture confirms this general
principle. For instance, Jesus refers to the sign of Jonah, comparing
the prophet Jonah's three days and nights in the belly of the fish
to His own burial in the earth (Matthew 12:38-40). In this case,
both events, although described as signs, were quite real indeed.
Jesus also uses the terminology of sign in connection with His Second
Coming (Matthew 24:30-31), which is believed by all Christians who
adhere to the Nicene Creed, and who have not denied biblical authority
or the possibility of miracles, to be a literal event, and not symbolic
only.
Protestants tend to use the same flawed analysis
when they find the abundant patristic citations extolling the greatness
and centrality of Holy Scripture, and thus assume that these Fathers
believed in the Protestant formal principle of Scripture Alone (sola
Scriptura), when in fact, further objective study reveals that they
accepted Tradition and Scripture as part of a unified whole. The
historical centrality of Scripture in the contention against heretics,
for example, did not mean that Tradition was divorced from Scripture,
since the Church Fathers routinely appealed to apostolic Tradition
in order to decisively counter heretical claims. In actuality, that
was the bottom line for the Fathers, the coup de grace. And this
appeal was an historical, rather than a biblical argument, based
on apostolic Church authority, as opposed to the methodological
approach of Scripture Alone.
Examples in the Fathers are legion. For instance,
St. Augustine makes many remarks which show that he regarded the
authority of the Church as supreme, all the while accepting the
primacy of Scriptures. In other words, they were two sides of the
same coin for him and the early Church, not opposed in terms of
ultimate authority, as in Protestantism:
The authority of our Scriptures, strengthened by
the consent of so many nations, and confirmed by the succession
of the Apostles, bishops and councils, is against you. (8)
No sensible person will go contrary to reason, no
Christian will contradict the Scriptures, no lover of peace will
go against the Church. (9)
Wherever this tradition comes from, we must believe
that the Church has not believed in vain, even though the express
authority of the canonical Scriptures is not brought forward for
it. (10)
To be sure, although on this matter, we cannot quote
a clear example taken from the canonical Scriptures, at any rate,
on this question, we are following the true thought of Scriptures
when we observe what has appeared good to the universal Church which
the authority of these same Scriptures recommends to you. (11)
Not knowing facts such as the above, or else refusing
to acknowledge them, I proceeded with my hostile research, cavalierly
assuming beforehand that the early Church was much more Protestant
than Catholic, and that the Catholic Church had become corrupt over
time (even while technically remaining Christian by the minimalist,
Protestant criterion of "central doctrines"). Such is
the standard view of Protestants, especially those most in line
with "Reformation thought." They assume, usually almost
without any direct analysis, that the Catholic Church has added
to the Christian faith, that faith which was once for all delivered
to the saints (Jude 3).
My Catholic friend John, confronted with the mass
of jaded, highly selective historical evidence I had compiled, and
my relentless polemics, was understandably frustrated. He kept urging
me to read John Henry Cardinal Newman's An Essay on the Development
of Christian Doctrine. What little familiarity I had with Newman
had shown me that he was a very impressive figure. I knew that he
was a brilliant Church historian, and highly respected by all, regardless
of theological affiliation.
So I started reading the Essay in October 1990,
after having been somewhat "softened" in the previous
months by my reading of Catholic books by the cultural historian
Christopher Dawson, pro-life heroine Joan Andrews, the famous Trappist
monk and convert Thomas Merton, and the marvelous, unparallelled
summary The Spirit of Catholicism by Karl Adam, which has been described
by Lutheran historian Jaroslav Pelikan as the best single volume
written for the purpose of explicating and defending Catholicism.
The timing - in God's Providence, and in retrospect - was perfect.
A few months before, I had also concluded, as a result of intense
discussions in my ecumenical group, that the Catholic Church possessed
the highest and most sublime moral theology of any Christian group.
Furthermore, I had been convinced (around July 1990) of the wrongness
of contraception, after involved arguments and the dumbfounded realization
that all Christians of all types had opposed it until 1930, when
the Anglicans adopted it at their Lambeth conference for "hard
cases" only. This was my first overt change of opinion, but
little did I suspect what was yet to come.
