John Thayer Jensen (right)
and his wife, Susan (left)

Introduction

8AM Mass this morning – Father gives us a homily that takes its departure from St Paul’s “thorn in the side” to reflect on our own sufferings and trials. His homily is personal and, at points, touching. He surmises that St Paul’s “thorn” may have been some physical defect, such as poor eyesight, or perhaps a tendency to a personal fault – anger, for instance. We ourselves have our “thorns.” We should remember that God’s grace is sufficient for us; that when we are weak, then we are strong. At the end, he reminds us that Christ had, also, His “thorns” – and Father gestures at his forehead to remind us of them. Not such a bad homily, after all, but aimed at sentiment rather than thought.

The music at this, as with most of our Masses, is negligible. The content of the hymns focuses on God’s unconditional love for us; calls us to be “instruments of peace.” We usually recite the Apostle’s rather than the Nicene Creed – perhaps the latter is too long. Our response to the prayers of the faithful is to chant a Maori version of “Lord, hear our prayer” – though of Maori speakers in the congregation of perhaps 200, there may be one at most.

At our Reformed church, of which we were one of the three founding families, the sermon – 40 minutes or so, by contrast with Father’s 15-minute homily – would have been systematic and Biblical; would have explicated the text of a passage chosen by the pastor; would have related it to Reformed theological themes. The singing was always of metrical psalms – for we wished to be Biblical.

In, therefore, the manner of worship in the two churches, there is a real contrast – though not one that allows me to say this or that is better. The ordinary parish Mass can be pretty lacking in many ways; the Reformed service, on the other hand, was often dry and tedious. Still, I am not a Catholic because of ‘bells and smells.’ At the Reformed Church, once every few months those of us who were communicant members would have attended an addition to the service to celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

At Mass today, as every day, the liturgical rite to this point, the homily, the singing, are all, in a way, preface. Now the gifts of bread and wine are brought to the altar. Father prays over them, using the Church’s liturgy. “This is My Body;” “This is the chalice of My Blood.” We adore what is no longer bread and wine. We receive into our own bodies the Body and Blood of Christ.

Is it this, then, that is the reason why, 20 years after my reception into the Catholic Church, I am still a Catholic? Is this tremendous fact what compensates for the lack, in many parishes, of the “bells and smells” which some of my Protestant friends think drew me into the Church? Not exactly. Not precisely just this – the reception of Our Lord. Let me explain. Certainly it is the Eucharist that keeps me a Catholic – but it is not the Eucharist itself. I could, after all, be Orthodox. The Church – the Roman Catholic Church – assures me that the Orthodox Churches have a valid Eucharist. If I were to attend one of the dozen or so Orthodox Churches in Auckland, I would receive Him – His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity – and I would experience a much more satisfying, beautiful, and, not to put too fine a point on it, reverent liturgy. My Orthodox friend tells me of the Divine Liturgy at the Serbian Orthodox Church. It causes my heart to long for the beauty that the Catholic Church could achieve – and does, in some Auckland parishes – approach.

It is not the Eucharist by itself that keeps me a Catholic.

I have written elsewhere of how I became a Catholic. I have been asked by (sadly few) Protestant friends which doctrine or doctrines of the Catholic Church made me a Catholic. Which Reformed teachings did I think wrong; which correct in the Catholic Church? What issue made me a Catholic?

This, I think, is to ask the wrong question. It is to put the cart before the horse; to assume that I became (and remain) a Catholic for what, at bottom, must be ideological reasons. I became a Catholic to join the Church.

Becoming Reformed

I became a Christian on the night of Saturday 27th December, 1969 – probably, actually, early on the Sunday morning. I was 27 years old. I had had no religious experience at all before the night when, under the influence of LSD, I experienced what may be called an intellectual vision. Though I was aware of only as much of Christ as any completely secular young American may absorb from the surrounding culture, that night I knew that Jesus and the Devil were present to me, and that I could choose. I chose Jesus.

I had chosen a Christ with almost no content. I was at the time virtually without a place in the world. I was in the process of being divorced. I had dropped out of University. I was using drugs regularly. Had this not been the case, I have no doubt I would not so readily have reached out to the Hand offered me – would have been sceptical about there being any Hand at all, or anyone to extend it. I was in the position of a drowning man. Candace’s (my future wife Susan’s sister) testimony to me of her own experience was my only Christian story.

The next day I knew that I must put some content into this tiniest flickering flame of faith. I had no sort of Christian background. Susan had been brought up Anglican, but when I met her, she was not actively attending church. If she had been, it is likely I would have attended Anglican (Episcopal) worship with her. During those first weeks of 1970, I heard radio advertisements for Prince of Peace Lutheran Church’s evening youth services (complete with electric guitars). Sue and I began attending. Pastor Norman Hammer baptised me on the 26th of July, 1970. By then I was no longer a Lutheran.

By that statement, I mean that by then I was already a non-Sacramentalist. I was – albeit not very consciously – in the evangelical camp. This came about because I was being catechised by some wonderful people connected with an organisation called Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru). Campus Crusade is non-denominational. I do not think they would have objected if people involved with them were Catholic. Nevertheless, at least in our group, the default assumptions were evangelical; indeed, were Baptist. At no point could I have said that anyone presented me with any doctrines other than that Jesus had died for our sins, the Holy Spirit was there to help us live as we ought, and that we ought to bring others to faith in Christ.

But when, sometime after my own baptism in the Lutheran Church – perhaps around the end of 1970 – I listened to the words Pastor Hammer said in baptising a child: something along the lines of ‘God, Who has regenerated you by water and the Spirit…’ – I was shocked. I had by then read a certain amount of Lutheran theology (including much of Luther), but a greater amount of Baptist (and dispensationalist) theology. I knew, I would have said, that baptismal regeneration was wrong. It was a form of magic. We were born again by believing. By 1971 I had persuaded Susan that we must become Baptists. We joined International Baptist Church. We were married there on 20 May, 1972. We were still members of that church on 31 January, 1973, when we left Honolulu for my first post-University job lecturing in linguistics at the University of Auckland.

In Auckland, we joined Hillsboro Baptist Church. It was near the flat we lived in. It was Baptist. But by now I was already on my way into the Reformed Church. From the morning that I turned to Christ, I read. I read voraciously. I read the Bible through – have done about once a year since. I already knew Greek, as my degrees are in linguistics. I taught myself Hebrew. I began reading Christian writers.

John Calvin

Being in a Lutheran Church at the start, I read Luther, and Lutheran authors: Helmut Thielicke is the one I best remember. But soon, from the Campus Crusade influence, I began reading others. I read Spurgeon. I read a lot of dispensationalist authors. I read many popular writers. I read Lewis Sperry Chafer’s multi-volume Systematic Theology. I was introduced to Calvin (by Spurgeon) and read the Institutes. And I read church history – Philip Schaff’s three-volume history, a number of other works. I cannot, at this time depth, remember the names of most of the writers whose books I read.

And, slowly, I was becoming convinced that the Baptists, excellent although they were, were inadequate. In particular, their theology seemed to me simplistic; and they were so extremely clearly a very recent innovation in the history of Christianity.

For I had some independent knowledge of Christianity through historical study. I knew, in particular, that traditional Christian worship had baptised infants. The Baptists argued, of course, that this was an error. It was difficult for me to believe that almost all Christians through most of history had been wrong on this point. And I knew, as well, that Christian worship had been more … well, formal! … through most of its history.

Amongst the authors I had been reading, I especially found the writings of R. J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen, Cornelius Van Til, and others in the Calvinist line convincing. Their theology was much more satisfying. I had become, by now, a Calvinist Christian. There were, of course, Calvinist Baptist churches in New Zealand. But there was a group called the Reformed Churches of New Zealand that was Calvinist, and baptised infants. The covenantal theology they taught to justify baptising infants convinced me. Sue and I began attending a Reformed Church. At the beginning of 1975 we joined the Avondale Reformed Church. When John, our first child, was born on 12 July, 1975, he was baptised there. When we left Auckland for me to work in the Education Department of the island of Yap, our official church membership remained with Avondale Reformed Church. We were members of Reformed Churches until 1995, when we left to become Catholics.

Being Reformed

I was excited about being Reformed – and I continued reading Reformed writers. I was reading van Til. Rushdoony had led me to him. Rushdoony led me also to Gary North, whose wife is Rushdoony’s daughter. And Gary North led me to Jim Jordan. Jim Jordan was a Calvinist – at least I believe he would accept the label. However, by contrast with some more doctrinaire Calvinists, he was also interested in good thought wherever it could be found – whether amongst Protestant writers, or Orthodox, or Catholic. His own background had been Lutheran. He wrote exciting things. He seemed to think that we Calvinists had thrown out the liturgical baby when we had thrown out the legalistic bathwater of the Roman Church. He thought we ought to have Communion every Sunday. He thought baptised children should receive Communion. He thought the Reformed liturgy should look a lot like the Anglican – even, in some respects, the Catholic – liturgy.

We lived eight years in Yap. Our three other children – Helen, Eddie, and Adele – were born there. When, on our 12th wedding anniversary – 20 May, 1984 – we returned to Auckland, it was to start a Reformed Church – and I returned as an evangelist of Jim Jordan.

Reformed Church

Although my degrees are in linguistics, I have been involved in computer programming since my first year at University, in 1960. The computer was a tool for my linguistics. In Yap, in 1977, I had ordered my first personal computer. By 1980, I was doing more computing in aid of the Education Department’s needs than in relation to linguistics. And in 1980, two of my dearest friends – one now a Reformed minister – made an agreement with me, that if I moved to Pukekohe, a satellite town of Auckland, Richard would sponsor us as the nucleus of a Reformed Church. In 1983, based on my computing experience, I was offered a job as a programmer with the firm Ross then worked for in Auckland. Susan and I moved to Pukekohe. At the beginning of 1989 the Pukekohe Reformed Church was formally instituted.

I was Reformed – but I was also a disciple of Jim Jordan. I was sure that Jim was right about so much. One thing that he pressed was that communion should be a part of every Sunday’s worship. So I pressed my elders – and they agreed to move from a position of quarterly communion to bimonthly communion. Another matter that I was very hot about was the age of communion. Jim said that the qualification for receiving communion ought to be baptism. Baptism, not a certain age. But in our church in Pukekohe, to be a communicant member was to be able to vote in congregational matters. The age of Communion, said our elders, was ‘marriageable age.’

I became very upset about this. None of our children could commune. I wrote an angry letter to Session about the matter, accusing them of the ‘sin’ (my word) of withholding communion from the baptised. This event proved a turning-point in my growth. I was asked to meet with them. I was very angry. I was sure I was right and they were wrong. What they said to me had nothing to do with the question of who was right on the issue. What they did was to explain that Christ had established His Church as His agent in the world. It was up to the Church to spread the Gospel – and to govern the Kingdom. I had stated that I believed this, that I considered them, the elders of Pukekohe Reformed Church, my ‘rulers’ (Hebrews 13:17). If I wished to take the matter up, it could not begin with my accusing them of sin. It could be a matter for discussion.

In becoming members of a Reformed Church, we answer ‘I do’ to four questions in the Public Profession of Faith. The fourth is this:

Do you promise to submit to the government of the church and also, if you should become delinquent either in doctrine or in life, to submit to its admonition and discipline?

For the Reformed Churches of New Zealand belief in a visible Church was an essential. From a section of Church Government:

The New Testament places a great deal of emphasis on the visible church, that is, on particular churches in each place where God is gathering His people together. The apostle Paul wrote Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians and the apostle John wrote letters to 7 churches in Asia Minor as dictated by Christ Himself. Our Lord Himself gave His church a procedure for dealing with sin in the congregation which makes clear that the church He is building comes to expression in visible congregations. The apostle Paul writes specific instruction to Timothy and Titus so that they might “know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15).

All of this makes clear that the visible church and how it is run (church government) is very important to our Lord. I may not have been completely Calvinistic; I was very definitely a churchman. I was shocked. I still thought I was right about the age of Communion. But I knew they were right about the Church. I wrote a statement retracting my intention to accuse them of sin. The matter itself rather faded out after that – but I was changed. I knew that they were right about the Church.

Something Missing

From 1975 I considered myself Reformed. Yet I felt a constant sense of something missing. I longed for … I knew not what. Although I had had no Christian upbringing at all, I had, in my imaginative life, an important exposure to Catholicism. As a teenager, I had read – and been deeply moved by – Sigrid Undset’s Lavransdatter. I have never been a keen reader of historical romances, but Kristin stuck with me. When I was at University, I found it in the library and read it again – and was so moved as to read also Undset’s The Master of Hestviken. That book gave me something I had never had before: a knowledge why Christianity made such a point of Jesus’s death. Olav, the ‘Master’ of Hestviken, hurrying home to his dying wife, is in an unconsecrated church – and meditates on the meaning of Christ’s Passion.¹

Jesus thought He was God, dying for the sins of men! I read this passage, and wept. I was staggered by such a conception. It did not occur to me to wonder if this could be true. Indeed, I do not know what content I might have put into a statement: ‘this man thinks he is God.’ I only knew that I was deeply moved by this idea, by the idea of this religion – and I identified this religion with Catholicism.

Until the night I became a Christian, I had little or no exposure to any religious ideas. Providentially, after my conversion, the writer I read and returned to time and time again with a real longing was C. S. Lewis. But Lewis was not a Catholic. Am I, perhaps, talking about Christianity in the ‘mere’ sense of Lewis’s “Mere Christianity?”

I do not think I am. The fact is that all of Lewis’s instincts are Catholic. His view of salvation as a ‘good infection’ (Mere Christianity) seems to me more akin to the idea of infused righteousness than that of the Reformed imputed righteousness. His writing is at odds with Calvinism at many points. I knew this, without really knowing how I knew it. All the 20 or so years I considered myself Reformed, I continued to read Lewis – but felt guilty doing so. I read him in secret. I would become unhappy about my Reformed worship in tears, at times – and would retire to my private office to read Lewis.

By 1991, I was thinking more and more about the Catholic-like practices: the Lord’s Supper as part of each Sunday church service, kneeling for prayer, a liturgy that more closely resembled what I thought of as Anglican but which was, really, Catholic. More accurately, my emotions were drawn more to these and similar things. Some songs that we sang before the service began – as I said above, we only used psalmody during the service itself – were translations of old Catholic hymns. One of my favourites was O Jesus Joy of Loving Hearts – a translation of St Bernard’s Jesu Dulcis Memoria.

Although this feeling is not the reason I became a Catholic – I could only become a Catholic because I believed it to be true – yet I think this emotional and instinctive feeling of missing is essential in explaining why, when I suddenly encountered the idea that Catholicism might be true, I was filled with a terrible fear – lest I be deceived – but with a great and deep joyous longing – that it might be true.

The Catholic Storm

In 1993, as part of my work as, by now, computer system administrator at the University of Auckland, I was connecting to the infant Internet. Today, the Internet is a part of everyone’s life. In 1993 it was my entry into a world I had not known existed. People from all around the world met together in this place. I discovered a Christian discussion group. There were people from all flavours of Christianity – including Catholics. I had no conception of Catholics as … well, in truth, I had no conception of Catholics at all. My ideas were in fact simply imaginary stereotypes of one sort and another. There were Catholics here who seemed to understand the Christian faith – and to be convinced Catholics. I involved myself in one or another discussion – principally defending Catholics against Protestant misconceptions I knew not to be true.

Blessed John Henry Newman

Someone mentioned a Reformed minister who had become a Catholic. I was electrified. I had never heard of anyone becoming a Catholic. I knew of any number of examples of Catholics becoming Protestants. Who was this, I asked? The name Scott Hahn was given. Who was he? What did he write? My University library could have books of his. ‘No,’ someone said, books in the University library were unlikely. He had recorded tapes about his own conversion. If I was interested in books about Catholic converts, had I ever read Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua? I had not. I had, however, heard of Newman. Newman was respectable in University circles, for he had written The Idea of a University, and University people read it, though I never had.

Francis Schaeffer had been an important early influence on me. In a taped talk of his that I had listened to, he had implied that Newman’s conversion to the Catholic Church had been dishonest. Newman had, Schaeffer had said, been exhausted by his struggles with liberalism. Newman, Schaeffer said, had wanted an infallible Church so that he would no longer need to work things out for himself. He had, in Schaeffer’s words, gone into the darkness of the Church and shut the door behind him.

I was terrified at being known to be seriously interested in Catholicism, but Newman was different. I thought of his writings as ‘serious literature.’ I went to the University library and got out Newman’s Apologia and his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. At about the same time I received, from one of the large number of kind, concerned persons in the Internet discussion group, a copy of Scott Hahn’s conversion tape, and one of Kimberley Hahn’s own story. I read both books in secret – I did not want my wife to know what I was doing! – and listened to the tapes, in my office, with earphones – instantly switching to the radio when Susan came in.

On 22nd September, 1993 – my 51st birthday – I knew I was in trouble. I had long since come to believe that many Catholic practices – such as communion as a part of every Church service – and some beliefs – such as Purgatory (which I had got from Lewis) were desirable and Biblical. As I finished reading Newman and listening to Hahn, I was horrified to find that I had come to think that the question was not what whether Reformed Christianity ought to bring back some Catholic practices and beliefs; the question was whether Jesus had in fact established a visible Kingdom on earth – and that that Kingdom might simply be the Catholic Church.

The ensuing ten months were the stormiest of my life. I have detailed something of what I experienced in the 1998 piece I referenced above. I re-read much of what I had read before in becoming, and being, Reformed. Many good people on the Internet sent me books, both for and against the Catholic Church. I consulted many on the Internet. I talked with the elder in our Reformed church who had been assigned as our family’s pastor. I talked (endlessly) with my family. I prayed. I prayed. I prayed.

Gradually, especially through reading Newman and other Catholic writers, I came to understand that the approach my Protestant – and a few Catholic – friends urged on me could not but fail. This approach was to compare the teachings of the Catholic Church with those of other Christian groups and to decide which taught the truth. In the nature of things, this could not succeed.

How was I to know which group taught the truth? I was told I should consult the Bible. I should compare the teachings of the individual churches with what the Bible taught, and see which was most Biblical. But: Why the Bible? What books were the Bible? What did the Bible teach?

The Bible is not, prima facie, a communication from God. As far back as 1985, in discussions with my Reformed pastor, I had been told that the truth and inspired character of the Bible had to be presupposed. I had to start with it; could not infer its nature from some other facts. If I did so, I was believing in myself, not in the Bible.

Further, in that same conversation, I had to presuppose the accuracy of the list of books in the Bible – in the Protestant Bible, forsooth! – in order to begin to think at all. Neither what the Bible was, nor what books constituted the Bible, were matters that could be proved from more fundamental premises. If I did so, I was believing in myself, not in God’s Word.

These considerations, nevertheless, were not of overwhelming practical importance. The contents of the Bible – at least the bulk of it, and, a decisive point, the New Testament – were agreed on by most Christians. I could start with the Bible in good company. The difficulty was with the teachings of the Bible. For the Bible does not teach. The Bible records. People teach.

Some told me that the Sacraments were symbols only. Some told me that they were covenants that God made with me, but were not something independent of my faith in them. Some said that they were real things. For example, if I were baptised, God’s life was really made to exist in me, quite apart from my faith. Some said that there were two Sacraments, but I knew that most of Christians through most of history thought there were seven.

I was told that it was the clear teaching of Scripture that Baptism was a conscious testimony to the world of having been saved (and therefore should not be applied to infants). I was told that faith alone saved me – but that if my faith were alone – that is, did not show itself in works – that I had not truly believed.

The arguable nature of practically every Christian notion, from the very fundamental (the divinity of Christ; the personality of the Holy Spirit) to the smallest detail (must women cover their heads in Church?) cannot be doubted. All these issues are argued from the Bible. To discern the Church by its agreement with the Bible would be, in fact, to discern the Church by its agreement with my understanding of the Bible.

So I did what I had always done: I read. I re-read Van Til and Rushdoony; Luther and Calvin. I read many new books, books arguing for the truth of Catholicism and books arguing for its falsity. By June of 1994, nine months later, crisis came. I had read intensely. I had begun (in fear and trembling) attending weekday Masses at the University Newman Centre. I grew more and more terrified.

On a bus one sunny winter afternoon in June of 1994, I experienced fugue. It was not quite full loss of identity, but a terrifying state nonetheless. I had the dreadful conviction that God was determined that I must choose – and that He had determined that I would choose wrong, and be condemned for that choice. I got off the bus at a random stop. I thought I did not know where I was nor where I was going. I sat on a bench for perhaps an hour, simply trying to calm down.

In the event I did the only thing I could do: I rejected a malicious God, a God who was not only hidden but deliberately deceptive. I consciously refused to believe in such a God. If, I thought, I did my best to find the truth, either I would make the right decision, or God would lead me from there to the right decision. It was a turning point.

As it happened, Ronald Knox’s excellent book The Belief of Catholics was my freedom. Knox freed me, in particular, from the presuppositionalist trap. Speaking of the necessity of the use of ‘private judgement’ in approaching the Church, Knox says:

Let me then, to avoid further ambiguity, give a list of certain leading doctrines which no Catholic, upon a moment’s reflection, could accept on the authority of the Church and on that ground alone.
The existence of God.
The fact that he has made a revelation to the world in Jesus Christ.
The Life (in its broad outlines), the Death, and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The fact that our Lord founded a Church.
The fact that he bequeathed to that Church his own teaching office, with the guarantee (naturally) that it should not err in teaching.
The consequent intellectual duty of believing what the Church believes.

That which I had begun to see in reading Newman Knox now made clear for me. Jesus left (again, in Knox’s words) not Christianity but Christendom. He left no writing; He left an authoritative body – His Body! He established a Kingdom. He fulfilled His holy people Israel, by incorporating them, with the Gentiles who would believe in His Name, into His own Body. This Body had an earthly as well as a Heavenly unity. This Body had come down to our own time. It was the Catholic Church. On a ‘plane from Wellington to Auckland at the end of July, 1994, I prayed: “Lord, I will never dot every ‘i’ or cross every ‘t.’ But I know enough to be certain that if You were to tell me I was to die tonight, I would want a priest. If You do not stop me, I am going to become a Catholic.

Coming Into Harbour

The ensuing seventeen months were characterised by frequent storms; a variety of obstacles had to be overcome. The article I referenced earlier describes this period in some detail. By late December, 1995, I had parted, in real tears and grief, with our Reformed minister, the elders, the congregation that we had been instrumental in establishing. Susan, my wife, and our four children, had all determined to enter the Catholic Church. We had gone through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). On the 23rd December, the day before we were to be received, the Diocese of San Francisco had judged my first marriage to be invalid (due to lack of due discretion).

That day – Saturday 23 December – we spent at the Sister’s house, making our retreat; making our first Confession (a terrifying, and, in the event, unspeakably good, experience). On Sunday morning – Christmas Eve – we affirmed: I believe and hold, what the Church believes and teaches.

That confession contains, it seems to me, the essence of what it means to be a Catholic. It is not that I have sought the truth about this or that religious position, and then found that the Church agrees with me. The asymmetry of the Confession is precisely correct. It is the Church that teaches; I hold. The Church had accepted our Protestant Baptism as valid, so we were confirmed and received our first Communion. We were Catholics.

Looking Back

In 1848, Newman published Loss and Gain – his first publication after he was received into the Church on 9 October, 1845. In the novel, Charles Reding loses much – especially his family’s favour. In the event, the reader is told what he gained. An hour after his reception into the Church:

[Charles] was … kneeling in the church of the Passionists before the Tabernacle, in the possession of a deep peace and serenity of mind, which he had not thought possible on earth. It was more like the stillness which almost sensibly affects the ears when a bell that has long been tolling stops, or when a vessel, after much tossing at sea, finds itself in harbour.

I recall, with sadness, our Reformed pastor telling me, the night at the end of 1994 when I told him that I must become a Catholic, that this was yet another wild swing of my heart and mind; that within three years I would have left the Church; perhaps become a Muslim, or a Hindu. Newman, in the Apologia, concludes the history up to his reception, by writing:

From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate. In saying this, I do not mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking on theological subjects; but that I have had no changes to record, and have had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment. I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any difference of thought or of temper from what I had before. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental truths of revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.

So it has been with me. In the almost twenty years since I became a Catholic, our lives have gone through many changes. Our children have all grown up, of course, and left home. One has left the Church – indeed, for a time, struggled with belief in God, though now he is a keen Evangelical Christian. Sue and I have seven grandchildren. We are members, now, and, indeed, for the last seventeen or eighteen years, of Opus Dei, an organisation which helps us to seek holiness and sanctification in daily life. It is as difficult for me to imagine not being a Catholic as it would be for me to imagine having had different parents than I have. In John’s Gospel, Andrew and hear John Baptist refer to Jesus as the “Lamb of God.” They respond:

And the two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus. Jesus turned round, saw them following and said, ‘What do you want?’ They answered, ‘Rabbi’ – which means Teacher – ‘where do you live?’ He replied, ‘Come and see’; so they went and saw where he lived, and stayed with him that day. It was about the tenth hour” (John 1:38-39).

I said above, at the end of the first section, that I had become a Catholic, not because the Church believes this or that doctrine, which I know on other grounds to be true. I became a Catholic to join the Church. I became a Catholic because that is where Jesus lives: in His Body, the Church; in the Eucharist, His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity. I became a Catholic to join the Church.

1. ‘Meditates!’ What a bloodless word for what I experienced! For those interested, the passage is in the last chapter, chapter 15, of the second volume of the English translation of the work, beginning with the words “The snow crunched under their feet as they came outside.”

Our thoughts about the future of the Church must come out of tensions in the present, tensions that must creatively produce watchfulness, prayer, faith, and commitment, love for truth and unity, love for unity and truth. — G.C. Berkouwer[1]

Eduardo Echeverria

I write this article on Gregg Allison’s new book[2] on Catholic theology and practice as a Catholic theologian with roots in the Evangelical and Reformed traditions. I am a member of the twenty-year-old American ecumenical initiative, Evangelicals and Catholics Together. My commitment to ecumenical dialogue with both traditions is evident from many of my writings, most recently my book, Berkouwer and Catholicism.[3] I very much appreciate the good will Allison exhibits as well as his commitment to engage in a more adequate understanding of Catholic teaching as expressed in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church (hereafter CCC). It is no small task he undertook to present in an almost five hundred page book the full range of teaching in the CCC, as well as express common ground and critique between Evangelicals (varied as that term is in his book, given its use in reference to several confessional traditions) and Catholics.[4] I highly commend him for his work. All of this work is done in the spirit of being faithful to the pursuance of truth. Still, I think Allison’s book is fundamentally weak for two reasons: one, on ecumenism, and two, on a hermeneutics of Catholicism.

Ecumenism

First, Allison’s book is flawed from an ecumenical perspective because his book does not encourage the reader to participate in the already substantial dialogue between Protestants from varied confessional traditions (Methodist, Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican) and Catholics, striving for reconciliation in the biblical faith. Allison pays no real attention to ecumenism and an evangelical perspective on John 17:21 in which Christ calls all his disciples to unity. Absent that perspective in his book, Allison is prevented from substantially advancing the discussion between Catholics and evangelicals. He is stuck in an a priori stance towards the Catholic Church on the traditional issues that have alienated Evangelicals and Catholics, and consequently is unable “to engage in a fresh constructive and critical evaluation both of the contemporary teaching and practice of the Roman Catholic Church and of the classical controverted issues” (see stance 3 below). Given Allison’s “own long-term familiarity with the Church” (18-19), why is his stance toward Catholicism finally one of “intrigue” when he speaks of “the book’s appreciation of and thanksgiving for many commonalities between Catholic and evangelical theology” (28)?

The word “intrigue” makes Allison sound like an outsider rather than one, like Berkouwer, who holds that all Christians share responsibility, as Berkouwer wrote, for “the Church as it is now, with its tensions and problems, its guilt and dividedness.” Allison shows no evidence that he is committed to the ecumenical imperative of the Christian faith as it is paradigmatically expressed by Christ in the Gospel of John 17:20-26. This shared responsibility for realizing “the unity of the Church will have meaning for our time,” says Berkouwer, “only when the question of unity is both honestly and stubbornly faced as the important issue.” Berkouwer continues: “New Testament eschatology—pointing as it does to the Church’s final victory—is charged with a sense of urgency as it calls us to do for the Church, here and now, what our hands find to do. It is no accident that Christ’s prayer for the unity of the Church in John 17 [20–23] includes a prayer that the Church may be kept from the Evil One [17:15].”[5] Lead us not into the temptation of regarding our disunity as normal, rather than as scandal and wound, but deliver us from the evil of our divisions. Berkouwer makes an ecumenically decisive point here, namely, it is no longer possible to remain divided because in willing the Church, God willed unity as a gift and task, “that they may all be one” (Jn 17:21).

Allison has interacted with Catholics for many years, yet he appears reticent to move to the stance of receptive ecumenism, namely, the conviction, as St. John Paul II expressed it, that “ecumenical dialogue is not simply an exchange of ideas. In some way it is always an ‘exchange of gifts’,” indeed, a “dialogue of love” between fellow Christians.[6] Although Allison identifies “with fascination and appreciation the commonalities between Catholic and [his own version of] evangelical theology” (18), there is no evidence in his book that he thinks evangelicals who share his theological convictions may learn from Catholics, particularly with respect to the issues that have divided them.

So, although Allison’s book is, indeed, a good first step to understanding the Catholic tradition, his study appears more apologetical than ecumenical, — and hence does not represent a significant shift in stance toward Roman Catholicism by a well-known Evangelical Protestant theologian who is a confessional Baptist.

There are three possible stances that Evangelical and Reformed Christians have taken toward Roman Catholicism. In the report of the second phase of the ecumenical conversations between the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (1984-1990), three contemporary Reformed and Evangelical attitudes toward the Roman Catholic Church are distinguished:

There are within the Reformed [and Evangelical] family those whose attitude to the Roman Catholic Church remains essentially negative: [1] some because they remain to be convinced that the modern developments of the Roman Catholic Church has really addressed the issues of the Reformation, and [2] others because they have been largely untouched by the ecumenical exchanges of recent times and have therefore not been challenged or encouraged to reconsider their traditional stance. But this is only one part of the picture. [3] Others in the Reformed [and Evangelical] tradition have sought to engage in a fresh constructive and critical evaluation both of the contemporary teaching and practice of the Roman Catholic Church and of the classical controverted issues.[7]

Allison’s book clearly exhibits the second stance in his evangelical assessment of the Catechism, in particular, the classical controverted issues that have divided Protestants and Catholics.[8] For example, this book appears uninformed by the results of the last half-century of bi-lateral ecumenical dialogues on the Trinity and Christology, salvation, justification, and sanctification, on ecclesiology, sacramentology, and Mary between the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity and the various confessional traditions of Methodists, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Reformed on precisely the classical controverted issues listed above.[9] Allison’s book is also uninformed by the bilateral dialogues of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission from 1971-2014 (Parts I-III) on authority in the Church, the sacraments, salvation, the moral life in Christ, and Mary. In addition, his work is uninformed by the the French-speaking ecumenists, Le Groupe des Dombes, comprised of Roman Catholic and Reformed scholars/pastors, who since 1937 until the present have written on the question of Christian Unity, the teaching authority of the Church, ordained ministry, Mary’s Place in the Plan of God, and others.

Yet for Christians from varied confessional traditions interested in pursuing ecumenical dialogue, knowledge of these documents is imperative. Why? Christ calls all his disciples to unity. Hence, as John Paul II pointedly asks, “How is it possible to remain divided, if we have been “buried” through Baptism in the Lord’s death, in the very act by which God, through the death of his Son, has broken down the walls of division?”

For this reason he sent his Son, so that by dying and rising for us he might bestow on us the Spirit of love. On the eve of his sacrifice on the Cross, Jesus himself prayed to the Father for his disciples and for all those who believe in him, that they might be one, a living communion. This is the basis not only of the duty, but also of the responsibility before God and his plan, which falls to those who through Baptism become members of the Body of Christ, a Body in which the fullness of reconciliation and communion must be made present. Division “openly contradicts the will of Christ, provides a stumbling block to the world, and inflicts damage on the most holy cause of proclaiming the Good News to every creature.”[10]

Not that Allison needed to discuss all these documents in his study of the CCC. Rather, his study should at least have shown some familiarity with documents that are the fruits of years of ecumenical dialogue. Thus his discussion of the classical controverted issues is unable “to engage in a fresh constructive and critical evaluation both of the contemporary teaching and practice of the Roman Catholic Church and of the classical controverted issues.”[11]

For instance, in his discussion on the doctrine of justification, there isn’t even a reference to the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, by the World Federation of Lutherans and the Catholic Church. Such an influential text on a topic that still alienates some Protestants and Catholics should inform one’s theological analysis. The same can be said for the classical controverted issue of Scripture and Tradition. Allison shows no awareness that the “two source” theory of revelation—the dominant theory between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries in Catholic theology—has undergone severe criticism within the Catholic theological tradition. These Catholic critics argue for the integration of the uniquely normative character of Scripture, as the supreme rule of faith, as Dei Verbum calls Scripture, or the highest authority in matters of faith (norma normans non normata), in an intrinsically and necessarily related way to tradition, as indispensable to the interpretation of the Word of God. On this view, Scripture must be interpreted in the concrete life of the Church, her liv­ing tradition, through the teaching authority of the ecclesiastical magis­terium, which is under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Arguably, then, when the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum §10 affirms a necessary and intrinsic relatedness of tradition and the Church to Scripture, it also affirms a prima scriptura (§§21-25).

Consider briefly also the ecclesiological question concerning the unity of the Church, namely, the relationship of the Catholic Church to separated brethren. Allison says, “Catholicism’s position that evangelical ecclesial communities are not even churches does nothing to overcome the problem of disunity” (172). Although Allison recognizes (162) that Lumen Gentium, Unitatis redintegratio, and, I would add, Ut unum sint, affirm that there are many elements of truth and sanctification outside the visible boundaries of the Church, he nowhere sees the significant implications this affirmation has: separated brethren are in real, albeit imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church. In other words, Christians—Protestants and Catholics alike—are brothers and sisters in Christ. Furthermore, Allison nowhere acknowledges that this affirmation contributes to overcoming the problem of disunity. Those many elements, John Paul II claimed, do not exist in an “ecclesial vacuum,”[12] because there is ecclesial reality, however fragmented, and to greater or lesser degrees, outside the visible boundaries of the Church that “participate in the Church of Christ in a qualified but real way” (to quote Thomas Guarino). Catholic ecclesiology rejects the following dilemma: either affirming that the Church of Christ fully and totally exists in the Catholic Church and implausibly denying that Orthodoxy and the historic churches of the Reformation are churches in any real sense whatsoever; or else accepting that they are churches but then accepting ecclesiological relativism.[13] Much dialogue has been had and ink spilt in the last half-century discussing this dilemma in Catholic ecclesiology striving to resolve the question of ecclesial unity in order to be faithful to the mark of the Church, credo unam ecclesiam. None of the fruits of these dialogues inform Allison’s approach in this book.

Moreover, his study lacks any reference to the master of dogmatic and ecumenical theology, Reformed theologian G.C. Berkouwer (1903-1996), who discusses the development of Catholic theology in general but also, in particular, the issue of Scripture and tradition in his 1965 work, The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism.[14] In this study on Vatican Council II, which Reformed theologian Heiko Oberman (1930–2001) called “breathtakingly important,” Berkouwer gives a Reformed theological assessment of the influence of the nouvelle théologie on the council. This work of Berkouwer is necessary reading for anyone, particularly an evangelical theologian, who is attempting to come to terms with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is the fruit of the Second Vatican Council. There is also no sign that Allison is informed by the debates leading up the Council in the writings of, for example, J.R. Geiselmann and Joseph Ratzinger, and after the Council in the writings of, for example, the French Catholic theologian Yves Congar, Tradition and traditions, and the Meaning of Tradition.

Moreover Allison makes no reference to the work of Evangelicals and Catholics Together on this topic: Your Word is Truth. In this collection, his fellow evangelicals, such as Timothy George, J.I. Packer, and John Woodbridge (all of whom belong to Evangelical and Catholics Together), enter into a discussion of the issue of Scripture and Tradition.[15]

One last piece of evidence, perhaps the most crucial, that Allison’s theological work lacks an ecumenical dimension but also that his understanding of the way that Christians should live Christianity lacks an encouragement to respond to Jesus’s ecumenical imperative is the last chapter. This chapter is not entitled “ecumenical ministry with Catholics,” but rather “evangelical ministry with Catholics.” This says a great deal about Allison’s stance towards the question of Christian unity between Evangelicals and Catholics. Apparently, Catholics as such need to be evangelized, given their rejection of “Protestant principles of sola Scriptura and justification by grace alone through faith alone” (172). Furthermore, evangelical Protestant theology cannot agree with the hermeneutics of Catholicism, meaning thereby “the axioms of the nature-grace interdependence and the Christ-Church interconnection” of Catholicism. Hence Allison does not call evangelical Protestants to engage in ecumenical dialogue with Catholics with the aim of restoring visible communion between these divided brethren. This move “should [not] even be pursued,” indeed, stronger, it is “not permissible” (172).

For such a move to take place Allison would need to affirm that the Catholic Church and Evangelicals are indeed together in Christ, having a common cause in the gospel, in this ecumenical journey. The journey of ecumenical dialogue is thus an ongoing “dialogue of conversion,” on both sides, trusting in the reconciling power of the truth which is Christ to overcome the obstacles to unity. The ground motive of this dialogue for reconciliation is “common prayer with our brothers and sisters who seek unity in Christ and in His Church.”[16] “Prayer is the ‘soul’ of the ecumenical renewal and of the yearning for unity,” adds John Paul II. In short, it is the basis and support for everything the [Second Vatican Ecumenical] Council defines as ‘dialogue.’”[17] Sometimes dialogue is made more difficult, indeed, impossible, when our words, judgments, and actions manifest a failure to deal with each other with understanding, truthfully and fairly. “When undertaking dialogue, each side must presuppose in the other a desire for reconciliation, for unity in truth.”[18]

A necessary sign of this dialogue is that we have passed from “antagonism and conflict to a situation where each party recognizes the other as a partner.”[19] Allison is stuck at intrigue, but has not yet developed a stance towards Catholics that I described above as stance 3. This stance is where an authentic inter-confessional dialogue is made possible because each confessional interlocutor recognizes the other as an ecumenical partner, as a fellow-believer in Christ, in the common cause of the Gospel, especially regarding the question of the visible unity of the Church. In short, the ecumenism of conversion embodies the conviction that “dialogue is not simply an exchange of ideas. In some way it is always an ‘exchange of gifts’,” indeed, a “dialogue of love.”[20] This is receptive ecumenism at its best, and it is sorely missing in Allison’s work.

On this view, the Church’s vision of visible unity “takes account of all the demands of revealed truth.” John Paul II correctly writes, “Love for the truth is the deepest dimension of any authentic quest for full communion between Christians.” Therefore, she seeks to avoid all those assumptions that sometimes plague ecumenical dialogue: forms of reductionism, such as doctrinal minimalism, or facile agreement, false irenicism, indifference to the Church’s teaching, and common-denominator ecumenicity.[21] Inter-confessional dialogue as such between Evangelical and Reformed Protestants, on the one hand, and Catholics, on the other, is often taken to be a “sign of weakness.” Berkouwer disagrees, and I think he is right. He insists that concern for the visible unity of the Body of Christ does not mean the levelling out of all genuine differences between Catholics and Evangelical/Reformed Christians. That is because an ecumenism based on anything else than truth—an ecumenism of conviction—is empty. Berkouwer correctly understands that “‘dialogue’ . . . does not signify a priori a relativizing approach to ecumenism.”[22] He adds, “Many Protestants suspect that by taking these confrontations seriously, we may water down the differences and lose some of the old convictions of the struggle.” On the contrary, argues Berkouwer, “Responsible encounter is not a sign of weakness; it is rather recognition of the seriousness of the division of the Church.”[23] Hence, he concludes, “the question of the gospel and unity in Christ must be both honestly and stubbornly faced as the important issue.”[24]

In sum, then, I have two objections to Allison’s apparent indifference to ecumenism. First, for Christians from varied confessional traditions interested in pursuing ecumenical dialogue, knowledge of the documents that are the fruits of half-century of dialogue is imperative if they are to advance the discussion regarding the quest for visible communion among Christians. Second, Allison’s insouciance regarding these ecumenical dialogues between various confessional traditions and the Catholic Church stems from a failure to take biblically and theologically serious the ecumenical imperative grounded in John 17:21.

Hermeneutics of Catholicism

In the second place, perhaps the most fundamental weakness in Allison’s study is his uncritical dependence on Leonardo De Chirico’s 2003 study on the hermeneutics of post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism from an Evangelical theological perspective.[25] I have great respect for De Chirico himself and his work, even though I reject his interpretation and conclusions about Catholicism. De Chirico claims to provide a hermeneutics of Catholicism as a coherent, all-encompassing system that is grounded in two first principles. Allison shares De Chirico’s hermeneutics that identifies these first principles: “the nature-grace interdependence, that is, a strong continuity between nature and grace; and the Christ-Church interconnection, that is, an ecclesiology . . . that views the Catholic Church as the ongoing incarnation of Jesus Christ” (31). This hermeneutics deserves far more critical attention than I can give here. So my critical comments on each of the first principles will be brief.

Nature and Grace

How are we to understand the distinction and relation of nature and grace? How should we understand the impact that the fall has had upon human nature? In what follows, I distinguish Position I and Position II in Allison’s theology of nature and grace. Position I is the stance he takes when criticizing Catholicism. Position II qualifies that stance and comes within the orbit of a Catholic theology of nature and grace.

Regarding Position I, Allison claims that Catholicism denies that “original sin impacts every aspect of human nature” (129). He explains: “Nature and grace are the two constitutive elements of the Catholic system, with sin as a serious yet not devastating secondary element. Nature, while wounded by sin, retains a capacity for grace [i.e., to receive, transmit, and cooperate with grace, he says elsewhere], and grace elevates or perfects nature. The two continue to operate interdependently” (47). By contrast, according to Allison:

[E]vangelical theology has three poles: creation, fall/sin, and redemption/grace. In this system, sin is taken more seriously, and its corrupting impact on the creation is not mitigated by its being part of nature. . . . Indeed, evangelical theology has three constitutive elements, with the fall or sin a primary, rather than secondary element of its system. Because of the devastatingly deep impact of sin on creation, the notion of nature as possessing some capacity for grace is nonsensical in the evangelical system   . . . . For Catholic theology, nature and grace are interdependent; for evangelical theology, nature and grace are at odds because of the devastating impact of sin on nature. . . . According to evangelical theology, [consequently] grace has nothing [emphasis added] to work with in nature because creation has been devastatingly tainted by sin (48-49).

