Catholic Tradition Matters (added musings on Ep. 71)

The Anglican Biblical scholar, Felix Cirlot, in his pamphlet on Apostolic Succession wrote:

The Catholic Church claims a divine commission and divine teaching authority, and the promise of divine assistance in preserving , transmitting, and defining the Divine Revelation committed to her. The burden of proof is admittedly on her to justify this fundamental claim; for to try to prove it “by authority” would be to argue in a circle…. But once this cardinal issue is left behind, the Catholic is not obliged to be able to justify independently every separate article of the Deposit of Faith of the Catholic Church by direct historical evidence, especially “with certainty” as some seem to ask. It suffice if he can show that the article in question was a part of the Faith of the Church at the earliest time for which determinative historical evidence is available, and that there is no conclusive reason to doubt the claim of the Church at that time that it had always been so. {Episode 71 linked HERE.}

Cirlot continues: In this sense, we are not only willing to concede, but glad to emphasize that the Catholic Religion is a “religion of authority,” which stands or falls as a whole with the basic claim referred above to be a Divine Revelation committed by God to a divinely commissioned, and divinely assisted Church. On their intrinsic merits, from the apologetical standpoint, the doctrines of the Catholic Faith are of very varying degrees of theological importance and also of intellectual cogency. But to the well-instructed Catholic they do not rest entirely on their intrinsic merits. They rest also on the supernatural, divine teaching authority of the Catholic Church. And in this respect they are all on the same level, provided only they be authentic parts of the Deposit of Faith. Nor can the claim that they are such parts be refuted merely by showing that there was a time for which the contemporary evidence is so scanty and indeterminate that it cannot be proved for certain, entirely apart from later evidence, whether a articular article was explicitly held at that time or not. {from Felix Cirlot, Apostolic Succession at the Bar of Modern Scholarship (West Park, NY: Holy Cross Publications, 1946) 14-15.}

I hope I have made clear from my extended Q&A in Episode 71, for an Orthodox Christian we do not stand in need of the certainty of historical facts in order for us to believe something as part of the Deposit of the Faith. First and foremost, we realize that the Church is a supernatural organism, that She is the outworking in all of its members of the Divine Life of God in Christ. As this is the case, the emphasis of this Life shall never be upon text, nor upon things that texts say, however important and vital texts, and here clearly I mean Holy Scripture, certainly are. Foremost, our life is a fellowship, in which we are hidden in God in Christ. This is the fellowship that St John talks about in his first epistle. Therefore, the most important and vital thing about the Christian faith is the Incarnation, the birth, life, ministry, Passion, and Ascension of our Lord, and His continual presence before the Father interceding for us.

Because the centrality of our faith orbits around the life of Christ, about which we don’t know a great deal, for we are told by Saint John himself that we know very little, and that were everything He had done written down, the books would overflow the world. Since this is the case, our faith in the Supernatural presence of Christ in the church, and especially in the Supernatural Ministry which he has given to the church, those stewards of his grace, meaning the stewards of the mysteries of God, which first comes to us in his apostles, assumes primacy in our lives. There were 12 Apostles at first, but then the term is extended after our Lord’s resurrection to all the others who had been part of that Apostolic band. The Apostles themselves, as ministers and stewards of the mysteries of God, as Saint Paul tells the Corinthians, gave to us the Christ who had been given to them by the Father. The essence of this mysteriological succession is told to us not only in Saint Paul and in Saint John, but also in Saint Clement of Rome.

St. Clement explicit states that the ministry of Christ came to Christ from the Father, then from Christ to the Apostles, and then from the Apostles to those whom they had appointed and those whom their appointees had appointed (you can see here Titus and Timothy). Apostolic succession, the continuous presence of the Apostolic ministry of the succession of bishops, is an easy thing which I as an historian can admit presents some lacunae for our knowledge. Yet these lacunae don’t say quite the things that many, such as Peter Lampe wishes to assert.

Lampe wishes to reduce what we know only to what we think we find at a given point in history, and take no account of what we know something is even just a few decades later. Here I am referring to Lampe’s assertion that there was no Church in Rome in the first century, but instead many churches, and that the “monoepiscopate” only emerges just in time for St. Irenaeus to tell falsehoods about it. The obvious question is, how did this happen that no one groused about it, and most importantly, why didn’t he even remotely engage with the arguments of dom Gregory Dix, Cirlot, or George Edmundson (whose book made it into Lampe’s bibliography, but seems one he didn’t crack open).

The answer is probably fairly easy, and one Cirlot mentions both in his short pamphlet, quoted above, but in his much longer Apostolic Succession: Is It True {if you wish a PDF of this excellent book, you can find a hyperlink to it at Perry Robinson’s Energetic Procession website}, namely that most historians are rather flabby theologians, and because Dix, Cirlot, and Edmundson started from a completely different perspective on the evidence (viz., not a reductionist one), they came to some very different conclusions about what the evidence tells us. Ironically, when the scholar and late bishop of Woolwich and professor and Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, John A. T. Robinson in his book Redating the New Testament placed the completion of the New Testament prior to AD 70 he rested his conclusion very much on Edmundson’s scholarship.

This same assertion I have made above about Apostolic Succession can be taken with icons. We see icons already in the 5th Century, what the icons were before that we have little evidence, archaeologically speaking. Which is not to say that we do not have any evidence, we certainly do. But what we do know is that when the presence of icons is referenced, no one was arguing that we should not venerate them or look to them with reverence them, with the exception of the Origenist and Arian Eusebius. There’s all sorts of things to say here, but that is for another post.

I wish to go back to this basic point about the supernatural nature of the church. This is a given for orthodox Christians. It is a given also for Catholics. Catholicism, though I feel it has strayed far from what it was even in the 16th century let alone what it was in the 10th, still makes this claim. They have not at least repudiated that. But let me put my own house in order. For us Orthodox, tradition is that Life of Christ in the church which continues to this day. Those people who want to think that they can play fast and loose and revise what the Church has believed everywhere, at all times, by everyone, and here I mean certain individuals who think that the Church needs to get with the modern times, we all know who they are and I need not mention them {COUGH! Fordhamites COUGH! Fordhamites}, have completely denied that Christ abides always and everywhere with his Church through the power of His Spirit. Protestantism necessarily denies this (but I am repeating myself). Protestantism (and theological liberalism, theological progressivism) has to do so otherwise it would have to say that what we find in the church, especially what we find in Orthodoxy, is somehow a great apostasy, that must have occurred very early on, and that Christ was not able to keep His Church in the Faith.

Certainly error can multiply and take on a “tradition” of its own: I once read the Presbyterian James B. Jordan say that since Protestantism has been around 500 years it can claim to be traditional. Well, that’s just a little longer than the Gnostics, so that ain’t sayin much.

More importantly, Protestantism began as a few, asserting something in a specific time, that was believed only by them, in their corner of Europe. Modern progressive Theology actually doesn’t even have that going for.

So I conclude: as St. Paul wrote to St. Timothy: “Guard the Deposit.”