Charles Harrold, the editor of an anthology of Newman's
writings, described the Essay as follows:
It was composed in 1845, when Newman was halting
midway between two forms of Christianity . . . Its aim was to explain
and justify what Protestants regarded as corruptions and additions
to the primitive Christian creed, and to show these to be legitimate
developments . . . In a series of eloquent and erudite analogies,
he seeks to show that the present highly complex doctrines of the
Church lay in germ in the original depositum of faith, which has
evolved or developed through progressive unfolding and explication.
(12)
One can see, given the above description of my views
and methodology in 1990, that the Essay was probably the most appropriate
and relevant work I could have read at that time, regardless of
whether I was going to be convinced by it or not. It provided the
"best shot" that the Catholic Church was likely to give,
in defense of its doctrines which showed marked "growth"
(a neutral term) throughout history, to the dismay of Protestants.
Finally, I was now reading some sort of response
to the research I had been doing for months, under the influence
of thoroughly Protestant presuppositions. Newman wrote, near the
beginning:
However beautiful and promising that Religion is
in theory, its history, we are told, is its best refutation . .
.
In reply to this specious objection, it is maintained
in this Essay that, granting that some large variations of teaching
in its long course of 1800 years exist, nevertheless, these, on
examination, will be found to arise from the nature of the case,
and to proceed on a law, and with a harmony and a definite drift,
and with an analogy to Scripture revelations, which, instead of
telling to their disadvantage, actually constitute an argument in
their favour, as witnessing to a superintending Providence and a
great Design in the mode and in the circumstances of their occurrence.
(13)
I was already quite intrigued and looking forward
(intellectually) to what Newman was going to say. The very premise
of his approach was so novel and curious to me that it guaranteed
my continued avid interest. He went on to assert, shortly after
this statement:
And this one thing at least is certain; whatever
history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates,
whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history
is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this.
And Protestantism . . . as a whole, feels it, and has felt it. This
is shown in the determination . . . of dispensing with historical
Christianity altogether, and of forming a Christianity from the
Bible alone: men never would have put it aside, unless they had
despaired of it . . . To be deep in history is to cease to be a
Protestant . . . I have elsewhere observed:
"So much must the Protestant grant that, if
such a system of doctrine as he would now introduce ever existed
in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge .
. . Let him take which of his doctrines he will, his peculiar view
of self-righteousness, of formality, . . . his notion of faith,
. . . his denial of the virtue of the sacraments, or of the ministerial
commission, or of the visible Church . . . the Scriptures as the
one appointed instrument of religious teachings and let him consider
how far Antiquity, as it has come down to us, will countenance him
in it" (14) . . .
That Protestantism, then, is not the Christianity of history, it
is easy to determine. (15)
This was clearly now a frontal attack on the entire
edifice of my Protestant ecclesiology: a turning of my argument
on its head, with the forceful assertion that it was Catholicism,
not Protestantism, which had the historical record on its side.
And I respected history enough to shudder at this prospect. I also
knew full well that Newman would bring to bear an enormous weight
of historical evidence to support his case, as the book before me
was 445 pages long!
After summary statements such as the above, Newman
proceeded to make brilliant specific analogies in order to bring
home his point. The first had to do with the doctrine of purgatory,
vis-a-vis the doctrine of original sin, which is, of course, accepted
by Protestants as well:
Some notion of suffering, or disadvantage, or punishment
after this life, in the case of the faithful departed, or other
vague forms of the doctrine of Purgatory, has in its favour almost
a consensus of the first four ages of the Church. (16)
Newman then recounts no less than sixteen Fathers
who hold the view in some form. But in comparing this consensus
to the doctrine of original sin, we find a disjunction:
No one will say that there is a testimony of the
Fathers, equally strong, for the doctrine of Original Sin. (17)
In spite of the forcible teaching of St. Paul on
the subject, the doctrine of Original Sin appears neither in the
Apostles' nor the Nicene Creed. (18)
This is a crucial distinction. It is a serious problem
for Protestantism that it by and large inconsistently rejects doctrines
which have a consensus in the early Church, such as purgatory, the
(still developing) papacy, bishops, the Real Presence, regenerative
infant baptism, apostolic succession, and intercession of the saints,
while accepting others with far less explicit early sanction, such
as original sin. Even many of their own foundational and distinctive
doctrines, such as the notion of Faith Alone (sola fide), or imputed,
extrinsic, forensic justification, are well-nigh nonexistent all
through Church history until Luther's arrival on the scene, as,
for example, prominent Protestant apologist Norman Geisler recently
freely admitted:
. . . these valuable insights into the doctrine
of justification had been largely lost throughout much of Christian
history, and it was the Reformers who recovered this biblical truth
. . .