First, Gregg claims that evangelical theology holds that human nature is fallen and devastatingly tainted by sin in the sense of being obliterated and, consequently, irreclaimable. Such a view however would suggest that post-fall human nature is simply a corrupt vessel needing to be replaced by something altogether new. Such a position seems inevitable if Allison denies that there exists any continuity whatsoever between nature and grace in view of the fall/sin. This emphasis on discontinuity between nature and grace reflects pessimism about nature after the Fall. This, too, is De Chirico’s view upon which Allison demonstrates an uncritical over-reliance. In the post-lapsarian situation, De Chirico says, the “protological status” of the structures of creation “has radically changed . . . into a sin-driven, and utterly corrupted reality.” Again, he says, “Creation is therefore a fallen creation which has irreversibly lost its primordial prerogatives and exists in a state of separation from God.”[26] Concurring again with De Chirico, Allison says that “grace has nothing to work with in nature because creation has been devastatingly tainted by sin.” Throughout the book he repeats this view that Evangelical theology rejects the “Catholic system’s axiom of the nature grace interdependence, specifically . . . grace must be embodied in nature” (253), or “that grace be manifested concretely in nature” (194; 170). So there is no sense whatsoever in which we can say that grace builds upon nature. Yet this would mean that grace has no point of contact whatsoever with nature (read: enduring structures of created reality). This position seems more Barthian than evangelical because it, for example, rejects natural theology. Here, too, Allison acknowledges that there does not exist unanimity among evangelicals concerning theistic arguments (76). Given the diversity of views among evangelicals, with some, like William Lane Craig,[27] sharing Catholicism’s affirmation of the legitimacy of natural theology, it isn’t clear why he identifies his view as evangelical and antithetical to Catholicism.

Be that as it may, Allison rejects the CCC’s support for natural theology because the “deceitfulness and destructiveness of sin . . . extends to human rationality and corrupts its ability to gain sure knowledge of God through the created order” (77). His reasoning is this: given human nature’s total corruption, then, human rationality, as an integral part of human nature, is grossly unreliable as an even subordinate source of knowledge of God’s general revelation and the enduring structures of creation, natural law, and hence cannot be of much service to the gospel. Allison, then, claims that given Catholicism’s view of a “nature-grace continuum” and hence its inadequate attention to human rationality being “thoroughly devastated by sin” (77), the CCC has a “rather hopeful attitude toward general revelation” (76). Hopeful in the sense, he claims, that for Catholicism general revelation is “enough for salvation to take place” and hence “the mere knowledge of the existence of God […] sufficient for a personal relationship with him” (76).

Furthermore, Allison repeats the same—as I will argue, faulty—argument in the context of the knowledge of the natural law. He acknowledges that Catholic theology affirms not only the noetic influences of sin upon man’s knowledge of natural law principles but also that man needs grace and revelation to overcome these influences. But then he draws the bewildering conclusion that for Catholicism “humanity’s problem is . . . just an epistemological one—the failure to know natural law’s precepts.” Allison insists, however, that man’s “plight is moral—the culpable failure to obey those precepts” (427).

But Allison couldn’t be further from the mark on both counts. Regarding man’s plight as allegedly merely epistemic, Allison offers no evidence that the failure to grasp natural law precepts is, according to Catholicism, the source of man’s alienation from God. He has reversed the order: man’s alienation from God is not merely noetic—even of the natural law—but religious because of sin. It is sin that is man’s plight. CCC states: “He freely sinned. By refusing God’s plan of love, he deceived himself and became a slave to sin. This first alienation engendered a multitude of others. From its outset, human history attests the wretchedness and oppression born of the human heart in consequence of the abuse of freedom” (§1739). CCC explains:

Sin is present in human history; any attempt to ignore it or to give this dark reality other names would be futile. To try to understand what sin is, one must first recognize the profound relation of man to God, for only in this relationship is the evil of sin unmasked in its true identity as humanity’s rejection of God and opposition to him, even as it continues to weigh heavy on human life and history [including man’s epistemic grasp of natural law precepts]. Only the light of divine Revelation clarifies the reality of sin and particularly of the sin committed at mankind’s origins [i.e., original sin]. Without the knowledge Revelation gives of God we cannot recognize sin clearly and are tempted to explain it as merely a developmental flaw, a psychological weakness, a mistake, or the necessary consequence of an inadequate social structure, etc. Only in the knowledge of God’s plan for man can we grasp that sin is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons so that they are capable of loving him and loving one another (§§386-387).

In sum, pace Allison, it is divine revelation, not the natural law, which illuminates the reality of sin by disclosing that man’s plight is his alienation from God. CCC states, “But this ‘intimate and vital bond of man to God’ (GS 19 # 1) can be forgotten, overlooked, or even explicitly rejected by man. Such attitudes can have different causes: revolt against evil in the world; religious ignorance or indifference; the cares and riches of this world; the scandal of bad example on the part of believers; currents of thought hostile to religion; finally, that attitude of sinful man which makes him hide from God out of fear and flee his call” (§29). Clearly, Allison’s interpretation of Catholicism on this point is reductionist and is not born out by what CCC actually says.

Now, regarding natural theology, what sets Allison off in the wrong direction is his misinterpretation of CCC’s statement:

Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man, and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith. (so) the proofs of God’s existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason (§35).

In addition to his inaccurate claim that general revelation discloses to us a saving knowledge of God, Allison claims that CCC affirms that general revelation “dispose nonbelievers to faith.” But how is this possible “when they [nonbelievers] so steadily and completely reject general revelation” (76; emphasis added)? Allison’s answer to this question returns him to the “nature-grace interdependence, one of the axioms of the Catholic theological system” in which “while sin has seriously influenced nature, it has not so corrupted it that a positive human response to general revelation is precluded” (76; emphasis added).

Although Allison underscores his conviction that “Evangelical theology strongly dissents from this position,” he would be more accurate that his version of evangelical theology strongly dissents. For instance, because of God’s common grace, Dutch neo-Calvinists like Kuyper and Herman Bavinck find truth and goodness in pagan religions.[28] Also, the Canons of Dort (1619) states: “There remains, however, in man since the fall, the glimmerings of natural light, whereby he retains some knowledge of God, of natural things, and of the difference between good and evil, and shows some regard for virtue and for good outward behavior.”[29] So, even according to the Reformed tradition, clearly man does not completely reject general revelation but also there is a positive human response, albeit non-salvific one, to that revelation.

Furthermore, Allison misunderstands the role of theistic arguments concerning faith’s knowledge of God. CCC says such arguments predispose one to faith in the sense of showing that “faith is not opposed to reason.” Does Allison deny this claim? I can’t imagine that he denies that faith is reasonable in that sense. Moreover, CCC doesn’t claim that theistic arguments, although available, are necessary to come to knowledge of God’s existence. Indeed, it says the very opposite. “In the historical conditions in which he finds himself, however, man experiences many difficulties in coming to know God by the light of reason alone.” It follows up this claim by quoting Pius XII in Humani generis, where he emphasizes, among other obstacles to gaining a natural knowledge of God, the noetic influences of sin:

Though human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his providence, and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator; yet there are many obstacles which prevent reason from the effective and fruitful use of this inborn faculty. For the truths that concern the relations between God and man wholly transcend the visible order of things, and, if they are translated into human action and influence it, they call for self-surrender and abnegation. the human mind, in its turn, is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also by disordered appetites which are the consequences of original sin. So it happens that men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful.

CCC concludes reiterating the point it made in §35 that “for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man, and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith.” Thus, it adds, “This is why man stands in need of being enlightened by God’s revelation, not only about those things that exceed his understanding, but also ‘about those religious and moral truths which of themselves are not beyond the grasp of human reason, so that even in the present condition of the human race, they can be known by all men with ease, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error’” (§§37-38).[30] And again, CCC states: “there is another order of knowledge, which man cannot possibly arrive at by his own powers: the order of divine Revelation. Through an utterly free decision, God has revealed himself and given himself to man. This he does by revealing the mystery, his plan of loving goodness, formed from all eternity in Christ, for the benefit of all men. God has fully revealed this plan by sending us his beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.” Allison inexplicably overlooks all these passages from CCC. Be that as it may, the Catholic tradition agrees with Allison that the knowledge of God by means of general revelation is insufficient to give us a saving knowledge of God. He is right: “general revelation was not designed to foster a personal relationship with God; special revelation serves that role” (76).

Now, it isn’t that Allison rejects God’s general revelation. He affirms God’s objective revelation of himself in and through the works of creation. This general revelation still persists despite the fall into sin. But no sooner does he affirm general revelation than he claims that we have no reliable access via natural reason’s grasps of the works of God (75-76) to certain knowledge of him. This means a rejection of natural theology, theistic arguments, or reasons for belief in God. Allison acknowledges that this conclusion is not unanimously held by all evangelicals (76). Why, then, does he take an antithetical stance only toward Catholicism?

Moreover, according to the Catholic tradition, the knowledge of God that is in principle possible to gain through general revelation is inadequate, distorted, incomplete, non-salvific knowledge, but nonetheless true. The noetic influences of sin suppress and impede the functioning of natural reason capacity to acquire knowledge of God through general revelation. Significantly, this knowledge of all such truth “must ultimately be disciplined by, and incorporated into, the revelatory narrative [of creation, fall, and redemption]. Athens, whatever its own insights into truth, must ultimately be chastened by Jerusalem”[31] if it is to be of any service in deepening our intimate knowledge of the Trinity.

I call Allison’s view “epistemic supernaturalism” because the sole source, not just the ultimate or primary source—which, in contrast, the Catechism teaches—of our reliable knowledge of God is special revelation. I return to this point in the next paragraph. For now, let us take note that at the root of this so-called “hopeful attitude” (76) concerning natural theology’s ability to grasp God through general revelation is, according to Allison, “the Catholic system’s axiom of a nature-grace continuum that is not thoroughly devastated by sin” (77; emphasis added). What, then, is grace restoring? On Allision unqualified view of the relation between nature and grace, there is nothing to restore because human nature in its fallen condition is, says Allison, “thoroughly devastated by sin” (77), and hence is essentially, irreclaimable. Human nature is just a corrupt vessel as a consequence of the fall into sin and hence it needs replacing by something entirely new by God’s grace. On this view, human nature is taken to be completely closed to God and hence as capable of nothing but sin, with the accompanying loss or destruction of natural reason’s response to the enduring structures of creation and general revelation.

In this connection, Allison’s epistemic supernaturalism appears to be a corollary of his understanding of sola Scriptura. He assures us that the principle of sola Scriptura does not mean Scripture alone, that is, scriptura nuda, “naked Scripture,” and hence it is not an anti-tradition or anti-creedal principle, but rather that “Scripture enjoys primary authority,” but “is not the only authority—indeed, the principle is not a rejection of other authorities” (92). Notwithstanding Allison’s claim about sola Scriptura, Scripture alone actually functions for him as a self-sufficient authority for Christian faith and thought. Of course, pace Allison, in fact, it isn’t Scripture alone that he uses as the standard of theological judgment, it is “Scripture and evangelical theology” (18; emphasis added), the latter refracted at times through, for example, a congregationalist ecclesiology (182, 192), Zwinglian sacramental theology (230; 243), and a particular understanding of the relation between grace and freedom (404n75).

Such an ecclesiology, sacramental theology, and understanding of grace and freedom are not held by all evangelicals. Evangelicals that are Lutheran or Reformed (or Catholic!) have either an episcopal or synodical/presbyterian form of church governance, take the universal church to be a visible, concrete, actual reality (170), rather than only local churches that are autonomous and self-governing congregations. These, adds Allison, “local churches are divinely designed to be the [only] instruments of salvation as their parents and members proclaim the gospel, disciple, worship, baptize, celebrate the Lord’s Supper, pray, educate, fellowship, provide care, exercise spiritual gifts, and the like” (169). Allison thinks that episcopal forms of church governance lead to the papacy and hence “departs from the sufficiency of Scripture because it is dependent on developments in the following centuries for its justification” (182). Of course, Presbyterian, Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, Orthodox—not to say, Catholic—would disagree that the only divinely designed instrument of salvation is the local church. The principle of sola Scriptura hasn’t overcome the theological differences on ecclesiology.

Furthermore, regarding Zwinglian sacramentology, as to the question of, not whether but how the sacraments are means of grace the Catholic tradition agrees with Calvin that the sacraments are the “pillars of our faith.”[32] Indeed, there is much that Reformed and Catholic theologies have in common when it comes to the doctrine of the sacraments. They agree that the sacraments are means of grace, rather than merely outward and empty signs.[33] In short, they agree that God really does impart his grace by sacramental means. They also agree, as Bavinck states, that God alone is the author, initiator, and efficient cause[34] of the sacraments.[35] On this question, according to Kuyper, “The Reformed stand with Rome, Luther, and Calvin against Zwingli in their adherence to a divine working of grace in the sacraments.”[36] Briefly, here, too, Allison acknowledges that “While one large segment of Protestant theology continued to embrace the sacraments as means of grace, another large segment moved to a view far removed from any notion of means of grace. Evangelical theology, therefore, encompasses these two positions” (243).

On the matter of grace and freedom, Allison acknowledges that “Evangelical theology embraces a number of views of human freedom, including libertarian freedom, dovetailing with indeterminism and with much overlap with Catholic theology’s position, and compatibilistic freedom, dovetailing with (soft) determinism” (404n75).

Clearly, the diversity of Evangelical positions on these matters and others is not, according to Allison, fellowship-dividing issues between Evangelicals. Conceding that point, however, makes it obvious that sola Scriptura does not settle the question of justified theological interpretations of these matters briefly sketched above.

Yet such a view – a perennial problem for any Protestant interpretation of Scripture –conflicts with one of the “solas” of Protestantism: “sola Scriptura (only Scripture), not Scripture and Tradition” (44). Be that as it may, evidence of my claim that Allison’s position on sola Scriptura is indistinguishable from scriptura nuda is clear from his judgment that Part III of the CCC that deals with the moral life in Christ, theological anthropology, moral theology, social and political dimensions of that life, the natural law, and much more, cannot be considered “definitive and binding.” Why? Because the claims made in Part III are “neither explicitly biblical nor explicitly unbiblical” (412; see also 404). Yes, Allison affirms that the views expressed there “may be welcomed as a possible contribution to discussions on corporate dimensions of human existence” (412). But that’s all they are being unable to be justified by Scripture alone. His “epistemic supernaturalism” is at work here. It is reflected in his ambivalence about the enduring structures of creation and about the reality of general revelation, which all these reflections purport to be grounded in. This is evident from his judgment that CCC’s teaching on the moral life in Christ is flawed because it lacks attention to “any explicit role of Scripture for Christian living.” This “criticism reflects what evangelical theology is known for –the Word of God and its authority, sufficiency, and necessity for life in Christ” (408). But Allison’s claim that the CCC’s teaching on the moral life in Christ lacks attention to “any explicit role of Scripture for Christian living” is inaccurate, not to say, false. Indeed, I am bewildered by his claim since CCC, Part III, Section Two, The Ten Commandments, devotes several hundred paragraphs (2052-2557) on the explicit role of Scripture for Christian living. Furthermore, CCC, Part I, Chapter Two, Article 3, recapitulates the teaching of Dei Verbum §§21-25 on the nature, scope, and necessity of biblical authority—prima Scriptura—in the Christian life.

Secondly, I turn now to Position II on Allison’s theology of nature and grace. Having opposed “the” evangelical theological view of nature and grace by insisting that it has been “thoroughly devastated by sin” and all that this claim entails about an unqualified opposition between nature and grace, Allison qualifies his claim about the discontinuity between nature and grace (48n36) by adding references to common grace and the distinction between structure and direction. He derives this idea of qualifying the discontinuity from De Chirico, which De Chirico himself gets from the Canadian neo-Calvinist theologian Albert Wolters, who posits and develops this distinction in his well-known book, Creation Regained (1985, 1st edition). The upshot of these distinctions is to limit the impact of the fall/sin upon nature (i.e., the structures of reality) such that the fall/sin disorders human nature but human nature itself, its deepest foundations, remained in place after the fall/sin. In other words, metaphysically speaking, what human nature lost because of the fall/sin was accidental, not substantial or essential to being a human being, for the fall/sin did not literally turn the human being into a different kind of creature. The distinction here is between substance/accident. Paul Helm appeals to this very distinction: “So there are essential features of being a human being–whatever they are–and also accidental features, those lost in the fall, and those restored in Christ.”[37] Indeed, Calvin himself appeals to this very distinction in his response to Albert Pighius, found in The Bondage and Liberation of the Will.[38] And this distinction is traceable to Augustine’s City of God, Book XIV, Chapter XI, which is applied by the CCC. Augustine writes: “The natures in which evil exists, in so far as they are natures, are good. And evil is removed, not by removing any nature, or part of a nature but by healing and correcting that which had been vitiated and depraved.” So, the essential feature of human nature remains the same, being primary, and hence sin is a secondary element (to use the language of De Chirico) such that it is accidental to human nature. Pace De Chirico, in this Augustinian perspective, the “negative effects [of sin] are therefore relativized.”[39] In sum, as Berkouwer argues:

Reformed theology has been particularly inclined to walk this road [of distinguishing substance and accident]. Calvin, for example, in his commentary on 2 Peter 3:10, distinguishes between substance and quality. The cleansing of heaven and earth ‘so that they may be fit for the kingdom of Christ’ is not a matter of annihilation, but a judgment in which something will remain. The things will be consumed ‘only in order to receive a new quality, while their substance remains the same’. According to Bavinck, the annihilation of substance is an impossibility, but the world, her appearance laid waste by sin, will vanish. There will not be a new, second creation, but a re-creation of what exists, a renaissance. Substantially, nothing will be lost.[40]

In a passage worth quoting in full from volume 4 of Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics, he succinctly describes this consummation and its substantial continuity with the original creation. This, too, is the position of the Catholic Church, as expressed in CCC.

All that is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable in the whole of creation, in heaven and on earth, is gathered up in the future city of God—renewed, re-created, boosted to its highest glory. The substance [of the city of God] is present in the creation. Just as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, as carbon is converted into diamond, as the grain of wheat upon dying in the ground produces other grains of wheat, as all of nature revives in the spring and dresses up in celebrative clothing, as the believing community is formed out of Adam’s fallen race, as the resurrection body is raised from the body that is dead and buried in the earth, so too, by the re-creating power of Christ, the new heaven and the new earth will one day emerge from the fire-purged elements of this world, radiant in enduring glory and forever set free from the “bondage to decay” … [Rom. 8:21]. More glorious than this beautiful earth, more glorious than the earthly Jerusalem, more glorious even than paradise will be the glory of the new Jerusalem, whose architect and builder is God himself. The state of glory (status gloriae) will be no mere restoration (restauratie) of the state of nature (status naturae), but a re-formation that, thanks to the power of Christ, transforms all matter … into form, all potency into actuality (potential, actus), and presents the entire creation before the face of God, brilliant in unfading splendor and blossoming in a springtime of eternal youth. Sustantially nothing is lost.[41]

De Chirico and Allison are obliged to revise their thinking on the Church’s understanding of nature and grace in view of the similarities between the Reformed and Catholic tradition. For both traditions grace neither abolishes nature nor leave it untouched but rather transforms it from within its own order; and grace presupposes nature because it is “the very material through which grace works and for whose ultimate perfection grace itself exists.”[42]

What I just described above in my second point as Allison’s qualified view of the nature-grace continuum is, ironically, the position of the Catholic Church. Significantly, Allison does not bring his critique of the Catholic system’s axiom of a nature-grace continuum to bear on CCC’s exposition of marriage. Consider CCC 29, 400, 405, 407 where fall/sins impact upon the totality of human nature is described. Consider also CCC 1601-1605, where marriage is considered from the perspective of creation, fall/sin, and redemption, with redemption/grace restoring and renewing the fallen creation from within. By nature CCC understands the deepest foundations of human nature that remain in place after the fall, a nature that has been savagely wounded or seriously disturbed by the fall/sin, but still remains what God originally made them to be. In this light, we can easily understand the teaching of CCC on the relation between sin and nature:

According to faith the disorder we notice so painfully [in marriage] does not stem from the nature of man and woman, nor from the nature of their relations, but from sin. . . . Nevertheless, the order of creation [of marriage] persists, though seriously disturbed. . . . In his mercy God has not forsaken sinful man. . . . After the fall, marriage helps to overcome self-absorption, egoism, pursuit of one’s own pleasure, to open oneself to the other, to mutual aid and to self-giving.

De Chirico is right, according to CCC, that the fallen creation is “incapable of restoring the relationship [with God] in its own strength, nor is it even willing to do so.”[43] Furthermore, “In his preaching Jesus unequivocally taught the original [i.e., creational, from the order of nature] meaning of the union of man and woman as the Creator willed it from the beginning. . . . By coming to restore the original order of creation disturbed by sin, [Jesus] himself gives the strength and grace to live marriage in the new dimension of the Reign of God” (CCC, §1603, §§§1606-9, §§1614-15). Grace restores nature to function properly according to its divinely intended ends.

Marriage and family are, then, grounded in the order of creation, seriously disrupted by the fall into sin, integrally redeemed by salvation in Christ, and attain the fullness of redemption in Christ when creation reaches its final goal. Within this comprehensive scope is the Thomistic in­sight that grace restores nature rather than abolishes or leaves it untouched and hence that grace presupposes nature in order to build on it being the “very material in which grace works and for whose ultimate perfection grace itself exists.”[44] But also, forasmuch as grace’s restoration is not a mere recovery of the deepest foundations of created reality, in some sense those foundations are raised to a “higher level” in the eschatological consummation of God’s plan of salvation for the whole creation. The exact sense in which “the redemption by grace of created reality, the reforma­tion of nature, is not merely repristination, but raises the natural to a higher level than it originally occupied” is a hotly disputed matter, especially in Reformed and Catholic thought.[45] Berkouwer summarizes the disputed issue clearly:

The meaning and extent of redemption are the heart of the issue. Is God’s Kingdom something more than just a restoration of what has been lost? Is not the deepest meaning of the eschatological mystery this, that it will supersede and transcend the original created nature of man?… It is as if according to God’s intention the glory of creatureliness sets up certain boundaries that cannot be transgressed, and any effort to attribute something more to man in the eschaton runs against these boundaries. Those who defy these boundaries need to be reminded that it “does not yet appear what we shall be” (1 John 3:2). This remark by John sets the limit to our penetration of the eschatological mystery. When we speak of that mystery, then, we cannot, in the very nature of the case make a simple identification of end-time and original time.[46]

In this light, we can understand Henri de Lubac’s point about the essence of Christianity:

The supernatural does not merely elevate nature (this traditional term is correct, but it is inadequate by itself); it does not penetrate nature merely to help it prolong its momentum … and bring it to a successful conclusion. It transforms it.… ‘Behold, I make all things news!’ (Rev. 21:4). Christianity is ‘a doctrine of transformation because the Spirit of Christ comes to permeate the first creation and make of it a ‘new creature’.[47]

Thus, Allison and hence De Chirico are criticizing a straw man concerning the relationship between nature and grace. Their criticism of Catholicism from the standpoint (Position I) of an unqualified emphasis on sin and hence a discontinuity between nature and grace brings with it problems that I have critically discussed. But the qualification made by them (Position II) concerning the nature-grace continuum brings their position within the orbit of a Catholic theology of nature and grace, and consequently of CCC.

Christ-Church Interconnection: Prolonging the Incarnation

I turn now to the second principle of De Chirico’s hermeneutics of Catholicism: the Christ-Church interconnection concerning the unity of Christ and the Church in a single body such that the Catholic Church is the continuation of the incarnation of Jesus Christ (56). Hans Urs von Balthasar expresses this view: “The Church, in this perspective, is the broadest ‘incarnation [of the Logos] . . . since she has as her goal leading all of humanity to God’.”[48] Accordingly, says Allison, “the Church is a prolongation of the incarnation of the Son of God, mediating the grace of God to the world as the incarnate Christ mediated the divine grace to the world” (58). De Chirico calls the Christ-Church interconnection, with the Church’s role being that of a mediating agent, the “law of Incarnation.” Unlike Allison, De Chirico makes clear that the evangelical objection is not to this law as such. Indeed, he says,

A broadly defined law of Incarnation is something that belongs to every classic and orthodox form of Christianity and not exclusively to Roman Catholicism. While it is true that each tradition articulates differently its understanding of this law, the significance of the incarnation of the Son of God is generally thought of as being a divine-human act which is not reducible to a merely historical event. It is rather envisaged as the pattern for the Church to accomplish her mission so that the Christian gospel may be witnessed and practiced in concrete, embodied forms in real situations. Even the less sacramentally oriented Evangelical tradition would strongly uphold some kind of law of Incarnation resulting in a corresponding theology of mediation, even though it would interpret it in an utterly different way from Roman Catholicism.[49]

Although Allison neither explicitly refers to this important passage from De Chirico nor gives an endorsement of a “law of Incarnation,” something like it is evident from his claim “that the salvation accomplished by Christ, revealed through the gospel, is and must be applied in a continuous fashion is certainly true” (230). So, it isn’t clear at all why De Chirico and Allison object to the “law of Incarnation.” The Incarnation is about the Word of God, the eternal Son of the Father, becoming man. The “teleology of the Incarnation” (to borrow a term from Robert Sokolowski) moves to the sacrificial Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ. As De Chirico rightly notes in the above passage, this work of God is not an event that recedes into the past because it was meant to transform creation and history, indeed, the whole of life. Where then is their objection to the Catholic teleology of the Incarnation?

The crux of the objection is rooted in “the hermeneutic of the Ascension for the self-understanding of the Church.”[50] In other words, their interpretation of Christ’s ascension into heaven sees, according to De Chirico: “[A] stronger element of discontinuity between the pre-ascension enactment of the law associated with the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ and its post-ascension prolongation within the life of the Church. . . . So, the ascension is the Christological locus from which the two ecclesiological perspectives depart, developing into two divergent systems.” He explains:

The theological hermeneutic of the ascension has therefore a systemic value for it decides the paramount questions: what kind of embodiment of the law of Incarnation comes to an end with the departing of Jesus Christ from the earth and what kind of embodiment of the same law continues in the Church even after His departure? The Roman Catholic system looks at the ascension within the continuity of the pattern established with the Incarnation, even though it recognizes the newness of the post-ascension period of the same law. . . . The Evangelical system tends to view the ascension in more abrupt, radical ways in that it conceives it as the coming to an end of the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ which cannot be extended or prolonged in any form because of its uniqueness within the economy of salvation and its once and for all soteriological significance.[51]

I think it is important here to see that the nature-grace interconnection and the Christ-Church interconnection are corollaries. Allison and De Chirico reject the latter because they reject the former. The latter is connected to the former in the following way. Allison quotes De Chirico: “Between the orders of nature and grace, a mediating subject is needed to represent nature to grace and grace to nature, so that nature will progressively and more fully be graced and grace will eventually achieve its final goal of elevating nature. That mediation is the theological raison d’etre . . . of the Roman Catholic Church and the chief role of the Church within the wider Roman Catholic system.”[52] Since I have already criticized their view of nature and grace above I won’t repeat my criticism here except to say that their view of the Ascension reinforces the discontinuity between nature and grace, resulting in their rejection of the Church as a mediator of grace.

Pared down for my purpose here, I’d like to concentrate on Allison’s total rejection of the idea that the Church is “the mediatorial agent between the grace of God and the world of nature (57; 194). This is not De Chirico’s view. He qualifies the rejection of “mediation” because there is, he says, “the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments.”[53] But insofar as De Chirico grants that grace comes to us through the meditation of the Church and through the preaching of the Word and the sacraments, he has no ground for making an in-principle objection to the Catholic doctrine of the “law of the Incarnation.” Still, he nevertheless rejects the ecclesiological claim of the Catholic Church that she is “the mediating agency between nature and grace.”[54] He adds, “The Roman Catholic Church stands in continuity with the Incarnation and is the new enactment of the law of Incarnation, being the post-ascension mediating agent which embodies the aspirations of nature to which the mission of grace is entrusted.”[55] Now, aside from Allison’s explicit rejection of Vatican II’s basic claim that the Catholic Church possesses “the fullness of the means of salvation” (175), the only other reason that I can see why he rejects the idea that the Church mediates grace is because he, like De Chirico, is deeply distressed by the tendency of substituting “‘the church in the place of its absent Lord’” (Michael Horton cited by Allison, 65).[56] But ecclesial mediation is, according to CCC, analogical and participatory, and hence not the primary source of grace, not even when it comes to the sacraments, but only an instrumental means of grace. As Berkouwer rightly understands, “God is the cause of grace, as causa principalis, and . . . he is this causa principalis in the sacraments as causa instrumentalis. . . . Ultimately God, as causa principalis, is the worker of grace.”[57] De Chirico completely ignores this distinction between causes and the fundamental point that the sacraments do not communicate grace in themselves and apart from God. Although he pays some attention to “analogy,” he doesn’t take seriously CCC’s understanding of the Church’s Christological consciousness, in other words, her awareness that the Catholic Church is the Church “of Christ”: Lumen gentium cum sit Christus” (LG §1). As Marc Cardinal Ouellet explains the teaching of Lumen Gentium and hence of CCC:

The light of nations [lumen gentium] is Christ and not the Church, but this light shines on the Church’s countenance. This Christological consciousness is expressed in the first paragraph of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, when it uses the term “sacramentum” to express the relationship between the visible reality of the Church and the invisible mystery–“mysterion”—of God in Christ: “the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race” (LG §1).[58]

Furthermore, their emphasis on discontinuity between Christ and the Church, Christ and the world, raises the question of how to maintain the dialectic between Christ’s presence and absence in the Church given his Ascension, and, with it, the proper relation between the Church and the world, Christ and culture, and, in consequence, nature and grace. The following brevity of my critical comments, are intended only to begin the ecumenical conversation of addressing these questions.

The Catholic tradition agrees that “since the Ascension God’s plan [of salvation] has entered into its fulfillment” (CCC, §670). The teleology of the Incarnation, of God’s plan of salvation, comes to fulfillment in the Ascension of Jesus Christ because by the “irreversible entry of his humanity into divine glory” (CCC, §659), his Ascension not only “truly affirms our humanity in Christ,” but also “completes the formation of man and perfects his image in man. In bearing our humanity home to the Father, Jesus brings human nature as such to its true end and to its fullest potential in the Holy Spirit.”[59] Furthermore, the Ascension of Jesus Christ invites us to consider that “Christ’s Ascension into heaven signifies his participation, in his humanity, in God’s power and authority.” That is, “Jesus Christ is Lord: he possesses all power in heaven and earth. He is ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion’, for the Father has put all things under his feet’ [Eph 1:20-22]. Christ is the Lord of the cosmos and of history. In him human history and indeed all creation are ‘set forth’ and transcendently fulfilled [Eph 1:10; cf. Eph 4:10; 1 Cor 15:24, 27-28]” (CCC, §668). When Allison and De Chirico are criticizing Catholicism from the standpoint of a unqualified emphasis on sin and hence a discontinuity between nature and grace, they miss out theologically on this understanding of the Ascension. By contrast, their qualified view is open to this interpretation. The Catholic view of nature and grace as I sketched it above fits well with this understanding of the Ascension. For the understanding of nature and grace presupposed in this view is none other than Aquinas’s teaching that grace perfects nature, neither abolishing nor suppressing nature, or leaving it untouched, but rather elevating as well as perfecting or completing it from within its own order.

Moreover, the Catholic view is that the teleology of the Incarnation involves the prolongation of the Incarnation, not only in the words of Sacred Scripture, God’s verbal revelation, and in its proclamation, but also in the sacramental actions of the Church because those actions are, as Allison rightly sees but categorically rejects, “instruments of grace that operate concretely through these visible means” (230; 245). This is a result of the influence of Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) on Allison; Zwingli sees the sacraments as a mere outward or empty sign (nudum signum), implying the exclusion of grace from the sacrament. Bavinck describes the position of Zwinglians, “True, the sacraments visibly represent the benefits that believers have received from God, but they do this as confessions of our faith and do not impart grace.”[60] I qualify the confessional roots of Zwingli’s rejection of the sacraments as means of grace because, as Dutch Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper rightly noted: “The Reformed stand with Rome, Luther, and Calvin against Zwingli in their adherence to a divine working of grace in the sacraments.”[61] Allison recognizes this difference between himself as an Evangelical Zwinglian and “one large segment of Protestant theology” (243), but he appears uninterested in taking up the convergence between Rome and the Reformed tradition as an opportunity for ecumenical dialogue and for a new perspective in the Rome/Reformation controversy regarding the sacraments. Berkouwer, for one, took up this ecumenical challenge in his 1954 extraordinary work, The Sacraments, as do the last half-century of bi-lateral ecumenical dialogues between the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity and the various confessional traditions of Methodists, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Reformed. Given the complex nature of sacramental theology, I can only highlight a couple of the most significant aspects of the fruits of this ecumenical dialogue that Allison would have benefited from in his evangelical assessment of Catholic theology.

For instance, Allison emphasizes that, according to Catholic sacramental theology, the sacramental efficacy of grace, in fact, “the ground of its validity . . . of the sacraments” is “ex opere operato” (244), which literally means “by the very fact of the action’s being performed. “Their validity is completely attached to their sign, which is virtuous or powerful in and of itself” (244). Given Allison’s Zwinglian sacramental theology, he rejects the Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic teaching that sacraments confer divine grace, but also holds “the question of their validity ex opere operato [to be] a moot one” (245).

Allison is wrong here on several counts regarding the dissimilarity between the Reformed theology of the sacraments and Catholic sacramental theology (244-245). First, Berkouwer argues that the Reformed objection to ex opere operato (“by the work performed” or “by force of the action itself”) should not be posed in term of sacramental efficacy. The question is not whether the sacraments are objectively efficacious but rather how they exercise their efficacy.[62] This, too, is Bavinck’s view, and, arguably, the view of Calvin and Luther. If so, therefore, the difference between Reformed and Catholic sacramentology is not at all over the real, objective efficacy of the sacraments, wherein the visible sign is not only expressive but also effective in communicating grace. But rather it is over, says Berkouwer, “a totally different understanding of what efficacy is.”[63]

Second, Allison misinterprets ex opere operato as leading to a view of the sacraments “as being mechanical, impersonal, and effective apart from faith and obedience” (245). His misreading stems from ignoring the explicitly stated Christological foundation of ex opere operato in CCC. Christ’s primary role in the sacraments is foundational: “They [sacraments] are efficacious because in them Christ himself is at work: it is he who baptizes, he who acts in his sacraments in order to communicate the grace that each sacrament signifies. . . . This is the meaning of the Church’s affirmation that the sacraments act ex opere operato . . . by virtue of the saving work of Christ, accomplished once for all” (§§1127-1128). Allison cites §1127 but fails to see its meaning for properly understanding ex opere operato.

Furthermore, because Allison confuses the crucial difference between principle cause and instrumental cause, with God as the ultimate cause of grace, such that in themselves and apart from God they would not communicate grace, he separates “the power working in the sacraments from their primary fountain, and looked upon them as working of themselves.”[64] No wonder that readings, such as Allison’s, lead to the charge that Catholic sacramentology suffers from sacramental automaton, ritualism, juridicism, cheap grace, a deistic view of “ex opere operato,” such that the sacraments are divorced from their Christological foundation, that is, “from their proper and sole source, namely from Christ, the true and only giver of grace, and gives them an independent status.”[65] In this light, we can understand why even Edward Schillebeeckx speaks of the very view that Allison rejects as “the headless corpse of sacramentalism,” [66] meaning thereby that the sacraments have been severed from the “Christological foundation of the ex opere operato efficacy.”[67]

Third, returning now to the teleology of the Incarnation in the sacramental actions of the Church and the bearing of the Ascension, in particular, upon the Eucharist, the Catholic teaching is that this teleology is “completed in the Eucharistic continuation of the presence of Christ in the world. The Eucharist is the sacramental extension of the Incarnation.”[68] Eucharistic Presence, the Catholic teaching that Christ is “truly, really, and substantially present” in the Eucharist, is rejected by Allison because it is “grounded on the axiom of the Christ-Church interconnection,” and this axiom presupposes “a defective view of the ascension” (317). If Christ is ascended into heaven, how could it be meaningfully said that he is present “body and blood, soul and divinity” under the species of bread and wine in the Eucharist? He can’t really be present, according to Allison, except symbolically and spiritually.

Given the limitations of this article, I can’t enter here into Berkouwer’s critique of the specious dilemma of symbol or reality in Reformed sacramentology. Berkouwer defends Reformed version of “Real Presence” in the Eucharist, affirms the sacramental significance of the signs of bread and wine and the connection between them and that which is signified, namely, the body and blood of Christ, resulting then in the defense of “sacramental realism.” This results in his definitive rejection of understanding Christ’s presence as merely a spiritual presence. Allison ignores Berkouwer on this matter of Catholic sacramentology and his ecumenical dialogue from the standpoint of a Reformed sacramentology. In particular, Berkouwer—unlike Allison—takes seriously the fundamental question that informs Berkouwer’s dialogue with Catholics: what “grounds the conjunction between the sign and the signified firmly in the acts of God.” Berkouwer’s answer to this question advances the discussion between Catholics and Reformed Christians by moving beyond the place where Allison is still stuck. Says Berkouwer, “This is to reject the automatic conjunction which depersonalizes the sacrament, but also to reject the notion of the mere sign in itself, for through the Spirit because of its institution by God the sign is full of efficacy with respect to faith. That is why the per sacramentum and the cum sacramentum can be accepted simultaneously without involving us in contradictions.”[69]

Furthermore, Berkouwer advances the ecumenical dialogue on sacramentology, particularly, the fundamental matter of Eucharistic presence because he understands that the crux of the matter between Catholic and Reformed sacramentology “is not a difference between praesentia realis or not, but a difference regarding the mode of this presence.”[70] Allison overlooks this matter. This is particularly the case in regard to Allison’s criticism that Catholics have a defective view of the Ascension. In particular, Berkouwer argues against views like those of Allison that the eschatological expectation of the return of Christ is not obscured by this presence already realized. Berkouwer writes,

It is no exaggeration to say that the controversy about the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper ultimately comes down to a different insight into the significance of the return of Christ and the significance of the eschatological orientation of faith. This does not mean that speaking of the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper automatically implies a danger to eschatological expectation, to the “not yet.” If that were the case, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed would agree on this point, for they all speak of a presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Hence everything depends on the manner of Christ’s presence in the Supper.[71]

Pace Allison, what this means is that the Eucharistic mode of Christ’s presence is itself eschatological, the “already” of the promised presence in absence, which is the “not yet” of the future still to come.

Finally, I conclude by returning briefly to the understanding of nature and grace that Allison and De Chirico defend in the contrast they make with the alleged nature-grace interconnection in Catholicism. Recall that they emphasize discontinuity between nature and grace because of sin, and hence they seem left with a rupture between Christ and the Church, Christ and the world, and hence nature and grace. Their presuppositions, arguably, are incompatible with the “substantial conversion” of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Eucharistic presence cannot be thought of without a real and, in this sense, ontological change of bread and wine in a sacramental form. As Edward Schillebeeckx put it, “The affirmation of the Eucharistic presence is so closely bound up with the affirmation of a real change of bread and wine that the affirmation of this change is the concrete content of the dogmatic statement—the real Tridentine dogma as an affirmation of reality.”[72] Of course the Aristotelian-Thomist concepts of substance and accidents do not belong to the content of faith, and neither the Church in general or Trent in particular claims that it does.

Although Christ’s Real Presence has been affirmed through the ages when the Church spoke of a real or substantial change of the bread and wine in connection with the Eucharist, this does not preclude a certain dogmatic development of Eucharistic doctrine between the Patristics and the Mediaevals, such as Aquinas, on the nature of real presence. This development includes the concept of transubstantiation that entered the dogmatic discussion with the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, an account of the mode of Christ’s Eucharistic presence that was later fully developed by Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae III, written in 1272, and then affirmed by the Council of Trent.

I cannot enter here into a critique of Allison claims concerning the concept of transubstantiation (316-319) except to say that just as the development of Trinitarian dogma’s introduction of the concept of homoousios (“of the same substance”) was controversial when used by the Council of Nicea to define the oneness of being of the Son with the Father, so too the concept of transubstantiation has generated conflict in the attempt to safeguard the Church’s faith in the Eucharistic presence. That is, Christ is truly, really, and substantially present, in the sacramental giving of himself, such that he identified himself, his person, and hence also his body and blood, in the change the Church calls transubstantiation, with the signs of bread and wine, rather than taking the latter to be mere tokens of his sacrificial death. As Sokolowski puts it,

This fact [of identification] is brought out by a remarkable comment of St. Thomas, who observes that in the Eucharistic Prayer Christ is quoted not as saying, ‘This bread is my body’, but ‘This is my body’. If Christ had said ‘this bread” was his body, then the thing referred to would still be bread, but the simple demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ without a noun implies that it is not bread any longer.[73]

Denying this substantial change entails the denial of the bodily presence of the glorified Christ and hence of Christ’s sacramental presence. Furthermore, pace Allison, rightly understood, transubstantiation is an eschatological concept—a sacramental parousia because the fallen creation “already shares in the eschatological situation of the glorified corporeality [of the body and blood of Christ].” Schillebeeckx continues:

But we are still in the ‘already now’ and ‘not yet’ that characterizes the period of salvation between the resurrection and the parousia, and the consecrated bread and wine therefore still belong, in their new meaning as ‘new creation’ of the order of salvation, to ‘this old world’ also. For this reason, transubstantiation contains two dimensions—a change of being of the bread and wine (in which Christ’s glorified body is really offered through the Holy Spirit), but within the terrestrial, but now (through this change of being) sacramental form of bread and wine, which remain subject, in this secular world, to the terrestrial laws of corporeality. Transubstantiation thus has two dimensions of one and the same undivided reality. This is the essential meaning of the dogma.”[74]

The Eucharist is, of its very nature, an event of the period between the resurrection and the Parousia, a period during which earthly realities become historical manifestations of the gift of grace here and now and—in the sacramental liturgy, within the mystery of the Church’s community of grace led by its office; that is, especially in the Eucharist—are withdrawn from their secular independence, their “being themselves,” to the extent of becoming the sacramental form in which the heavenly bodiliness of Christ himself—that is, of his real presence for me—appears. . . . It is, of course, a sacramental earthly presence, due to Christ’s real act of making himself present in the gift of holy bread placed at the disposal of all who wish to approach this sacrament in faith. For this reason, the true reality in the Eucharist is no longer bread, but simply the body and blood of Christ in a sacramental form.[75]

In conclusion, aside from Schillebeeckx’s attempt to deflect the criticism that the dogma of transubstantiation presupposes a defective view of the Ascension, we also get a glimpse here into the argument that transubstantiation presupposes the concept of grace transforming and fulfilling nature, with Christ’s real presence being a foretaste of the new creation. What then is essential to the dogma of Eucharistic presence is an ontological depth or density in which the substantial conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ “introduces within creation the principle of a radical change,” according to Benedict XVI, “a sort of ‘nuclear fission’, to use an image familiar to us today, which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be all in all.”[76]

I began this article emphasizing the importance of the ecumenical imperative. I conclude then with a word from Berkouwer, the Reformed master of dogmatics and ecumenical theology in the twentieth-century: “The very mystery of the Church invites, rather compels us, to ask about the perspective ahead for the difficult way of estrangement and rapprochement, of dialogue, contact, controversy, and for the ecumenical striving to overcome the divisions of the Church.”[77]

[1] Vatikaans Concilie en Nieuwe Theologie (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1964). ET: The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, Translated by Lewis Smedes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), 250.

[2] Roman Catholic Theology & Practice: An Evangelical Assessment (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2014), Pp. 493.

[3] Eduardo Echeverria, Berkouwer and Catholicism, Disputed Questions (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013). Studies in Reformed Theology, Vol. 24.

[4] Indeed, Allison does “not claim to speak for all evangelicals or to represent the many versions of evangelical theology; given the expansive nature of evangelicalism, no one person and no one particular theological swath can accomplish that task” (18). Yet, despite his disclaimer, Allison persists in speaking for “evangelical theology” throughout his book.

[5] Berkouwer, The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, 254.

[6] John Paul II, Encyclical Letter, 1995, Ut unum sint, §§28, 47, respectively.

[7] “Towards a Common Understanding of the Church,” in Deepening Communion, International Documents with Roman Catholic Participation, Edited by William G. Rusch and Jeffrey Gros (Washington, D.C.: United State Catholic Conference, 1998), 179-229, and at 187.

[8] John Paul II, Ut unum sint, §79, gives the following as examples of issues that need further ecumenical dialogue: “1) the relationship between Sacred Scripture, as the highest authority in matters of faith, and Sacred Tradition, as indispensable to the interpretation of the Word of God; 2) the Eucharist, as the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, an offering of praise to the Father, the sacrificial memorial and Real Presence of Christ and the sanctifying outpouring of the Holy Spirit; 3) Ordination, as a Sacrament, to the threefold ministry of the episcopate, presbyterate and diaconate; 4) the Magisterium of the Church, entrusted to the Pope and the Bishops in communion with him, understood as a responsibility and an authority exercised in the name of Christ for teaching and safeguarding the faith; [and] 5) the Virgin Mary, as Mother of God and Icon of the Church, the spiritual Mother who intercedes for Christ’s disciples and for all humanity.”

[9] I think the same must be said of the little study of Leonardo De Chirico, Papacy, Its Origin and Role in the 21^st Century (Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus Publications, 2015). On the fruits of these dialogues, see the study by Walter Cardinal Kasper, Harvesting the Fruits: Basic Aspects of Christian Faith in Ecumenical Dialogue (London: Bloomsbury, 2009).

[10] John Paul II, Ut unum sint, §6. The quote within the quote is from the Decree on Ecumenism, §1.

[11] “Towards a Common Understanding of the Church,” 187.

[12] John Paul II, Ut unum sint, §13.

[13] I am grateful to Fr. Thomas Guarino, Seton Hall University, for helping me to formulate this dilemma. I consider a solution to this dilemma—again, with his help—in my recent book, Pope Francis. The Legacy of Vatican II (Lectio Publishing, 2015), 145-181.

[14] There is also a chapter on Dei Verbum in G. C. Berkouwer, Nabetrachting op het Concilie (Kampen: Kok, 1968). This is Berkouwer’s second book on Vatican II, but it remains untranslated.

[15] Furthermore, see Aidan Nichols, O.P., two volume commentary on the Catechism of the Catholic Church: The Splendour of Doctrine, I, On Christian Believing; The Service of Glory, II, On Worship, Ethics, Spirituality (T&T Clark, 1995, 1997, respectively).

[16] John Paul II, Ut unum sint, §24.

[17] John Paul II, Ut unum sint, §28.

[18] John Paul II, Ut unum sint, §29.

[19] John Paul II, Ut unum sint, §41.

[20] John Paul II, Ut unum sint, §§28, 47, respectively.

[21] John Paul II, Ut unum sint, §84.

[22] G.C. Berkouwer, De Kerk, Vol. I, Eenheid en Katholiciteit (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1970, 91n130. ET: The Church, Translated by James E. Davidson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 74n71.

[23] Berkouwer, The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, 30.

[24] Berkouwer, The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, 254.

[25] Evangelical Theological Perspectives on post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003). Vol. 19, Religions and Discourse, Edited by James M.M. Francis.

[26] De Chirico, Evangelical Theological Perspectives, 237.

[27] For example, William Lane Craig, “God is not Dead Yet: How current philosophers argue for his existence,” Christianity Today, Jul3, 2008, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/july/13.22.html.

[28] Encyclopaedie der Heilige Godgeleerdheid, II, 254-255; see also 227, 231. ET: Principles of Sacred Theology, 301-302; see also 275, 279. Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, I, 290-291. ET: Reformed Dogmatics, I, 318-319.

[29] The Canons of Dort (1618-1619), in Reformed Confessions of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries in English Translation, Vol. 4, 1600-1693, Complied with Introduction by James T. Dennision Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014), 120-153, and at 135, Article 4, Third and Fourth Heads of Doctrine.

[30] CCC cites in the note attached to this quotation from Pius XII, references to Vatican I, Dei Filius 2; Vatican II, Dei Verbum 6, and St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, I, I. For an in depth study of the issues raised here, see Echeverria, Berkouwer and Catholicism, 110-272.

[31] Thomas Guarino, Foundations of Systematic Theology (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 269.

[32] Calvin, Institutes, IV, XIV, 6: “We might refer to other similitudes, by which sacraments are more plainly designated, as when they are called the pillars of our faith. For just as a building stands and leans on its foundation, and yet is rendered more stable when supported by pillars, so faith leans on the word of God as its proper foundation, and yet when sacraments are added leans more firmly, as if resting on pillars. Or we may call them mirrors, in which we may contemplate the riches of the grace which God bestows upon us. For then, as has been said, he manifests himself to us in as far as our dullness can enable us to recognize him, and testifies his love and kindness to us more expressly than by word.”

[33] The Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) sees the sacraments as a mere outward or empty sign (nudum signum), implying the exclusion of grace from the sacrament. Bavinck describes the position of Zwinglians, “True, the sacraments visibly represent the benefits that believers have received from God, but they do this as confessions of our faith and do not impart grace” (Gereformeerde Dogmatiek IV, 448 [470]. For Luther’s rejection of Zwinglians or Anabatists, as he also called them, see his The Large Catechism, Translated by Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), Fourth Part: Baptism, 80-101.

[34] God is the principal efficient cause and the sacraments are examples of instrumental efficient causality. On this distinction and its sacramental import, see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 62, a. 1, ad 1, ad 2; and q. 62, a. 5.

[35] Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek IV, 451 [474].

[36] Cited by Berkouwer, De Sacramenten (Kampen: J.H.Kok, 1954), 101-102. Translated by Hugo Bekker as The Sacraments (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1969), 84.

[37] Faith, Form, and Fashion, Classical reformed Theology and its Postmodern Critics (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 28.

[38] See Bondage and Liberation of the Will, 2.263 (at n. 58), 264 (at nn. 63, 65), 284 (at n. 213), 290 (at n. 259); 4.331 (at n. 45); 5.361 (at n. 100); 6.381 (at n. 59). Wederkomst van Christus, I [Kampen: Kok, 1961], 279. Translated by James van Oosterom as The Return of Christ [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972], 225).

[39] De Chirico, Evangelical Theological Perspectives, 236.

[40] G. C. Berkouwer, Wederkomst van Christus, I (Kampen: Kok, 1961), 279. Translated by James van Oosterom as The Return of Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 225.

[41] Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, 4 (Kampen: Kok, 1901), 702. ET: John Bolt, ed., Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 720, see also editor’s note, 697.

[42] In the words of the Anglican Thomist, E.L. Mascall, The Openness of Being, Natural Theology Today, Gifford Lectures, 1970-1971 (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 1971), 153.

[43] De Chirico, Evangelical Theological Perspectives, 237.

[44] Mascall, The Openness of Being, 153.

[45] For this quote, see Jan Veenhof, “Nature and Grace in Bavinck,” Pro Rege June 2006, 10–31, and at 22; see also Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, 4 (Kampen: Kok, 1901), 702. ET: John Bolt, ed., Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 720, see also editor’s note, 697.

[46] G.C. Berkouwer, Wederkomst van Christus, II, 267–68; ET: 449-450.

[47] Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature & Grace (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 81.

[48] H. U. von Balthasar, Parole et mystère chez Origène (Paris: Cerf, 1957), 51, as cited by Marc Cardinal Ouellet, Mystery and Sacrament of Love, Translated by Michelle K. Borras and Adrian J. Walker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 27.

[49] De Chirico, Evangelical Theological Perspectives, 250.

[50] De Chirico, Evangelical Theological Perspectives, 275.

[51] De Chirico, Evangelical Theological Perspectives, 275-276. See also, Allison, 64-65.

[52] De Chirico, Evangelical Theological Perspectives, 249. See also, Allison, 56.

[53] De Chirico, Evangelical Theological Perspectives, 248.

[54] De Chirico, Evangelical Theological Perspectives, 249.

[55] De Chirico, Evangelical Theological Perspectives, 249.

[56] I engage Michael Horton on claims like this and others that he makes against Catholicism in my article, “Revelation, Faith, and Tradition: Catholic Ecumenical Dialogue,” Calvin Theological Journal 49 (2014): 25-62.

[57] Berkouwer, De Sacramenten; ET: 65.

[58] Marc Cardinal Ouellet, Mystery and Sacrament of Love, 24.

[59] Douglas Farrow, Ascension Theology (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2011), xii, 122.

[60] Gereformeerde Dogmatiek IV, 448 [ET: 470]. For Luther’s rejection of Zwinglians or Anabaptists, as he also called them, see his The Large Catechism, Fourth Part: Baptism, 80-101.

[61] Cited by Berkouwer, The Sacraments , 84.

[62] For Berkouwer’s defense of sacramental efficacy but not ex opere operato, see The Sacraments, 13-26, 56-89. See also, G.C. Berkouwer, “Ex Opere Operato,” Part I, Gereformeerd Theologisch Tijdschrift 53 (No. 3-1953): 78-88; idem., “Ex Opere Operato,” Part II, Gereformeerd Theologisch Tijdschrift 53 (No. 4-1953): 93-103. So, too, Herman Bavinck, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper,” Mid-America Journal of Theology 19 (2008; [1887]): 127-142, and at 132: “With this objective view of the sacrament, Calvin stands decidedly on the side of Rome and the Lutherans. . . . [Calvin] can hardly find words strong enough to express his conviction concerning the real, essential, genuine presence of Christ’s own flesh and of his own blood in the Lord’s Supper. He declares explicitly that the issue between him and his Roman Catholic and Lutheran opponents involves only the manner of that presence” (132).

[63] Berkouwer, The Sacraments, 62.

[64] Johann Adam Möhler, Symbolism, Translated by J.B. Robertson (New York: Crossroad Herder Book, 1997 [1832]), 218n2.

[65] Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism, Translated by Dom Justin McCann, O.S.B. (Steubenville, Ohio: Franciscan University Press, 1996 [1929]), 27.

[66] Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., Christus Sacrament van de Godsontmoeting, Achtste druk (Bilthoven: H. Nelissen, 1966 [1959]). Translated by Paul Barrett, O.P., et al, as Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Oxford/Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1963). Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, 88n60. This note, indeed, the whole appendix, “St. Thomas’ Christological Interpretation of Sacramental Ex Opere Operato Causality” (82-89), is not present in the original Dutch edition.

[67] Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, 85.

[68] Robert Sokolowski, “Phenomenology and the Eucharist,” in Christian Faith & Human Understanding (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 72. Hans Urs von Balthasar echoes this Catholic point: “Only the Eucharist really completes the Incarnation” (Theo-Drama, IV, Translated by Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994 [1980]), 338-351, and at 348).

[69] Berkouwer, The Sacraments, 87-88.

[70] Berkouwer, The Sacraments, 223.

[71] Berkouwer, The Sacraments, 236.

[72] The Eucharist, translated by N.D. Smith [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968], 75-76.

[73] Sokolowski, “The Eucharist and Transubstantiation,” in Christian Faith & Human Understanding, 105-106.

[74] The Eucharist, 83.

[75] The Eucharist, 84-85.

[76] Benedict XVI, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, February 22, 2007, Sacramentum caritatis, §11.

[77] The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, 249.

Outline

I. INTRODUCTION
A. What is At Stake?
B. The Catholic Response
C. A “Criticism of Criticism”
D. The Scope of Politicizing the Bible
II. CONTENT OVERVIEW
A. Chopping at the Roots
B. Medieval Miscalculations
C. John Wycliffe: Reformation’s “Morning Star or Incendiary to Henry VIII’s Fire?
D. Machiavelli: Exegeting Scripture for the Sake of Political Philosophy
E. Luther: Committed Purveyor of Scriptural Politicization
F. Henry VIII: Erastianism Finds an English Home
G. The Cartesian Shift: Mechanical Mathematics and the Mania for Method
H. Scripture and Christianity Revisited in the Hands of Hobbes and His Leviathan
I. Spinoza’s Philosophic and Methodical Contributions to Historical Criticism
J. Richard Simon: A Catholic Exegete Who Hurts More Than Helps
K. John Locke: Politicizing Scripture for the Sake of Tolerance
L. John Toland and His Radical Exegetical Mission
M. Concluding Chapter
III. EVALUATION
A. The Closing of the Cosmos
B. Consequences of a Closed Cosmology
C. Private “I”s
D. Politicization of Religion and Scripture
E. Catholicism: The Unthinkable Option
F. Mild Criticisms
G. Evaluative summary
IV. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I. INTRODUCTION

The historical-critical method as applied to biblical studies has long been a source of controversy. Does it aid or support Christian convictions, or do its principles and methodology intrinsically tend to work like an acid, slowly eroding the intellectual foundations of Christian theism as a viable worldview? Has historical criticism benefited the lay faithful by improving their understanding of the text and thereby strengthening a living Christian faith, or has the method become associated with technical expertise and specialization such that the average believer avoids the text due to fear of interpretive inadequacy? From a Catholic point of view, has a magisterium of the academic elite been erected to compete with the Magisterium of the Church? Must historical criticism necessarily give rise to oppositions: theological conservatives versus theological liberals, confessionalists versus non-confessionalists? Nor is the question limited to the relation of professional historical criticism to the wider Christian world. For within the academy itself the debate concerning which principles and presuppositions should underwrite historical-critical methodology is often contested. One cause of such contentiousness is the increasingly apparent fact that the particular conclusions generated by the historical-critical method often differ dramatically depending upon which set of broader philosophical presuppositions guide the practitioner in plying his craft.

The difficulty involved in assessing the impact of historical-criticism both within the academy and throughout the larger Christian community is a sign that some ambiguity surrounds the very meaning of the phrase “historical criticism.” A common and seemingly innocuous way to define historical criticism might be to understand the historical-critical method as a particular species of literary criticism that evaluates a text “in the light of historical evidence or based on the context in which a work was written, including facts about the author’s life and the historical and social circumstances of the time.”¹ However, such a nominal definition runs the risk of glossing over the fact that evaluation of historical evidences or cultural contexts implies and imports a host of underlying presuppositions, both philosophical and ideological, which inevitably bear upon the practice of historiography, especially when historical conclusions touch upon questions of deep religious significance. It is precisely such background commitments and their relation to the practice of the historical-critical method that have given rise to trenchant disagreements in the areas of both Old and New Testament studies.

In the case of Old Testament scholarship, one encounters the struggle between the so called “minimalists” and “maximalists” with respect to establishing the basic historical reliability of the Hebrew narrative. Minimalist scholars, citing lack of direct explicit evidence for various biblical claims concerning early Israelite history are often skeptical about the reliability of key epochal features of the biblical account such as the lives of the patriarchs, the existence of Israel in Egypt, the Exodus and wilderness wanderings, the conquest of the Canaanites, the stories of the Judges, and even the existence of a united kingdom under David and Solomon. Examples of such scholarship might include Thomas L. Thompson’s The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology And The Myth Of Israel and Giovanni Garbini’s History and Ideology in Ancient Israel. Maximalist scholars, on the other hand, citing the correspondence between the chronological and factual claims of the biblical narrative with the known archaeological, linguistic, and cultural conventions of the Ancient Near East, tend to embrace the essential reliability of the Old Testament. Examples of such scholarship might include Kenneth Kitchen’s On the Reliability of the Old Testament, James Hoffmeier’s Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition, and A Biblical History of Israel by Iain Provan, V. Phillips Long and Tremper Longman III.

With respect to New Testament Scholarship, one finds a similar divergence. On the one hand, there are scholars who are skeptical concerning the historical veracity of large portions of the Gospel narrative, especially where the text touches upon claims of supernatural intervention, including the central event of the Christian story – the resurrection of Christ. One thinks here not only of seminal critical works such as David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined or Rudolf Bultmann’s Jesus Christ and Mythology, but also of more recent scholars who continue to work within a similar presuppositional context such as those associated with the Jesus Seminar, or of Bart Ehrman and his recently released How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.

On the other hand, there is a host of New Testament scholars who, while also trained and practiced in the tools and techniques of historical critical methodology, find the evidence for the essential reliability of the New Testament accounts quite compelling. Here mention might be made of Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, and the Jesus of Nazareth series by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

A. What is at Stake?

It is important to recognize just how high the stakes really are with respect to a proper assessment of historical criticism. For although some practitioners are more cognizant than others concerning the impact of presuppositions upon the probative force of their conclusions, many scholars conduct their work without sufficient critical reflection upon the implicit commitments that shape their research and findings. In some cases the conclusions of historical-critical scholars are antithetical to Christian theism at a fundamental level. It is not simply a question of better or worse exegetical results, or even the impact of the historical-critical method upon questions of biblical inspiration or inerrancy. When situated within an anti-theistic (or at least anti-supernaturalist) philosophical context, historical criticism can represent a direct threat to the rational foundations of Christianity and the authority of the Church per se precisely because it challenges the basic reliability of the biblical text. In challenging the basic reliability of the texts, this form of historical criticism undermines the traditional apologetic which renders Christian theism and the authority of the Church rationally credible as a cosmic-cultural vision of reality.

That is because the traditional apologetic that establishes the fact of a divine revelation, and therefore a specifically Christian notion of theism, depends upon establishing the basic reliability of the biblical corpus as essentially truthful human testimony, including where that testimony touches upon claims to both the prophetic and the miraculous. The historical accounts of the two testaments, taken as reliable human testimony, serve as the principal non-circular means by which to establish the divinity of Christ and consequently the full constellation of Christian doctrines about man, God, and the cosmos, doctrines which flow from a recognition of Christ’s words as the very words of God. Accordingly, by calling the basic historical reliability of the text into question, historical criticism can be toxic to Christian faith at a deeper level than some orthodox observers perhaps recognize.

It is not enough simply to point out that in an effort to maintain objectivity, academic historical criticism often proceeds with an a priori indifference to Christian philosophical and theological claims. That manner of proceeding is often a condition arising from a deeper conviction. The deeper conviction held by a number of historical critical practitioners both past and present is the belief that what they have discovered about the text via critical tools and methodology has actually undermined the substantial human reliability of the biblical text, which (if that were true) in turn vitiates the fundamental apologetic that underwrites a Christian worldview. In fact, to claim that some historical-critical scholars are operating with an a priori indifference to a Christian worldview is not quite right. Precisely because such scholars think that a traditional Christian cosmology has itself been discredited through the discoveries of the critical method, their refusal to recognize a limiting or supervening confessionalist framework (Catholic, Protestant or otherwise) from within which to conduct their trade is, for them, a matter of intellectual integrity. For all of these reasons, the subject at hand should be of great interest and concern to all Christians.

B. The Catholic Response

What then is one to make of the value of historical criticism when it seems capable of yielding such divergent results? One stance might be simply to reject the value of historical criticism altogether. This approach is sometimes associated with biblical fundamentalism. Another approach on the other end of the spectrum might be to accept the conclusions of historical critical scholars uncritically, overlooking altogether the impact of presuppositions upon conclusions. In fact, operating with a presuppositional blind spot seems to characterize some historical critical scholars themselves, a weakness in no way unique to the field of biblical studies, but rather a common hazard of modern academic specialization wherein islands of intra-guild peer interaction, isolated from inter-disciplinary influences, too often breeds an unhealthy academic parochialism.² A third and middle approach to historical criticism involves proceeding with caution, paying careful attention to the distinction between the tools and techniques used by the critic and the broader philosophical commitments that establish the context within which such tools and techniques are deployed.

For her part, the Catholic Church has taken the path of cautious assessment and distinction, followed by conditional acceptance of the historical critical enterprise. As the practice of the historical critical method gained ascendancy within the Protestant world during the past few centuries, both its merits and weaknesses became more apparent, as well as its capacity to influence Catholic scholarship for better or worse. Accordingly, the Magisterium of the Church was compelled to take stock of the developing situation in biblical studies and render guidance. Three primary Church documents that bear upon the question of biblical criticism are Providentissumus Deus issued in November of 1892 by Pope Leo XIII, Divino Afflante Spiritu issued in September of 1943 by Pope Pius XII, and Humani Generis issued in August of 1950, also by Pope Pius XII. While each document is worthy of careful study in itself, it is sufficient here to point out three general themes which emerge from the encyclicals. First and foremost comes a warning that biblical studies cannot be carried out in a philosophical vacuum, that its tools and techniques, principles and methods presuppose a cognitive framework. Moreover, the popes have pointed out that the presuppositions underwriting the work of many biblical critics were (and in many cases still are) inimical to Christian faith. A second theme is the recognition that great advances have been made in archaeology, linguistics and many other specialized disciplines relevant to a better material understanding of Sacred Scripture, and further, that such advances in tools and techniques ought to be welcomed and appropriated by scholars for the benefit of the Church. Thirdly, though perhaps more implicit than explicit, is the conviction that there is a crucial distinction between the philosophical presuppositions which undergird biblical scholarship on the one hand, and the legitimate use of modern tools and techniques on the other. The specialized tools and techniques of the historical-critical guild may be deployed by practitioners with diverse, and even opposing, background philosophical presuppositions. Accordingly, the discovery and rejection of one or more insupportable presuppositions does not, ipso facto, require rejection of the tools and techniques utilized by the historical critic. So long as this distinction is kept clearly in mind, the essential benefits of modern advances in historiography might be gleaned without fear of an adverse impact resulting from the embedding of faulty philosophical premises. For a more detailed account of the Catholic Church’s stance toward historical criticism over the last century, along with an extensive list of relevant Catholic documents, see Andrew Preslar’s helpful synopsis Sacred Scripture and the Catholic Church.

C. A “Criticism of Criticism”

Throughout the later half of the twentieth century an increasing number of Catholic scholars entered into the professional arena of historical-critical studies alongside Protestant scholars who had heretofore dominated the field. While the work of both Protestant and Catholic biblical scholars has produced much fruit over the last several decades, the tendency to harness the historical-critical method to various philosophical and methodological presuppositions without sufficient reflection upon the soundness of such presuppositions and their subtle impact upon the guild has continued, and in some cases worsened. As relative newcomers to historical critical academic circles, Catholic scholars have not been immune to what might be termed the “presuppositional problem” despite the admonitions of the Catholic Magisterium concerning the impact of broader philosophical commitments on the deployment of the method.

The growth of this problem within academic biblical studies motivated the presentation of a landmark response from a world-renowned Catholic biblical theologian. In 1988 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger delivered his famous Erasmus lecture titled Biblical Interpretation in Crisis which, while unequivocally recognizing the positive benefits of the historical critical method, highlighted some of the real deformities that threaten the integrity of the discipline. Moreover, the future pope proposed an initial strategy for solving the interpretive crisis by famously calling for a “criticism of criticism:”

“In order to arrive at a real solution, we must get beyond disputes over details and press on to the foundations. What we need might be called a criticism of criticism. By this I mean not some exterior analysis, but a criticism based on the inherent potential of all critical thought to analyze itself. . . We need a self-criticism of the historical method which can expand to an analysis of historical reason itself . . .”³

Cardinal Ratzinger’s “criticism of criticism” seemed principally to be a careful evaluation of the foundational and often implicit philosophical and ideological commitments that inform the modern academic approach to biblical studies, in order to determine the degree to which those commitments influenced the conclusions generated within the guild. In short, his lecture was aimed to disabuse biblical scholars of the myth of neutrality, of a certain naïveté presuming that the tools and techniques of the guild are wielded according to a strict scientific objectivity. However, before the soundness of those philosophical and ideological commitments that influence historical-critical studies can be evaluated on their own merits, we must first identify exactly which philosophical and ideological streams have shaped historical criticism from its inception to the present.

Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker’s Politicizing The Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300 -1700 masterfully supplies precisely this need for deep historical analysis of the genesis and growth of historical-criticism. Indeed, the work is magisterial in its contribution to this effort in at least two ways. In the first place Politicizing the Bible explores the deep roots of historical criticism by drawing attention to the political and philosophical movements which pre-dated and pre-figured the full flowering of historical-critical studies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hahn and Wiker’s work plows the intellectual and political fields of the four centuries prior to this flowering, and therefore stops where many surveys of the historical critical method begin. Secondly, Politicizing the Bible is not only a history of persons, places and events; but more importantly for the subject at hand it is a history of ideas. Its great value derives principally from its profound exposition and clarification of those seminal philosophical and ideological streams that converged historically to constitute and define the contours of academic biblical criticism as we receive it today.⁴

D. The Scope of Politicizing the Bible

Politicizing the Bible is truly a monumental research effort, as would be expected given its scope – with four hundred years of scholarship and history to cover – and Hahn and Wiker prove their depth of knowledge and expertise on the subject through 611 pages and an extensive bibliography that demonstrates their familiarity with historical criticism as a discipline, as well as its complex history. The sheer breadth of texts and thinkers addressed is quite astounding, with an extraordinary level of detail concerning many lesser known but critical figures (e.g. Giordano Bruno, a critical influence on early Enlightenment biblical scholar John Toland). In their exploration the authors take the reader on a fascinating historical odyssey requiring a grasp of history, and the history of ideas and their interrelations. This requires understanding the influences of each successive historical figure through a study of their own intellectual development and the important intellectual relationships they formed throughout their lives. Hahn and Wicker excel at this uncovering and explaining of presuppositional and ideological motifs. By taking this “magnifying glass” approach, their work is able to identify the key presuppositions of the historical-critical method. It then extrapolates to the logical and historical consequences of the method, including perceptions of Scripture that follow from an uncritical adoption of the formative presuppositions that underwrite such scholarship.

There are several things Politicizing the Bible is not. For example, it is not a technical evaluation of the cogency or validity of the philosophical or political ideas that shaped historical criticism – though it becomes clear that the authors have deep reservations about them. Thus Hahn and Wiker’s treatment of ideas like Averroism, nominalism, Cartesianism, positivism, and republicanism are primarily descriptive and consequence-predictive, rather than philosophically reflective. For example, in a 50-page chapter on Spinoza and the beginning of the radical enlightenment, only three pages are devoted to a critical assessment of the pantheistic philosopher whom they claim “produced a great shift, perhaps the great shift in the modern politicizing of Scripture, from a politicized exegesis in support of cuius regio, eius religio, to a politicized exegesis in support of liberal democracy.” They argue, for example, that Spinoza held a “severely restricted view of reason,” that was essentially limited to mathematics, resulting in “the most absurd and self-blinding type of pride and idolatry,” since this view of reason deforms nature to fit only what can be “easily understood by human reason.” In the authors’ estimation, Spinoza’s positivism creates a “miracle-proof” mindset that could be overturned by “a single confirmed miracle.” The reader naturally is eager for more, given that the authors have spent more than 45 pages explaining Spinoza and his contributions to the the historical-critical method – surely there is more to understanding and ultimately defeating Spinoza’s system – yet this is the extent of the authors’ critical assessment.

This work is not an attempt to specify what alternate presuppositions should inform the historical-critical guild. We get tastes here and there that Hahn and Wiker think that the wide-scale abandonment of Aristotelianism and Thomism, beginning with William of Ockham and other medieval thinkers, was a poor choice with deep and wide philosophical implications. Yet they do not make a positive case in any substantial form for either Aristotle or St. Thomas – which is certainly understandable given the scope and breadth of the present project.

Nor do the authors explain to what degree higher-critical tools and techniques might be compatible with the philosophical and theological foundations of Christian orthodoxy. Certainly both authors have been influenced by historical criticism, still find merit in many of its forms, and do not think it should be scuttled and sent to the bottom of the ocean. Yet what are we to make of the many tools and techniques the project employs, especially the most notorious? Is “JEPD” a valid thesis for understanding various influences on the Old Testament texts or do the philosophical presuppositions that underlie the thesis make it untenable? What of the intensive work that has been done on the synoptic Gospels, their interdependency and difference – is there value in furthering that field of study? Yet, what Hahn and Wiker’s work does argue, it argues superbly well, and to that we now turn.

II. CONTENT OVERVIEW

A. Chopping at the Roots

In Hahn and Wiker’s opening chapter, “Getting to the Roots of the Historical Critical Method,” the authors seek to paint the landscape of their study by explaining the nature, purpose, and scope of their argument. The authors observe that, “it is commonplace to see the historical-critical method described as an objective or neutral method,” an assumption they hope to break upon the rocks of the method’s own history by illuminating the deep philosophical commitments to which the method submits.⁵ Theirs is an appropriately-titled “criticism of criticism,” arguing that it would be “fair to subject the presuppositions of the historical-critical method to the same intense scrutiny as its proponents exercise on the biblical text, ‘suspecting the hermeneuts of suspicion.’”⁶

Hahn and Wiker lay down the aim they hope to achieve in the following way:

Obviously we intend more than a mere chronology of ideas; we hope to contribute to a critical and historical understanding of the historical-critical method itself. Our argument, to put it all too simply, is that the development of the historical-critical method in biblical studies is only fully intelligible as part of the more comprehensive project of secularization that occurred in the West over the last seven hundred years, and that the politicizing of the Bible was, in one way or another, essential to this project. By politicization, we mean the intentional exegetical reinterpretation of Scripture so as to make it serve a merely political, this-worldly (hence secular) goal.⁷

The authors go on to clarify the target of their critique by writing:

Here we wish to make clear again that we are not condemning the historical-critical method, but attempting to bring to light why it has particular characteristic effects that undermine or radically transform religious belief and how these effects are related to the method itself.⁸

More specifically, Hahn and Wiker hope to show that:

. . . we have a good reason to suspect that the historical-critical method is, in significant aspects, defined by motives other than the laudable desire to get at the truth of the biblical text using every available and appropriate means. . . The defining secular political aim is to keep religion from disturbing or significantly determining public life . . . .⁹

As to the principle philosophical commitments that pave the road for the attainment of this political objective, Hahn and Wiker contend that:

The two . . . presuppositions that contribute the most to achieving this aim through exegetical method are the bias against the supernatural and the notion that the core of Christianity is moral rather than dogmatic. A critical approach and a deeper knowledge of history do not produce these presuppositions, we shall argue. Rather, the presuppositions determine the way that exegetes are critical and the way they use history. We hope to make this clear to the reader as the following chapters unfold. . . . This union of tools with secularizing presuppositions constitutes what is almost invariably meant by the historical-critical method.¹⁰

For those familiar with the historical-critical method, particularly as it is taught in undergraduate and graduate religious studies programs, this already sounds terribly familiar. Another and perhaps more concise statement of the authors’ essential thesis is captured well by the following quotation from Jon Levinson whose work is cited repeatedly within the introductory chapter of Politicizing the Bible:

historical criticism is the form of biblical studies that corresponds to the classical liberal political idea.¹¹

In summary Hahn and Wiker’s argument seems to be that while the modern development and utilization of advances in historiographic tools and techniques that deepen human understanding of the biblical text are a welcome boon, as a matter of historical fact, the deployment of such tools and techniques has come to be entangled with a set of philosophical and ideological presuppositions whose intertwining with historical-critical method was woven together, implicitly or explicitly, for the purpose of fostering and securing a secular political ascendency wherein religion is denuded of its transcendental appeal and recast in private and moral terms so as to inoculate the modern project of a secular ordering of society from any other-worldly disturbances.

B. Medieval Miscalculations

In the second chapter, “The First Cracks of Secularism: Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham,” the authors seek to find in these two medieval personalities the roots of the via moderna, or modern way, that ultimately led to the critical method of modern scriptural scholarship. Ockham, the father of nominalist philosophy, argued against papal supremacy and in so doing, “inadvertently aided Marsilius’s far more radical case for the complete subordination of the Church, theology, and Scripture to the secular political order.¹² As we see continually throughout this survey, the context of this sub-narrative is of a Church in strife, particularly during the Avignon papacy.

Marsilius, an Averroist philosopher who believed the truths of natural reason to be superior to those of revelation, was an ally of Ludwig of Bavaria, a pretender to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, and an enemy of the papacy, including Popes John XXII and Innocent III. (( Hahn, Wiker, p. 23. )) Marsilius, ultimately declared a heretic by Pope John XXII, used Scripture to defend his reordering of secular and sacred authority so that “the priesthood is firmly subordinated to political power,” something that would serve his friend Ludwig well.¹³ To accomplish this goal, Marsilius in his Defensor Pacis reinterpreted Scripture against the primacy of the Church, arguing that, “it is quite evident that Christ, the Apostle, and the saints held the view that all men must be subject to the human laws and to the judges according to these laws.”¹⁴ He also rejected all allegorical and typological exegesis of Scripture, and even rejects natural law, observing that even unjust laws, rather than being no laws at all, are simply “not absolutely perfect,” in that they have the proper form of a “coercive command,” but lack the “proper and true ordering of justice.”¹⁵ Even more assiduously Marsilius by innuendo argues that revealed religion always has a natural cause, whether it be, in the authors’ words, “the philosophic few who use religion to control the unruly masses for the sake of good political order,” or at worst, “the cagey priest who dupe the masses to fill their own coffers.” Of course, if this could be true of religion in general, it could also be true of the Bible’s authors, too, a claim we find pervasive in the historical-critical method.¹⁶

William of Ockham

Contemporaneously to Marsilius, English nominalist philosopher William of Ockham had also befriended Ludwig, condemning the Avignon papacy and calling for a group of “experts” to assert authority over the papacy and Church councils to interpret the Scriptures properly.¹⁷ Ockham argued that the expert “should be preferred to the pope” in interpretation, and that the experts and “those having sufficient understanding of the other written sources” should “judge in the manner of firm assertion” what should be defined as right interpretation.¹⁸ Thus exegesis is an “independent skill that can be practiced by anyone with the requisite intellectual abilities and training,” rather than a method which required an ultimate religious authority to guide and define proper interpretation.¹⁹

Ockham’s nominalism, which rejected all universals, was also employed in exegesis, as he “severed the real connection between the similar appearance of natural kinds and the actual species-universal in things,” meaning that universals were regarded as having no objective weight, and no intrinsic correspondence to individual, concrete things.²⁰He also rejected the doctrine of analogy, or the idea that certain ideas or objects are analogous to higher realities of being. Ockham, by extension, asserted that natural things do not bear inherent spiritual meanings, since they are not analogical of greater spiritual realities. By consequence, spiritual senses of scriptural interpretation, such as the allegorical, moral, and or anagogical, were downplayed, while the literal-historical sense would be elevated, a development central to the historical-critical method. Scripture was then understood “as signifying in the same way as any humanly written book.”²¹ We show below the implications of this revising of scriptural interpretation in such later figures as Wycliffe and especially Luther, a monk trained in nominalist philosophy who despised Aristotelianism, and by extension, Thomism.

C. John Wycliffe: Reformation’s “Morning Star” or Incendiary to Henry VIII’s Fire?

Fourteenth century priest and theologian John Wycliffe is often heralded in Protestant circles as a proto-Protestant, making many of the same claims that the Protestant Reformers would ultimately raise several generations later, including the following: the need for wider vernacular translations, the corruption of the papacy, the rejection of transubstantiation, etc. However, in Hahn and Wiker’s third chapter, we find a much more complicated figure who very purposefully furthered the politicization of the Bible by promoting the empowerment of secular authorities to intervene in ecclesial matters, and thereby in some respects providing the intellectual basis for Henry VIII’s eventual establishment of a national English church with the king as its sovereign. Indeed, Wycliffe argued for the “deuniversalization” of the Catholic Church, claiming in his De Civili Dominio that the pope was head only of a “particular Church,” and that the English King Edward III should be head of an English church, since the head of state was in some sense replicating King David’s role in religious matters in the Old Testament.²²

Wycliffe’s De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae reflects his strong criticism of nominalism, an antagonism that led him to an almost hyper-realist understanding of the Thomist “analogy of being,” in that his understanding of the analogy between certain things was so strong that the difference between them became almost imperceptible. For example, Wycliffe nearly collapsed the divine Logos (Christ) into the created logos (Scripture) so that they seemed practically one and the same. Wycliffe fashioned a fairly complicated schema of five levels of Scripture, the highest being the incarnate Christ Himself “the Scripture that cannot be destroyed,” and the lowest being the physical, corruptible manuscripts. Wycliffe, the supposed proto-Reformer, argued that “under no circumstances” is the physical, biblical manuscript “sacred, except for the fact that it functions as a guiding process which leads the faithful into the knowledge of the heavenly Scripture,” in other words, Christ. The words and manuscripts, which sometimes have errors, were “only the signs of Holy Scripture, which is the knowledge of the Holy Spirit.”²³ The inherent problems in the text then necessitated that a group of skilled theologians must serve to interpret the Scriptures properly to the Christian. This in effect replaces an ordained magisterium, whom Wycliffe derogatively called “pseudo-disciples,” with an academic magisterium who can properly mediate texts.²⁴ In turn this placed the Scriptures, interpreted through these supposedly objective “experts,” as the “default authority against the Church,” in the words of Hahn and Wiker²⁵

However, Wycliffe in De Officio Regis went even further, arguing that the king acts as a kind of shepherd and pastor of the people, as “Christ, according to his deity, gave to the king as His vicar that office before there was a Roman Church.”²⁶ Even more explicitly, Wycliffe argued “the pope ought, as he formerly was, to be subject to Caesar.”²⁶ This divinely-sponsored king thus ruled the men of his kingdom “according to divine law,” and employed “doctors and worshipers of the divine law,” which effectively gave secular authorities both the power to determine who will interpret and teach Scripture, and quite notably, the power to judge cases of heresy.²⁷ Wycliffe’s religious and “politicization” legacy in England spanned many generations, especially through the Lollards, an English religious group that promoted the Disendowment Bill of 1410 that sought to persuade the kings and nobles of disendowing Church possessions.²⁸ Wycliffe is also credited with influencing Bohemian priest and Church reformer John Hus, another opponent of the Church hierarchy, as well as other philosophical movements on the continent.

D. Machiavelli: Exegeting Scripture for the Sake of Political Philosophy

Most people are familiar with Machiavelli as the notorious political realist and cynic whose magnum opus The Prince exposed the great hypocrisy and intrigue of Italian political states (including popes, cardinals, and bishops), and promoted a political theory where ends justify means. Yet the astute Machiavelli understood how powerful Scripture could be, particularly as a force in political philosophy. He thus sought to reinterpret Scripture and re-engineer its focus to serve his own political theories. Through his years as adviser to various Italian political leaders Machiavelli’s came to reject the peculiarly Aristotelian and Platonic notion that the state should conform to “independent rational or moral principles” in favor of a system defined by “knowledge of the means of preserving domination over a people.”²⁹ In such a political schema, Jesus and His message of humility and charity are counterproductive to the well-being of the state. Rather, Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Thesesus and other pre-Christian figures exemplify the best political leaders.

Moses’ inclusion is telling: by including him, Machiavelli reads the Bible, in the authors’ words, “alongside other ancient historical accounts, in the same kind of historical-critical treatment as one would any other historical work.”³⁰ Moses thus would “not have been able” to make the Jews “observe their constitutions for long if they had been unarmed,” as in the example of Moses’ order to the Levites to slaughter thousands of disobedient, idolatrous Israelites.³¹ Machiavelli also appeared to believe that the writers of Scripture and leaders like Moses used supernatural events to legitimize their message; indeed, Machiavelli notes that it was a “pardonable fault of the ancients to mix divine things with human things to make the beginnings of cities more august.”³² He further observes, “whoever reads the Bible judiciously will see that since he [Moses] wished his laws and his orders to go forward, Moses was forced to kill infinite men who, moved by nothing other than envy, were opposed to his plans.”³³ As seems evident from his biblical analysis, religion finds its telos not in communion with God, but in its utility to maintain political order.³⁴ As Machiavelli himself observes, “all things that arise in favor of that religion they [leaders] should favor and magnify, even though they judge them false… and their authority then gives them credit with anyone whatever.”³⁵ The Bible thus contains a hidden message that discerning men like Machiavelli can see, which enables exegetes to advance some secular goal – a pattern in step with the mission of many historical-critical scholars.

E. Luther: Confused and Committed Purveyor of Scriptural Politicization

Martin Luther is often characterized as the spark that set alight a religious reformation that would spread across Europe and change forever the face of Christianity in the West. Yet, beyond this famous characterization lies an individual deeply wedded to a nominalist philosophy; an advocate of a German national church led by secular authorities; a promoter of the use of temporal authorities to accomplish spiritual goals; and a sower of historical-critical interpretive seeds. These qualities occur within a man who would consistently re-shape his theology in response to external forces, all in a historical context of corruption in the Catholic Church and a rising sense of unique German identity separate from Rome.