During the patristic, and especially the later medieval
periods, forensic justification was largely lost . . . Still, the
theological formulations of such figures as Augustine, Anselm, and
Aquinas did not preclude a rediscovery of this judicial element
in the Pauline doctrine of justification . . .
. . . one can be saved without believing that imputed
righteousness (or forensic justification) is an essential part of
the true gospel. Otherwise, few people were saved between the time
of the apostle Paul and the Reformation, since scarcely anyone taught
imputed righteousness (or forensic justification) during that period!
(19)
On the other hand, Protestants clearly accept developing
doctrine on several fronts: the Canon of the New Testament is a
clear example of such a (technically "non-biblical") doctrine
It wasn't finalized until 397 A.D. The divinity of Christ was dogmatically
proclaimed only at the "late" date of 325, the fully worked-out
doctrine of the Holy Trinity in 381, and the Two Natures of Christ
(God and Man) in 451, all in Ecumenical Councils which are accepted
by most Protestants. So development is an unavoidable fact for both
Protestants and Catholics.
The trick for Protestants (granting Church history
an important and legitimate role, whether it is considered normative
and authoritative or not), is to determine a non-arbitrary rationale
for accepting some doctrines while rejecting others. It will not
do to simply say that certain doctrines are "unbiblical"
and thus unworthy of Protestant allegiance, since it must immediately
be explained why the majority of early Christians believed in them,
and why beliefs such as the Canon of the New Testament and Scripture
Alone are adopted despite the absence of biblical rationale, or
why (chances are) many other strands of Protestantism disagree with
the one making the claim, when Scripture is allegedly so "clear"
and able to be interpreted in the main without difficulty by the
layman.
Newman writes, regarding the New Testament Canon:
As regards the New Testament, Catholics and Protestants
receive the same books as canonical and inspired; yet . . . the
degrees of evidence are very various for one book and another .
. . For instance, as to the Epistle of St. James . . . Origen, in
the third century, is the first writer who distinctly mentions it
among the Greeks and it is not quoted by name by any Latin till
the fourth . . . Again: The Epistle to the Hebrews, though received
in the East, was not received in the Latin Churches till St. Jerome's
time . . . Again, St. Jerome tells us, that in his day, towards
A.D. 400, the Greek Church rejected the Apocalypse, but the Latin
received it. Again: The New Testament consists of twenty-seven books
. . . Of these, fourteen are not mentioned at all till from eighty
to one hundred years after St. John's death, in which number are
the Acts, 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Colossians, 1st and 2nd Thessalonians,
and James. Of the other thirteen, five, viz. St. John's Gospel,
Philippians, 1st Timothy, Hebrews, and 1st John, are quoted but
by one writer during the same period. On what ground, then, do we
receive the Canon as it comes to us, but on the authority of the
Church of the fourth and fifth centuries? . . . The fifth century
acts as a comment on the obscure text of the centuries before it.
(20)
Newman makes another brilliant analogy between the
"lateness" of the development of the papacy and the Marian
doctrines, and the Creed and the Canon:
Ecclesiastical recognition of the place which St.
Mary holds in the Economy of grace . . . was reserved for the fifth
century, as the definition of our Lord's proper Divinity had been
the work of the fourth . . . In order to do honour to Christ, .
. . to defend the true doctrine of the Incarnation . . . to secure
a right faith in the manhood of the Eternal Son, the Council of
Ephesus determined the Blessed Virgin to be the Mother of God .
. . The title 'Theotokos,' or Mother of God, was familiar to Christians
from primitive times, and had been used, among other writers, by
Origen, Eusebius, . . . St. Athanasius, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory
Nazianzen, St. Gregory Nyssen. (21)
If the Imperial power checked the development of
Councils, it availed also for keeping back the power of the Papacy.