Many are familiar with the story of Luther’s roadside decision to become a monk – less are familiar with his previous law training deeply immersed in the nominalism of William of Ockham. Indeed, Luther called the nominalist philosopher, “my master Occam,” “the greatest dialectician,” and his philosophy, “my own school… which I have absorbed completely.”³⁶ This would have far reaching implications for his own theological thought, as we have noted elsewhere. It is particularly evident in Ockham’s rejection of the analogy of being, as Luther himself rejected the traditional fourfold meaning of scripture in favor of his dialectical mode of exegesis, as he placed law and gospel against one another.³⁷ Also deeply influential was Luther’s conception of the invisible church, which essentially privatized religious belief in such a dualistic fashion that it ultimately pitted the subjective realm of faith against the objective world in a form reminiscent of Averroism. This would in turn influence thinkers like Descartes, as well as many historical-critical exegetes.³⁸

Once Luther became professor of theology at Wittenberg, we see his tendencies towards politicization emerge, teaching that, “it would be much safer if the temporal affairs also of the clergy were placed under the control of secular rulers.”³⁹ Like England, Germany was developing a deeper sense of nationalism that chafed under papal authority, particularly the large monies flowing out of Germany to Rome; much popular literature circulating in Germany at the time, sometimes apocalyptic in nature, anticipated a German church separate from Rome and guided by a political ruler. This immediate context explains to some degree the intense German reaction to the papal indulgences sold throughout the Holy Roman Empire, and that provided the catalyst for Luther’s call for reform. In 1520, Luther appealed to the German nobility in a tract that urged the rejection of papal authority and called for the German nobility to step in to effect dramatic religious change.⁴⁰ This appeal would take a more drastic turn in 1524 when Luther’s antagonism with fellow reformer Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt led him to request that the prince of Saxony expel Karlstadt on account of his more radical teachings.⁴¹ In language notably similar to that of Marsilius and Ockham, Luther argued “we are under our princes, lords, and emperors… we must outwardly obey their laws instead of the laws of Moses.”⁴² This embrace of what became called the erastian solution entailed using secular authorities to mandate the proper interpretation of Scripture; as Luther would argue, “the princes of Saxony sit as governing authorities by God. The land and the people are subject to them.”⁴³

Interestingly, Luther would later backpedal on the role of secular authorities in religion because of his frustration with political authorities who confiscated German New Testaments and Luther’s works, leading him to fashion his “two kingdoms” theory in which the spiritual and temporal authorities should remain separate. Yet even this became later convoluted by arguments made in 1530, when he suggested that rulers should intervene when “papists and Lutherans” disagreed over the meaning of Scripture. As one scholar has observed, Luther “bristles with contradictions and it is impossible to interpret the majority of his statements on the issue as more than impulsive and often thoughtless responses to particular situations.”⁴⁴ What is perhaps more broadly significant is how Lutheran ideas spread and took hold in Germany, often through city councils’ or princes’ affirmation of Protestant teachings, creating a de facto formula where political leaders were the ones shaping and defining religious belief, oftentimes at odds with Protestant theologians.⁴⁵ Those familiar with John Calvin’s life will be familiar with this religio-political tension.⁴⁶

Another important development influencing historical-critical methods would be Luther’s conception of the “canon within the canon,” seeking to determine the “true kernel and marrow of all the books [of Scripture],” a method later exegetes would appropriate in trying to find the true “historical Jesus.”⁴⁷ As the authors note, “individual books do not provide unanimous affirmation of the chosen kernel,” leading exegetes to resort to “sorting through individual texts, layering them according to authentic and spurious, early and late, pure and tainted passages.”⁴⁸ Luther’s influence on the historical-critical method can also be seen in his attempts at revising the canon, questioning the apostolic authorship of the epistle of James and expressing suspicion of the book of Revelation.⁴⁹ Of course, once one begins questioning the canon, it does not take long for others to see the potential “Pandora’s Box” and realize that every book’s authenticity or veracity is up for grabs.

Our summary of Luther and his influence on the development of the politicization of the Bible as it is catalogued by Hahn and Wiker does not do proper justice to the detail and study they have employed in making sense of Luther’s complex and influential thought. Yet hopefully it is clear how Luther, whether at times knowingly or unknowingly, contributed to the secularization of Scripture and to the appropriation of those texts for purely political goals. Luther, as the authors argue, contributed to a “revolution” in the understanding of the word “secular,” meaning no longer the political order as distinguished from the ecclesiastical order, but a “this-worldly orientation set in antithesis to religion,” which radicalized the distinction between “secular and sacred, body and soul, law and Gospel, philosophy and revelation.”⁵⁰ Luther’s ideas also undergirded a deepening German nationalism that encouraged the replacement of a Catholic Church with a peculiarly German church. Finally, and maybe most significantly for historical criticism, Luther’s principle of sola scriptura re-focused the interpretation of Scripture away from Church authority, and focused it instead toward scholars who would progressively delve deeper into debates over language, manuscripts, and the true historical meaning of the text. Oddly enough, Luther would probably be surprised and frustrated by the course his reformation took in the generations that followed.

F. Henry VIII: Erastianism Finds an English Home

English King Henry VIII (left)
meeting with Pope Leo X (center)
and Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V (right)

Even many Protestants recognize the seeming hypocrisy of Henry VIII’s turn away from Rome, which gave him the freedom to divorce and marry seven different women, divest Church properties for his own benefit, and ultimately become the head of an English national church. As we have already observed, Erastianism was “in the English air” long before Henry’s declaration of royal supremacy, as evidenced in Wycliffe’s teaching, Lollardism, and Edward III’s Ordinance and Statute of Praemunire, which forbade appeals to Rome over English courts.⁵¹ Influenced by these historical developments, and a burgeoning religious reform movement on the continent, Henry would find strong support for the centralization of ecclesial and interpretive authority around the throne.

One of the first steps was his reading of William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man, recommended ironically enough by Henry’s paramour Anne Boleyn. This work served as an English apologetic for “caesaropapism.”⁵² Tyndale argued in this work not only for English translations of the Bible, but also for a rejection of papal authority in favor of submission to secular powers who are “ordained by God” and must be obeyed, even if they “be the greatest tyrant in the world.”⁵³ Henry VIII declared of Tyndale’s work, “this is a book for me and for all kings to read,” and at first sought to have Tyndale translate the Bible into English, though he eventually executed Tyndale for his criticism of Henry’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon.⁵⁴

At the same time that Henry was embracing Tyndale’s arguments, he was also requesting that scholars find Scriptural support for his divorce from Catherine, a notably clear example of the politicization of the text. He subsequently divorced Catherine with the blessing of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and with the approval of parliament, and passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534 giving him “supreme” headship over the Church of England.⁵⁵ The authors provide evidence indicating the influence of Machiavelli and Marsilius of Padua on the scholars and theologians surrounding Henry VIII. Thomas Cromwell went so far as to ensure the publication of an English translation of Defensor Pacis. Cromwell’s Act in Restraint of Appeals was likewise deeply Marsilian, declaring England “governed by one supreme head and king,” and declaring all “foreign” intrusions by Rome or anyone else as null and void. This action, and similar ones like the dissolution of monasteries, closure of shrines, and seizure of Church wealth, were all rationalized as religious reform to be necessarily guided by the king.⁵⁶

Henry followed the Act of Supremacy with the King’s Book, which provided “an official lens through which the English version of the Scripture was to be read,” and would counteract the many varying interpretations of the Bible spreading throughout England. In one striking statement the book declared that individuals must be subject not to any universal church, but to the “particular church” of the region in which they live, and obey the “Christian kings and princes” to whom they are subject.⁵⁷ Although political leadership should be driven by a sola scriptura model, this would ultimately mean that religious matters would be settled not by a separate church authority, but by the secular state.⁵⁸ As the authors illuminate through these examples and through the torrid details of Henry’s life of religious hypocrisy, it becomes clear that he was much less a committed religious reformer, and more an “astute politician,” a true Machiavellian who determined that to strengthen the crown, it must “control and drive theology.”⁵⁹

G. The Cartesian Shift: Mechanical Mathematics and the Mania for Method

Rene Descartes may seem a strange subject to include alongside theologians like Wycliffe or Luther in a study of Scriptural interpretation, but as Hahn and Wiker demonstrate, Descartes’s dualist philosophy, reliant on Marsilian and Averroistic thought, profoundly influenced the philosophical development of the historical-critical method. Like Marsilius, Descartes came to view religion as something entirely separate from the methods of reason and objectivity, religion being “beyond our understanding,” while the natural world explored through mathematical and scientific research can be known and manipulated with certainty. This hypothesis was also indebted to nominalism, as Descartes determined that mathematical forms rather than Aristotelian universals should govern human conceptions of forms.⁶⁰ This mathematical certainty and truth, however, lay not in nature, but in the person (e.g. Descartes himself), enabling the human person to re-create and refashion nature so that he becomes the “master and possessor” of nature.⁶¹ This has important implications: (1) Descartes’s new mathematical-mechanical account entirely removes mystery from nature since the wisdom of God is identical to the wisdom of man; (2) such a mathematical schema naturally becomes progressively more suspicious of the miraculous since it does not easily fit inside such a mechanical epistemological framework; and (3) the technical mastery of nature replaces salvation history as the defining narrative of human development.⁶²

Descartes’s famous maxim “cogito ergo sum” also provided the intellectual platform from which the individual comes to view himself, rather than tradition and one’s forebears, as the authority of what is true knowledge. This in turn fed a “hermeneutic of suspicion” in the mind of the individual, since all information, particularly that which might be acquired from tradition, was highly suspect.⁶³ His method thus introduced a “radical doubt of the senses,” as the mechanistic-mathematical ontology replaced ordinary thinking, language, symbols, and metaphors as the means by which the individual can acquire true knowledge. Furthermore, if mathematical philosophy is the means by which the cosmos is to be understood properly, there is little left for the Bible but to serve as a moral guide – the assessment made by many modern historical-critical exegetes. More fundamentally, Descartes’s philosophy represents a monumental shift from focusing on the text to focusing on the method of interpretation, where the individual is the rational, self-sufficient authority over the text and tradition. Like the natural world, Scripture becomes a ball of “Cartesian wax” to be molded and shaped by the hermeneut and his methodology; it is here that we find the deep philosophical influence of Descartes on modern biblical scholarship.⁶⁴

H. Scripture and Christianity Revisited in the Hands of Hobbes and His Leviathan

The early Enlightenment political philosopher Thomas Hobbes may also seem an unlikely candidate in a history of Scriptural interpretation. Yet for those who have slogged through the entirety of his Leviathan, it is evident that Hobbes believed a revised interpretation of the Bible was critical to his philosophy of absolutism. The underlying presuppositions of Leviathan include a belief that all human actions could be reduced to purely material and efficient causes, thus making life profoundly deterministic, and ultimately defined by competing human passions and a brute desire for power. Only a powerful state ruled by an absolute monarch can bring order to this chaos. And by extension this leader must have authority to use religion to maintain political order.⁶⁵

The second half of Leviathan is an extensive assessment of Scripture, in which Hobbes refashions the miraculous as serving to strengthen the authority of political leaders such as Moses, asserts that the canon of Scripture is to be defined by sovereigns, and reduces ecclesial bodies to the jurisdiction of national entities.⁶⁶ He argues that prophets who speak against the sovereign are false prophets, since they encourage “chaos of violence and civil war.”⁶⁷ He declares that there is only “one chief Pastor” who is “according to the law of Nature… the civil sovereign.”⁶⁸ He appropriates the Biblical stories of Abraham, Isaac, Moses, and Solomon to support his political and theological power, all while questioning the authorship of the canon, particularly the Pentateuch, and claiming that the Bible’s purpose was to “convert men to the obedience of God,” or, more particularly, to the obedience of the one who “represent[s] the person of God,” namely, the sovereign.⁶⁹

Even more radically, Hobbes used his materalist philosophy to weaken religious authorities’ ability to judge the state, rejecting the idea of God being a spirit, and claiming that all spiritual references in Scripture were merely “metaphorical.”⁷⁰ Demons and demoniacs must likewise go, attributed to the pagan contamination of the texts and Jewish ignorance.⁷¹ And finally, so must heaven and hell, Hobbes proposing that the kingdom of God is in truth not an other-worldly reality but a “civil commonwealth” where God rules through his “lieutenant.”⁷² Hell and judgment are then only metaphorical in nature, Hobbes presenting his belief in annihilationism.⁷³ In this great religious revision, Hobbes also rejects traditional forms of interpretation, arguing that many signs and types discussed in the Bible, from baptism to the Eucharist, were merely pagan contaminations of true religion.⁷⁴ Here we can see the similarities between Hobbes and the historical-critical scholars who followed him, even if his ultimate goal was to fashion a new Christianity whose most fundamental purpose was to encourage obedience to the civil sovereign.⁷⁵

I. Spinoza’s Philosophic and Methodical Contributions to Historical Criticism

Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza, the Jewish pantheistic philosopher known for his promotion of democracy, developed his ideas in a Netherlands teeming with radical thinkers in an intellectual milieu the authors assess had a perceptible though not explicit effect on Spinoza, forming powerful impressions on his own thinking. He praised Machiavelli as “that most farseeing man” while his philosophical conclusions flowed quite naturally out of Descartes’ dualism.⁷⁶ He lived in circles with various radical thinkers in the Netherlands: Juan de Prado the Epicurean who believed religions were man-made and inferior to reason; Isaac La Peyrere, the Bible skeptic who questioned the Old Testament historical narrative and traditional authorship, and believed the Bible to be filled with errors; Adriaen and Johannes Koerbagh, Dutch pantheists who questioned the Bible’s accuracy and rejected much of traditional Christian teaching; and Lodewijk Meyer, the Cartesian who collapsed revelation into the mathematical-mechanical philosophy and rejected any theology outside the bounds of his conception of reason.⁷⁷ All of these strains of thought are visible in Spinoza’s own life and philosophical work.

Spinoza was indeed a true pantheist, who “collapsed God and nature, divinizing nature and naturalizing God.”⁷⁸ These pantheistic tenets led him to completely eliminate supernatural revelation as a possibility, calling miracles a “mere absurdity” whose “natural cause we can explain on the mode of some other, usual thing.”⁷⁹ Spinoza’s philosophy had a political dimension as well, seeking to create a government that could accommodate the masses who still believed in what he called “superstition.” Scripture would need to be appropriated to fit within this political model. In his estimation, religion gives the “vulgar” masses “pleasures of heaven,” and threatens “eternal punishments” to curb them like horses, since “nothing regulates a multitude more effectively than superstition.”⁸⁰ Like Hobbes, Spinoza argued for the state to have the “highest right to make statutes concerning religion,” and that “all are bound to comply” with the religious dictates of the state. In his words, “religion receives the force of right solely from the decree of those who have the right to command.”⁸¹ However, unlike Hobbes, Spinoza emphasized toleration of others and their private religious beliefs, declaring seven “dogmas of the universal faith” to which all people could easily subscribe, and claiming that “faith does not require true dogmas so much as pious ones.” This is because “there is no commerce and no affinity between theology and philosophy,” given theology’s inherent irrationalism. Thus, people can privately think what they please about religion, as long as they act in accordance with Spinoza’s “universal” religious dogma.⁸²

Spinoza’s contribution to historical-critical scholarship is not just philosophic – he employed tactics that will sound quite familiar to exegetes today. Everything described in Scripture, according to Spinoza, has a natural explanation. Thus a reasonable exegete using the right methods can determine the true realities described in the text.⁸³ Ironically, even Spinoza admitted that sometimes it was difficult to find any natural explanation for miraculous phenomena in the Bible; in such cases, this would reflect that “sacrilegious human beings” had “inserted” such anecdotes into the text.⁸⁴ As with other contemporary philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza believed that the purpose of Scripture was to teach morality and “only very simple matters, which can be perceived even by the slowest,” not philosophical truth or “grand theories.”⁸⁵ Prophets described in the Bible likewise provide only moral guidance, including Christ, whose ministry Spinoza summarizes as being essentially concerned with “teaching moral lessons.”⁸⁶ As the authors observe, Spinoza’s interpretive project is indeed the historical-critical project, “freeing the mind from theological prejudices” and “human fantasies.”⁸⁷ Indeed, Spinoza, much like historical-critical scholars, argued that the true meaning of Scripture lay behind complex questions of language, historical context, linguistic ambiguities, and authorship – Spinoza even having asserted that the entire Old Testament was written by Ezra for political objectives.⁸⁸ In his thought and work we thus find not only philosophical presumptions that have since guided historical-critical scholarship, but the method, as well.

J. Richard Simon: A Catholic Exegete Who Hurts More Than Helps

French Catholic scholar Richard Simon at first glance appears like a devoted defender of the Catholic Church and its unique authority to interpret Scripture. Yet, Hahn and Wiker argue that Simon, in his quest to undermine the Protestant doctrine sola scriptura by questioning the authenticity of the Biblical texts and illuminating the many apparent contradictions, actually furthered Spinoza’s philosophical project, rather than prove the need for Church tradition and magisterial authority.⁸⁹ In his A Critical History of the Old Testament, Simon calls into question the Pentateuch’s Mosaic authorship by claiming Scripture was written by “public writers,” and noting the “disorder of the biblical text,” as well as its “repetitions and transpositions,” which resulted in corrupted texts that plagued not only the Old Testament Jews, but Jesus and the Apostles as well. With so many textual difficulties, it became all the more important to have some means of determining “authentic” Scripture, something Simon asserts that only Catholic Church authority can provide. However, even the Latin Vulgate, the “authentic” version of the Scriptures, still had faults… but at least, in Simon’s reasoning, it had the stamp of Church approval! Simon goes so far as to acknowledge that, “we have at present no exact translation of the Holy Scripture.” Yet, as the authors observe, by devaluing Scripture, Simon seems to argue that Holy Tradition acts “not in accord with Scripture, but in spite of it,” as if traditio makes sense out of the chaos of the text.⁹⁰

The New Testament falls under the same degree of skeptical evaluation in Simon’s A Critical History of the Text of the New Testament, which is a “supplement to the defects of those who compile the different readings out of the manuscripts.”⁹¹ Of particular importance in this exegetical project was the argument that previous Church Fathers made “manifest errors” in their reading of Scripture, as they were ignorant of what Simon calls the “true laws of criticism.”⁹² Many problems developed in the early Church regarding the New Testament texts: which texts were authentic, who authored which texts, and how old were they? Again, Simon is skeptical of the Church’s ability to provide any original documentation – thus traditio is again needed to determine a common textual tradition. Even the originals were not necessarily inspired, as the New Testament writers “did not confine themselves in their quotations to the rigor of the letter,” while subsequent copyists made the texts “more clear.” Likewise, allegorical interpretations of the Bible were valid not because of their inherent validity, but because tradition had declared them so.

Simon believed that Scripture was inspired not because of the apostolic authorship of the original texts, but because tradition had declared them inspired. In language much more amenable to secular historical-critical scholarship than Catholic teaching, Simon argued that it was “not necessary that all the words” of Scripture be inspired, nor for all “truths and sentences to be immediately indicated by inspiration to the writer,” and that certain texts were not Scripture by virtue of their nature, but because “the Holy Spirit doth testify that there is nothing that is false in that book.”⁹³ In his questioning of the immediate inspiration of Scripture, Simon sought to divide texts into new categories, such as those directly guided by the Holy Spirit, and those indirectly guided by reasoning, as Scripture’s authors “said many things that were not revealed to [them].”⁹⁴ Of course in a system where some parts are directly inspired and others not, there is little stopping the exegete from calling into question the inspiration of the entire work. Furthermore, as the authors note, Simon’s overwhelming reliance on Holy Tradition at the expense of Scripture provided Protestant critics ample ammunition to question his project, given the complexity and seeming incongruities in traditio as well. By playing tradition against Scripture, Simon unintentionally invalidated both.⁹⁴

K. John Locke: Politicizing Scripture for the Sake of Tolerance

John Locke was born into a tumultuous period in English history, the English Civil Wars, which were often defined by intense religious power struggles between various Christian sects of high-church Anglicans, Puritans, Quakers, the Independents (or Levellers), and the more radical Leveller sects including the “Diggers” and “Ranters,” who united pantheism with radical politics.⁹⁵ Amidst this chaos, Locke, like Spinoza before him, yearned for a strong government that would restore order, and actively argued for a state-controlled church and that “toleration be the chief ‘characteristical’ mark of the true church” since religious sentiments were private matters “of the mind.”⁹⁶ The influence of several figures loom large in Locke’s own intellectual development. Robert Boyle, for example, promoted a mechanist atomist philosophy based on Cartesian thought that labored to lay a “foundation, not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power,” so that man might have “dominion… over the universe.” To accomplish this, a broad religious consensus would be necessary to maintain political peace and gain peaceful stability.⁹⁷ Locke was likewise influenced by many other religious and political radicals, including liberal Protestant Jean Le Clerc, whose skepticism of Scripture and attempts to treat the Gospels solely as historical accounts earned Le Clerc great praise from Locke.⁹⁸

Following Descartes, Locke argued that individuals could only have knowledge through “ideas” and “perception” by way of intuition or reason rather than revelation, since faith could have “no authority against the plain and clear dictates of reason,” especially since faith might be “contradictory to our clear intuitive knowledge.”⁹⁹ Faith, meanwhile, was based on probability, Scripture being one of the lowest forms of probability, given that it relied on a “copy of a copy” that was subject to all manners of “passion, interest, inadvertency, [and] mistake of… meaning.”¹⁰⁰ All the same, Locke was not averse to using Scripture for his own political aims, engaging in a debate with absolutist Sir Robert Filmer by appealing to Scripture, particularly Genesis, to attack Filmer’s arguments for absolute monarchy by claiming that the Bible affirmed that paternal-familiar power was transitory, while the desire for self-preservation and property was permanent. The goal of government was then to preserve property. Locke appropriates Scripture to strengthen his “social contract” political theory, since in his estimation mankind was fundamentally the “property” of God.¹⁰¹

Locke further sought to solidify his political philosophy in The Reasonableness of Christianity, which set forth the Biblical foundation for the minimum requirements for the “true Church.”¹⁰² In this treatise Locke argued that Christianity could be reduced to the single proposition that Jesus was the Christ, emphasizing Jesus exclusively as a political messiah who demanded civil morality through “plain commands.”¹⁰³ Interestingly, Locke devotes energy to rebuking the Catholic belief in the Eucharist and the Catholic Scriptural justification of Petrine primacy, as well as claiming that the offices of priest and prophet did not carry over into the New Testament – by in effect making Christ only a king and eliminating the need for priests and prophets in Locke’s own day.¹⁰⁴ Locke subsequently wrote critical commentaries of St. Paul in Paraphrase, emphasizing the obscurity of St. Paul because of lost contextual knowledge, the probable tampering of the texts by later authors, and St. Paul’s use of Greek. Locke’s proposed new method of interpreting St. Paul included finding the central “point” of each Pauline letter, which typically focused on tolerance, a theme central to Locke’s political philosophy. Ironically, Locke’s emphasis on tolerance was not to be extended to Catholics.¹⁰⁵

L. John Toland and His Radical Exegetical Mission

Early Enlightenment philosopher John Toland

Rumored to be the illegitimate son of an Irish Roman Catholic priest and his mistress, John Toland, like Locke, grew up in the wake of the chaotic English Civil Wars shaping religious and political beliefs that would be steeped in the growing radical heterodoxy across Europe. After completing studies in Scotland, Toland worked as a trafficker of radical texts. These Enlightenment manifestos included The Treatise of the Three Imposters, published by a close friend of Toland’s, which offered a “compendium of heterodox arguments” showing that religion was caused by “ignorance” and fear. It accused Christians of “malice and stupidity” for believing in a book that was “only a tissue of fragments stitched together at different times, collected by different persons, and published on the authority of the Rabbis who decided according to their fancy what should be approved or rejected.” While Moses was “the grandson of a great Magician,” Jesus fooled “imbeciles” into believing that “the Holy Spirit was his Father; and his mother a virgin.¹⁰⁶ Toland, in time, gained a reputation for publishing pseudonymous tracts that championed pantheism and materialism, promoted his own radical Whig political philosophy, offered revised interpretations of the Book of Genesis and the New Testament, and questioned Scriptures’ authenticity, given its having been written in “primitive times” defined by “superstition.” Toland was himself a political opportunist, supporting the House of Hanover’s claim to the English throne and maneuvering for a place of honor in the palace court as a royal philosopher.¹⁰⁷

In his Christianity not Mysterious (1696) and later Clidophorus, or Of the Exoteric and Esoteric Philosophy (1720), Toland argued that philosophers spoke on two levels, one “internal,” (or esoteric) and the other “external” (or exoteric) which allowed them to speak one way to the masses according to the accepted religion, and the other a “secret philosophy” called “equivocal expression” to the enlightened. Moses’ teaching is one example of this “double philosophy” in practice, as he “accommodate[d] his words, when speaking of GOD himself, to the capacity and preconceived opinions of the vulgar.” This was done to manage “by guile” the ignorant through “agreeable fables,” that they would live in “obedience to their governors.” Toland further argued in his Origins of the Jews that Moses was “truly a pantheist,” who cleverly used religion for political purposes by tricking the Jews into believing in miracles that could actually “be explained by the laws of nature or ordinary means.” Jesus too exemplifies this formula, teaching in parables to disguise “true doctrine” since pearls should not be cast before swine. As with other thinkers, Toland’s approach to interpretation was mediated through his own pantheistic and materialist definition of “reason,” appropriating it to serve a tolerable “civil theology” that incorporates the fables of Christianity and universal philosophic truth. This allows for a society built on tolerance, since it enables people to hold to “one thing…in the heart” or in a “private meeting,” and “another thing abroad, and in public assemblies.”¹⁰⁸

Toland in turn launched stinging attacks against any sense of “mystery” in Christianity and the Bible, since this allowed “cunning priests” to contradict reason and manipulate the ignorant through a sacramental system mediated by a priestly class. Meanwhile, other forms of early Christianity exemplified in such apocryphal texts as the Gospel of Barnabas, which promoted tolerance above all else, were marginalized by the institutional church, and thus subverted the “true original plan of Christianity.” These examples demonstrate that Toland’s decidedly politicized interpretation of Scripture and early Christian history foreshadowed the historical-critical method, which as the authors note, would “recreate Toland within the soul of the exegete,” illustrated through such later examples as D.F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined or Barth Ehrman’s Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. As the authors conclude, Toland’s practice of rewriting “fabulous and popular theology” to conform to the “natural,” undergirded by his divinized principle of motion, came to define much of historical criticism as we know it today.¹⁰⁹

M. Concluding Chapter

Through four hundred years of the history of Scriptural scholarship from the Middle Ages through the early Enlightenment, a clear trend of elevating politics over theology emerges. As Hahn and Wiker acknowledge, many of the individuals surveyed were reacting to the egregious corruption of Medieval and Renaissance popes, as well as other scandals like the Avignon papacy or the English Civil Wars. Yet rather than urge a better, more faithful application of the Catholic Church’s conception of interpretation, individuals like Luther and Wycliffe sought alternative solutions in sola scriptura or the state, which only compounded the problem. Indeed, power-hungry kings and princes were only too willing to use developments in Biblical interpretation to strengthen their own religious and political power to the loss of the Catholic Church.¹¹⁰ Although each generation sought to offer a neutral, scientific, and objective interpretation of Scripture, the perceptions of the content of Scripture coupled with peculiar methods of interpretation were easily manipulated time and again for political objectives. This progressively replaced an exegetical method that had been founded upon a God-centered cosmology, in which the exegetes, assenting to the historical creeds and traditions of the Church, believed that nature and Scripture manifested a wisdom higher than what humans could grasp, but in the words of the authors, “condescended to human capacities.”¹¹¹

Through Hahn and Wiker’s analysis, it becomes clear that many scholars associated with the historical-critical method drew much of their method and philosophy from earlier thinkers. Through a brief assessment of early German historical-critical scholarship the authors seek to draw attention to these connections, and encourage future study of the politicization of Scripture in the modern era. For example, Gotthold Lessing and Hermann Samuel Reimarus embraced Machiavelli and Toland, and uncovered the supposed political intentions of Scripture’s authors, drawing a distinction between explicit and implicit truth, and claiming that history moved from ignorant and vulgar beliefs in the supernatural to greater degrees of reason and enlightenment. Also like his predecessors, Lessing promoted a religion of tolerance focused on morality.¹¹² Johann Georg Wachter meanwhile argued that Christianity originated from one of many Jewish sects, the Essenes, while Johann Christian Edelmann’s Christian faith crashed on the rocks of Spinoza’s Tractatus, leading him ultimately to deny the Mosaic authorship of the Bible and claim that the Bible was filled with contradictions.¹¹³ D.F. Strauss likewise argued that events in Scripture that he assessed to be “irreconcilable with the known and universal laws which govern the course of events” were not historical, but mythical in the sense of holding some sort of undeveloped kernal of truth. For example, Jesus did not rise from the dead, but his disciples came to believe he did, which, positively, serves as a type of the divine-like power of humanity.¹¹⁴

Early historical-critical scholars like Johann Salomo Semler, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Juluis Wellhausen, and W.M.L de Wette similarly affirmed many strands of politicization discussed by the authors. These include promoting the esoteric/exoteric distinction, questioning the canon of Scripture while asserting the varying competing influences on the text, elevating religious toleration and privatized religion (given the inherent irrational nature of theology), naturalizing the supernatural, denigrating the priesthood, and reducing Christianity to a simple moralism.¹¹⁵ All of this served a broader German political objective of using a scientific approach to religion, still needed to maintain public order, while promoting a culture of religious tolerance where Protestants, Catholics, and Jews could co-exist, as well as further the unification of Germany by attacking Catholic theological beliefs still held in predominantly Catholic southern Germany.¹¹⁶ With the development of historical-critical scholarship in 18th and 19th century Germany, we thus come full circle, as scholars appropriated Scripture to serve political aims. Yet as Hahn and Wiker acknowledge, there is still much work to be done in uncovering this political agenda in the modern development of the historical-critical method.

III. EVALUATION

Before evaluating the degree to which the authors of Politicizing the Bible succeed in establishing the argument they set out to advance, it is important to remember what that argument is according to the authors’ own stated purposes, for it is both uncharitable and specious to judge a work according to ends its authors never set out to achieve. As we have observed above, the central premise of Hahn and Wiker’s work is that the historical-critical method has been intertwined with a set of philosophical and ideological presuppositions that either implicitly or explicitly further the fostering and securing of a secular political ascendency. This trend dethrones religion, and indeed theology, as “queen of the sciences,” and fashions religion as a primarily private and moral enterprise, creating an impenetrable wall around the modern project of a secular ordering of society.

In order to evaluate whether the authors have been successful in establishing the cogency of this controversial thesis, we shall in this section gather together and synthesize some of the core philosophical, theological and political elements that Hahn and Wiker have identified and explicated throughout their historical odyssey as shaping the historical-critical method. By isolating these core presuppositional and ideological motifs we hope to highlight their conceptual and consequential interrelations so as to more clearly assess the probative force of Hahn and Wiker’s argument.

A. The Closing of the Cosmos

There is one central and pervasive philosophical paradigm that consistently emerges from Hahn and Wiker’s study; a paradigm which might be characterized as the “closing of the cosmos.” This can be described as a cosmological vision that tends or seeks, implicitly or explicitly, to reject the fact or even the possibility of a divine revelation, of a body of truths speaking to the origin, purpose, and ends of mankind and the cosmos and that transcends the capacities of unaided natural reason to discover. Hahn and Wiker identify a number of key figures, already noted above, who contributed to the development and crystallization of this paradigm within the four centuries leading up to the enshrinement of historical criticism as the dominant method within academic biblical studies. Yet, perhaps the most significant catalyst for the establishment of a philosophical outlook antithetical to revelatory claims was the seventeenth century emergence of a mechanistic vision of the cosmos. Nature, which was previously understood as a multi-layered reality suffused with formal and final causes was supplanted by a reductionist vision focused upon material and efficient causes that could be mathematically quantified and controlled, a flattened ontology operating according to immutable laws. The predictive success and productive wonders of Newtonian physics, whose metaphysical foundations – at least for methodological purposes – squarely presupposed a mechanistic cosmology, fostered a notion of reality as entirely explicable in rational and law-driven terms without remainder. While key figures such as Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, and other founding fathers of the modern scientific cosmology were practicing Christians who did not explicitly draw such anti-revelatory conclusions, the logic of their adopted methodology was bound to give rise to an explicitly deistic outlook followed by an unsurprising devolution into various forms of monism.

One of the first and most influential of such monisms was the complicated pantheism advanced by Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677). Drawing upon the skepticism of Descartes while fully embracing the new mechanistic and mathematicized cosmology, as well as the sufficiency of human reason thus enlightened to comprehend the whole of reality, Spinoza developed a materialist monism in which not only God and nature, but even the orders of knowing and being were collapsed into one. The immanentist pantheism which is explicated in Spinoza’s Ethics constituted the philosophical framework, and hence the presuppositional commitments, that informed Spinoza’s treatment of Scripture in his famous Tractatus, a treatment that has secured his position as one of the founding fathers of modern historical criticism. With Spinoza one encounters a cosmos entirely closed off to divine intervention not only in fact (as with the Deists), but according to possibility. There is no fundamental distinction between the nature of God and the nature of Nature such that the former might impact the latter, for the two are one and the same. Moreover, what reason knows about one it necessarily knows about the other. Hence in a rejuvenated and emancipated Averroism it is unsurprisingly the philosophically enlightened, as contrasted with the common run of men, who are privy to the truth and therefore responsible for directing human progress accordingly. In the centuries following Spinoza various monisms such as Hegelian idealism, the dialectical materialism of Marx, or modern scientific naturalism, would come to constitute the philosophical milieu from within which many historical-critical scholars would conduct their research. Whether a particular monist cosmology collapses the immaterial and the material orders into one, or simply denies the existence of one order or the other altogether, what remains common and essential is the erecting of a cosmology in which there is no inside/outside dichotomy; a cosmology in which there is no conceptual nor ontological space for a divine revelation.

B. Consequences of a Closed Cosmology

In the course of their historical survey Hahn and Wiker identify a wide array of consequences that flow either directly or indirectly from the embrace of a closed cosmology. To begin with, and to state the obvious, a closed cosmology entails that whatever the sources may be for claims of divine intervention within human affairs, they cannot be the result of a transcendent God breaking in upon that vast network of secondary causes that we call nature. As a result, all historical claims or accounts that imply the notion of divine revelation must be man made. Such accounts may originate from a variety of causes and motives. At best, revelatory accounts might arise from a sort of superstitious innocence among men whereby natural truths about nature and morality are exaggerated and ensconced in religious myths and rituals that make such natural truths easier to instantiate in the day-to-day life of the human race. In the worst case, revelatory claims might be the result of an intentional deception constructed by those in power who, knowing perfectly well that such claims are false, nevertheless foster superstition in order to wield control over the masses. In any case, given the philosophical impossibility of a divine revelation, religion is always and everywhere recognized as an effective tool by which political power may be gained or consolidated. In this way, the embrace of a closed cosmology leads directly to a suspicion of all forms of tradition where appeals to revealed religion are concerned. Given that divine intervention is philosophically impossible, and knowing how easily and often religious myths are put to political ends, traditional claims to supernatural intervention must always be approached with wary skepticism. Herein lies the philosophical root of the so-called “hermeneutic of suspicion”

Moreover, a closed cosmology naturally leads to a cosmic-cultural narrative quite different from that generated by Christian theism. While both a closed cosmology and Christian theism may embrace a progressive understanding of the flow of human history, the former often envisions such progress as involving a gradual emancipation from the social influence of religion, whereas the later envisions human progress in terms of a deepening religious knowledge and practice as mankind advances toward an eschatological goal to which God has ordered the cosmos. In keeping with a nascent Averroism often embedded within the thinking of those who embrace a closed cosmology, the enlightened few clearly see, and boldly embrace, the fact that naturally knowable truths exhaust what man can know about himself and the universe. Looking back upon human history, the enlightened person perceives a drama wherein the greater part of the human race repeatedly succumbs to the power of religious myth and ritual, whether due to superstitious ignorance or intentional deception on the part of political handlers. While such myth and ritual may have past or present value with respect to maintaining social order by fostering a religiously motivated morality, more often than not such myths and rituals serve as means of manipulation by which the powerful retard the long term advancement and maturity of the human race. Moreover, since it is both possible and desirable to champion a socially effective morality stripped of all religious garb, what is needed is a concerted effort by the philosophically enlightened to emancipate humankind strategically from the bondage of superstitions concerned with gods and the afterlife, into the freedom of a clear and honest assessment of reality wherein the good of temporal man predominates.

A number of the key figures noted within Politicizing the Bible are shown to be motivated by just such a project. The philosophical underpinnings of a closed cosmology inform their intentional efforts to shape Scriptural interpretation in a direction that minimizes its revelatory claims while maximizing – at least in the short term – its moral utility within the polis. Such a program of emancipation must evidently be pursued slowly and prudentially since a too rapid or radical attack on Scripture’s alleged divine authority could provoke a reaction that would set the long term project back. Accordingly, a key strategy for recasting Scripture and religion in moral terms at the expense of its revelatory claims is to deploy the language of Christian orthodoxy while carefully altering its meaning in accord with a non-Christian cosmology as exemplified by a critic such as David Friedrich Strauss, whose finale in his famous Life of Jesus Critically Examined is described by Hahn and Wiker as:

“. . . a stunning example of the purposeful use of equivocal speech, wherein the enlightened pastor, like Toland, says one thing but means another. . . For Strauss, the spiritual truth was the esoteric truth of scientific materialism, the truth that had to slowly displace the literal but unhistorical and unphilosophic ‘truth’ of Scripture . . .”¹¹⁷

While Hahn and Wiker effectively argue that the general conception of the meaning and direction of man’s cultural history was radically altered during the four centuries which their study treats, Politicizing the Bible also highlights the concomitant consequences of such a framework for biblical studies in particular.

Theologian and Biblical critic David Friedrich Strauss

In the first place, it is obvious that commitment to a closed cosmology entails an anti-supernaturalism that undermines all accounts of divine intervention in Scripture such as prophecy and miracles. This presuppositional stance is something Christian scholars have long pointed out, and Hahn and Wiker provide no shortage of evidence that the roots of such anti-supernaturalism are tied up with the ascendency of a closed cosmology that arose during the time period they survey. As mentioned earlier, such anti-supernaturalism is destructive not only because it calls into question the basic reliability of the biblical account, but more crucially because in doing so many of the key motives of credibility which underwrite a specifically Christian form of theism are undermined.

More broadly still, a closed cosmology does away with any notion of a divine unity embedded within Sacred Scripture. If there is no transcendent Providence capable of directing the course of nature and the history of men, then the possibility of there being a unified divine message embedded within the codex of books that constitute the Bible is impossible. The conviction that the Old and New Testaments shed light upon one another, or that “knowledge of Scripture is knowledge of Christ” becomes hollow. Nor can there truly be any divinely orchestrated typology in the Bible. From a traditional Christian perspective, not only can God signify by way of natural concepts and words, He can providentially deploy historical things and events to signify revealed truths. As St. Thomas remarks in the Summa Theologica:

“. . . The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not only by words alone (as man also can do), but also by things themselves.”¹¹⁸

In this way, an event such as the passing of the children of Israel through the Red Sea can prefigure Christian baptism, or the ancient rite of Passover on the night before the Exodus can prefigure the sacrifice of Christ and the Eucharist. But clearly if there is no God outside of nature Who can providentially guide or act upon nature, then there can be no divine use of things or events to signify. The bottom line is that given a closed cosmology, there can be no “spiritual” sense within Scripture.

All cosmic monisms do away with transcendence, thereby eviscerating the claim that natural things, or the human concepts that signify natural things, or the human words that signify human concepts, can have any relation to God’s transcendent nature. In this way, a closed cosmology undermines the “analogy of being”. Not only are analogous terms of “proper proportionality” such as unity, truth, and goodness deprived of their transcendental extension, so too are strictly metaphorical phrases such as “God’s strong right arm,” that depend upon some albeit imperfect similitude with sensible realities. Moreover, Scriptural terms directly related to the Godhead such as “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit,” are also denuded of their transcendent utility since these terms too are taken from the natural order. For the same reason the same can be said with respect to time-honored technical terms developed to clarify the Trinitarian relations such as “paternity,” “generation,” and “spiration.”

As both Aristotle and St. Thomas taught, the first and proper object of man’s intellect is sensible, created realities. Indeed both Aristotle and St. Thomas held that there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses. Accordingly the conceptual treasury of each human intellect, as well as the aggregate conceptual treasury of the human race, is built up over time through the intellect’s apprehension or grasp of sensible, created things. From sensible apprehensions the mind may come to know additional truths through definition, judgment, and reasoning. Nevertheless the foundation of human concepts and therefore of the conventions of human language are rooted in the sensible, created order. Therefore, if man is to grasp and understand supernatural truths that exceed the powers of the natural intellect, such truths will have to be presented to him according to the conceptual categories intrinsic to his nature, for knowledge is received according to the capacity of the knower. Since man’s natural way of knowing is through concepts originating from within the created order, if created realities retained no similitude whatsoever with their Creator, human concepts and human language, the fundamentals of which are rooted in sensible realities, could not serve as vehicles for knowledge of things divine.

In short, a closed cosmology militates against the key truths in the areas of ontology, epistemology, and linguistics that establish theological science as having a real object, as opposed to being a mere word game. From a Christian point of view, if there is no analogical link between creation and the Creator, there can be no knowledge of God’s nature. If the Logos – the Word of God – through Whom and for Whom all things were made, had not seeded finite traces of God’s infinite perfections throughout the created order, there would be no effective communicative medium for God’s self-disclosure to man. As Rene Latourelle wrote so concisely in his magisterial Theology of Revelation:

“If Christ can utilize all the resources of the created universe to make us know God and the ways of God, it is because the word of creation has preceded and left a foundation for the word of revelation; it is because both one and the other have their principle in the same interior Word of God. The revelation of Christ presupposes the truth of analogy”.¹¹⁹

A direct corollary of the undermining of the philosophical framework within which it becomes possible to perceive a unified divine message within the pages of the Bible is that biblical studies become entirely centered upon the literal sense of Scripture and the material dimensions of the text such as the cultural context in which a work was written, its date of composition, authorship, genre, etc. In an attempt to imitate the hard sciences and thereby share in their growing prestige, biblical interpretation may appear adorned with the cloak of an objectivity that seeks simply to unearth the “real “ history and “real” message of Scripture, stripped of all distorting background commitments – confessionalist or otherwise. Proceeding methodologically as if philosophical background commitments had little if any impact upon the “objective” nature of historical criticism, and focusing predominantly upon the archaeological, cultural, linguistic, and other material features of the biblical text, it is only natural that some scholars might come to see in the Bible only a human literary artifact. In the traditional Christian framework, all of the human and historically mundane features of the text are entirely consistent with there being a unified divine message in the Bible, because God condescends to use humble and ordinary means by which to speak to mankind according to his natural capacities. As the second Vatican council stated within its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation – Dei Verbum:

“For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men”.¹²⁰

However, for those working within the framework of a closed cosmology and under the illusion of a methodology immune to distortion by background presuppositions, there can be no divine message instantiated within the humble and human matrix of the Judeo-Christian literary heritage. The biblical text appears little more than a hodge-podge of eclectic and often contradictory religious, historical, mythical, and cultural elements from which some useful moral insights might be extracted.

Finally, the penchant for attempting to model the practice of academic biblical studies according to the standard of the natural sciences leads to an ever growing level of technical and terminological specialization that increasingly erects a gulf between the university scholar and the Christian layman in terms of their respective perception of the meaning of the biblical text. If the scholar and the layman shared the same background framework such that they both recognized a formal divine unity supervening upon the material dimensions of the text, then the scholar could conceivably enhance the layman’s understanding of Scripture by explaining how his academic discoveries illuminate the wider revelatory framework they both share. In that case the scholar would be conducting his research at the service of the wider Christian community. However, if the scholar is working within a presuppositional framework directly at odds with Christian theism, the inevitable result must be the gradual separation of academic biblical studies from the broader biblical experience of the Christian community, a separation resulting in either isolation or conflict.

Such are the principal consequences for biblical studies that flow from the embrace of a closed cosmology. Evidently the historical criticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as significant sectors of current academic biblical criticism have been characterized by such traits. One of the great strengths of Hahn and Wiker’s Politicizing the Bible is the rigorous historical research by which they establish that these consequences and characteristics were forged in the four centuries leading up to the advent of modern historical criticism.

C. Private “I”s

Martin Luther (1533), by Lucas Cranach the Elder

The advent and development of the historical-critical method has been shaped not only by philosophical factors. It has been no less shaped by theological factors, especially those theological concerns and controversies that arose during the Protestant Reformation. Here we focus on two landmark motifs that emerge with Martin Luther and that play a central role in the spread of the early Reformation. The first motif is the theological principle of “private judgment” that arises as a corollary to the core Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. The second motif concerns Luther’s theological-cum political vision whereby he attempted to reformulate the boundaries between secular and religious authority.¹²¹

The principle of private judgment is the Protestant principle that the individual Christian is ultimately responsible for determining the correct interpretation of Scripture. It entails that a Christian has the right, if his conscience demands it, to interpret the meaning of Scripture in a way contrary to the tradition of the Catholic Church, which had heretofore served as the communal context in which Scripture’s meaning was to be understood. The principle of private judgment is captured vividly in Martin Luther’s famous words at the Diet of Worms:

“Unless I am convicted by scripture and by plain reason (I do not believe in the authority of either popes or councils by themselves, for it is plain that they have often erred and contradicted each other) in those scriptures that I have presented, for my conscience is captive to the Word of God, I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me, Amen.”¹²²

But of course if Luther himself could judge the meaning of Scripture without reference to the authoritative pronouncements of the Catholic Church, there was no good reason in principle why others could not do the same. Indeed within Luther’s own lifetime a host of variant and contentious interpretations of Scripture arose not only between Catholics and Protestants, but between competing Protestant factions. And although Luther and other early Reformers continued to cling to various elements of the Catholic tradition with respect to many areas of Scriptural exegesis, the principle by which they rejected certain other elements of the tradition, namely that of private judgment, provided a reasonable basis upon which others would drift much further away from Catholic tradition. The net result of the hermeneutical trajectory set in motion by the principle of private judgment was the growing conviction that there simply was no privileged Tradition by which one’s own interpretation of Scripture must necessarily be formed or moderated.

Moreover, having denied the authority of popes and councils in spiritual matters, and having denied the validity of the sacramental priesthood, Martin Luther naturally rejected the Catholic vision of the relationship between the spiritual and temporal orders. From a Catholic perspective, the Church was understood as being responsible for informing and guiding the state with respect to matters of faith and morals. In place of that vision, Luther put forward his “Two Kingdoms” thesis. Luther’s theoretical answer to the question concerning how the temporal and spiritual orders ought to interact advocated a more complete separation between the spiritual and temporal orders than had been previously conceived. As Luther himself wrote:

“The spiritual government or authority should direct the people vertically toward God that they may do right and be saved; just so the secular government should direct the people horizontally toward one another, seeing to it that body, property, honor, wife, child, house, home, and all manner of goods remain in peace and security and are blessed on earth.”¹²³

According to Luther, on one side are the goods of the soul to be governed by the spiritual authority, and on the other side the goods of the body to be governed by the secular authority. In theory the spiritual government of the people, including the proper interpretation of Scripture, would be left to pastors and their congregations, while the secular authority of kings and princes was to be carried out according to the dictates of the natural law. However, in an effort to achieve his own religious ends, Luther at times advised political powers to cross the line he himself had drawn, encouraging rulers to introduce and enforce religious reforms actively, going so far as to declare that secular power could justly punish those who reject doctrines “clearly grounded in Scripture and believed throughout the world by all Christendom.”¹²⁴

But exactly which doctrines were “clearly” grounded in Scripture and believed throughout the world by all Christendom? The principle of sola scriptura and its offspring principle of private judgment had rendered that question opaque, if not indeterminable. The broader trouble, of course, was that by advocating the notion that promulgation and enforcement of Reformation doctrines was at least in some cases a legitimate activity of the secular authority, Luther had opened the door for the appropriation of Scriptural exegesis by political powers for political ends. The notion that the state could legitimately enforce religious reform, combined with the doctrines of sola scriptura and private judgment, provided the theological foundation upon which those in power would all too willingly channel the religiously motivated forces of the Reformation to serve their own ambitions, an effort that often ended in military conflict. For example, with reference to the Schmalkaldic and Thirty Years’ Wars, Hahn and Wiker make the following astute observation:

“we should not fall prey to the simplistic and popular notion that these were solely and simply wars of religion. In truth they were just as deeply political as religious, religion more often than not acting as a pretext for political ends and a means of rallying support of the ruled for the sake of the rulers.”¹²⁵

In what way, then, did these two theological-cum-political motifs originating with the Reformation shape the historical-critical method? In the first place, eighteenth and nineteenth century academic historical criticism was primarily a Protestant phenomena. As such, the authoritative declarations of the Catholic Church wherever these might touch upon matters of Scriptural exegesis enjoyed no binding or supervening force from the perspective of the early practitioners of the historical-critical method. Interpretation, whatever trajectory it might take, was unlikely to move in any direction supportive of Catholic claims. Moreover the spectacle of bloody religious wars ostensibly fought over contentious doctrinal differences rooted in incompatible interpretations of the biblical text and subsequently hijacked by political powers to further their own ends, naturally gave rise to a deep cynicism with respect to confessionalist interpretations of Scripture in general. Such a spectacle also reinforced the growing perception of religion as a tool for manipulation in the hands of the powerful. Such suspicions easily bled over into suspicion concerning the reliability of the biblical text itself.

Did the central events of ancient Hebrew history happen just as the authors, editors, and compilers of the text describe, or are the “real” historical events shrouded by alterations, exaggerations, or even outright falsities designed to secure the power and prestige of the biblical writers or their patrons? Did the New Testament accounts occur as recorded in the Gospels, or were miraculous claims such as the resurrection of Jesus perhaps interpolations foisted back upon natural events in order to elicit the adherence of early Christian communities to the reigning ecclesial order? In fact, both Protestant suspicions concerning the claims of the Catholic Church as well as widespread political manipulation of Scripture help explain the emergence of the so-called “hermeneutic of suspicion” within modern historical critical studies. Combined with the ascendency of the scientific method within the sphere of the natural sciences, one can better understand the tendency among academic historical-critical scholars to reject or discount the notion that there is any privileged context or tradition that can speak to the intended meaning of the biblical text, and to adopt in its place a positivist stance whereby only those conclusions that can be reached through the application of the “objective” tools and techniques of the historical-critical method and its sub-disciplines are recognized as yielding trustworthy knowledge concerning the biblical text.

D. Politicization of Religion and Scripture

Broadly construed, the “politicization of scripture” means the utilization of a hermeneutical approach to Scripture designed to achieve or further some “this-worldly” political end. As Hahn and Wiker develop their tome, a number of different causes are shown to have contributed to the tendency toward politicization of the biblical text. Some such causes were not directly philosophical, while others were explicitly so. Among the non-philosophical causes there was the perennial temptation among those in authority to grasp power and honor for themselves, often using religion as a pretext, as described above. Historically, there has been no shortage of political figures upon the world stage whose political aspirations are driven by little else than a desire to bolster pride and feed concupiscence. For such as these, manipulation of religion or Scripture for the purpose of political gain is hardly a mystery. In some ways Henry VIII exemplifies this type of ruler. However, another non-philosophical cause driving the politicization of Scripture, and one with which it is easier to sympathize, was the emergence of grave scandal among religious leaders and religious groups.

Renaissance Pope Alexander VI

There can be little doubt that injustice and moral deprivation among Church leaders (including popes) during the time period Politicizing the Bible surveys bred a deep cynicism toward traditional religious outlooks on reality. The formation of Machiavelli’s ideas within the context of his longstanding observation of the papal courts of Sixtus IV and Alexander VI is a good example of the way in which intellectual formation can be skewed by scandal.¹²⁶ As mentioned above, another source of scandal traced throughout Hahn and Wiker’s work was the outbreak of the grueling religious wars arising in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Incessant warring between rival political powers in the name of religion naturally weakened the broader public conviction concerning the practical benefits of religion within the social order. In the minds of many observers, religion came increasingly to be seen as a negative force, as a threat to social stability because of the strong passions naturally elicited when deeply held religious commitments are unleashed within the political sphere. Such religiously-motivated conflict quite understandably contributed to an increasingly cynical view of religious truth claims. In part the efforts of intellectuals such as Spinoza to limit the influence of religion and Scripture to the moral and private spheres as a way of securing social stability in the form of liberal democracy was a reaction to the scandal of religious wars.

Besides power seeking and moral scandal, the tendency to politicize Scripture and religion was also the product of philosophical causes. Insofar as one’s philosophy tends to minimize or eliminate any transcendent or eschatological vision of human history, one is more likely to see religion and Scripture as obstructions to the achievement of this-worldly ends, or else as tools for the advance of such ends, since allegedly those are the only kinds of ends there really are. Among such philosophical causes traced within Politicizing the Bible was a sort of subtle intellectual pride that sees in religious history, ritual, and texts an inferior form of knowledge designed to satisfy the ignorant masses. Scripture and religion on this view are inferior or perhaps even negative forces juxtaposed against the deliverances of sophisticated philosophical wisdom. Such a position naturally facilitates the subordination of religion to “higher” political ends for which the intellectual elite unsurprisingly see themselves as best suited to determine. Hahn and Wiker trace this theme from Averroes through Marsilius, Machiavelli, Descartes, Spinoza and others. Nevertheless it should be said that many of the actors within Hahn and Wiker’s tome seem to have held their philosophical position more or less sincerely. Moreover, to the degree that Christians failed to present a persuasive macroscopic narrative concerning the origin and destiny of human history, secular worldviews naturally swept in to fill the intellectual void.

The non-philosophical and philosophical causes of the politicization of Scripture often run together. While it is true that philosophy began in wonder, as Aristotle notes, it is also true that man’s philosophical speculations have a direct relation to his understanding of the goals that should drive the ordering of individual and social life. When religious leaders and movements give widespread scandal and simultaneously fail to provide a robust intellectual defense of a religious worldview, seeking souls might look elsewhere to find answers to fundamental human questions about life’s meaning and purpose. Accordingly, the key players which Hahn and Wiker highlight were not one-dimensional, as if guided simply by either power-lust or intellectual pride. Along with these natural human tendencies, the subordination of Scripture and religion for the achievement of strictly this-worldly ends, is a logical step for men who had come to believe that this-worldly ends are the only ends which one is intellectually justified in pursuing.

Finally, such broader trends and causes of the politicization of Scripture could not help but have a direct impact upon the dispositions with which scholars would approach the biblical text in academic circles. The results of several centuries of obvious interpretive abuse of the biblical text for purposes of gaining or consolidating political power, which interpretive abuses Hahn and Wiker highlight so clearly, understandably led the earliest practitioners of the historical-critical method to suspect political or quasi-political ends on the part of all “traditional” accounts of the data of revelation, including data internal to both the Old and New Testaments. The same could be said with respect to ecclesial and patristic testimony concerning the early life of the Church and the formation of the biblical canon. While the politicization of Scripture from AD 1300 – 1700 does not account for all of the features that have come to characterize the historical-critical method, it does shed light on the origin of “suspicion” as a methodological stance. Scholars in their strong distrust of all traditional accounts and interpretations of revelation often envisioned themselves as recovering the “real” and “historical” meaning of the text from the machinations of the traditional politicizers, including religious confessionalists and perhaps above all, Catholic confessionalists.

E. Catholicism: The Unthinkable Option

This brings us to another motif that winds its way through Hahn and Wiker’s narrative. That motif is an agreement among all key players, whether kings and princes, or moderate to radical intellectuals, that Scripture’s meaning and interpretation must by all means be wrested from the traditio of the Catholic Church. Given the philosophical and political streams discussed above, the reasons for this are easy enough to see. Catholicism uniquely represents both a philosophical and political threat. Catholicism is a cosmic-cum-cultural narrative, a macroscopic vision of the origin and destiny of the cosmos that bears down into the warp and woof of history, planting its feet firmly in the social order with global structure and organization. This synthesis of cosmic purpose and visible presence renders Catholicism a dynamic force capable of vying for the allegiances of men alongside of, or even in resistance to, the state. Catholicism is a tangible reality, a world presence, a society embedded within the diverse societies of the world, yet pointing all the while to a transcendental Truth and an eschatological end. In this sense it is supra-political, very much capable of disturbing and subverting the goals and proclivities of the state when those goals conflict with the Church’s transcendental vision and mission.

On the social plane the Catholic Church has property, buildings, rites, a law, her own art, literature and music, and a time-tested hierarchical organization. On the intellectual and philosophical plane Catholicism is the repository and protector of the philosophia perennis, bringing together and coordinating ancient Greek philosophy with Judeo-Christian revelation in a profound synthesis honed and bequeathed to the Church by the scholastic tradition. Catholicism champions a realist epistemology and non-reductionist ontology capable of striking at the epistemological and ontological roots of both skepticism and a closed mechanistic cosmology. She holds as a matter of dogma that God’s existence can be demonstrated by natural reason. Given all of these traits, despite whatever political and philosophical differences might exist among the powers that lay beyond her borders, there remains a solidarity among her enemies whereby the Church is recognized as a force to be reckoned with in the socio-political order. This sentiment is well captured by H.G. Wells, one of her outspoken literary critics, writing during the turmoil of the Second World War:

As this present world war goes on, and even if there is some sort of temporary half peace before it degenerates into a tangle of minor wars, it will become plainer and plainer that it is no longer a geographically determined warfare of governments, nations and peoples, but the world-wide struggle of our species to release itself from the strangling octopus of Catholic Christianity. Everywhere the Church extends its tentacles and fights to prolong the Martyrdom of Man. Through St. Cyr and de Gaullism it assails the fine liberal tradition of France; it dominates the policy of the British War Office and Foreign Office, and through these the B.B.C. and the press; by a disciplined Catholic vote, a casting vote in endless elections and a sustained organisation of menace and boycott, it silences the frank discussion of its influence in America. It works counter both to the old nationalisms that broke away from it at the Reformation and to the emergence of a scientifically guided world commonweal . . . Like an octopus it has . . . only an instinct to survive. In Ireland, Spain, Italy, reactionary France, North and South America, Japan, and wherever it can stretch a tentacle, it seeks allies in every element that is socially base that will help it to continue its struggle against the awakening liberalism of the ‘United Democracies’. . . .¹²⁷

Moreover it should be noted that since Catholicism explicitly and self-consciously operates on both a temporal as well as a transcendent plane, a Catholic vision of reality supplies the biblical exegete with the philosophical and theological resources necessary to avoid a one-sided approach to Scripture that might lead either to exaggerated allegorization or else a reductive politicization of the text. On the one hand, Catholic teaching recognizes that God’s revelatory condescension, as recorded in Scripture, involved the use of a multitude of concrete cultural realities as vehicles of divine communication; vehicles such as human concepts and language, rites and rituals, historical and political events, etc. Hence, the Catholic exegete recognizes a responsibility to carefully study the material dimensions of the text and highlight the literal sense of Scripture, which sense properly grounds further allegorical insights. On the other hand, Catholic teaching emphasizes the fact that the language, concepts, cultural monuments, and events of biblical history, despite their humanness, bear the treasure of God’s Word to man. Therefore, exclusive attention to the literal sense would risk missing the unity of Scripture and its spiritual sense. Hence, operating within a Catholic context the exegete is free to utilize the full range of historical-critical tools and techniques in an effort to maximize his understanding of the human and material dimensions of the Bible, while in no way undermining his recognition of Scripture’s divine authorship, and his consequent commitment to the reality of a spiritual sense.

F. Mild Criticisms

For all its benefits Hahn and Wiker’s monumental analysis still suffers flaws and weaknesses – something difficult to avoid in a work with such an incredibly wide historical scope. Structurally the overwhelming detail and study that define their work are in some sense a two-edged sword. While extensive footnotes, sourcing, and historical asides provide the essential evidence and context to substantiate their broad claims and move the narrative forward, these sometimes have the opposite effect of slowing down the story or providing unnecessarily detailed background that complicates an already complex book. A prime example of this tendency is found on page 49 of the hard-copy edition, which has only two lines of text; the rest of the page is a massive footnote on the historiography of William of Ockham. Other times the authors provide extensive biographical details on the “politicizers” that a more skeptical reader might interpret more as “scoring points” than providing necessary detail to build their case. Henry VIII’s perennial philandering, for example, is news to few; certainly it has a place in the politicizing narrative, given that the English king’s complex sexual relationships provided some basis for his break with Rome and his need to reinterpret Scripture to justify doing so. Yet the reader is repeatedly exposed to Henry’s hypocrisy in maintaining so many illicit relationships that some might find the presentation to be overkill.¹²⁸

As for their own historical method, Hahn and Wiker many times use arguments based on personal connections (one individual spent time with another individual, who was influenced by yet another individual, therefore we can see the connection between people and streams of thought), personal libraries (one figure had a copy of a specific book in his library, therefore he was influenced by that work), or personal travels (he spent time in this town, which was crawling with people of a certain philosophical persuasion, therefore he was influenced by that philosophy). These arguments may be valid – indeed, they are often quite telling and informative – but they seem inadequate, or at least conjectural, in seeking to prove definitively the influence of one individual or idea upon another. This weakness doesn’t necessarily invalidate the authors’ broader thesis, but rather calls into question the intricate web of influencing agents and ideas Hahn and Wiker create.

Most of the book is spent on the “bad guys,” or more appropriately, the “bad ideas.” Yet not enough time is devoted to discussing what an alternative approach might look like, perhaps Aristotelianism or Thomism in philosophy, or a re-emphasis on Catholic Tradition and Patristics in exegesis, etc. Without a more thorough discussion concerning what other options were available at the time, or of the good to be found in the exegetical approaches that preceded the historical-critical method, it is sometimes difficult to understand what would have been a better historical road for Scriptural interpretation to take. Although we get tastes here and there, including a brief paragraph on page 545 that presents an alternative approach based on a “God-centered cosmology,” the offering is hardly adequate. Of course, the book’s declared scope and current length make such an addition difficult to imagine, though an appendix could have served such a beneficial purpose.

In addition some critics may claim that the authors paint with too broad a brush in their characterization of such a diverse set of philosophers, theologians, and political leaders as all contributing to a single and coherent project of secularization through politicization.¹²⁹ This is a fair objection, given, for example, that Luther’s goals were certainly much different than Spinoza’s, and that Luther had what one might call a “love-hate” relationship with secular authorities in Germany. Likely, Luther would roll over in his grave if he knew he could in any way be placed in a category with the pantheistic Jewish philosopher. Furthermore, individuals like Luther and Wycliffe would take umbrage at being characterized as serving “the intentional exegetical reinterpretation of Scripture so as to make it serve a merely (emphasis added) political, this-worldly (hence secular) goal.”⁷ In truth, these men and other pre-modern Christian thinkers viewed themselves and their intellectual projects as furthering the other-worldly kingdom of God. Richard Simon, a Catholic cleric who sought to be a clever apologist for the Church and Holy Tradition by highlighting Scripture’s weaknesses, was almost certainly not intentional in contributing to the politicization narrative. It may be more precise to say that some of the individuals covered in Hahn and Wiker’s narrative unintentionally furthered the politicization of Scripture, or furthered it with varying degrees of intentionality.

Scottish Reformer John Knox admonishing Mary, Queen of Scots

In addition, the authors largely ignore Reformed theology, in spite of Reformed theology’s strong contribution to Biblical scholarship. Indeed some critics would argue that in some respects Reformed theology can be construed as advancing a counter-narrative to the politicization project. Calvin, for example, endured a notably tumultuous relationship with the political leadership in Geneva, viewing them more as an obstacle to his authority, which he believed should be viewed as ultimate, seemingly seeking to create a separate magisterium around himself and his theological followers.¹³⁰ One thinks likewise of John Knox and his attempts to play an almost prophetic role in criticizing Mary, Queen of Scots, telling her that he communicated his “judgment to the world” in criticizing her Catholic practices, condemning the “vanity of the Papistical Religion, and the deceit, pride, and tyranny of that Roman Antichrist.”¹³¹

In their laudable thoroughness pinpointing the philosophical and theological errors that defined the shift towards historical criticism, the authors also unintentionally give the impression that there was little lacking in the pre historical-critical approach to Biblical studies. Many scholars have noted the heavy use of allegorical interpretation in the Patristic tradition, so much so that the immediate contextual point and purpose of certain passages were obscured or ignored. Consider for example Origen’s treatment of the passage in Psalm 137 which declares “Happy shall he be who take your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” Origen’s treatment of this text is no doubt spiritually illuminating. He writes:

“In this sense also we understand the language of Psalm 137 . . . For, “the little ones of Babylon” (which signifies confusion) are those troublesome sinful thoughts that arise in the soul, and one who subdues them by striking, as it were, their heads against the firm and solid strength of reason and truth, is the person who “dashes the little ones against the stones”; and he is therefore truly blessed.”¹³²

Nevertheless the use of historical-critical tools and techniques can shed additional light on this passage by highlighting the social and political context within which this stark expression was evoked. There is, therefore, much to affirm in historical-critical scholarship. And although the authors agree with this sentiment, their characterization of the politicization narrative can appear so decidedly negative that there seems to be nothing to praise in the Reformation era calls for ad fontes. For example, modern tools and techniques have uncovered a profound level of complexity involved in determining authorship of texts and studying literary forms (e.g. historical narrative, poetry, apocryphal literature) in order to understand properly the context and meaning of specific writings. The fields of linguistics and archaeology have also shed great light on Biblical interpretation. Even Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in his 2010 exhortation, Verbum Domini, noted that the historical-critical approach could help clarify “dark passages” of the Bible:

“In discussing the relationship between the Old and the New Testaments, [we must consider] those passages in the Bible which, due to the violence and immorality they occasionally contain, prove obscure and difficult… [W]e should be aware that the correct interpretation of these passages requires a degree of expertise, acquired through a training that interprets the texts in their historical-literary context and within the Christian perspective, which has as its ultimate hermeneutical key ‘the Gospel and the new commandment of Jesus Christ brought about in the paschal mystery.’ I encourage scholars and pastors to help all the faithful to approach these passages through an interpretation which enables their meaning to emerge in the light of the mystery of Christ.”¹³³

Moreover Scripture has in some sense always been politicized since Christianity itself, especially in its Catholic manifestation, is a religion with political consequences, encompassing a body of teachings and practices that have immediate political repercussions. The Scriptural narrative is charged with political implications – from St. John the Baptist’s very public condemnation of Herod for cohabiting with his brother’s lawful wife, to the socio-economic implications of Christ’s parables, to His death at the hands of Roman soldiers, or to the Apostles’ refusal to submit to Jewish or Roman authorities’ demands that they cease spreading the Gospel. Beyond the Apostolic age, the history of the early Church includes a political struggle between Christian orthodoxy and a host of heterodox threats: Gnostics, Arians, Docetists, Donatists among many. Sometimes, such as at Nicea, the Church used political authority to assert its dominance over theological dissidents. In other circumstances, orthodoxy faced incredible opposition from Arian-influenced authorities who sought to co-opt the Church’s mission and power. And although Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians profess goals that transcend this-worldly political aspirations, to the extent that those transcendent goals have implications within the temporal order, Christianity becomes a force within the political arena with its own vision for the proper ordering of society in accord with its eschatological understanding of the goal and purpose of human history. Christians are, after all, in the world – even if they are not of the world.

Looked at from this perspective, Politicizing the Bible raises some broader questions. Perhaps, ultimately, the real concern is not so much the politicizing of the Bible per se if one simply means using Scripture for political objectives. Perhaps the broader question raised by the politicization of Scripture is “what paradigm should inform our understanding of what Scripture is” and what import ought it to have within the temporal sphere? Is it the written instantiation of a divine revelation, or is it merely the human record of one people’s religious history? Accordingly, the impact of Scripture upon the public sphere will either be driven by a secular state or else by some religious authority. If the latter, whom? Does the Catholic Church, for instance, have the authority, and in very real sense, the political authority, to define and interpret Scripture? If it does, then certain politicizations of the text become both inevitable and warranted, even if such politicizations remain always subordinate to the transcendental truths and goals with which the Church claims to be entrusted by God. Of course Hahn and Wiker’s tome is not designed to address these larger questions to which their work gives rise. As they humbly acknowledge, they hope only to start, or possibly revive, a wider discussion on the history of interpretation.

G. Evaluative Summary

Earlier we summarized Hahn and Wiker’s argument as follows:

“Hahn and Wiker’s argument seems to be that while the modern development and utilization of advances in historiographic tools and techniques which deepen human understanding of the biblical text is a welcome boon, as a matter of historical fact, the deployment of such tools and techniques has come to be entangled with a set of philosophical and ideological presuppositions whose intertwining with historical-critical method was woven together, implicitly or explicitly, for the purpose of fostering and securing a secular political ascendency wherein religion is denuded of its transcendental appeal and recast in private and moral terms so as to inoculate the modern project of a secular ordering of society from any other-worldly disturbances.”

We have expressed some reservations about the way in which the interplay between political and philosophical commitments is construed with reference to this or that historical figure, as well as some concerns about narrative over-simplification, and a wish that more positive alternatives to the negative dimensions of historical-criticism had been presented. Yet by-and-large the evidence that the authors present to establish the conclusion that a whole host of philosophical-cum-theological presuppositions and associated political motivations were part-and-parcel of the formation of the historical-critical method seems incontestable. Moreover, their implication that the tools and techniques of the historical critical method, as well as many of its findings, can be effectively distinguished from background commitments that are not essential to the method itself, seem eminently reasonable – even if the authors do not pretend to explain exactly how that disentanglement ought best to be achieved. Accordingly we believe that Hahn and Wiker have largely succeeding in establishing the argument they set out to defend. In doing so they have rendered an inestimable service both to the Church and to the academy.

IV. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

In light of the penetrating historical analysis that Hahn and Wiker have contributed to the larger project of a “criticism of criticism,” it is apparent that the historical genesis and formation of academic historical criticism has been very much shaped by various philosophical, theological and political forces. In particular, the macroscopic context within which the historical critic conducts his work is marked by broader philosophical presuppositions whose truth or falsity cannot be decided solely by way of the tools, techniques, or historical subject matter of which the historical critic treats. It is crucial to demythologize the “myth of neutrality” with respect to the practice of biblical criticism. Of course, recognizing the presence and influence of background commitments in no way entails that historical-critical methodology does not produce stable and trustworthy results. It is simply a recognition that, like any other applied science, its contextual principles and presuppositions are generally borrowed from a broader supervening science which cannot avoid having some bearing upon the interpretation of results. The key need is to recognize this fact forthrightly so that the distinction between the tools, techniques and data on the one hand, and the background philosophical notions that frame the methodology on the other, is kept clearly in mind when assessing the probative force of conclusions.

Perhaps one helpful way to conceptualize the relationship between the tools and techniques of the historical-critical method on the one hand, and whatever philosophical framework informs the outlook of the historical-critical practitioner on the other, is the classical distinction between a thing’s form and matter. As an analogy, while all types of music rely upon the same matter (sound waves, etc.), the formal musical structure that supervenes upon the matter determines the harmony perceived on the part of the hearer. Or consider the natural sciences. While the methodology and research findings emerging from modern physics, chemistry and biology are generally quite indifferent to the philosophical presuppositions of the scientist, the broader interpretation of those findings – as bearing upon man’s macroscopic vision of reality – is very much dependent upon which metaphysical schema informs the physicist, chemist or biologist. Hence, while both a philosophical theist and a philosophical naturalist might – as physicists – be equally capable of producing the highest quality peer reviewed research, when questions concerning the broader ontological or metaphysical meaning of such research arises, contention often ensues due to incompatible metaphysical commitments.

The same can be said with respect to historical criticism. While the tools and techniques related to the various sub-disciplines that fall under the umbrella of historical-critical studies may be used equally well by those who hold to a closed cosmology as by those who affirm an open cosmology, the interpretation of the philosophic or macroscopic import of particular historical-critical discoveries will often depend upon those background presuppositions that determine the interpretive options. Keeping in mind the distinction between the tools, techniques, and subject matter that comprise the material dimensions of a science on the one hand, and the background presuppositions that frame the formal context within which such tools and techniques are wielded on the other, can serve as a useful conceptual device for neutralizing the myth of neutrality.

A. Completing the “Criticism of Criticism”

Finally, given that the findings generated by application of historical-critical methods are susceptible to a widely divergent range of interpretation depending upon which background commitments make up the cognitive landscape of the historical-critical practitioner, it seems evident that in order to complete a successful “criticism of criticism” both a critical and a constructive philosophical-cum-theological task is urgently required of Christian scholars. By way of critique, it is essential that Christian scholars recognize and refute those philosophical commitments holding sway within the academy which are both false and corrosive of Christian faith. This will require hard work and heroic effort by well-trained Christian philosophers and theologians who are also familiar with the inner workings of the historical-critical guild.

However, it is not sufficient simply to criticize or even refute those problematic philosophical commitments that often inform academic historical-criticism. Equally if not more important is that Christian philosophers, theologians, and scientists work together to present a broad macroscopic apologetic for the claims of Christian theism. What is required is a unified macroscopic account of reality, the truth and beauty of which demonstrates its superior ability to integrate and proportion the vast influx of knowledge arising from mankind’s ever-increasing grasp of the material dimensions of the universe and human history. Only through the championing of an alternative framework possessed of such superior philosophical and theological credentials and integrative power, will the nascent naturalism which often contextualizes historical-critical studies be unseated.

Lord God, we ask on this feast day of St. Leo the Great, who so faithfully sought to teach in accord with your Holy Scriptures, that we may seek always to pursue Scriptural interpretation that is pleasing to our Lord Jesus Christ, and is faithful to His will. Amen.

1. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s. v. Historical Criticism.
2. Ian Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 3-97. Pages 3-97 supply an in-depth analysis of crucial presuppositional problems within modern historical-critical studies.
3. Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph. Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The 1988 Erasmus Lecture. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2008/04/biblical-interpretation-in-cri (accessed September 16, 2014).
4. Readers may also be interested in Biblical Errancy: An Analysis of its Philosophical Roots (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1981) edited by Norman Geisler and featuring contributions from various Evangelical scholars; a work which overlaps some of the same historical and conceptual territory as Politicizing the Bible.
5. Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300-1700 (New York: Herder & Herder, 2013) p. 1.
6. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 14, 8.
7. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 8-9.
8. Hahn, Wiker, p. 9.
9. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 11-12.
10. Hahn, Wiker, p. 12.
11. Hahn, Wiker, p. 11.
12. Hahn, Wiker, p. 17.
13. Hahn, Wiker, p. 26.
14. Hahn, Wiker, p. 35.
15. Hahn, Wiker, p. 36.
16. Hahn, Wiker, p. 58.
17. Hahn, Wiker, p. 45.
18. Hahn, Wiker, p. 46.
19. Hahn, Wiker, p. 59.
20. For a more extended reflection on Ockham and his philosophy, see Joshua Lim’s post Post Tenebras Lux
21. Hahn, Wiker, p. 56.
22. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 61-72.
23. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 75-77.
24. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 79-84.
25. Hahn, Wiker, p. 80.
26. Hahn, Wiker, p. 92.
27. Hahn, Wiker, p. 93-95.
28. Hahn, Wiker, p. 106.
29. Hahn, Wiker, p. 128.
30. Hahn, Wiker, p. 132.
31. Hahn, Wiker, p. 135.
32. Hahn, Wiker, p. 138.
33. Hahn, Wiker, p. 139.
34. Hahn, Wiker, p. 140.
35. Hahn, Wiker, p. 141.
36. Hahn, Wiker, p. 148.
37. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 176-177.
38. Hahn, Wiker, p. 184.
39. Hahn, Wiker, p. 153.
40. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 170-171.
41. Hahn, Wiker, p.192.
42. Hahn, Wiker, p. 195.
43. Hahn, Wiker, pp.196-197.
44. Hahn, Wiker, p. 206.
45. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 212-216.
46. We direct readers to Dr. David Anders article “How John Calvin Made me a Catholic” for a deeper discussion of John Calvin’s religious and political ideas.
47. Hahn, Wiker, p. 199.
48. Hahn, Wiker, p. 201.
49. Hahn, Wiker, p. 200, 208.
50. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 217-218.
51. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 222-223.
52. Hahn, Wiker, p. 226.
53. Hahn, Wiker, p. 227.
54. Hahn, Wiker, p. 226-230.
55. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 234-236.
56. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 241-243.
57. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 246-248.
58. Hahn, Wiker, p. 251.
59. Hahn, Wiker, p. 253.
60. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 265-268.
61. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 270-271.
62. Hahn, Wiker, p. 274.
63. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 279-280.
64. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 279-284.
65. Hahn, Wiker, p. 299-311.
66. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 313-317.
67. Hahn, Wiker, p. 321.
68. Hahn, Wiker, p. 317.
69. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 318-319, 323.
70. Hahn, Wiker, p. 325.
71. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 327-328.
72. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 329-330.
73. Hahn, Wiker, p. 332.
74. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 334-335.
75. Hahn, Wiker, p. 337.
76. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 343-344.
77. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 344-356.
78. Hahn, Wiker, p. 358.
79. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 362, 363-365.
80. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 370, 384.
81. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 382, 386.
82. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 378-387.
83. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 366-367.
84. Hahn, Wiker, p. 368.
85. Hahn, Wiker, p. 369.
86. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 371-373.
87. Hahn, Wiker, p. 374.
88. Hahn, Wiker, pp.375-376.
89. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 396-398.
90. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 405-411.
91. Hahn, Wiker, p. 412.
92. Hahn, Wiker, p. 413.
93. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 414-419.
94. Hahn, Wiker, p. 422.
95. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 426-432.
96. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 432, 446-447.
97. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 432-438.
98. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 443-445.
99. Hahn, Wiker, p. 451.
100. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 453-55.
101. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 455-461, 462.
102. Hahn, Wiker, p. 467.
103. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 469-472.
104. Hahn, Wiker, p. 470.
105. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 476-480.
106. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 505-514.
107. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 495-505.
108. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 488-495, 520-528.
109. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 533-541.
110. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 543-545.
111. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 544-545.
112. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 547-553.
113. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 549-550.
114. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 553-554.
115. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 555-565.
116. Hahn, Wiker, p. 565.
117. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 539-540.
118. ST I, Q1, A10.
119. Latourelle, Rene, Theology of Revelation (Stanton Island, NY: Alba House, 1966), 367.
120. Vatican Council II. Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation – Dei Verbum. https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html (accessed September 16, 2014).
121. For readers who may be interested in a deeper study of the Reformation’s impact upon the modern intellectual landscape, of which historical-criticism is but a part, we recommend Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.
122. Hahn, Wiker, p. 187.
123. Hahn, Wiker p. 202.
124. Hahn, Wiker, p. 205.
125. Hahn, Wiker, p. 217.
126. Brief historical accounts of Sixtus IV and Alexander VI that note their guilt in propagating corruption and immorality, can be found here here and here.
127. Wells, H. G. Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church. https://freeread.com.au/@RGLibrary/HGWells/NonFiction/CruxAnsata.html (accessed September 16, 2014).
128. Hahn, Wiker, pp. 223-225, 235-236, 245-246.
129. Criticism’s Limits.
130. For a more thorough analysis of Calvin’s “Reformed Magisterium” in Geneva, see David Anders’ “How John Calvin Made Me Catholic.”
131. John Knox Interview with Mary Queen of Scots.
132. Ramage, Matthew J., Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI & Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 182.
133. Verbum Domini, 42. For an excellent example of how Benedict XVI’s proposal might be carried out, we direct our readers to Dr. Matthew Ramage’s 2013 book Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI and St. Thomas Aquinas which carefully examines Old Testament themes which seem to endorse polytheism, promote violence, and reject an afterlife. Ramage effectively appropriates the historical-critical method in conjunction with the patristic-medieval approach in a way which reconciles these “problems” with official Catholic teaching.

[The story that was posted here will soon be available in a slightly modified form as part of a collection of conversion stories published by Ignatius Press, entitled Evangelical Exodus. If you enjoyed the version previously available on this website, or if you have yet to read it, or if you are generally interested in the phenomenon of Protestants converting to Catholicism, please consider picking up a copy of the forthcoming book.]

Apse mosaic, Santa Pudenziana, Rome

[To download a pdf of this document, right-click here.]

Outline

I. A Short Summary of Brandon’s Essay and Argument
A. A Summary of the Nine Sections of the Essay
B. A Summary of the Argument in the Essay
II. Evaluation
A. Evaluation of Brandon’s Argument
1. Evaluation of major premise
2. Evaluation of minor premise
B. Examination of the Evidence
1. Preliminary Principles
a. Inscrutable Likelihood Differential (ILD)
b. Conditions for silence to carry evidential weight
c. Positive evidence in relation to silence
d. Proximate evidence informs underdetermined evidence
2. Canonical evidence
a. Acts
b. Pastorals
c. Catholic Epistles
3. Extra-Canonical evidence
a. 1 Clement
b. St. Ignatius of Antioch
c. St. Polycarp of Smyrna
d. Shepherd of Hermas
e. St. Justin Martyr
4. Hegesippus and Irenaeus
a. St. Hegesippus
b. St. Irenaeus
(1.) Brandon’s two mistakes
(2.) Selective arguments from silence
(3.) St. Irenaeus’s two ‘mistakes’
(4.) Differences in the successions lists of the bishops in Rome
(5.) The testimony of St. Irenaeus’s arguments
(6.) False dilemmas
(7.) Evidence in St. Irenaeus’s account of the Gnostics
(8.) Which: the Petrine pattern or massive rejection of the patristics?
(9.) Evidence in St. Irenaeus’s own history
5. Fractionation
a. Why fractionation is not evidence of the non-existence of the episcopacy
b. Fractionation as diocesan parishes: an alternative perspective
6. Evaluative Summary
a. Summary of evaluation of Brandon’s argument
b. The Original Challenge
c. Apostolic Succession Not Refuted
III. Resolution: Continuity and Paradigms
A. Documentary Witness of the Early Church Concerning the Episcopate
1. Brief introduction to the documentary witness
2. Presentation of the documentary witness
a. Proximate Evidence for the Apostolic Origins of the Episcopate
(1.) First Century
(2.) Second Century
(3.) Third and Fourth Centuries
b. Proximate Evidence for the Existence and Authority of the Petrine Succession
(1.) First Century
(2.) Second Century
(3.) Third Century
(4.) Fourth Century
(5.) Fifth Century
(6.) Sixth Century
3. The Documentary Witness of the Early Church and the Principle of Proximate Evidence
a. The Proximate Witness of the Early Church and the New Testament
b. The Principle of Proximate Evidence and the Evaluation of Paradigms
B. Two Paradigms
1. Deconstructing the Fathers
2. A Silent Ecclesial Revolution?
3. Where did the Church Christ Founded go for a Thousand Years?
C. Three Objections
IV. Conclusion

I. A Short Summary of Brandon’s Essay and Argument

A. A Summary of the nine sections of his essay

In his post titled “The Quest for the Historical Church: A Protestant Assessment,” Brandon sets out to refute the claim that Jesus founded the [Roman] Catholic Church. His post consists of nine sections. In his first section he presents his thesis and offers some thoughts about the burden of proof, methodology, what prompted him to write this article, the argument from silence, and why scholars cannot be dismissed on account of their beliefs about other matters. His second section discusses the Protestant and Catholic interpretive paradigms. Here Brandon argues from the acceptance by a number of Catholic scholars of the “fractionation” of early “Roman Christianity” to the conclusion that this interpretation of the historical data is not a result of the Protestant interpretive paradigm. In his third section Brandon examines the evidence from Scripture, and argues that the terms πρεσβύτεροι (elders/presbyters) and ἐπισκόποι (overseers/bishops) were used interchangeably, that the apostolic practice was to establish a plurality of presbyters in each particular church, that the Jerusalem council included presbyters, and that even if there was a difference between bishops and presbyters, leadership in each of the churches was under the direction of “multiple individuals,” including the Church in Rome, where even St. Peter referred to himself as a fellow presbyter. The fourth section of Brandon’s article examines some patristic data from the first and second centuries. Here Brandon argues that in St. Clement’s letter to the Corinthians the terms ‘bishop’ and ‘presbyter’ are used interchangeably, that St. Ignatius’s distinction between bishop and presbyter was not universal at that time, that St. Polycarp refers to presbyters present with himself in the leadership of the church at Smyrna, and does not mention a bishop in his letter, and that St. Ignatius, Hermas, and St. Justin Martyr do not mention a bishop at Rome. In the fifth section of his essay, Brandon examines the episcopal lists from Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus, and argues that their lists are not reliable. In his sixth section Brandon argues “that the city of Rome was fractionated in the first and second century,” and thus that “Roman Christianity was not centralized and the entire Roman Church was not ruled over by a monarchical bishop.” In his seventh section Brandon examines the argumentation of some scholars who dissent from the ‘fractionation’ thesis, and concludes that “modern scholarship … agrees that the existence of a monarchical episcopate developed in the second century” and that “churches, and the church in Rome in particular, were governed by presbyterial authority.” In his eighth section, Brandon considers some objections, and lays out some implications, particularly that “the failure to substantiate the claim that Jesus did found the Roman Catholic Church undermines the apologetic attempts at showing the Roman Catholic epistemological advantage over Protestants.” Finally, in his ninth section Brandon presents his conclusion.