The Creed, the Canon, in like manner, both remained undefined .
. . All began to form, as soon as the Empire relaxed its tyrannous
oppression of the Church. (22)
The venerable Cardinal then defines seven characteristics
of all true developments:
It becomes necessary . . . to assign certain characteristics
of faithful developments . . . the presence of which serves as a
test to discriminate between them and corruptions . . . I venture
to set down Seven Notes . . . as follows: - There is no corruption
if it retains one and the same type, the same principles, the same
organization; if its beginnings anticipate its subsequent phases,
and its later phenomena protect and subserve its earlier; if it
has a power of assimilation and revival, and a vigorous action from
first to last. (23)
A corruption is a development in that very stage
in which it ceases to illustrate, and begins to disturb, the acquisitions
gained in its previous history . . . A true development . . . is
an addition which illustrates . . . the body of thought from which
it proceeds . . . it is of a tendency conservative of what has gone
before it. (24)
After consideration, especially, of Newman's analogies
between Protestant developments and distinctively Catholic ones,
and his "Seven Notes," it became clear to me that Protestantism
represented a massive corruption of historical Christianity, rather
than a consistent development, as I formerly believed, and my thinking
underwent a paradigm shift of massive proportions. For Protestantism
undeniably introduced radically new doctrines such as sola fide,
sola Scriptura, sectarianism, private judgment, the notion of an
invisible, non-hierarchical church, and symbolic baptism and Eucharist,
which were sheer novelties, rather than reforms, supposedly hearkening
back to the alleged state of affairs in the early Church. But they
simply cannot be found in the early Church.
Newman builds his case to its climax, with the following
lucid comment:
If it be true that the principles of the later Church
are the same as those of the earlier, then . . . the later in reality
agrees more than it differs with the earlier, for principles are
responsible for doctrines. Hence they who assert that the modern
Roman system is the corruption of primitive theology are forced
to discover some difference of principle . . . for instance, that
the right of private judgment was secured to the early Church and
has been lost to the later, or again, that the later Church rationalizes
and the earlier went by faith.
Moreover . . . the various heresies . . . have in
one respect or other . . . violated those principles with which
she rose into existence, and which she still retains. Thus Arian
(25) and Nestorian (26) schools denied the allegorical rule of Scripture
interpretation; the Gnostics (27) and Eunomians (28) for Faith professed
to substitute knowledge; and the Manichees (29) also . . . The dogmatic
Rule . . . was thrown aside by all those sects which, as Tertullian
tells us, claimed to judge for themselves from Scripture; and the
Sacramental principle was violated, ipso facto, by all who separated
from the Church . . . In like manner the contempt of mystery, of
reverence, of devoutness, of sanctity, are other notes of the heretical
spirit. As to Protestantism it is plain in how many ways it has
reversed the principles of Catholic theology. (30)
In other words, the early heretics were the ones
who usually operated on the basis of the so-called perspicuity,
or clearness of Scripture, without authoritative interpretation
by authoritative ecclesiastical bodies. Protestants look back today
with the benefit of hindsight and speak of the "early Church"
or simply, "the Church," yet fail to recognize that this
"Church" which they tacitly assume was one and unified,
is none other than the organically-connected ancestor of the present-day
Catholic Church, which operates on the same principles (apostolic
succession, a certain understanding of the organic relationship
of Church, Bible, and Tradition, sacramentalism, sacerdotalism,
papacy, conciliarism, episcopacy, the communion of saints, etc.).
One need not posit an absolute break of continuity
in order to equate the present Catholic Church with the "Church"
of the early centuries. One need only understand the true nature
of development, whereby doctrines can grow in the sense that they
are more clearly understood, and more deeply and thoroughly explicated,
while not undergoing any essential transformation. But Protestantism
requires a radical change of principle, and hence, fails the test
of what constitutes a true development, in Newman's analysis. Besides,
corruption can just as easily consist of subtraction as addition.
Corruption entails a departure from normalcy and precedent.