B. A Summary of the argument in his post

The argument in Brandon’s essay is aimed ultimately at showing that Christ did not found the [Roman] Catholic Church, as Brandon states at the beginning of his first section where he points out that his goal is “refuting the claim that Jesus founded the RCC.” He reasons to that conclusion from two key premises, the first premise stating an alleged necessary condition for the Catholic Church to be the Church Christ founded, and the second premise stating that this necessary condition is not satisfied. In essence, Brandon’s argument looks like this:

(1) In order for Jesus to have founded the [Roman] Catholic Church, the monepiscopate in Rome would have had to originate with the Apostle Peter, and thus would have had to be present in Rome when Peter died and in the years immediately after Peter’s death.

(2) The monepiscopate in Rome gradually emerged in the middle to late second century, and did not originate with the Apostle Peter.²

Therefore,

(3) Jesus did not found the [Roman] Catholic Church.

Before evaluating the argument, it may be helpful to explain here at least what motivates the first premise of Brandon’s argument. In Comment #11 following his essay Brandon writes:

The many Catholic authors I’ve cited remain committed to the Pope because they believe the Petrine office providentially developed even though it was not established by Jesus. Those who hold such a position are not the object of criticism in this essay.

Brandon believes that it is possible to be a faithful Catholic and simultaneously to believe that the Petrine office was not established by Jesus, but only providentially came into existence at some later time, and to believe that the Catholic Church is not the Church Christ founded. Brandon’s first premise, then, is not aimed at opposing such a position, but instead is aimed at the position of those who claim that the Petrine office was established by Christ, and that the Catholic Church is the Church Christ founded.

But these beliefs are not optional for Catholics. It is de fide that Christ appointed St. Peter to be the prince of all the apostles, and visible head of the whole Church militant, and that Christ gave to him primacy of jurisdiction. As the First Vatican Council declares:

If anyone says that blessed Peter the apostle was not appointed by Christ the lord as prince of all the apostles and visible head of the whole Church militant; or that it was a primacy of honor only and not one of true and proper jurisdiction that he directly and immediately received from our lord Jesus Christ himself: let him be anathema.³

Moreover, the First Vatican Council defined as Catholic dogma that:

[T]he holy and most blessed Peter, prince and head of the apostles, the pillar of faith and the foundation of the Catholic Church, received the keys of the kingdom from our Lord Jesus Christ, the savior and redeemer of the human race, and that to this day and for ever he lives and presides and exercises judgment in his successors the bishops of the Holy Roman See, which he [i.e., St. Peter] founded and consecrated with his blood. . . .

Therefore, if anyone says that it is not by the institution of Christ the Lord himself (that is to say, by divine law) that blessed Peter should have perpetual successors in the primacy over the whole Church; or that the Roman Pontiff is not the successor of blessed Peter in this primacy: let him be anathema.⁴

Finally, the doctrine that the Catholic Church is the Church Christ founded is not an optional belief that Catholics may deny. The 1973 Declaration Mysterium Ecclesiae teaches:

Catholics are bound to profess that through the gift of God’s mercy they belong to that Church which Christ founded and which is governed by the successors of Peter and the other Apostles, who are the depositories of the original apostolic tradition, living and intact, which is the permanent heritage of doctrine and holiness of that same Church. The followers of Christ are therefore not permitted to imagine that Christ’s Church is nothing more than a collection (divided, but still possessing a certain unity) of Churches and ecclesial communities.⁵

The Declaration Dominus Iesus, promulgated in 2000, includes the following:

The Catholic faithful are required to profess that there is an historical continuity — rooted in the apostolic succession — between the Church founded by Christ and the Catholic Church: “This is the single Church of Christ… which our Saviour, after his resurrection, entrusted to Peter’s pastoral care (cf. Jn 21:17), commissioning him and the other Apostles to extend and rule her (cf. Mt 28:18ff.), erected for all ages as ‘the pillar and mainstay of the truth’ (1 Tim 3:15). This Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in [subsistit in] the Catholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him.” With the expression subsistit in, the Second Vatican Council sought to harmonize two doctrinal statements: on the one hand, that the Church of Christ, despite the divisions which exist among Christians, continues to exist fully only in the Catholic Church, and on the other hand, that “outside of her structure, many elements can be found of sanctification and truth,” that is, in those Churches and ecclesial communities which are not yet in full communion with the Catholic Church. But with respect to these, it needs to be stated that “they derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Catholic Church.”⁶

And the 2007 document Responsa ad quaestiones explains:

Christ “established here on earth” only one Church and instituted it as a “visible and spiritual community,” that from its beginning and throughout the centuries has always existed and will always exist, and in which alone are found all the elements that Christ himself instituted. “This one Church of Christ, which we confess in the Creed as one, holy, catholic and apostolic . . . . This Church, constituted and organised in this world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and the Bishops in communion with him.”⁷

So if any Catholic claims either that St. Peter was not appointed by Christ as prince of all the Apostles, or that it is not by the institution of Christ Himself that St. Peter had perpetual successors in the primacy over the whole Church, or that the papal office did not come from Christ through St. Peter, or that the Catholic Church is not the one and only Church Christ founded,⁸ he or she has fallen into at least material heresy.⁹ Hence the reasoning behind the first premise of Brandon’s argument. Brandon goes beyond the claim that Christ did not found the [Roman] Catholic Church, by claiming more ambitiously that “there are no good reasons to believe the traditional RCC narrative that Jesus founded the RCC.”¹⁰

II. Evaluation

A. Evaluation of Brandon’s Argument

In essence the formal structure of the argument is:

If A then B.
~B.
Therefore ~A.

where A is “Jesus founded the [Roman] Catholic Church” and B is “The monepiscopate in Rome originated with the Apostle Peter and was present in Rome when Peter died and in the years immediately after Peter’s death up to the middle of the second century.”

Formally, the argument is valid, as a modus tollens.¹¹ That means that the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. The soundness of the argument therefore depends entirely on the truth of all the premises, and to that question we now turn.

1. Evaluation of major premise

In order to avoid confusion, and especially to avoid the fallacy of equivocation, we have to disambiguate the term ‘monepiscopate.’ But disambiguating the term ‘monepiscopate’ requires first disambiguating the term ‘episcopate.’ The term ‘episcopate’ or ‘bishop’ has different possible senses, and for that reason when we are evaluating arguments constructed from historical claims that make use of these terms, we have to make sure that the term is used in the same sense in each premise. In this case, the term ‘episcopate’ can refer to the office invested with the authority and responsibility of overseeing the Church generally, or of overseeing a particular Church. This is also known as the power of supreme jurisdiction over a particular Church. The verbal form of the term (“oversee”) means the activity of shepherding the Church, and is an activity in which each of the three grades of Orders participates, each according to its station.¹² The term ‘episcopate’ can also refer to that grade of sacramental Orders by which one man may ordain other men.

Explicitly distinguishing these two different senses of the term ‘episcopacy’ allows us to distinguish different senses of the term ‘monepiscopacy.’¹³ In one sense the term can refer to there being stationed within a particular Church only one person with that grade of sacramental order by which he may ordain others. In another sense the term can refer to that form of Church government by which within a particular Church there is only one person with the highest jurisdictional authority over that Church, such that all other ordained persons in that particular Church, whatever their grade of Holy Orders, are under his authority. Monepiscopacy in that latter sense of the term is compatible with multiple bishops in the former, third-grade-of-Holy-Orders sense of the term serving simultaneously in that local Church under that governing bishop’s authority.¹⁴ In fact, the Catholic Church today has many dioceses where several bishops labor together, one as the diocesan bishop having jurisdictional authority and the others as titular or auxiliary bishops.¹⁵ Monepiscopacy in that jurisdictional sense is also compatible with the simultaneous presence and collaboration with that bishop of ordained persons not possessing the third grade of sacramental order by which to ordain others, yet participating in the overseeing of the Church, each according to his station. Having distinguished these senses of the terms ‘episcopate’ and ‘monepiscopate,’ we can now return to the question of the truth-value of the first premise of Brandon’s argument.

The claim that Christ founded the [Roman] Catholic Church does not require that upon the death of the Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome, there was at any point in time subsequent to their martyrdoms only one man in the Church at Rome having the power to ordain other men. Given the truth of Catholic doctrine, there can be multiple men working at the same time in the Church at Rome, each having the power to ordain others. At the end of the third century Tertullian even provides us with a reason to believe this to have been the case by testifying that according to the Church at Rome, St. Peter ordained St. Clement, and from the Tradition we know that St. Clement was ordained to the third grade of Orders.¹⁶ Thus given the evidence we will discuss below there were at that time in the Church at Rome at least three persons capable of ordaining others: St. Peter, St. Linus who succeeded him, and St. Clement.¹⁷ Thus in that sense of the term ‘bishop,’ from the Catholic point of view there could be three bishops simultaneously present in the Church at Rome before St. Peter’s martyrdom. So in that sense of the term ‘episcopate,’ there being multiple bishops working together in the Church at Rome is fully compatible with the [Roman] Catholic Church being the Church Christ founded, with all Catholic doctrine, and with historical data indicating the presence of a plurality of presbyters in Rome. The simultaneous presence of a plurality of persons having the third degree of Holy Orders is compatible with historical data indicating a plurality of presbyters because every bishop, whether such in sacramental Orders or also in jurisdictional authority, is a presbyter. Much as every human is a mammal, but not every mammal is a human, so every bishop is a presbyter, but not every presbyter is a bishop.¹⁸

So on the one hand, if by ‘monepiscopate’ Brandon is referring to there being only one person in a particular Church with the power to ordain, then his first premise is false. It is not true that in order for Jesus to have founded the [Roman] Catholic Church, upon the death of the Apostles Peter and Paul there must have been only one person in the Church at Rome having the power to ordain others. On the other hand, if by ‘monepiscopate’ Brandon is referring to there being only one man in a particular Church with supreme jurisdiction over that particular Church, then this puts the weight on the second premise, to which we now turn.

2. Evaluation of minor premise

To this very day, every Catholic diocese in the world is governed by a group of presbyters. We usually do not speak in this way, because now we more often use the term ‘presbyter’ (or ‘priest’) to refer only to those ordained to that grade of Orders by which one may offer the Eucharistic sacrifice but without the capacity to ordain others. That is, we usually use the term ‘presbyter’ to refer only to a man with the second grade of Holy Orders, because when speaking of men having the third grade of Orders we refer to them by a term that specifically designates their higher grade of Order, and the term ‘presbyter’ does not do this. But a presbyter having the second grade of Orders does not cease to be a presbyter (or priest) when he receives the third grade of Orders and becomes a bishop. Acquiring the ability to ordain does not remove one’s ability to offer the Eucharistic sacrifice, and this is why bishops remain presbyters when they become bishops.

Furthermore, because no Catholic bishop governs his diocese alone, but does so only with a group of presbyters working with him under his authority, therefore it follows that every Catholic diocese in the world is governed by a group of presbyters. For that reason, merely knowing that a particular Church is governed by a group of presbyters does not show whether this particular Church is governed according to Presbyterian polity or episcopal polity. This is why each piece of data Brandon cites indicating the presence of a plurality of presbyters in Rome in the first two centuries is fully compatible with the existence of a jurisdictional monepiscopate in Rome at that time. And all the data Brandon cites in support of his thesis is data indicating that from the time immediately after the martyrdoms of Sts. Peter and Paul to the middle second century, the Church at Rome was governed by a group of presbyters. Hence Brandon writes:

I’ve argued that we should take the earliest sources at face value which state that there were multiple presbyters ruling the church in Rome.¹⁹

We too take those sources at “face value,” and fully affirm that there were multiple presbyters ruling the Church in Rome. But the Church at Rome being governed during this time by a group of presbyters is fully compatible with there being a jurisdictional monepiscopacy in Rome during that time, because a bishop is a presbyter. For this reason Brandon’s second premise has not been shown to be true, in part because the data he cites in support of his second premise is fully compatible with that premise being false, and, as we show below, is not evidence that that premise is true.

So although Brandon’s argument is valid, if by ‘monepiscopate’ he means that there is only one man in a particular Church with the power to ordain, then his first premise is false. If by ‘monepiscopate’ he means that there is only one man in a particular Church with supreme jurisdictional authority over that particular Church, then the data to which he appeals does not show his second premise to be true. Thus given that these are the only two available senses of the term ‘monepiscopate,’ Brandon’s argument has at least not been shown to be sound.

That evaluation of his argument depends on whether all the evidence he cites is fully compatible with the existence of a jurisdictional monepiscopate in Rome in the first hundred years or so after the martyrdom of St. Peter. So in the following section we examine the evidence Brandon presents, and show that the evidence is fully compatible with the existence of a jurisdictional monepiscopate in Rome from the time of the death of St. Peter to the middle of the second century.

B. Examination of the Evidence

1. Preliminary Principles

a. Inscrutable Likelihood Differential (ILD)

Before examining the evidence Brandon puts forward, it is worth reviewing certain second-order preliminary principles. One such principle is that data that is fully compatible with contrary available explanatory theses, and for which the respective likelihoods of the competing hypotheses are inscrutably comparable without begging the question, is not evidence for one of those theses above the others, all other things being equal. This follows from what is referred to as the “Law of Likelihood:”

Evidence E favors hypothesis H₁ over H₂ iff P(E/H₁) > P(E/H₂).²⁰

From the “Law of Likelihood” it follows that if for two or more explanatory hypotheses the differences between the respective probabilities of the data given each hypothesis are inscrutable without begging the question against one or the other hypotheses, the data does not serve as evidence for one hypothesis over the others, all other things being equal. In other words, if one must presuppose one of the available hypotheses in order to determine the difference between the respective probabilities of the data given each hypothesis, then the data is not evidence for that hypothesis over and above the other available hypotheses, all other things being equal. So if we come across data for which multiple explanatory theses are available, and for which the difference between the likelihoods of the theses is inscrutable without presupposing what is in question, then we cannot justifiably claim that the data supports one of the explanatory theses above the others, all other things being equal. For short this can be referred to as the inscrutable likelihood differential (ILD) principle.

b. Conditions for silence to carry evidential weight

A second such principle concerns the conditions necessary in order for silence to carry evidential weight. In the first section of his essay Brandon claims that arguments from silence “are not fallacious;” rather, they “are valid arguments which infer conclusions from silence.” Of course an argument from silence infers a conclusion from silence, because any argument infers a conclusion from its premises. But the conclusion of an argument from silence does not necessarily follow from its premises. That is why such an argument is not deductively valid, and why such an inference is a logical fallacy.²¹ Silence can be legitimately used as evidence in abductive reasoning, but only if certain conditions are met. An argument from silence within a text carries evidential weight only when the conjunction of the four following conditions is satisfied:

(a) we know by other means that the author of the text intended the text to provide an exhaustive list of the items or events of the sort to which the unstated entity or event would belong,

(b) the author is not the sort of person who would overlook the unstated entity or event,

(c) the missing entity or event is not the sort of thing that might be unnoticed or overlooked by the author, and

(d) we have good reason to believe that the author has no overriding reason for concealing the entity or event.²²

Merely calling the silence “noteworthy,” for example, or “highly suggestive,” or saying that it “stands out,” or is “exceptionally noticeable,” or “conspicuous” is not enough to make the silence carry evidential weight.

c. Positive evidence in relation to silence

A third relevant principle has to do with the relative strengths of positive evidence in relation to arguments from silence. When claiming in his essay that the argument from silence is not a fallacy, Brandon quoted from a website hosted by the University of Massachusetts. That same page explains the third important preliminary principle related to the argument from silence:

A single positive may overturn any number of negatives. A single sound refutes all silences.²³

When one text gives a positive account of an event or condition, it trumps the silence of other accounts regarding that event or condition, all other things being equal.

d. Proximate evidence informs underdetermined evidence

A fourth principle is that proximate data informs the interpretation of underdetermined direct data unless there is independent positive evidence of discontinuity. If the data directly pertaining to the event in question is underdetermined with respect to its ability to indicate which of the available theses is correct, then data proximate to the direct data rightly informs the interpretation of the direct data, unless there is evidence of relevant discontinuity between the direct and proximate data. This means that when the direct data is such that from this data alone multiple explanations are possible, and the difference between the likelihoods of the explanations is inscrutable without presupposing what is in question, then all other things being equal, the explanation most compatible with data proximate in time and space is to be preferred unless there is independent positive evidence of a discontinuity between the direct data and the proximate data. As a consequence, the likelihood of an explanation of underdetermined direct data is increased by the existence of proximate data that comports with that explanation, all other things being equal.

This principle thus requires that the scope of relevant data must not be artificially restricted.²⁴ That form of epistemic reductionism applied to historical inquiry by which one excludes a priori the evidential relevance of proximate data on the basis of an assumed discontinuity is a violation of this principle, because such reductionism presupposes discontinuity by interpolating discontinuity into the methodology. Likewise, the positivist methodology of historiography by which one presupposes that there is no evidence for an event or entity at time t, unless there exists presently documents written at time t about that event or entity is a violation of this principle, again because such a methodology unjustifiably loads the presupposition of discontinuity into the methodology by unjustifiably disallowing proximate data to count as evidence. For this reason the silence of explanatorily underdetermined direct data does not establish a priori a discontinuity with proximate data having positive evidential implications for one of the available explanations of the direct data. On the contrary, all other things being equal, proximate data supports that explanation of the direct data that is continuous with that proximate data where there is no independent positive evidence indicating a discontinuity between the respective circumstances from which the direct and proximate data are drawn. With these principles in view, our evaluation of the evidence Brandon cited in support of his thesis follows below.

1. Section III: Canonical evidence

a. Acts

All the data in the book of Acts to which Brandon appeals (i.e., Acts 6, 14, 15, 20:17,28) is fully compatible with Catholic and Orthodox doctrine and polity, and is not evidence for Brandon’s thesis, under the ILD principle explained above. That data includes the appointing of deacons in Acts 6, the existence of presbyters at the Church in Jerusalem (Acts 11:30), the appointing of a plurality of presbyters in each of the particular Churches (Acts 14:23), the existence of presbyters at the council of Jerusalem (Acts 15), and the plurality of presbyter-bishops in the Church at Ephesus (Acts 20:17, 28). Consider each of those pieces of evidence in turn. The appointing of deacons in Acts 6 is fully compatible with the Apostles ordaining bishops, and with there being a monepiscopate in Rome from the time of the martyrdom of St. Peter to the middle of the second century. The existence of a plurality of presbyters at a particular Church is fully compatible with at least nine different polity possibilities:

(e) multiple presbyter-bishops, only one of whom has supreme jurisdictional authority, and no mere presbyters,²⁵
(f) multiple presbyter-bishops, one having supreme jurisdictional authority, and accompanied by subordinate mere presbyters,
(g) only mere presbyters all having equally shared supreme jurisdictional authority, but with the possibility of presbyter-bishops,
(h) multiple presbyter-bishops, all having equal shared supreme jurisdictional authority, there being no mere presbyters present or possible, because to be a presbyter is ipso facto to have the power to ordain,
(i) multiple presbyter-bishops, all having equally shared supreme jurisdiction, accompanied by mere presbyters subordinate to the presbyter-bishops,
(j) only mere presbyters, only one of whom has supreme jurisdictional authority,
(k) only mere presbyters, some of whom, but not all of whom, share equally supreme jurisdictional authority.
(l) multiple presbyter-bishops, all having equally shared supreme jurisdictional authority, there being no mere presbyters present, though mere presbyters are possible, simply not present in this particular Church at this time.
(m) only mere presbyters, none having supreme jurisdictional authority, because that authority is held by a living Apostle to whom these mere presbyters are subject.

All other things being equal, each of these nine is fully compatible with, and its likelihood differential inscrutably comparable in the light of Scriptural data indicating a plurality of elders in a particular Church. However, Brandon appeals to this Scriptural data indicating a plurality of elders as if this data is evidential support for his own thesis, i.e., (h). Here’s an example. In his section on Acts, Brandon writes:

The way the Jerusalem council is convened it would seem to match the definition of presbyterian government: the representation of the people of God from local congregations (Antioch, Jerusalem, outside Judea, etc.) in assembly making decisions as the body of Christ.

All other things being equal, the way the Jerusalem council is convened is no less compatible with, or scrutably more likely under a Catholic or Orthodox conception of Church polity than under a Presbyterian polity, without begging the question. This compatibility of the Scriptural data located in Acts 15 with Catholic and Orthodox polity makes possible the Catholic and Orthodox use of the Jerusalem council as an exemplar for all subsequent ecumenical councils. Brandon treats the Jerusalem council as evidence against Catholic (and Orthodox) polity for three reasons: because St. Luke mentions six times that presbyters are present at the council, because the final decision is conciliar (i.e., “is represented as the entire deliberative assembly’s decision”), and because the council includes representation from local congregations (i.e., Antioch, Jerusalem, outside Judaea, etc.). But each of those three reasons is fully compatible with, and not non-question-beggingly and scrutably less likely under Catholic doctrine. Of course presbyters are present at councils; every Apostle is a presbyter, and every bishop is a presbyter. Likewise, the conciliar nature of council decisions is intrinsic to the very nature of councils; it is not something more likely under Presbyterian polity than under Catholic polity. And representation from various regions is fully compatible with, and no less likely under Catholic polity. So according to the ILD principle, the Acts 15 data is not evidence for Presbyterian polity over Catholic polity, and thus not evidence for Brandon’s thesis.

Regarding Acts 20:28 (“Keep watch over yourselves and over all the flock, of which the Holy Spirit has made you bishops, to shepherd the church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son.”), the First Vatican Council uses the language of this passage to describe the modern office of bishop, noting that “bishops, who have succeeded to the place of the Apostles by appointment of the Holy Spirit [episcopi, qui positi a Spiritu Sancto…; cf. Acts 20:28 Vulg.: vos Spiritus Sanctus posuit episcopos], tend and govern individually the particular flocks that have been assigned to them.”²⁶ Here the Church has no difficulty understanding the “presbyters” of Acts 20 as being “bishops,” called together in a kind of regional synod to hear St. Paul’s farewell and final instruction.

In short, nothing in the passages from Acts conflicts with Catholic doctrine, or is non-question-beggingly and scrutably less likely under Catholic doctrine. Thus according to the ILD principle, the data to which Brandon appeals in the book of Acts does not support his thesis.

b. Pastorals

The Skull of St. Titus

In his section on the Pastorals, Brandon first appeals to the fact that St. Paul explains that he left St. Titus in Crete to appoint presbyters in every town (St. Titus 1:5), and then two verses later says, “For a bishop, as God’s steward, must be blameless … ” (St. Titus 1:7), as if this is a problem for Catholic doctrine. However, the use of the distinct terms already suggests two distinct offices, even if they conceptually overlap.²⁷ As Paul Owen points out, it is possible here that by “καταστήσῃς κατὰ πόλιν πρεσβυτέρους” [katasteses kata polin presbyterous] in St. Titus 1:5 St. Paul means that St. Titus is to appoint presbyter-bishops, according to city, that is, [one] in each city.²⁸ And for the reason already explained above, even if St. Titus appointed presbyter-bishops (plural) in every town in Crete, this is fully compatible with Catholic doctrine. Nothing about Christ founding the Catholic Church, and nothing about the truth of the Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession requires that only one bishop be appointed in each town. If St. Titus ordained a plurality of bishops in each town, there are multiple ways he could have done this, as explained in the section above on the book of Acts. Among those theoretical possibilities St. Titus could have established one bishop with jurisdictional authority in each town, with other bishops serving as auxiliaries. Or he could have established multiple bishops in each town but withheld supreme jurisdictional authority from the bishops of each town and retained that authority to himself, thereby serving as the principle of unity among the congregations in the various towns of Crete until he could eventually select one bishop from each town, and give supreme jurisdictional authority to that bishop over the Church in his town. Or he could have given an equal share of supreme jurisdictional authority to each of the bishops in each town. Brandon assumes that St. Paul means the latter, and that there is no distinction between presbyter-bishop and mere presbyter. But again, because of the ILD principle, the data is not evidence for that assumption.

Brandon then points to 1 Timothy, writing:

A similar construction is found in 1 Timothy 3:1-2. Paul states that trustworthy saying that anyone who aspires to the office of “ἐπισκοπῆς,” an overseer, he desires a noble thing. He then goes on to explain that an “ἐπίσκοπον,” overseer, must meet the specified criteria. The use of the singular here could indicate that Timothy has in mind the office of bishop, but that becomes highly unlikely when considered with the instructions in 1 Timothy 5:17, “Let the πρεσβύτεροι who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching.” Not only does the mention of a plurality of leaders show that the church was led by multiple presbyters, the same grammatical construction with the singular is used just two verses later, “Do not admit a charge ‘κατὰ πρεσβυτέρου’ against an elder.…” When talking about the presbyters corporately, we see the singular, πρεσβυτέρου, used to talk about a potential case of someone bringing a charge against one of the elders.

Here Brandon infers from the fact that St. Paul mentions a plurality of presbyters in 1 Timothy 5:17 to the conclusion that when St. Paul specifically refers to the “office of bishop” [ἐπισκοπῆς] in 1 Timothy 3:1, it is “highly unlikely” that St. Paul has in mind the “office of bishop.” But that is a non sequitur. Loaded into Brandon’s reasoning here is the assumption that “office of bishop” can mean only jurisdictional monepiscopacy. But because the “office of bishop” can refer to the third grade of Holy Orders, and because in one particular Church at the same time there can be multiple persons having the power to ordain, therefore the existence of a plurality of presbyters in a particular Church, whether these presbyters are all presbyter-bishops or a combination of presbyter-bishops and mere presbyters, is fully compatible with there being actually an “office of bishop.” For this reason Brandon’s conclusion does not follow from what St. Paul says in 1 Timothy 5:17. Each of these possible polities is fully compatible with, and not non-question-beggingly and scrutably less likely under the data of 1 Timothy 5:17. Thus because of the ILD principle, what St. Paul says in 1 Timothy 5:17 is not evidence that there is no “office of bishop” or that in 1 Timothy 3:1 St. Paul is not referring to the “office of bishop.” The mistake in the argument here is conceptually conflating the office of bishop with jurisdictional monepiscopacy.

Brandon’s last piece of evidence from the Pastorals is from 1 Timothy 4:14, wherein St. Paul urges St. Timothy not to neglect the gift he has, which was given to him by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on him. Brandon claims that this shows that ordination was not by a single bishop, but that “presbyters corporately ordained Timothy.” Tim Troutman has addressed this question in his section titled “g. A Refutation of Presbyterial Ordination,” in “Holy Orders and the Sacrificial Priesthood.”

Either the ordination being referred to in 1 Timothy 4:14 is to the [mere] presbyterate (i.e., the second grade of Holy Orders), or to the episcopate (i.e., the third grade of Holy Orders). If the ordination being referred to in 1 Timothy 4:14 is to the [mere] presbyterate but not to the sacramental episcopacy, then as St. Hippolytus of Rome records in AD 215 in his Apostolic Tradition:

When an elder is ordained, the bishop places his hand upon his head, along with the other elders . . . . Upon the elders, the other elders place their hands because of a common spirit and similar duty. Indeed, the elder has only the authority to receive this, but he has no authority to give it. Therefore he does not ordain the clergy.²⁹

When a man is being ordained to the office of [mere] presbyter by the bishop, the other [mere] presbyters present also lay their hands on the one being ordained, not because they too can ordain, but in order to show their solidarity with the bishop and, as St. Hippolytus says, to indicate “a common spirit and similar duty” with the [mere] presbyter being ordained. If one attends any priestly ordination in the Latin Church to this present day, one will see the same thing, namely, all the other priests subsequently laying their hands on the one(s) whom the bishop has just ordained to the priesthood.

If, however, the ordination being referred to in 1 Timothy 4:14 is to the sacramental episcopacy, then the fact that bishops are also presbyters shows that the presbyters being referred to in 1 Timothy 4:14 could be presbyter-bishops, as distinct from mere presbyters. The ancient and modern Catholic practice regarding the ordination of bishops is for at least three bishops to participate in episcopal ordination.³⁰

So whether the ordination in 1 Timothy 4:14 was to the [mere] presbyterate or to the sacramental episcopacy, either way, the fact that presbyters laid their hands on St. Timothy at his ordination does not show either that mere-presbyters can ordain, or that there can be no distinction between presbyter-bishops and mere presbyters. The data of 1 Timothy 4:14 is for these reasons fully compatible with, and not non-question-beggingly and scrutably less likely under the truth of Catholic doctrine. For that reason, according to the ILD principle, the data of 1 Timothy 4:14 is not evidence for Presbyterian polity over Catholic polity.

Thus all the data from the Pastorals to which Brandon points in support of his thesis is fully compatible with Catholic doctrine, and not non-question-beggingly and scrutably less likely under the truth of Catholic doctrine. For this reason, none of the data to which he appeals from the Pastorals is evidence for his position or his thesis. Brandon’s mistake here is treating data that has multiple possible explanations as though it has only one possible explanation, namely, his own position, or presuming in question-begging fashion that his own position is the best explanation for the data.

c. Catholic Epistles

Brandon suggests that the letter to the Hebrews was written to persons in Rome, and then claims that since “Hebrews 13:7 mentions a plurality of leaders in the city of Rome who minister the Word of God to the faithful,” this supports his thesis that there was a plurality of leaders in Rome at the time the epistle was written. The problem with claiming that this passage supports the non-existence in Rome of a jurisdictional monepiscopacy is, as explained above, that there being a plurality of leaders in the Church at Rome is fully compatible with a jurisdictional monepiscopacy wherein there are also other auxiliary bishops and/or mere presbyters serving as leaders of the Church in Rome. As explained above when describing the ILD principle, evidence that is fully compatible with, and not non-question-beggingly and scrutably less likely under, contrary theses is not evidence for one of those theses, all other things being equal. So Hebrews 13:7 is not evidence in support of Brandon’s argument or his position.

Then Brandon turns to 1 Peter 5:1-4, and notes that there is a textual variant in verse 2 in which the elders referred to in verse 1 are exhorted to exercise oversight [ἐπισκοποῦντες] of the flock of God. From this he concludes that the Greek terms πρεσβύτερος [presbyteros] and ἐπίσκοπον [episkopos] were synonymous. However, that conclusion does not follow from the premise, because the truth of the premise is fully compatible with the conclusion being false. Moreover, given the ILD principle, the possibility that these presbyters were either all presbyter-bishops or that they were a mix of presbyter-bishop(s) and mere presbyters shows that this textual variant is no evidential support for Brandon’s argument or position over the alternative explanations. That is because the text is fully compatible with the falsity of his notion that there is no such thing as a distinction between presbyter-bishops and mere presbyters, and because the data in these verses is not non-question-beggingly and scrutably less likely under these other possibilities.

Similarly, Brandon, drawing from St. Peter’s reference in 1 Peter 5:1 to himself as a “fellow elder,” writes:

Even Peter, the one who is supposedly the bishop in the city of Rome, identifies himself as an apostle and a fellow presbyter with others throughout the “dispersion.” This statement again reinforces the thesis of the article: Roman Christianity was led by a plurality of presbyter-bishops in the first century.

Brandon thinks that St. Peter’s reference to himself as a fellow elder “reinforces” the thesis of Brandon’s article, namely that in the first century the Church in Rome “was led by a plurality of presbyter-bishops.”³¹ As we have shown above, however, there are at least nine possible ways in which there can be a plurality of presbyters in a particular Church. Brandon treats 1 Peter 5:1 as evidence for one of those nine (i.e., his own position), even though at least eight other possible scenarios are equally compatible with, and not non-question-beggingly and scrutably less likely than the data in 1 Peter 5:1, all other things being equal.³² Once again, for the reason of the ILD principle, 1 Peter 5:1 is not evidence for Brandon’s thesis or argument.

Brandon’s argument also entails that the Apostles Peter and Paul did not have authority over other presbyters. Here’s why. For Brandon, the fact that Sts. Peter and Paul could be identified as fellow elders proves his presbyterial thesis that there was no distinction among those men who were called “presbyter,” and that for this reason the presbyters shared supreme jurisdiction. Because Peter and Paul were called presbyters, this would entail that there was no difference in authority between them and other presbyters, and that the Apostles could not exercise jurisdiction apart from their presbytery. Yet that is contrary to the evidence, for how could St. Paul give orders to Sts. Timothy and Titus, and how could any apostle give orders to others, being “presbyters”? Nonetheless, that conclusion follows from the assumption that all presbyters are equal. What makes more sense of the behavior of the Apostles is seeing them as having been simultaneously both presbyters and having more authority than other presbyters. So it is possible to be called a presbyter and yet at the same time have jurisdictional authority superior to some other presbyter. This same point is confirmed also by the Apostle John, who refers to himself as “the elder” in 2 John 1:1, and in 3 John 1:1, and yet carried apostolic authority.

Peter being a fellow elder (1 Pet. 5:1), and holding an episcopal office (Acts 1:20) is important because it establishes that presbyters possessing distinct episcopē or authoritative oversight in a church, which episcopē the Apostles surely possessed and clearly exercised, is compatible with there being multiple presbyter-bishops in a given church. This indicates that there were at least three levels of ministry during the time of Apostles, namely, the Apostles themselves, presbyter-bishops, and deacons. This basic structure is preserved in the Church via the transition, in apostolic succession, from Apostles to monarchical bishops who assume the leadership role of the Apostles after the latter have passed from the scene. Note that this view, which is the one prevailing throughout Church history, preserves the original structure of the Church whereas Brandon’s view requires a substantial change in structure, which is, ironically, his exact criticism of Catholicism.

Thus, every piece of data Brandon draws from Scripture, including everything he draws from the book of Acts, from the Pastorals, and from the Catholic Epistles, is not evidence for his thesis, because in each case as shown above the data is fully compatible with and not non-question-beggingly and scrutably less likely under explanations contrary to his thesis. This is true not only for the Scriptural data taken individually, but also taken together.

In the final paragraph of this section Brandon states that in Scripture, “There is no mention of a threefold office, much less a monarchical bishop,” as if this supports his thesis. This, however, is an argument from silence. As explained above, an argument from silence in a text carries evidential weight only when the conjunction of the four necessary conditions is met. But here we have no way of knowing a priori or independently that the intention of the authors (both human and divine) of the New Testament was to provide an exhaustive prescription for ecclesial polity. Moreover, such an assumption would beg the question against the Catholic Church’s claim that the apostolic deposit comes to us not only through Tradition as written but also through unwritten Tradition, as explained in the VIII. Scripture and Tradition section of our article titled “Sola Scriptura: A Dialogue Between Michael Horton and Bryan Cross.”

In the Catholic paradigm this unwritten Tradition was exemplified in the practice of the universal Church, which very quickly showed itself to be episcopal in polity. Moreover, because the texts of the New Testament were written to existing particular Churches, there was no absolute need to lay out Church polity in these texts, since each Church would have already received this polity at its founding.³³ So we have some reason to believe that the New Testament authors would not seek to provide an exhaustive polity in the canonical works that were incorporated into the New Testament. Moreover, even if during the time of the Apostles, and thus during the time when the New Testament was written, there were no men who had been appointed by the Apostles to serve in jurisdictional monepiscopacies while the Apostles remained alive, it would not follow that the Apostles had not established a means by which those whom they had ordained to the third degree of Holy Order would fill jurisdictional monepiscopacies after the death of the Apostles in order to avoid strife and contention among the leadership. For that reason too, the absence of an explicitly laid out three-fold polity in the New Testament is not evidence that the Apostles intended no such thing. So Brandon’s appeal to silence here does not support his thesis, not only because it does not meet the conditions necessary for silence to carry evidential weight, but also because this follows from the ILD principle and there being multiple contrary and not non-question-beggingly and scrutably less likely explanations for that silence.

2. Section IV. Extra-Canonical evidence

a. 1 Clement

Regarding the letter of St. Clement to the Corinthians, Brandon makes multiple claims. First he claims that “For Clement there are two orders, “επισκοπους και διακονους” (“bishops and deacons”).” Second he claims that for St. Clement the terms επισκοπης [“bishops”] and πρεσβυτεροι [“presbyters”] are equivalent. Third he claims that both terms are used throughout in the plural, and that there is no mention in the letter of a “monarchical bishop.” Fourth he notes that St. Clement himself does not identify himself as a monarchical bishop. From this he infers the following:

Instead, what we find is what is consistent with my thesis: the church of Rome (and it appears Corinth) was led by a plurality of leaders of whom the title “presbyter” or “bishop” could be used.

Here we examine each of Brandon’s four claims. Regarding Brandon’s first claim, he draws an inference from St. Clement’s description in c. 42 of what the Apostles did after preaching through countries and cities, namely, “they appointed the first fruits [of their labors], having first proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterwards believe.” From this statement Brandon infers that “For Clement there are two orders.” But that is too hasty, because the conclusion does not follow from the premise. Merely because St. Clement notes that the Apostles appointed bishops and deacons, it does not follow that St. Clement believed that there are only two grades of Holy Orders: the episcopate and the diaconate. That is because by the instructions of the Apostles, presbyter-bishops could subsequently ordain mere presbyters, and in this way the second grade of Orders was and is contained in the third grade of Orders. St. Jerome points this out when he says

In writing both to Titus and to Timothy the apostle speaks of the ordination of bishops and of deacons, but says not a word of the ordination of presbyters; for the fact is that the word bishops includes presbyters also.³⁴

The third grade of Orders includes two capacities the first grade of Orders does not have, namely, the capacity to offer the Eucharistic sacrifice and the capacity to ordain. For this reason the bishop can ordain a man to offer the Eucharistic sacrifice, without also conferring on him the capacity to ordain. In response to this statement by St. Jerome, Brandon writes:

This is a rather interesting way of putting it because typically it is stated in the reverse, bishops are presbyters. But Jerome’s argument (“unwittingly,” as Dolan puts it) shows that the distinction between presbyters and bishops wasn’t present from the earliest stages. If presbyters were bishops (and it has already been conceded that bishops are presbyters) then the distinction between the offices evaporates.³⁵

If presbyter-bishops are bishops, and if bishops are presbyters, it does not follow that there is no difference between the office of bishop and the office of [mere] presbyter, i.e., between the third and second grades of Holy Orders. Brandon makes this mistaken inference because he does not conceive of the possibility of two types of presbyters. Brandon assumes that if bishops are presbyters, and presbyters are bishops, then there is no conceptual distinction between the meanings of the two terms. But that simply does not follow. Only if necessarily all bishops are presbyters, and all presbyters are bishops, would there be no semantic distinction between the two terms. If, however, all bishops are presbyters, and some presbyters are bishops, then there is a semantic and conceptual distinction between the two terms. And St. Jerome’s statement is supporting the thesis that some presbyters are bishops, not that all presbyters are bishops.

Brandon assumes that St. Jerome’s claim means that all presbyters ipso facto can ordain, and are thus bishops in that sense, and that it was only by some subsequent stipulated convention that by the time of St. Jerome some presbyters were allowed to ordain while others were not allowed to ordain, even though those not allowed to ordain retained the charism by which they could validly ordain others had they been permitted to do so by the Church. This is why Brandon thinks that there could be no development of the second office (i.e., mere presbyter), and thus that any later development of the episcopate, such that the distinction between bishop and mere presbyter became clearer is incompatible with the Catholic Church being the Church Christ founded. But St. Jerome’s statement is better explained by the early predominance of presbyter-bishops, as Tim Troutman explained in 2010 in “Holy Orders and the Sacramental Priesthood.” So in this way Brandon’s argument against the episcopal position is built on the assumption that there cannot be two ways of being a presbyter, and thus simply presupposes precisely what is in question.

Two chapters before, St. Clement had already shown his awareness not only of the three grades of Orders, but also of the unique relation between the second and third grades of Orders where he writes:

For his own peculiar services are assigned to the high priest, and their own proper place is prescribed to the priests, and their own special ministrations devolve on the Levites. The layman is bound by the laws that pertain to laymen. (c. 40)

St. Clement draws an analogy here between the high priest and the priest in the Old Covenant on the one hand, and the bishop and the mere presbyter in the New Covenant on the other hand. In the Old Covenant, the high priest is still a priest, just as in the New Covenant a bishop is still a presbyter. The high priest and the priests share in the one priesthood, while the high priest uniquely retains certain offices. The Levite assists the priests and the high priest, without having a role in the offering of sacrifice. Likewise, in the New Covenant the bishop and the mere presbyter share the priesthood, and thus are both presbyters. The deacon assists the bishop and mere presbyters, but does not offer the Eucharist. So the key distinction in the Old Covenant hierarchy is between Levites and priests, one of the latter being the high priest, just as in the New Covenant the key distinction is between deacon and presbyters.

This same typology of the sacrament of Holy Orders can be found in other early sources, such as the Apostolic Constitutions:

For these [the bishops] are your high priests, as the presbyters are your priests, and your present deacons instead of your Levites; as are also your readers, your singers, your porters, your deaconesses, your widows, your virgins, and your orphans: but He who is above all these is the High Priest.³⁶

And St. Jerome says the same:

In fact as if to tell us that the traditions handed down by the apostles were taken by them from the old testament, bishops, presbyters and deacons occupy in the church the same positions as those which were occupied by Aaron, his sons, and the Levites in the temple.³⁷

Likewise, the Scottish Catechism of Aberdeen reads:

Q. Was not the Christian Priesthood typified or prefigured by the Jewish?
A. Yes; the Bishop is the Christian High Priest, and the Presbyters and Deacons answer to the Priests and Levites.
Q. Whom does the Christian High Priest represent?
A. Jesus Christ, the invisible Bishop and Head of the whole Church.³⁸

Brandon says in the comments that he has never encountered this in the literature.³⁹ He also claims that this interpretation “stretches this passage further than [he] believe[s] the text warrants.”⁴⁰ But simply stipulating the boundaries of warrant is easy, yet carries no evidential or argumentative weight, since any interlocutor could stipulate otherwise. Moreover, because stipulations are implicit appeals to the authority of the speaker, they are arguments from authority based on human reason, which is “the weakest” of all types of argumentation, as St. Thomas observes.⁴¹ And much has been written by scholars about the relation of the three-fold order under the Old Covenant and that of the New Covenant.⁴² The Didache hints at it when it says that the prophets are the people’s “high priests” (c. 13) presumably because these prophets approved by the Apostles oversaw in such cases even the presbyter-bishops in the particular Churches. This “high priestly” role would fall to one of the bishops in each particular Church after the prophets died. St. Hippolytus’s Apostolic Tradition written in AD 215 also explicitly relates the episcopate to the “high priesthood,” the [mere] presbyter to the elders Moses chose, and again refers to the “inheritance of the high priests” when describing ordination to the deaconate.⁴³ This is also discussed in the third-century work titled Didascalia Apostolorum.⁴⁴

Regarding this particular line from c. 42 of St. Clement’s letter, the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Canon of the Mass says the following:

The high-priest [i.e., bishop] has his duties, a special place is appointed to the priests, and the Levites have their ministry” (xi). From this it is evident that at Rome the liturgy was celebrated according to fixed rules and definite order. Chap. xxxiv tells us that the Romans “gathered together in concord, and as it were with one mouth”, said the Sanctus from Isaiah 6:3, as we do.⁴⁵

In laying out the three-fold order in the Old Covenant, St. Clement is subtly teaching what is part of the Tradition passed down in the Church Fathers, namely, that Christ the new Moses established in His New Covenant three different grades of Holy Orders: new high priests, new priests, and new Levites. And these refer to the three-fold division of bishop, priest, and deacon, with the bishop being the high priest of the Church in his city. So the data Brandon cites is not evidence that “For Clement there are [only] two orders,” not only because that conclusion does not follow from what St. Clement says, and not only because the second grade of Orders is contained in the third, but also because St. Clement himself alludes to there being three orders, and positive evidence trumps the argument from silence, as we explained above in our discussion of important preliminary principles of historical inquiry.

Regarding Brandon’s second claim that for St. Clement the terms επισκοπης (“bishops”) and πρεσβυτεροι (“presbyters”) are equivalent, Brandon says this because St. Clement writes:

For our sin will not be small, if we eject from the episcopate those who have blamelessly and holily fulfilled its duties. Blessed are those presbyters who, having finished their course before now, have obtained a fruitful and perfect departure [from this world] . . . (c. 44)

But because every bishop is a presbyter, it does not follow from St. Clement’s referring to bishops as presbyters that all presbyters are bishops, or that for St. Clement the two terms are semantically equivalent. For example, just because when speaking of humans we refer to ourselves as mammals, it does not follow that we believe that the term ‘human’ is equivalent to the term ‘mammal.’ Again on account of the ILD principle, the data is not evidence for Brandon’s claim.

Brandon’s third claim that both terms [i.e., επισκοπης and πρεσβυτεροι] are used throughout in the plural is misleading because there are multiple polity structures according to which what St. Clement says is true, and in which there is a monepiscopal bishop, as explained above. For example, every statement by St. Clement particularly about bishops, is fully compatible with there being a jurisdictional monepiscopate in Corinth along with auxiliary bishops. Moreover, nothing in his letter entails even the presence of multiple bishops in Corinth. Every statement in his letter is fully compatible with there being only one bishop in Corinth accompanied by multiple [mere] presbyters. And again, from the ILD principle, the data therefore is not evidence for Brandon’s thesis over and against an episcopal polity. Given only the data from 1 Clement, there may have been only presbyter-bishops all having equal jurisdictional authority in the Church in Corinth, but the data here is fully compatible with that being false. Nor are the likelihood differentials non-question-beggingly scrutable, and for this reason this data is not evidence that in Corinth the Apostles established Presbyterian polity and not episcopal polity.

What is doing all the argumentative work here, for Brandon, is an argument from silence, namely, that because St. Clement does not identify or name a single ruling bishop of the Church at Corinth, therefore, there was none, and all the Corinthian presbyter-bishops equally shared supreme jurisdictional authority, and the office of mere presbyter was not only not filled, it was not even possible. But that is not a good argument, not only because the conclusion does not follow from the premise, but also because as explained above, there are other possible scenarios that equally account for the data in the premise. It could be that there were multiple bishops all equally sharing jurisdictional authority, or that only one bishop possessed jurisdictional authority among other auxiliary bishops, or that the jurisdictional bishop had died and not been replaced, leaving only a group of bishops. It could also be that the presbyter-bishops had been until recently under the authority of a traveling apostle, a prophet having episcopal Orders, or a regional bishop like St. Titus or St. Timothy, the latter of which tradition claims to have remained bishop of Ephesus until the last decade of the first century, which is right around the most likely time St. Clement wrote his letter. Or it could be that presbyters consisted of one presbyter-bishop assisted by a number of mere presbyters. Because of the ILD principle, the data here is not evidence for Presbyterian polity over episcopal polity.

Regarding Brandon’s fourth claim, his appeal to there being no mention in the letter of a “monarchical bishop” is likewise an argument from silence. There being no mention of a monarchical bishop in the letter is not in itself evidence that there was none. We have no way of knowing independently whether or not St. Clement intended in his letter addressed to the laity of the Church at Corinth to pick out explicitly or by name that presbyter-bishop having jurisdictional authority, if one had presided over the Church at Corinth up to that time. Because there are many different possible explanations of the data, none independently more likely than the others given the data internal to the document, the data does not support the thesis that all presbyters are ipso facto presbyter-bishops, and thus that there is no such office as that of [mere] presbyter, or no such possible office as that of [mere] presbyter. For the very same reason, the data in 1 Clement is not evidence that Rome had no jurisdictional monepiscopate until the mid-second century.

Finally, Brandon claims that the “tone of the letter does not indicate . . . at all” that St. Clement shows the authority of the Roman Church over the Corinthian Church. Brandon’s argument here presupposes that the only tone possible for one having authority is one of forceful compulsion and demand. His argument presupposes that a gentle pastoral tone is impossible for one having authority. This is not a safe assumption, however, and thus the argument is not a good argument. St. Clement is aware that the brute appeal to authority would not be prudent with persons who have recently ejected their divinely appointed leaders. The whole point of the letter is rhetorically to demonstrate that humbly submitting to divinely established authorities is submitting to God, as one of us has argued elsewhere.⁴⁶ St. Clement therefore recognizes the need for gentle persuasion over heavy-handedness, especially in a letter about humility. The schismatics have already shown that they will not accept authority, and so need to be reproved by a gentle, persuasive argument rather than an approach that places its primary emphasis on an appeal to the author’s authority.

Nevertheless, from one point of view the letter positively indicates self-consciousness of authority on the part of the sender both in the fact of his intervention from Rome, and in the judgment he lays down in the letter if the Corinthians should refuse to comply. For example, he writes:

But if certain people should disobey what has been said by him [God] through us, let them understand that they will entangle themselves in no small sin and danger. . . .

For you will give us great joy and gladness if you obey what we have written through the Holy Spirit and root out the unlawful anger of your jealousy, in accordance with the appeal for peace and harmony that we have made in this letter.⁴⁷

St. Irenaeus speaks of St. Clement’s letter as a “most powerful epistle” that “exhorted them to peace.”⁴⁸ Power is not necessarily manifest in force or compulsion. It can be manifest in love, virtue, and winsome revelation of the truth. Imagine the way, for example, Pope Francis might write a letter to the lay people of a diocese that had just ejected its bishop. It might not be strong-armed in tone. But that would not mean that Pope Francis does not have papal authority, or thinks he has no papal authority. So here too, again according to the ILD principle, the tone of the letter is not evidence that St. Clement did not have such authority.

Moreover, St. Clement provides us with additional indirect evidence that he is speaking of the monepiscopacy when he says:

Our apostles also knew, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be strife on account of the office of the episcopate. For this reason, therefore, inasmuch as they had obtained a perfect fore-knowledge of this, they appointed those [ministers] already mentioned, and afterwards gave instructions, that when these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed them in their ministry. (c. 44)

The very notion of strife for the episcopal office makes little sense if there is no non-arbitrary maximum number of persons simultaneously occupying it in the same particular Church. The unlimited number of potential presbyters in Presbyterian polity does not fit with the idea of a new presbyter being selected to succeed each one who dies. And when Presbyterian presbyters die, the remaining presbyters need only select men to replace them, which has little potential for intractable strife, since the persons having the authority in question are still present. The only strife would be among the remaining presbyters, insofar as they could not agree regarding who if anyone should replace the deceased presbyter. But St. Clement’s wording implies that he is speaking of an office that, upon the death of the person holding that office, no one with equal authority already holds, so as to make the decision regarding who to replace that person. Hence there would potentially be strife for the vacated office among those not holding that authority, unless a system of succession were established in advance.

Having examined each piece of data to which Brandon has appealed in St. Clement’s letter, we have shown that each is not only fully compatible with Catholic doctrine, and according to the ILD principle not evidence for Brandon’s thesis, but also that additional data in St. Clement’s points to a distinction between bishop and mere presbyter.

b. St. Ignatius of Antioch

In his treatment of St. Ignatius, Brandon notes that St. Ignatius says the following:

For even Jesus Christ, our inseparable life, is the [manifested] will of the Father; as also bishops, settled everywhere to the utmost bounds [of the earth], are so by the will of Jesus Christ.⁴⁹

From this Brandon infers:

If we are to believe Ignatius, the threefold view of ministry is one that was divinely instituted *and* which had spread throughout the world.

The first thing to observe is that Brandon’s interpretation does not follow from St. Ignatius’s statement. In the statement in question, St. Ignatius does not say anything about the three-fold view of ministry. He says only that bishops are settled everywhere to the utmost bounds of the earth. Brandon himself believes that bishops (i.e., presbyter-bishops) had been appointed by the Apostles, and that by the first decade of the second century had settled everywhere to the utmost bounds of the world.

The explanation of Brandon’s non sequitur here is his assumption that for St. Ignatius, the bishop is not also a presbyter. Only if the bishop were not also a presbyter, and the ubiquity of presbyters and deacons taken as a given, would it follow that St. Ignatius’s statement about bishops being settled everywhere around the world entails that the “three-fold view of ministry” had spread around the world. But if St. Ignatius believed that all bishops are presbyters, then it does not follow that he believed that there were both bishops and [mere] presbyters in all the particular Churches around the world. He may have believed that some particular Churches had no [mere] presbyters. Brandon’s assumption is made clear in when he writes:

There is nothing from the canonical or extra-canonical data that shows any evidence of a single presbyter-bishop presiding over a city.⁵⁰

Of course Brandon is not unaware of St. Ignatius’s writings. So his comment reveals his question-begging presupposition that no bishop is a presbyter. And it is this presupposition that leads Brandon, in violation of the ILD principle, to construe mistakenly data indicating a plurality of presbyters in particular Churches as though it were evidence that there were no monarchical presbyter-bishops presiding over those Churches.

Then Brandon sets out to refute St. Ignatius’s claim. First he refers to a statement by St. Ignatius concerning those who act apart from their bishop:

It is fitting, then, not only to be called Christians, but to be so in reality: as some indeed give one the title of bishop, but do all things without him. Now such persons seem to me to be not possessed of a good conscience, seeing they are not steadfastly gathered together according to the commandment.⁵¹

From the fact that some people acknowledge the bishop’s title, but do all things apart from him, Brandon infers that the existence of opponents with a “difference of opinion” about the episcopacy indicates something about whether Jesus Christ founded the Catholic Church or the episcopacy, and about the truthfulness of St. Ignatius’s statement about bishops being settled everywhere to the utmost bounds of the earth. Hence Brandon says, “we do have reason to doubt the breadth of the episcopate at the time of Ignatius based on his own testimony . . . .”⁴⁰ Brandon thus treats the existence of baptized persons who subsequently disregarded or rebelled against the authority of their bishop as evidence against St. Ignatius’s statement about bishops being settled everywhere to the utmost bounds of the earth by the will of Jesus Christ. Or, at least Brandon’s use of this passage as evidence against the truth of St. Ignatius’s statement about the ubiquity of bishops presupposes that the Christians doing all things apart from their bishop were not persons who were rebelling against the authority of their bishop. But that is not a safe assumption. From the very fact that some people acted apart from the bishop, it does not follow that “Ignatius is not trustworthy in terms of the scope of the episcopate.”⁴⁰ That’s because it may have been the case that the persons acting apart from the bishop were schismatics or heretics.

Setting aside the problem of interpreting an author so as to make him out to be contradicting himself when a more charitable interpretation is available, there being persons who act apart from or against the authority of the bishop is fully compatible with Jesus Christ establishing the Catholic Church and the episcopate. St. Paul had his opponents, but this did not make his apostleship intrinsically doubtful. The heretic Cerinthus was also an opponent of the Apostle John, but that did not call into question the Apostle John’s authority or veracity.⁵² Moreover, the existence in a region of persons rebelling against their bishop does not entail or indicate that there is no rightful bishop in that region. The persons who acknowledge the title of the bishop, “but do all things without him” should not be interpreted as evidence that these persons who “do all things without him” were the original Presbyterians established by the Apostles, and from whom St. Ignatius, by arrogating to himself authority the Apostles gave to no one, was estranged, as though St. Ignatius was the false teacher here, and the ones who give lip service to the title of bishop but “do all things without him” were the true followers of Christ. The more charitable interpretation of what St. Ignatius is saying is the interpretation that does not make him out to be contradicting himself, and thereby make him out to be “not trustworthy.” And that interpretation is that these persons who acknowledge the title of ‘bishop’ but “do all things without him” are in rebellion against their divinely established ecclesial authority. So once again, the existence of an alternative explanation of the data, fully compatible with and no less likely than the one Brandon proposes, shows that this data is not evidence for his thesis.

It is also worth noting Brandon’s selective use of evidence here. Brandon treats this one statement from St. Ignatius’s letter to the Ephesians as trustworthy and reliable, but dismisses as untrustworthy and unreliable a great portion of what St. Ignatius says in the rest of his letters, namely, most everything St. Ignatius says is normative about bishops, the relation of bishops to [mere] presbyters, and the relation of the laity to bishops, etc., doctrines that we lay out in a section below.⁵³ For example, St. Ignatius writes:

Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast; but whatsoever he shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be secure and valid. . . . It is well to reverence both God and the bishop. He who honours the bishop has been honoured by God; he who does anything without the knowledge of the bishop, does [in reality] serve the devil. (Smyrn. 8:9)

Given Brandon’s interpretation of St. Ignatius, it would follow that St. Ignatius did not realize that by noting that some Christians acknowledge the bishop’s title, but wrongly “do all things without him,” he was undermining his own credibility regarding all the things he says are normative concerning the bishop. Otherwise, Brandon could not selectively affirm and utilize the truth of St. Ignatius’s claim that some Christians “do all things without [the bishop]” while rejecting the truth of St. Ignatius’s claim that Christians who act apart from the knowledge of the bishop “serve the devil.” If the “office of bishop” were only an innovation or optional, and not apostolic, St. Ignatius could not in good conscience say such a thing. But trusting a man’s word, as the premise by which to accuse him of being a liar, is self-contradictory. And interpreting him in such a way as to make him out to be contradicting himself, when an alternative interpretation is available that does not make him out to be contradicting himself, is uncharitable.

Selective use of data is revealed in various ways, one of which is biased language. For example, regarding St. Ignatius, Brandon writes:

Ignatius, who is fixated on the importance of the bishop, does not mention any leaders in Rome or the all-important office of bishop.

Brandon would not say that St. Paul was “fixated” on justification, or that St. John was “fixated” on love. But Brandon construes St. Ignatius’s teaching concerning the bishop as a “fixation,” and by using this biased language aimed at detracting from St. Ignatius’s trustworthiness, he seeks to dismiss all that St. Ignatius says is normative concerning the bishop. Why? Because Brandon does not agree with St. Ignatius. So St. Ignatius is “fixated.”⁵⁴

As for Brandon’s claim about St. Ignatius’s silence regarding the bishop of Rome, to begin with, in his letter to the Church at Rome St. Ignatius does mention the office of bishop and the monarchical nature of the office in Syria. As Joe Heschmeyer has pointed out, St. Ignatius presents himself in his epistle To the Romans as “the bishop of Syria,” without any further explanation (Rom., 2:2).⁵⁵ St. Ignatius expects the Christians of Rome to understand what ton episkopos Syrias (τον επισκοπον Συριας) is, which would not be the case if St. Ignatius believed that the episcopacy was a novelty. Later, St. Ignatius asks the Church in Rome to pray for the Church in Syria, which now “has God for its shepherd in my place [αντι εμου]. Jesus Christ alone will be its bishop [επισκοπησει]–as will your [the Roman Church’s] love.”⁵⁶ Therefore, St. Ignatius does mention the office of bishop when writing to the Church at Rome.

Nevertheless, after observing that St. Ignatius does not mention the existence of the office of bishop in Rome when writing to the Church there, Brandon concludes that “the silence from Ignatius in his letter to the Romans speaks loudly about the church structure of the Roman church being led by one bishop as Ignatius elsewhere writes.” That is, Brandon holds that the silence of St. Ignatius regarding any bishop in Rome indicates that there was no monarchical bishop in Rome. Brandon claims that “Ignatius’s silence is actually a legitimate argument against the existence of an episcopate.”⁵⁷

However, as others have already noted (including Paul Owen, David Albert Jones, OP, and Francis A. Sullivan, SJ), one might as well argue that the silence of St. Ignatius on the subject of Roman presbyters and deacons shows that there were no presbyters or deacons in Rome. Or one might likewise argue that because in 1 Peter 5 St. Peter does not mention the existence of presbyters in the Church in Rome, that therefore the Church in Rome had no presbyters.⁵⁸ But Brandon would not accept those conclusions, and this indicates his selective use of silence, i.e., treating silence as “a legitimate argument” when that argument supports one’s own position, but ignoring silence when it opposes one’s own position.

Recall especially the fourth of the four conditions necessary for textual silence to carry evidential weight, discussed above, and how the context of the letter is relevant to those four conditions. Where exactly is St. Ignatius being taken? To Rome. Why? Because St. Ignatius, refusing to obey the Emperor Trajan’s command that the Christians should either sacrifice to idols or die, came forward on behalf of the Church of the Antiochians, and was thereby condemned by Trajan to be taken to Rome and fed to the wild beasts for the entertainment of the Roman people.⁵⁹ So then, do we have good reason to believe that in writing to the Roman Christians, while bound to ten Roman soldiers,⁶⁰ the author has no overriding reason for concealing the identity of Pope St. Alexander as the bishop of the Church at Rome? Obviously not. It would have been foolish, dangerous, and perhaps even immoral for St. Ignatius to identify openly Pope St. Alexander as the bishop of the Church at Rome. It would practically sentence Pope St. Alexander to death as well, for the very same reason St. Ignatius was being executed. Recall, for example, the discovery of Pope Sixtus II (AD 257-258) celebrating the Eucharist with four deacons and a crowd of laity on August 6, 258, in the catacomb of Praetextatus. While seated on his chair, addressing the flock, he was apprehended by a band of soldiers who beheaded him and the four deacons that same day.⁶¹ So this silence in St. Ignatius’s letter to the Romans concerning the existence and identity of the bishop (and presbyters) of Rome is not evidence that at this time the Church at Rome had no bishop, because the silence does not meet all four conditions necessary for silence to carry evidential weight.

The letters of St. Ignatius show both the presence of the monarchical episcopacy in Antioch and also that St. Ignatius expected the Roman Christians to understand what he meant in referring to himself as “the bishop of Syria.” And as we show below, the lists of St. Hegesippus and St. Irenaeus provide explicit evidence for the episcopal succession in Rome. These are “sounds” that break St. Ignatius’s silence when writing to the Church at Rome. Moreover, St. Ignatius’s humble approach to the Church of Rome would make no sense in conjunction with his addressing them as the bishop of Syria and with his explicit teaching concerning the superiority of the bishop over the mere presbyter, if he believed that the leadership of the Church at Rome was composed only of mere presbyters. The very act of referring to himself as the bishop of Syria, in view of his other statements about the authority of bishops in relation to mere presbyters, and his humble approach to the Church at Rome, implies that he believed that the Church in Rome had a bishop.

Brandon further says that the threefold office of Orders found in St. Ignatius is not compatible with the threefold office of Orders as it exists in the post-Tridentine Catholic Church. He writes:

Furthermore, James F. McCue demonstrates how the conception of the “presbyters” in Ignatius is distinct from subsequent developments of the office where the presbyter serves a “priestly” role. Highlighting this development, McCue points out that the Council of Trent (Session 23) and Ignatius (Smyrn. 8.) have competing concepts of priesthood. Ignatius believes that anyone can offer the Eucharist under the direction of the bishop (including the laity) while Trent dogmatically teaches that only a priest validly ordained can do so (article here).

However, what St. Ignatius says in Smyrn. 8:1 is entirely compatible with the Council of Trent and the Catholic tradition, because [mere] presbyters (i.e., “priests”) can be designated by the bishop to say Mass. This is, in fact, what the parish priest does: celebrates the Mass in union with the diocesan bishop. St. Ignatius does not say that the bishop may designate simply anyone to celebrate the Eucharist, as Brandon takes him to say, for St. Ignatius only says, “Consider that Eucharist valid which is under the authority of the bishop, or whomever he himself appoints [η ῳ αν αυτος επιτρεψῃ].”⁶² Nothing in this statement entails that anyone other than a bishop or a priest may celebrate Mass. Therefore, the Ignatian and Tridentine concepts of the priesthood are not “competing.” Hence Brandon’s inference, “Ignatius provides an example of a threefold ministry that exists but which does not possess the threefold office in the same manner as the Tridentine formula,” is a non sequitur because it does not follow from the text of St. Ignatius. An unspecified statement is not the same as an assertion of non-specificity. Brandon mistakenly treats St. Ignatius’s unspecified statement “whomever he himself appoints” as though it is an assertion of non-specificity, i.e., he may appoint anyone, even the laity as such, to offer the Eucharist.

Next, similar to his argument from silence regarding St. Ignatius’s epistle To the Romans, Brandon also argues that St. Ignatius’s view of the episcopacy was not shared or practiced by other parts of the Church at the beginning of the second century AD. Brandon bases his case in part on Patrick Burke’s argument from silence. That argument seeks to prove that there was no bishop in first-century Egypt from the fact that we have no mention of a bishop in Egypt. Brandon writes:

We should be cautious about extrapolating too much data from the silence, but as Burke notes, we would think that some mention of a bishop who was exerting that type of authority Ignatius speaks of would be mentioned (particular in the literary hotbed of Alexandria!), but we encounter silence.

As explained above, this silence would carry evidential weight only if the four necessary conditions were satisfied. Regarding the Church in first-century Egypt, the corpus of literary evidence is quite small, comprised of three documents of possible Alexandrine origin, none of which directly addresses the question of the sacrament of Orders and jurisdictional office. In fact, Protestant scholar Richard Bauckham believes the Apocalypse of Peter to be of Palestinian origin, from after the Bar Kokhba revolt (AD 132-35). But if Burke means the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, one wonders why this should be admitted as evidence against the Catholic tradition, for that work is Gnostic and teaches a heretical Docetic Christology! In that work the true “Savior” does not die on the Cross, but only the physical Jesus. Regarding the Preaching (Kerygma) of Peter, which “survives only in a small number of quotations,” Bauckham says nothing about its origin.⁶³ Regarding the epistle of Barnabas, Protestant scholar Michael Holmes says that a “lack of information renders difficult any determination regarding location,” though he thinks an origin in Alexandria is the most likely, given “its numerous affinities in hermeneutical style with Alexandrian Judaism and Christianity and because its earliest witness is Clement of Alexandria.”⁶⁴ So basing ourselves on “scholarship,” only one of these three texts is probably from late first- or early second-century Alexandria.

That being said, here is Burke’s only substantive comment on the Church in Egypt, in its entirety:

With regard to the condition of the church in Egypt, we have three documents which probably originated in Egypt early in the second century: the Kerygma of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, and the Epistle of Barnabas. This constitutes the totality of our contemporary sources of information for that time, which is itself a most remarkable fact, considering the eminence of Alexandria as one of the chief cities of the Empire at that time. However not one of these documents deals with any matter of church structure, also a very interesting fact. The terms “episkopos,” “presbyteros,” “diakonos,” or “teacher” do not occur in any of them. The term “prophet” is used only in reference to the Old Testament.

We must say therefore that we simply do not possess any evidence whatever for the structure of the church in Egypt, except the argument from silence: a monarchical bishop would surely make his presence felt, and the first structural evidence we do have comes with such a person, Demetrius, at the end of the second century.⁶⁵

In other words, these documents have absolutely nothing to say about the issue at hand. They provide no evidence for a bishop in Egypt; neither do they provide evidence for presbyters and deacons in Egypt. If silence about x were sufficient to establish ~x, and the ad hoc appeal to silence were recognized as intellectually dishonest, then Brandon would also have to say that there were no presbyters or deacons in Egypt during this time. Rather, Burke’s own admission is that of the three documents possibly coming out of Egypt at this time, “not one of these documents deals with any matter of church structure.” Therefore the conditions for a proper use of silence in abductive reasoning have not been fulfilled in this case, because the documents do not intend to address the sacrament of Holy Orders or supreme jurisdiction in the Egyptian Church. The silence of the textual history, composed of documents written in the first century about the first century Church in Egypt, is not an indication that there was no monarchical bishop in Egypt. On the contrary, the fact that we do hear of there being a bishop over the Egyptian Church later in the second century, with no mention of this being a radical change in ecclesial sacramental or jurisdictional order, provides yet another positive “sound” that fills in the picture left by the negative silence.

Thus the lack of first- or early second-century documents mentioning a bishop in Egypt contemporary with St. Ignatius of Antioch is fully compatible with there being a bishop in Egypt contemporary with St. Ignatius. This silence is not evidence for the non-existence of a bishop in Egypt because the first condition for silence to carry evidential weight is not satisfied, namely, that we know by other means that the author of the text intended the text to provide an exhaustive list of the items or events of the sort to which the unstated entity would belong. We have no reason to believe that the authors of the documents in question intended to describe exhaustively the existing polity or leaders of the Church in Egypt, because they do not even address the general subject. Moreover, because the difference between the likelihoods of the available explanations of the direct data (i.e., silence in these three texts) is inscrutable without presupposing what is in question, this data is not evidence for one of these explanations over the other available explanations, all other things being equal.

In actuality, however, there is not silence regarding this question, because it is not the case that all other things are equal. We have an episcopal succession starting from St. Mark for the Patriarchs of Alexandria. This list has been handed down internally as part of the tradition of the particular Church in Egypt. I (Bryan) laid out some of that history up to the third century elsewhere.⁶⁶ We discuss that also in one of the sections below.

How then does Brandon create the appearance of silence regarding the early Alexandrian succession? He does so by arbitrarily stipulating that only the text of documents written in the late first and early second centuries, and preserved to the present day, is allowed to count as evidence regarding the structure of the polity of the Alexandrian Church in the late first and early second centuries. This methodology implicitly presupposes that third and late second century documents have no evidential value regarding the question of late first- and early second-century polity, by presupposing discontinuity and disruption. But in examining Christianity, of which the Alexandrian Church is a part, we are examining a movement that not only began in the first century, and hence initially was relatively small, but also a movement that was widely and brutally persecuted during its first two hundred and fifty years of existence, limiting both the ordinary freedom of the documentary archive-keeping we experience in the modern West and the likelihood of preserving such documents. Stipulating that later data has no evidential value regarding underdetermined later first and early second century data violates the fourth principle laid out above in our section on preliminary principles, namely, that proximate data informs the interpretation of underdetermined data unless there is independent positive evidence of discontinuity of essence. And in this case there is no such evidence.⁶⁷ Hence by that fourth principle, instead of treating the late second and early third century data as evidence of a corruption of earlier polity on the arbitrary presupposition of discontinuity, that data is rightly treated as informing and contextualizing the earlier underdetermined data.

We cannot justifiably assume that we are in a better position to know the early history of each particular Church than were the third and fourth century leaders of those particular Churches, leaders who were not only bishops, but who all testify that the episcopacy was instituted by the Apostles. No one in the third and fourth centuries claims that the Apostles instituted only [mere] presbyters and deacons, and that ambitious, power-hungry men later went beyond the teaching of the Apostles and established for themselves the episcopacy, which subsequently spread around the whole Christian world. History is entirely silent about such a transition and any protest or controversy regarding such a transition. Brandon, however, thinks that that silence does not count as evidence. He creates his argument by drawing a stipulated, question-begging, and methodologically loaded circle around only the silence he can use to tell a just-so story about how the Church went wrong, while ignoring or dismissing the silence that would falsify that story. Again, that is an example of the selective use of data.

Brandon also appeals to the Didache to refute St. Ignatius on the threefold office. For Brandon, this early Christian text is another piece of evidence for his presbyterial thesis and against there being a divinely-established episcopacy in the Church. He writes:

Of particular importance for the presbyterial position is that here we encounter another piece of evidence where there are two sources of leadership [in the Didache], the “bishops” and the “deacons.” There is no threefold understanding of the offices (contra Ignatius). This leadership rules in plurality and it is interesting that the laity seem to have the responsibility to make sure that things are carried out in an appropriate way (all the commands are in the second person plural).

While later responding to Paul Owen, Brandon also adds:

In #10 you are right to say that we should be careful to press the Didache too hard, but, it is simply another piece of evidence to show in the area of Asia Minor that the threefold office was not as widespread as Ignatius indicates at the end of the 1st century/beginning of the second century.³⁹

Yet the portrait of the Didache does not count as evidence for the “presbyterial” thesis over and above the episcopal thesis, because the text is equally compatible with either thesis. There are a number of names for leaders in the text: apostles, prophets, teachers, bishops, and deacons. “Apostles” are “prophets” (11:3-7). Moreover, “prophets” are “high priests” (13:3), who are capable of settling in one town (13:1), and who are capable of celebrating the Eucharist (10:7; cf. 15:1). “Bishops and deacons” perform the “service” (λειτουργια, “liturgy”) of prophets and teachers: “for they too carry out for you the service [υμιν λειτουργουσι και αυτοι την λειτουργια] of the prophets and teachers” (15:1).

All this is compatible with there being a threefold order either in the “apostles and prophets,” “bishops,” and “deacons;” or in the “bishops” and “deacons,” with [mere] presbyters latent in the episcopal order; or in the “bishops” and “deacons,” with one bishop being over the college of other bishops.⁶⁸ For these reasons, and the ILD principle, the silence about the presence of a presiding “bishop” is not evidence for a Presbyterian polity over against an episcopal polity. Moreover, the Didache may quite possibly have been written thirty years earlier than the letters of St. Ignatius, and thus may reflect the time period of transition between Church government under still-living apostles and prophets. By contrast, as we show below, St. Ignatius was the second bishop of Antioch after St. Evodius, and was writing after the Apostles had died. So it may be misguided to attempt to use the Didache to correct St. Ignatius, rather than allow them to complement each other by providing windows into transitional apostolic polity and post-apostolic polity.

c. St. Polycarp of Smyrna

In his article Brandon includes a section on St. Polycarp, presumably because Brandon thinks St. Polycarp’s writing supports Brandon’s Presbyterian thesis. Brandon notes that in his letter to the Philippians, St. Polycarp “introduces himself as “Polycarp and the presbyters with him.”⁶⁹ Brandon does not say that this greeting is evidence that St. Polycarp was not a bishop. Brandon says only that it is “interesting,” thereby possibly hinting that St. Polycarp’s introduction is evidence for Brandon’s presbyterial thesis. However, the salutation of St. Polycarp’s letter, “Polycarp and the presbyters with him to the Church of God sojourning at Philippi,” is no evidence for the parity-of-presbyters position against the episcopacy position, because the salutation is entirely compatible with St. Polycarp being a bishop and having presbyters under him. Brandon’s source, Patrick Burke, admits this, writing: “While this [salutation] is, of course, compatible with the notion that Polycarp was a monarchical bishop, it is equally compatible with the idea that he was one member, though an outstanding one by virtue of his known saintliness and energy, of a college of elders.”⁷⁰ In light of the ILD principle, this data is therefore not evidence against the Catholic position or for Brandon’s thesis.

Brandon next suggests that St. Polycarp’s silence about any bishop at Philippi indicates that there was not any bishop at Philippi, nor any empty episcopal office. Yet by the same ILD principle, even the overall silence of the letter on this point is not evidence that there was no episcopal office in Philippi. Moreover, when St. Polycarp’s letter is viewed as a whole, not only is it not evidence against the Catholic position, but it supports the existence and normativity of the episcopacy because St. Polycarp’s communication to the Philippians included St. Ignatius’ teaching on the monarchical bishop, passed along with commendation by St. Polycarp. At the end of his letter (Phil. 13:2), St. Polycarp says that he is responding to the Philippians’ request for St. Ignatius’ letters by attaching copies of those “that were sent to us by him together with any other that we have in our possession.” St. Polycarp commends these letters to the Philippians, for they [i.e., the Philippians] “will be able to receive great benefit from them, for they deal with faith and patient endurance and all building up that relates to our Lord.”⁷¹ Naturally, these letters contain precisely the doctrine of St. Ignatius on the monarchical episcopacy that Brandon is keen to show is an innovation.⁷² Since St. Polycarp passed along St. Ignatius’ teaching on the monarchical episcopacy by means of these copies of St. Ignatius’ own letters, and did so commending them, St. Polycarp’s To the Philippians does not count as evidence against the apostolic origin of the monarchical episcopacy, but in fact upholds the very thing on which, according to Brandon, St. Ignatius is “fixated.” If St. Polycarp believed the episcopate to be an innovation departing from the apostolic teaching, wouldn’t he have made sure to add that qualification to his letter? Brandon has simply selected the internal silence he wants to count as evidence, and ignored the internal silence he does not want to count as evidence. And again, that selective use of data is special pleading.

The Roman Ampitheater in Smyrna

But here too he is attempting to create silence by arbitrarily restricting the scope of what is allowed to count as evidence. Because “a single positive may overturn any number of negatives,” the other sources explicitly stating that St. Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna not only answer the question, but demonstrate the danger of attempting to argue from the silence of direct data, as Brandon does in attempting to argue from St. Polycarp’s not referring to himself as a bishop in his salutation to the Philippians. The other sources we have that mention St. Polycarp explicitly identify him as the “bishop” of Smyrna. So it is in the salutation of St. Ignatius to St. Polycarp in To Polycarp, which reads: “Ignatius, who is also called Theophorus, to Polycarp, Bishop of the Church of the Smyrnæans, or rather, who has, as his own bishop, God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.”⁷³ Similarly, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, a second-century account, of which St. Irenaeus had a copy (cf. Chap. 22), includes the following which specifically designates St. Polycarp as the bishop of Smyrna:

At length, when those wicked men perceived that his body could not be consumed by the fire, they commanded an executioner to go near and pierce him through with a dagger. … and all the people wondered that there should be such a difference between the unbelievers and the elect, of whom this most admirable Polycarp was one, having in our own times been an apostolic and prophetic teacher, and bishop of the Catholic Church which is in Smyrna.⁷⁴

Of his own article Brandon claims, “[T]he point of this article is to prove that the Church of Rome was ruled by presbyters (and not by a monarchical bishop) until c. 150 AD.”⁷⁵ But when the eighty-six year old St. Polycarp came to Rome to visit Pope Anicetus in AD 155 to defend the tradition he had received from the Apostle John concerning the date on which to celebrate Easter, why did he entirely overlook what Brandon claims to be a novel and non-apostolic monepiscopacy in Rome?⁷⁶ Of St. Polycarp’s visit to Rome, St. Irenaeus, as quoted by Eusebius, writes:

He [St. Polycarp] also was in Rome in the time of Anicetus and caused many to turn away from the above-mentioned heretics to the Church of God, proclaiming that he had received from the apostles this one and only system of truth which has been transmitted by the Church.⁷⁷

The Gnostics in Rome (e.g. Cerdo, Valentinus, Marcion) had been claiming that the Church in Rome was not faithfully passing on what the Apostles had taught, but that the Gnostics had some secret knowledge that came from the Apostles. St. Polycarp, having himself conversed with the Apostles in his younger years, was able to refute this claim powerfully by testifying that he himself had known Apostles and been taught by them directly, and that what he had received from them was the one and only system of truth which they had transmitted to the Church, and which the Church presently taught. St. Irenaeus, who had known St. Polycarp personally, describes this:

But Polycarp also was not only instructed by apostles, and conversed with many who had seen Christ, but was also, by apostles in Asia, appointed bishop of the Church in Smyrna, whom I also saw in my early youth, for he tarried [on earth] a very long time, and, when a very old man, gloriously and most nobly suffering martyrdom, departed this life, having always taught the things which he had learned from the apostles, and which the Church has handed down, and which alone are true. To these things all the Asiatic Churches testify, as do also those men who have succeeded Polycarp down to the present time,— a man who was of much greater weight, and a more steadfast witness of truth, than Valentinus, and Marcion, and the rest of the heretics. He it was who, coming to Rome in the time of Anicetus caused many to turn away from the aforesaid heretics to the Church of God, proclaiming that he had received this one and sole truth from the apostles—that, namely, which is handed down by the Church.⁷⁶

In this way he was able to cause many Gnostics to turn away from their heresy. St. Polycarp’s argument against the Gnostics in Rome would have been vitiated had any of the following been the case: (a) there had been some widespread debate within the Church about whether monepiscopacy was apostolic, or (b) there was a Presbyterian polity in the Church in Rome while all the Churches of Asia had a monepiscopacy, or (c) there was a newly formed monepiscopacy in the Church in Rome, departing thereby from a prior Presbyterian polity. He could not have argued successfully to the Gnostics that the Church had faithfully preserved the one and only system of truth from the Apostles if he believed that the Church in Rome had departed from the apostolic polity. If preserving the apostolic teaching concerning the date of Easter was important to him, a fortiori preserving apostolic teaching concerning Church polity was far more important. We therefore have reason to believe that had there been a monepiscopacy in Rome at the time of St. Polycarp’s visit, and had he believed this polity to be contrary to the teaching of the Apostles, he would have vigorously protested it. Instead, he celebrated the Eucharist with Pope Anicetus, as St. Irenaeus records.⁷⁸

Thus the evidence that directly addresses the issue of the sacrament of Order and polity in relation to St. Polycarp testifies not only to there having been a monarchical bishop in Smyrna at the time of Ignatius, and that St. Polycarp was that bishop, but also that there was a bishop of Rome in St. Polycarp’s time, and that for St. Polycarp, there being a bishop of Rome was not a departure from the apostolic teaching. As explained above in discussing arguments from silence, “A single positive may overturn any number of negatives.”

As already noted, St. Polycarp’s salutation, “Polycarp and the presbyters with him,” is fully compatible with St. Polycarp being a monarchical bishop over the Smyrnaean Church. Nothing about the conjunctive grouping of monarchical bishop and college of presbyters proves otherwise. Even more problematic for Brandon’s argument is the fact that being a monarchical bishop and being a member of a college of presbyters are compatible ideas, because each Catholic diocesan bishop is the presiding presbyter in his Church. In fact, St. Ignatius exhorts the various Churches to cling to their respective bishop and his presbyters as their rulers. In the epistle to St. Polycarp’s Church in Smyrna, St. Ignatius exhorts the laity to “follow the bishop as Jesus Christ the Father, and the council of presbyters as the apostles; respect the deacons as the commandment of God.”⁷⁹ St. Ignatius exhorts them on the one hand to “follow” the bishop and presbyters, and on the other to “respect” the deacons. The bishops and presbyters are together the governors the laity are to follow. And this is entirely compatible with St. Polycarp being the monarchical bishop presiding over a college of presbyters. In To the Magnesians, St. Ignatius links the bishop and presbyters as the organ of governance from the perspective of the laity: “be united with the bishop and with those who lead” (Magn. 6:2), and “you must not do anything without the bishop and the presbyters” (Magn. 7:1).

Again, this is fully compatible with the bishop being the president of the college of presbyters, which is fully compatible with the truth of the Catholic position. To this day, the pastors of parishes in the Catholic Church rule their parishes only in communion with the pastor of the entire diocese, the monarchical (diocesan) bishop. A lay Catholic today should still “follow” the bishop and the presbyters, while understanding at the same time that the bishop holds supreme jurisdictional authority in the diocese. So none of the data Brandon points to in relation to St. Polycarp is evidence that St. Polycarp was not a bishop. On the contrary, not only the internal data indicating an unqualified endorsement of St. Ignatius’s teaching, but the external data as well indicates clearly that St. Polycarp was in fact a bishop, even the bishop of Smyrna. Moreover, the very attempt to try to make it seem that St. Polycarp was not a bishop, in light of the magnitude of positive evidence showing that he was a bishop, suggests an ideologically- or theologically-driven agenda.

d. Shepherd of Hermas

Brandon dates the Shepherd of Hermas to around AD 140 by relying primarily on the Muratorian Fragment. How does it show this date? Because, according to Brandon, it states that Hermas “had a brother named Pius who was allegedly the bishop of the city of Rome c. AD 142-155.” The complete line from the Muratorian Fragment reads:

The Pastor [i.e., the Shepherd], moreover, did Hermas write very recently in our times in the city of Rome, while his brother, the bishop Pius, sat in the [episcopal] chair of the Church of Rome. [Pastorem uero nuperrime temporibus nostris in Urbe Roma Hermas conscripsit, sedente cathedra Urbis Romae ecclesiae Pio Episcopo fratre eius.]⁸⁰

Brandon adds “allegedly” because he does not believe that there was an episcopal chair [cathedra] in Rome occupied by Pope Pius in AD 142. Recall the aim of Brandon’s essay: “the point of this article is to prove that the Church of Rome was ruled by presbyters (and not by a monarchical bishop) until c. 150 AD.”⁷⁵ The presence of an episcopal chair in Rome prior to AD 150 is therefore problematic for his thesis. But Brandon does think that the Muratorian Fragment supports his claim that the Shepherd of Hermas was written around AD 140. Brandon thus uses a text which claims that Hermas wrote “while bishop St. Pius, his brother, was occupying the [episcopal] chair of the Church of the city of Rome” in order to date the Shepherd earlier than AD 150. He then claims as evidence for the no-bishop-in-Rome thesis that Hermas never mentions a single leader in the Church at Rome. So Brandon uses the Muratorian Fragment’s claim that Hermas wrote the Shepherd while his brother Pius occupied the episcopal chair in Rome, to date the Shepherd to AD 140, in order to show from the Shepherd that at that time there was no episcopal chair in Rome.

Obviously Brandon cannot have it both ways. If the Muratorian Fragment is reliable as Brandon wants it to be to establish when the Shepherd was written, then it should be treated as reliable evidence regarding St. Pius being the bishop of Rome in the 140s, especially since the only way to use the Fragment to support the AD 140 date for the Shepherd is to rely on the other lists (e.g. that of St. Irenaeus) that tell us when St. Pius was bishop, lists that Brandon himself thinks are false. But if the Muratorian Fragment is unreliable, then it cannot support the thesis that there was no monepiscopacy in Rome in the 140s. This arbitrarily selective use of sources, and selective even within particular sources, is an example of the fallacy of special pleading.

Regarding the content of the Shepherd, the three main pieces of data Brandon wishes to use as evidence here are the silence regarding a “monarchical bishop,” the reference to a plurality of presbyters, and the fighting for prominence among the presbyters. Regarding the first point Brandon writes:

Hermas never mentions a single leader in the church but uses ἐπισκόποι and πρεσβύτεροι when discussing the leadership of the church

Here again Brandon is again attempting to use an argument from silence, which, in his section on St. Irenaeus he claims is “invalid.” More specifically, this case of silence does not satisfy the first and fourth conditions necessary for silence within a text to carry evidential weight. We have no evidence by other means that Hermas intends his text to provide the identity of the bishop sitting in the episcopal chair in Rome, or intends to provide a complete specification of the hierarchy in Rome. Nor do we have good reason to believe that the author has no overriding reason for concealing the entity or event. Identifying his brother as the bishop of Rome would likely get his brother killed.