Furthermore, it is instructive to realize that what
we now consider orthodox in early Christianity, is simply the position
of the Roman apostolic see, which was proven right again and again
on this score, far beyond coincidence, given the multiplicity of
heretical sects in the early centuries, and the thousands of competing
Christian denominations today.
This fact and the others recounted above in Newman's
Essay and my own commentary upon it, are what basically compelled
me to become a Catholic (along with the profundity and beauty of
unchanging Catholic moral teaching). I had too much respect for
logic, historical theology, and Church history to resist what I
felt to be an utterly unanswerable argument. I discovered, with
the inestimable assistance of Cardinal Newman, that the Catholic
Church had far and away the most cogent, consistent claim to ecclesiological
and apostolic preeminence, and this, coupled with my simultaneous
intensive study of what happened in the sixteenth century (especially
the stated reasons for the Protestant Revolution, and the motivations
of its leading proponents) and the theological and moral views of
the major Protestant Founders (such as: sola fide, sola Scriptura,
libertine views of clerical vows and divorce, lying, filthy language,
disrespect for authority and precedent, plundering and violence,
iconoclasm, anti-intellectualism, etc.) made any further resistance
to Catholicism on my part equivalent to rearranging chairs on the
deck of the sinking Titanic.
Thus it was fitting that a little more than a month
after completing the Essay, while reading Cardinal Newman's meditation
on "Hope in God the Creator," I quietly gave up what little
remaining emotional resistance I had to conversion, and realized
that I had already entered the gates of Rome (and therefore, historic
Christendom) for good. And, thus far, I've never had the slightest
desire or inclination to look back.
FOOTNOTES
1. Butler: New York, Sheed & Ward, 1954, 230
pages. A friend was recently able to obtain the articles from the
Irish Ecclesiastical Record in the library of a well-known evangelical
seminary in the Chicago area.
2. Geisler, Norman L. and Ralph E. MacKenzie, Roman Catholics and
Evangelicals: Agreements and Differences, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Books, 1995, p.206, which calls it the "classic refutation
of papal infallibility." See also p.459.
3. Geisler and MacKenzie, ibid., pp.206-207.
4. Salmon, George, The Infallibility of the Church, Grand Rapids,
MI: Baker Book House (originally 1888), pp.31-33 (cf. also pp.35,
39).
5. 23:28-30, cited from Jurgens, William A., The Faith of the Early
Fathers (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979), vol. 3,
p.265.
6. Geisler and MacKenzie, ibid., p.459.
7. Vatican II: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, chapter III:
"The Church is Hierarchical," sections 18, 22. From edition
/ translation by Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing
Co., 1988 revised ed., pp.370,375).
8. C. Faustus, 8,5.
9. The Trinity, 4,6,10.
10. Letter 164 to Evodius of Uzalis.
11. C. Cresconius, 1,33.
12. Harrold, Charles F., A Newman Treasury, London: Longmans, Green
and Co., 1943, pp.83-84.
13. All quotes from the Essay are taken from the edition published
by the University of Notre Dame Press, 1989, with a foreword by
Ian Ker, from the 1878 edition of the original work of 1845; pp.vii-viii.
14. Newman, John Henry, Historical Sketches, vol.1: The Church of
the Fathers, London: 1872, p.418.
15. Newman, Essay, ibid., pp.7-9.
16. Ibid., p.21
17. Ibid., p.21.
18. Ibid., p.23.
19. Geisler and MacKenzie, ibid., pp.247-248,503.
20. Newman, Essay, pp.123-126.
21. Ibid., p.145.
22. Ibid., p.151.
23. Ibid., pp.170-171.
24. Ibid., pp.199-200,203.
25. Arianism: a heresy holding that Jesus Christ was a mere created
being and not co-equal with the Father.
26. Nestorianism: a heresy which denied that Christ had a Divine
Nature.
27. Gnosticism: a heresy which claimed a secret knowledge ("gnosis")
which went beyond revelation, faith, and reason.
28. Eunomianism: akin to Arianism, it held that Jesus was inferior
in essence to the Father, and that the Holy Spirit was created by
Jesus.
29. Manichaeanism: a form of Gnosticism; it held to a sub-personal
cosmic dualism between good and evil and was severely ascetic.
30. Newman, Essay, pp.353-354
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