Regarding Brandon’s second point relating to the Shepherd, Brandon is attempting to use Hermas’s reference to the plurality of presbyters as evidence that there was a presbyterial polity in Rome at the time. Recall what Brandon means by “presbyterian,” as he explains in his article:

By “presbyterian,” I am not thinking particularly of a current denomination or flavor of modern Presbyterianism (two office, three office, centralized power, “grass roots,” etc.) The meaning is broader and refers to the leadership of the church of a particular geographic area being led by a plurality of leaders (elders or presbyters). This definition would exclude a notion of a monarchical episcopate or the notion of a threefold office.

So according to Brandon, “presbyterianism” as he is using the term excludes “a threefold office.” But one problem for the attempt to use the Shepherd in defense of the claim that Rome was Presbyterian is that Hermas himself acknowledges the threefold office. Hermas writes:

Hear now with regard to the stones which are in the building. Those square white stones which fitted exactly into each other, are apostles, bishops, teachers, and deacons, who have lived in godly purity, and have acted as bishops and teachers and deacons chastely and reverently to the elect of God. Some of them have fallen asleep, and some still remain alive. And they have always agreed with each other, and been at peace among themselves, and listened to each other. On account of this, they join exactly into the building of the tower.⁸¹

Here we have a description of apostles, bishops, teachers and deacons. The term ‘apostle’ seems clearly to be a title limited to the first generation of persons, those who had seen and been sent by Christ directly, for the other three are also functions that apostles also performed. But bishop, teacher and deacon are offices that continue, while that of apostle does not. The term ‘teacher’ here seems to be used to refer to the activity of the office described elsewhere (e.g. in St. Ignatius) as [mere] presbyter, though that is not definitive. Hermas does not use the term ‘presbyter’ here, because both bishops and teachers are presbyters, and therefore using the term ‘presbyter’ would not distinguish them from each other. Bishops too are teachers, of course, so there would be no need to specify the office of ‘teacher’ as distinct from the office of bishop, unless it referred to an office in which one had the authority to teach, but was not a bishop, because it did not include the power to ordain. The only ecclesial office fitting that description is the [mere] presbyter office St. Ignatius describes.

Furthermore, the vision in which the threefold office is described is not said to pertain only to the Church of Rome, exclusive of the whole universal Church. If anything, the vision pertains more to the universal Church, the mystical body of all the faithful, both those no longer alive and those now living (“some have fallen asleep, while others are still living”).⁸² In the Visions of Hermas, he is visited by a lady under three forms, who later is revealed to be “the Church.”⁸³ A young man tells Hermas that “she was created before all things; therefore she is elderly, and for her sake the world was formed.”⁸⁴ Thus she is the one universal Church. Later in the next, third vision the lady identifies herself as the Church. This is the vision from which comes the quotation above about the threefold order after the apostles.

The lady takes Hermas to a field to observe the construction of a large tower built by six men out of stones from sea and land, with some stones rejected. The lady eventually reveals to Hermas what the tower is: “The tower that you see being built is I, the Church, who appeared to you now and previously.”⁸⁵ The tower is built upon water, signifying baptism, and has the Name [of Jesus] for its foundation. The six young men building the tower are identified as “the holy angels of God who were created first of all, to whom the Lord committed all his creation to increase and build up, and to rule over all creation. Through them, therefore, the construction of the tower will be completed.”⁸⁶ The tower is the Church, and the ones building her are the angels superior to all others, the angels who rule over all creation. Creation itself was identified as existing for the Church in the previous vision. So the mystical representation here seems not to be one particular Church, but rather the one, universal Church throughout creation.

Next, the lady reveals who the stones of the tower are. The stones are the “apostles and bishops and teachers and deacons.” Now the apostles are simply mentioned as one group, supporting the identification of the Church as the one, universal Church. The “bishops” therefore are not necessarily limited to the “bishops” of any particular Church, for it is a general grouping of bishops. The other stones out of which the tower was built represent other general groups of people with regard to the Church: “those who have suffered for the name of the Lord,” “those whom the Lord has approved because they walked in the uprightness of the Lord and rightly performed his commandments,” and “the young in faith, and faithful.”⁸⁷ Stones that were rejected but not destroyed are “the ones who have sinned and wish to repent. Therefore they were not thrown far from the tower, because they will be useful for building if they repent.”⁸⁸ Finally, stones that were not only rejected but destroyed are “the children of lawlessness; they believed hypocritically, and no wickedness escaped them….” The lady continues explaining whom the stones mystically represent through Vis. 3.7 [15]. Nothing in these visions requires us to find a presbyterial government (in Brandon’s sense) in Rome. In fact, their mystical character and the allegorical details of the visions point to the Church being the Church universal. And if that is the case, how can there be any surprise in Hermas’s reference to bishops in the plural? A plurality of bishops in the universal Church is obviously fully compatible with monepiscopacy in the universal Church.⁸⁹

Later Hermas writes:

And from the tenth mountain, where were trees which overshadowed certain sheep, they who believed were the following: bishops given to hospitality, who always gladly received into their houses the servants of God, without dissimulation. And the bishops never failed to protect, by their service, the widows, and those who were in want, and always maintained a holy conversation. All these, accordingly, shall be protected by the Lord for ever.⁹⁰

Here we see him describe good bishops of the Church, those given to hospitality and care for widows, and preserving holiness in their conversation. Overall, while Hermas does not provide us with a substantive or complete ecclesiology, he clearly recognizes an hierarchical authority structure in the Church. And he shows (implicitly) an awareness of apostolic succession in his description of the continuity between the apostles on the one hand and the bishops, teachers, and deacons who continue the apostles’ work.

Assuming a date of Hermas being c. AD 140 on Brandon’s premise that the Muratorian Fragment is a reliable historical document, and the fact that the visions pertain to the universal Church, the mention of a certain Clement in Vis. 2.4.3 [8:3] is not evidence for or against the establishment of a monarchical bishop in Rome. He is spoken of as someone alive during the time of Hermas’ writing. But as far as anyone can tell, St. Clement I died around the year AD 100. Thus, the identification of the Clement of Hermas remains a subject of scholarly debate. That the Clement of Hermas had as his job sending things “to the cities abroad” is no evidence against there being a monarchical bishop in Rome, for it is also fully compatible with there being at that time a monarchical bishop in Rome. Neither is the mention of “those who preside over the Church” in 2.4.3 incompatible with there being one presbyter-bishop who leads the college of the city’s presbyters, for reasons already explained above. Thus when Brandon says, “Such occurrences [e.g., the description of Clement’s job and what Grapte will do, along with the mention of “those who preside over the Church”] fit exactly what Lampe’s thesis of fractionation would expect,” he violates the ILD principle. The evidence can “fit exactly” either hypothesis, and the likelihood differential is inscrutably comparable without begging the question, all other things being equal. So Brandon begs the question by presuming that this data supports his thesis over and against the Catholic position.

Brandon then quotes Hermas’s criticism of those who “love the first seats” and writes, “Hermas is thus unequivocal that the leadership in the church should not seek to distinguish themselves from one another.” By “distinguish” Brandon means hold a rank over other leaders. Similarly, Brandon says elsewhere that according to Hermas, possessing a leadership rank higher than other leaders in the Church is negative. Hence Brandon says:

Hermas never mentions a single leader in the church but uses ἐπισκόποι and πρεσβύτεροι when discussing the leadership of the church and also calls them proistamenoi, προηγουμένοις, and πρωτοκαθεδρίταις. (Vis. 3.9.7.) This latter term is particularly interesting because it is not a neutral description but an insult. The English translations bear this out:

I now say to you who preside over the Church and love the first seats

The context here is those who are looking to put themselves over others and jealously keep their wealth to themselves.

First, Brandon gives no evidence that οι πρωτοκαθεδριται is an insult; he only asserts it. The verse is addressed “to those who preside over the Church and occupy the first seats” (Gk. τοις προηγουμενοις της εκκλησιας και τοις πρωτοκαθεδριταις). These men are acknowledged to preside over the Church and occupy the first seats, indicating that members of the presbyterate are in view. Whether these men are also coextensive with the rich remains to be proved, for the Greek signals a shift in subject: “now, therefore, I say to you who lead the Church and occupy the first seats…” (νυν ουν υμιν λεγω τοις προηγουμενοις της εκκλησιας και τοις πρωτοκαθεδριταις…). The general context of this verse is Hermas relaying an exhortation to various groups within the Church. First, Hermas is commanded to “show [these things about the seven women, Faith, Self-control, Sincerity, Innocence, Reverence, Knowledge, and Love] to everyone.”⁹¹ Then Hermas delivers the message to the “children” (3.9.1-10), including both “you rich” as well as “those who preside over the Church and occupy the first seats.” These groups could be overlapping sets of people, to be sure, but the distinct sets are addressed directly in different verses.

Further, the English translation of Vis. 3.9.7 provided by Brandon is inaccurate, for the verse says nothing about loving the first seats, but about “occupying the first seats” (Gk. τοις πρωτοκαθεδριταις). There is simply nothing in this sentence about “loving” the first seats. In the Gospels, the Lord Jesus excoriates the Pharisees for “loving” or “desiring” the first seats (Mt 23:6 [φιλουσιν]; Mk 12:39 [των θελοντων]; Lk 11:43 [αγαπατε]; 20:46 [φιλουντων]). Similarly, the “false prophet” mentioned by Hermas is not condemned for occupying the first seat, but for “desiring to have” (θελει … εχειν) the first seat. In Vis. 3.9.7, however, these men are not said to love the first seats, but to be in them. This difference is not any more sophistical than the difference between money being the root of all evil and the love of money being the root of all evil (1 Tim 6:10; cf. 2 Tim. 3:2). Hermas does not tell them to abandon the first seats but to avoid “these divisions of yours.” In fact, Hermas grants that these men are involved in the instruction of God’s elect.⁹² Brandon has not shown that Hermas is portraying negatively men who occupy the first seats, or the occupation of these seats.

Let us return to Brandon’s original comment about the negative connotation of possessing a higher leadership rank than other leaders. Here it is in context. Brandon writes:

This selfish tendency seems to have caught Hermas’s eye enough that he mentions it again to the leaders of the church in Similitude 8.7.4-6:

[A]s many as do not repent at all, but abide in their deeds, shall utterly perish. And they who gave in their branches green and cracked were always faithful and good, though emulous of each other about the foremost places, and about fame: now all these are foolish, in indulging in such a rivalry. Yet they also, being naturally good, on hearing my commandments, purified themselves, and soon repented. Their dwelling, accordingly, was in the tower. But if any one relapse into strife, he will be cast out of the tower, and will lose his life. Life is the possession of all who keep the commandments of the Lord; but in the commandments there is no rivalry in regard to the first places, or glory of any kind, but in regard to patience and personal humility. Among such persons, then, is the life of the Lord, but amongst the quarrelsome and transgressors, death.

Some of the teachers had repented of their rivalry and dissension, but Hermas reminds them that if they lapse back into their disputes about the “foremost places and about fame” then they will reap death. Hermas is thus unequivocal that the leadership in the church should not seek to distinguish themselves from one another.

Here Brandon infers from the sin of pridefully wanting and striving to be first and famous above others to the conclusion that there should be no hierarchy of authority among the Church’s leaders. But that is a non sequitur. From wanting pridefully to have more authority and fame than others have, it does not follow that all persons should have equal authority, or that presbyters and deacons should have equal authority, or that bishops and [mere] presbyters should have equal authority. Prideful coveting, strife, and ambition in relation to an hierarchy does not nullify the goodness and propriety of hierarchy itself. Brandon’s argument conflates disordered desires concerning first places in the hierarchy, with the hierarchy itself, and in this way wrongly infers from the wrongfulness of the former to the wrongfulness of the latter.

Hermas records his vision against these people for “having some zeal of one another concerning the first places and concerning some honor” (εχοντες δε ζηλον τινα εν αλληλοις περι πρωτειων και περι δοξης τινος). It cannot be the case that “distinction” is sinful, for then every presbyter in Rome (and any other particular Church) should have given up being a presbyter in distinction to being a layman. The issue is loving rank, honor, and one’s reputation for the very fact that they elevate one over others. This is the pride and double-mindedness that the Lord Jesus condemned in the Sermon on the Mount (St. Matthew 6). He also condemned it when He answered the request of the mother of the Sons of Thunder that her sons would have the honor of the first places at Jesus’ right and left. In response Jesus told the Twelve that if any were to be great, he should serve, and if any were to be first, he should be the slave of the rest (Mt 20:20-28). But Jesus did not then say that the Twelve were not the Twelve, or that Peter was not Peter. Quite the contrary! So the issue cannot be distinctions simpliciter, but a craving to be superior, a disordered desire for a station, office, or power that has not been entrusted to oneself. For this reason there is nothing incompatible in this text with there having been a monarchical bishop in the city of Rome. Nor is the condemnation of disordered desire for a hierarchical position of authority evidence against there being a hierarchy or a monepiscopacy.

Finally, Brandon’s comments about the negative image of being in leadership is overturned by the one positive example of Vis. 3.5, in which text the Lady commends those who have ruled well. Also, that some clerics jockeyed with other clerics for honor is likewise compatible with, and not evidence against, the presence of a monarchical bishop in Rome. St. Jerome wrote ep. 146 because deacons were jockeying for honor over presbyters. Of course everyone knows that there was a monarchical bishop in Rome at the time St. Jerome wrote.

e. St. Justin Martyr

In his brief section on St. Justin Martyr, Brandon appeals to two pieces of data in support of his thesis: (a) silence regarding the existence of a monarchical bishop in Rome, and (b) fractionation. We have addressed the fractionation issue in a subsequent section below. As for Brandon’s argument from silence in St. Justin, anyone who has read the entirety of St. Justin’s existing works will be aware that in the whole of his work, about the only opportunity St. Justin would have to mention a bishop of Rome is in the paragraph Brandon cites. That’s because the topic of St. Justin’s writings is not the polity of the Church, or the present leaders of any particular Church, but an apologetic of defending Christianity in general against the pagans. So this argument fails to meet the first condition necessary for silence to have evidential weight; it has not shown independently that the author intends to address the subject, and so in an exhaustive way such that if there was a bishop of Rome at the time, he would be mentioned in St. Justin’s writings, all other things being equal.

Moreover, the nature of the document to which Brandon is appealing in his argument from silence regarding St. Justin’s not mentioning the bishop of Rome, is relevant to Brandon’s argument. Brandon is appealing to what might rightly be called a trial transcript, titled “The Martyrdom of Justin,” which ends as follows:

Rusticus the [Roman] prefect pronounced sentence, saying, Let those who have refused to sacrifice to the gods and to yield to the command of the emperor be scourged, and led away to suffer the punishment of decapitation, according to the laws. The holy martyrs having glorified God, and having gone forth to the accustomed place, were beheaded, and perfected their testimony in the confession of the Saviour. And some of the faithful having secretly removed their bodies, laid them in a suitable place, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ having wrought along with them, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

S. Giovanni Battista Church in Sacrofano

Note the words ‘decapitation’ and ‘beheaded.’ Recall also from above the fourth criterion for silence within a text to carry evidential weight, namely, that we have good reason to believe that the author has no overriding reason for concealing the entity or event in question. Seeing that in this text St. Justin foresees his immediate decapitation for being a Christian and refusing to sacrifice to the gods, do we have good reason to believe that St. Justin has no overriding reason for concealing the identity of the leader of the Church at Rome? It seems to us that the answer to that question is “no.” In his trial before the Roman prefect, and facing immediate beheading for being a Christian, St. Justin would likely refrain from mentioning the existence or identity of St. Anicetus as the bishop of the Church at Rome, just as approximately fifty-eight years earlier St. Ignatius, while on his way to be eaten by wild beasts in Rome had a very good reason in his letter to the Christians in Rome not to refer to or identify the bishop of Rome, as we have explained above. Therefore, for the same reason here too Brandon’s argument from silence carries no evidential weight, because the data to which he refers does not satisfy one of the necessary conditions for silence to carry evidential weight.

3. Section V. Hegesippus and Irenaeus

a. St. Hegesippus

Here Brandon responds to the following quotation from St. Hegesippus, preserved by Eusebius:

καὶ ἐπέμενεν ἡ ἐκκλησία ἡ Κορινθίων ἐν τῷ ὀρθῷ λόγῳ μέχρι Πρίμου ἐπισκοπεύοντος ἐν Κορίνθῳ· οἷς συνέμιξα πλέων εἰς Ῥώμην καὶ συνδιέτριψα τοῖς Κορινθίοις ἡμέρας ἱκανάς, ἐν αἷς συνανεπάημεν τῷ ὀρθῷ λόγῳ· γενόμενος δὲ ἐν Ῥώμῃ, διαδοχὴν ἐποιησάμην μέχρις Ἀνικήτου· οὗ διάκονος ἦν Ἐλεύθερος, καὶ παρὰ Ἀνικήτου διαδέχεται Σωτήρ, μεθ᾿ ὃν Ἐλεύθερος. ἐν ἑκάστῃ δὲ διαδοχῇ καὶ ἐν ἑκάστῃ πόλει οὕτως έχει ὡς ὁ νόμος κηρύσσει καὶ οἱ προφῆται καὶ ὁ κύριος. (Εκκλησιαστική Ιστορία, IV.22)

In English this reads:

And the church of Corinth continued in the true faith until Primus was bishop [ἐπισκοπεύοντος] in Corinth. I conversed with them on my way to Rome, and abode with the Corinthians many days, during which we were mutually refreshed in the true doctrine. And when I had come to Rome I pieced together the succession [διαδοχὴν ἐποιησάμην] until Anicetus, whose deacon was Eleutherius. And Anicetus was succeeded [διαδέχεται] by Soter, and he by Eleutherius. In every succession [διαδοχῇ], and in every city that is held which is preached by the law and the prophets and the Lord.

To this Brandon writes:

The import of this writing is that Hegesippus is talking about the “succession,” but the word “ἐπίσκοπος,” or “bishops” is not in the Greek text. Instead, Hegesippus states that he drew up for himself a succession of διαδοχην, or teaching.

Here again, Brandon uses an argument from silence, claiming that because St. Hegesippus does not use the word “ἐπίσκοπος,” [i.e., bishop] in the immediate statements about succession, therefore St. Hegesippus is not talking about a succession of bishops, but rather a succession of teaching. However, not only does that conclusion not follow from that premise, and not only is it an argument from silence, but it also presupposes a false dichotomy between continuity of teaching on the one hand, and succession of bishops on the other hand as if concern for one precludes concern for the other. The term “διαδοχην” means succession. And when Brandon writes, “a succession of διαδοχην” he is literally saying “a succession of succession,” which is already unintelligible. In claiming “he drew up for himself a succession of διαδοχην, or teaching,” Brandon is apparently mistaking the word διαδοχην [which means ‘succession’] with the word διδαχη or διδασκαλία, both of which mean teaching. Brandon’s additional claim that St. Hegesippus is talking about a succession of doctrine would require St. Hegesippus to switch in three sentences from speaking of a succession of doctrine, to a succession of three bishops, back to a succession of doctrine. Nothing justifies forcing that hermeneutic onto the text.

In this passage St. Hegesippus is referring to the succession of bishops, as can be shown by his use of the verbal form of the term to say that Anicetus was succeeded by Soter, and Soter succeeded by Eleutherius. The term ‘διαδοχην’ is the same word used a few sentences earlier when St. Hegesippus says that when he arrived in Rome, he made for himself a succession [list] “down to Anicetus.” He says this right after saying that he had been refreshed with the “true doctrine.” It would make no sense to talk about making a succession if by ‘succession’ he meant ‘teaching’ given that he had just finished saying that he already had the true doctrine. Nor would it make sense to piece together a succession of doctrine from prior times in the Church at Rome, as if there were records of the earlier doctrines, against which he (but, apparently not the Church in Rome) could compare the present teaching of the Church at Rome. St. Hegesippus’s broader project was comparing doctrine across the particular Churches to discover their agreement and thereby confirm their apostolicity, not making lists of doctrinal successions. A problem for Brandon’s claim is that we have no existing record of any such doctrinal succession lists, so if silence about prior bishop lists means there were no successions of bishops, then the present non-existence of first century “doctrinal succession” lists means that they didn’t exist either. But Brandon proposes them anyway. This is another example of selective, ad hoc use of silence.

It is worth considering what St. Hegesippus is doing in Rome and why. He is searching out the succession of bishops in order to determine to whom he should look to know what is the apostolic teaching. In the last sentence of the quotation St. Hegesippus states that in his travels he has found that ἐν ἑκάστῃ δὲ διαδοχῇ καὶ ἐν ἑκάστῃ πόλει [“in every succession and in every city”] the same doctrine is preached. This implies that every city (πόλει) has a succession (διαδοχῇ) of bishops. St. Hegesippus treats the universality of episcopal successions as an uncontroversial given, as he notes that in every succession of bishops, in every city, the same thing is held that is proclaimed by the law and the prophets and the Lord. Thus he is taking the same approach St. Irenaeus takes in response to the Gnostics, in both looking to and pointing to the succession of bishops in the Apostolic Churches as the standard by which the apostolic tradition is to be located, and against which any teaching is to be measured. If one claims that St. Hegesippus is simply making up a line of episcopal succession for the Church in Rome, where previously there had been only groups of presbyters all having equal authority, one has to claim that St. Hegesippus is fabricating such lines for all the cities through which he has travelled, not just for Rome.

Then Brandon, following T.C.G. Thornton, proposes that St. Hegesippus’s

proximity to Judaism … caused him to view succession lists similarly to the Jewish disputes over the proper successor of the high priest…. For Thornton, the argument of Hegesippus is unique, but it is not mechanically tied to the succession of bishops. Hegesippus’s argument is instead wed to the tradition of the Apostolic teaching being passed down publicly in the Church.

The first statement is mere speculation. Nothing about St. Hegesippus’s proximity to Judaism entails that his commitment to truth is lacking, or that he is willing to lie about the succession of bishops of the Church at Rome or anywhere. The word “instead” in Brandon’s statement is a subtle and sophistical way of attacking St. Hegesippus’s moral character. It asserts without any substantiating evidence that although St. Hegesippus is concerned about the truth of apostolic teaching, he is not only not concerned about the truth regarding the succession of bishops, but is even willing to make up falsehoods regarding the succession of bishops, as if a person can be deeply committed to the “Apostolic teaching” and yet be willing to lie about history. Intentionally misrepresenting history is not compatible with being committed to the “Apostolic teaching,” which includes love for the truth (and Christ who is the Truth), and teaches that liars end up in the lake of fire (Rev. 21:8). Couching and juxtaposing this personal attack against St. Hegesippus directly beside a positive claim affirming his concern for and commitment to the apostolic tradition, sophistically hides the personal attack the way honey hides the bad taste of medicine. Brandon then uses his unsubstantiated attack on St. Hegesippus’s character to discredit his testimony concerning the succession of bishops, even though Brandon said above that St. Hegesippus was not talking about a succession of bishops, but only a succession of doctrine.

What justification does Brandon give for this personal attack against St. Hegesippus? In his article he writes:

For Thornton, the argument of Hegesippus is unique, but it is not mechanically tied to the succession of bishops. Hegesippus’s argument is instead wed to the tradition of the Apostolic teaching being passed down publicly in the Church. The fact that his list is limited in its scope and in determining the identity of a bishop (let alone that there was a monarchical bishop) are reasons to avoid concluding that Hegesippus is writing about the existence of a monarchical episcopate connected to Peter in Rome.

St. Hegesippus never says that the doctrine of the Apostles is not necessarily joined to the episcopal succession from the Apostles, as though the Apostolic doctrine could be lost from all the successors of the Apostles. Nor does anything he says entail this. So already Thorton’s claim that for St. Hegesippus the doctrine of the Apostles is not necessarily joined to the episcopal succession from the Apostles by being preserved within that succession is mere speculation. Moreover, everything in St. Hegesippus’s method of inquiry suggests he believed at least in His own time (without making any speculation about whether he believed that necessarily, until Christ returned in glory, the Apostolic doctrine would remain in the succession of bishops from the Apostles), the way to find out what was the doctrine of the Apostles was to consult the successions of bishops from the Apostles.

But from Thorton’s speculative assumption that for St. Hegesippus the doctrine of the Apostles is not necessarily preserved within the succession of bishop from the Apostles, Brandon infers that St. Hegesippus is concerned only with the Apostolic doctrine, and is not writing about the existence in Rome of an episcopate connected to St. Peter in Rome. That conclusion, however, does not follow from that premise. Even if it were true that St. Hegesippus either did not have any opinion about whether the succession of bishops would preserve the Apostolic doctrine until Christ returns, or even if he believed they would not preserve that doctrine until Christ returns, neither of which is entailed by anything St. Hegesippus actually says, it would not follow that when St. Hegesippus writes down in every city its succession of bishops, and explicitly writes that he does so in Rome as well, that when doing so he is not “writing about the existence of a monarchical episcopate connected to Peter in Rome,” or that when doing so he is not concerned about truthfully reporting the succession of bishops, let alone that he is willing to falsify Church records and make up a false list of bishops. So Brandon’s conclusion that St. Hegesippus was not “writing about the existence of a monarchical episcopate connected to Peter in Rome” is a non sequitur built on an unsupported assumption.

In the comments following his article Brandon says more about how he justified his conclusion concerning St. Hegesippus. He writes:

My argument is that the use of succession lists did not occur from the earliest times but originated in the second century (most likely from Jewish lists) when Hegesippus first used that methodology. His methodology was not confined to Rome because he did the same thing in Corinth. In tracing the Apostolic teaching through the bearers of tradition, Hegesippus utilized a methodology which later Christians would use as well taking their current ecclesiastical context (a monarchical episcopate) and assuming that the church had always had such a figure.⁹³

First of all, Hegesippus is writing not about bishops, but about the succession of doctrine. He mentions an individual named Anicetus whose deacon was Eleutherus, but Hegesippus is not concerned with bishop lists back to the Apostles (He only lists contemporary “bishops”), he is concerned with the continued teaching of the Apostolic teaching. This becomes significant because Hegesippus is reported as a former Jew (there is some contention about the specifics of his background, but Eusebius tells us that he was a Jew and knew Hebrew) and the Jewish arguments against Gentiles applied this same type of argument for the antiquity (and superiority) of Jewish beliefs. The Jewish argument was typically tied to a bearer of tradition like a High Priest, but the priority is always given to the passing down of the true doctrine. Along those same lines Hegesippus is looking for bearers of the apostolic tradition and does not mention a monarchical bishop at all, as Lampe notes. The list itself also does not stretch back to the Apostles and only speaks to the contemporary time of Hegesippus (The alleged textual problems here could also greatly impact the meaning. It would be either “I took up residence in Rome until Anicetus” or “I made up a ‘succession’ until Anicetus”.) In addition, while I didn’t mention it in my article it is interesting (though not determinative) that Hegesippus writes in the middle/passive that he “made for himself” a succession. This would match with other considerations that Hegesippus does not have access to a pre-existent list. He creates the list himself.⁹⁴

Here he gives four fundamental reasons. First he claims that St. Hegesippus was the first Christian to make use of succession lists, particularly in an apologetic context. This seems to contradict Brandon’s other claim that St. Hegesippus is not writing about successions of bishops, but only about successions of doctrine. Surely Brandon is not claiming that St. Hegesippus was the first Christian apologist to claim that the doctrine taught in and by the Church is the doctrine received by the Apostles! But that self-contradiction problem aside, do we know that St. Hegesippus was the first to use episcopal succession lists in apologetics? No we do not. Given the historical evidence that has survived from the first and second centuries, his use of them is the first such instance preserved in that historical data. But that does not entail that he was the first to do so.⁹⁵

Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that St. Hegesippus was the first Christian to use episcopal succession lists in apologetical arguments. From that premise, Brandon arrives at the conclusion that St. Hegesippus made up a false succession list. But again, that conclusion does not follow from that premise, and is thus a non sequitur. From St. Hegesippus being the first to use episcopal succession lists in apologetics, it does not follow either that these lists are false or that St. Hegesippus made false lists. Otherwise, no one could be the first to make a true historical list.

Moreover, even if St. Hegesippus were the first to use such lists apologetically, it would not follow that each particular Church did not keep a record of its bishops, or that there were no monepiscopal bishops in Rome or in the other particular Churches. The apologetic use of such lists would entirely backfire if the lists were false, because those persons to whom in response St. Hegesippus made apologetic use of these lists could have undercut that apologetic simply by pointing out that the lists were “fictive constructions.” So the very making of such lists for apologetic purposes methodologically presupposes that the one making and using them not only believes them to be true, but believes that his interlocutors either also believe them to be true, or can find out that they are true, and cannot show them to be false.

Moreover, there is a natural reason why this issue began to arise in the middle of the second century, and it has nothing do with making up fictive lists of episcopal successions. This was the time period during which the last of the auditors of the apostles were dying. St. Polycarp was one of the last persons who had talked with an apostle, and when he visited Rome (c. AD 155), he was for this very reason able to win back many who had been led astray by the gnostics, as we discussed above in our section on St. Polycarp. Persons like St. Polycarp had an authoritative trump card: “I talked with apostles.”⁹⁶ Naturally, when the last of these persons had died, the question regarding the authoritative locus of the Apostolic doctrine would arise. And right around this time we find St. Hegesippus traveling from city to city, writing down in each city the list of its succession of bishops. So the time between the death of the last apostle c. AD 100), and the first surviving historical evidence of the apologetic use of episcopal succession lists (AD 155-166) does not imply either that there were no such successions of bishops during that 50-65 year time period. Even if we were to grant the positivist notion that the absence of surviving historical evidence of the apologetic use of succession lists during that period shows that there was no apologetic use of succession lists during that period, there are other possible factors, all fully compatible with there being actual episcopal successions during this time period, that can explain why there was no need to use such lists apologetically during this time period. And hence, not only does this data not show that St. Hegessipus’s lists are false, but by the ILD principle this data is not evidence for the claim that St. Hegesippus’s lists are in some way false.

The second reason Brandon gives for justifying his conclusion concerning St. Hegesippus is that St. Hegesippus “is writing not about bishops, but about the succession of doctrine.” We have already shown above that this claim is false. St. Hegesippus is indeed writing about a succession of bishops, while at the same time writing about the “true doctrine.”

The third reason Brandon gives for justifying his conclusion concerning St. Hegesippus is that St. Hegesippus was Jewish, and Jewish apologetic arguments against the Gentiles used this same appeal to successions of high priests.⁹⁷ Here again, even if this premise is true, Brandon’s conclusion does not follow from his premise. That is, even if as a Christian St. Hegesippus was using the same appeal to successions that Jewish apologetic arguments used, it would not follow that St. Hegesippus’s lists are false, or that St. Hegesippus made up “fictive constructions.” St. Hegesippus’s being Jewish and using a type of apologetic argument used also by Jewish apologists is fully compatible with everything St. Hegesippus says being true, and according to the ILD principle is not evidence for anything St. Hegesippus says being false.

In order to infer justifiably from St. Hegesippus using this same type of apologetic argument used also by Jews to the conclusion that St. Hegesippus constructed and made apologetic use of false succession lists, one would have to know both that the Jews who composed such lists typically and knowingly made false lists, and that St. Hegesippus knew and endorsed the making of false succession lists for apologetic purposes. But we have no evidence that the Jews made false lists, knowingly made false lists, or that St. Hegesippus knew and endorsed the making of false succession lists. On the contrary, everything we know about St. Hegesippus’s character indicates that he was a person who feared God, and loved the truth.

The very line of reasoning that goes from St. Hegesippus being a former Jew, to the conclusion that St. Hegesippus’s list is false, is troubling because of its implicit anti-Semitic presupposition. That’s because the only way justifiably to reach the conclusion that St. Hegesippus’s list is false from the given premises is for the argument to be an enthymeme in which the hidden premise is some sort of claim that Jews are not truthful, not trustworthy, or are willing to falsify history in order to defend their beliefs. Otherwise, if the Jewish succession lists were truthful, then nothing about St. Hegesippus’s being formerly Jewish, and doing something similar to what Jews did when making succession lists, would be evidence that St. Hegesippus too is anything less than perfectly truthful and reliable regarding what he says concerning episcopal successions in the Catholic Church. Even if it were true that some Jews created false histories, we would still not be justified in inferring from the conjunction of St. Hegesippus being a former Jew and using the same type of appeal to successions also used by Jewish apologists to the conclusion that St. Hegesippus’s lists were false and contrived. That would be a non sequitur.⁹⁸

As is, Brandon’s conclusion does not follow from his premises. Just because St. Hegesippus was a “former Jew,” and just because Jews kept track of succession lists, it does not follow that St. Hegesippus simply made up the successions of bishops of the cities he visited, or distorted the truth in any way concerning those lists. What if, because Jesus and the early Church were entirely Jewish, the whole notion of episcopal successions came from the Jewish Messiah and His Jewish Apostles, and each city therefore kept track of its succession of bishops?⁹⁹ Brandon presumes that that could not have been the case, and that therefore St. Hegesippus must have made up the succession lists. But that assumption is not only not substantiated, it is not justified. Nor, according to the ILD principle, is it evidence that St. Hegesippus’s list is not true.

Brandon’s fourth reason for justifying his conclusion concerning St. Hegesippus is that:

Hegesippus writes in the middle/passive that he “made for himself” a succession. This would match with other considerations that Hegesippus does not have access to a pre-existent list. He creates the list himself.⁹⁴

I addressed this previously when I wrote:

This term [ἐποιησάμην] is a first person, aorist middle, and means that he made for himself something, in this case a succession (διαδοχὴν) [list]. The verb does not in itself mean “creating where nothing existed before.” A person who makes something for himself may be doing so where nothing of that sort existed before. But the verb form itself does not demand that. It surely suggests that he himself did not already have a list of the succession of bishops at Rome. But what he says here is fully compatible with his wanting such a list for himself, and so making one for himself upon arriving at Rome, even possibly by using existing lists already present in Rome at the time.¹⁰⁰

Nothing at all about the middle/passive implies that St. Hegesippus did not have access to a pre-existing list in Rome. The data is fully compatible with, and its likelihood differential inscrutable under either thesis, i.e. that he did not have access in Rome to a pre-existing list, or that he did have access in Rome to a pre-existing list. For this reason, according to the ILD principle, St. Hegesippus’s use of the middle/passive is not evidence either that St. Hegesippus had no access in Rome to a pre-existing list, or that no such list already existed, or that St. Hegesippus made a false list.

From these four reasons, Brandon then concludes that St. Hegesippus was the first Christian to use succession lists in apologetics. Setting aside once more Brandon’s self-contradiction problem of St. Hegesippus being the first to use something St. Hegesippus is not writing about, even if it is true that St. Hegesippus was the first Christian to use episcopal succession lists in apologetics, this would not entail or imply that there had been no such successions, or that St. Hegesippus in any way falsified history. Again, that inference would be a non sequitur. So, in light of the ILD principle, not a single piece of data cites in relation to St. Hegesippus is evidence that St. Hegisippus’s list is false or contrived.

But undermining St. Hegesippus’s credibility is crucial to Brandon’s argument, because Brandon builds his case against St. Irenaeus’s list on the claim that St. Irenaeus wrongly trusted the list of St. Hegesippus. Brandon writes:

Irenaeus actually believes that the information as passed along via episcopal succession (from Peter and Paul). He uses a list composed c. 180 AD to trace the passing of the apostolic doctrine in the apostolically established episcopate.³⁹

Irenaeus’s list is composed c. 180 AD and is based off of the list of Hegesippus who is writing about the succession of doctrine and does not provide an exhaustive list of “bishops.”¹⁰¹

With Hegesippus being the “innovator” we see Irenaeus as the “developer.”⁹⁴

But as we have just shown, no data or conjunction of data Brandon cites regarding St. Hegesippus is evidence that what he said concerning the succession of bishops is untruthful or untrustworthy. And Brandon’s repeated claim that St. Hegesippus is concerned with doctrine and not with the succession is, as we have shown, an entirely unjustified personal attack against St. Hegesippus.

Brandon’s reply to this is that St. Hegesippus presumably did not intentionally deceive anyone. St. Hegesippus made up a list of prominent presbyters in the history of the Church at Rome by talking to Christians in the Church at Rome and simply read back into that list the monepiscopal polity he saw around him both in the Church at Rome in the time of St. Anicetus and in the other particular Churches he had visited in his journeys. But this is still a just-so story, with no evidence to support it.¹⁰² It presupposes either:

(n) that all the Christians in Rome with whom St. Hegesippus consulted concerning the succession were ignorant of and could not remember the transition from a plurality of presbyters each sharing equally in jurisdictional authority and none having any more authority than the others, to the monarchical episcopacy St. Hegesippus could see in bishop St. Anicetus, and still all these Christians in Rome gave to St. Hegesippus the same succession list or

(o) the Christians in Rome with whom St. Hegesippus consulted concerning the succession knew about this transition but all lied to hide the fact that it had happened, and conspired together among themselves to come up with the list they gave to St. Hegesippus, so that they would not give him many different incompatible lists, or

(p) the Christians in Rome with whom St. Hegesippus consulted concerning the succession told the truth to St. Hegesippus, and then St. Hegesippus lied.

The only reason to believe (p) would be the anti-Semitism we discussed above; St. Hegesippus was Jewish, therefore we may justifiably suppose that he lied. So (p) is not justified. Nor do we have any justifying reason to believe that the Christians in Rome conspired together to lie about their own history, so (o) is not justified. That leaves (n). But if there were any Christians in Rome who had been Christians all their lives, had lived their whole lives in Rome, and were over sixty years old, then this Presbyterian-to-episcopal transition would have had to occur prior to AD 115; otherwise they would have remembered it. If there were any such Christians over eighty years old, this tradition would have had to occur prior to AD 95. And here we are required to presuppose that their parents all failed to tell them about this transition, and instead all told them this same succession list. And that simply pushes the problem back a generation, i.e., either these parents lied, or they too were ignorant of the transition, and that again pushes the problem back to the AD 70s. But recall Brandon’s claim that “[T]he point of this article is to prove that the Church of Rome was ruled by presbyters (and not by a monarchical bishop) until c. 150 AD.” So how can it be that even if St. Hegesippus were making his inquiry in AD 166, i.e., the very last year of the episcopate of St. Anicetus and thus the latest year possible for St. Hegesippus to arrive in Rome, that none of the Christians of Rome whom St. Hegesippus consulted could even remember the transition just sixteen years earlier? So (n) is also not justified. But (n), (o), and (p) are the only available ways to discredit St. Hegesippus’s testimony. Therefore, there is no good reason available to justify claiming that St. Hegesippus made up a list of prominent presbyters in the history of the Church at Rome by talking to Christians in the Church at Rome, and simply read back into that list the monepiscopal polity he saw around him both in the Church at Rome in the time of St. Anicetus and in the other particular Churches he had visited.

Brandon then writes:

The fact that his list is limited in its scope and in determining the identity of a bishop (let alone that there was a monarchical bishop) are reasons to avoid concluding that Hegesippus is writing about the existence of a monarchical episcopate connected to Peter in Rome.

Brandon is here claiming that there are two reasons not to conclude that St. Hegesippus is writing about the existence of a monarchical episcopate connected to St. Peter in Rome. The first reason is that St. Hegesippus’s list is limited in scope; it does not list the succession of bishops all the way back to St. Peter. That’s not a good reason not to conclude that this list is about the existence of a monarchical episcopate connected to St. Peter in Rome, because that conclusion does not follow from that premise. In the section of St. Hegesippus’s writing Eusebius is quoting here, St. Hegesippus is not attempting to present the entirety of the list to his readers. He is telling a story. On his way to Rome he stayed in Corinth and was mutually refreshed in the true doctrine. Then when he arrived in Rome he pieced together a succession list up until St. Anicetus, who was the present bishop of Rome. Subsequent to his arrival in Rome, St. Anicetus was succeeded by St. Soter, and St. Soter by St. Eleutherius, who had been the deacon of St. Anicetus. That’s the narrative. The point of the narrative excerpt is not to lay out for the reader the historical succession of bishops prior to St. Anicetus. But that does not entail that the succession list St. Hegesippus drew up when he arrived in Rome was not about the existence of a monarchical episcopate connected to St. Peter in Rome. If I tell you the names in order of the Presidents of the United States that have been in office since I was born, that does not give you a reason not to conclude that the list I’ve just provided is about the existence of a presidential office connected to George Washington. When someone gives part of a list, and states that it is part of a larger list (as St. Hegesippus does in stating that he drew up a succession up to Anicetus, but then only gives the names of those bishops from Anicetus onward), that is no reason at all to think either that the part is not a part of a greater whole, or that the greater whole is incomplete.

The second reason Brandon gives as a reason to avoid concluding that St. Hegesippus is writing about the existence of a monarchical episcopate connected to St. Peter in Rome is that St. Hegesippus’s list is limited “in determining the identity of a bishop (let alone that there was a monarchical bishop).” Again, however, just because the list I give you of U. S. Presidents who served during my lifetime is limited in its capacity to help you determine the identity of any president who served prior to my birth, that does not give you a reason to avoid concluding that there were U. S. Presidents prior to my birth, or to avoid concluding that the line of U. S. Presidents began with George Washington. Here again, Brandon is attempting to use an argument from silence to do positive evidential work, i.e., St. Hegesippus does not give a complete list in the excerpt quoted by Eusebius, therefore we have a reason to “avoid concluding that Hegesippus is writing about the existence of a monarchical episcopate connected to Peter in Rome.” But the data does not support avoiding or denying that conclusion, just as my listing only the U. S. Presidents who served since I was born does not support avoiding or denying the conclusion that the line of U. S. Presidents extends back to George Washington. In short, nothing here in any way discredits the veracity of St. Hegesippus’s list.

What is notable in St. Hegesippus’s testimony is first that he arrives in Rome and immediately puts together the succession of bishops of the Church at Rome, leading up to St. Anicetus. St. Hegesippus does this, apparently, because he knows from his travel experience that every Church keeps a succession list. The matter-of-fact ordinariness of his putting together the list at Rome, of not noticing any evidence of some turbulent ecclesiastical revolution all around the world as individual bishops in each particular Church took power to themselves, and subordinated all other presbyter-bishops who originally equally shared supreme jurisdictional authority, suggests that the episcopal situation in Rome during the time of Anicetus (AD 155 – 166) was not only very much like it was throughout the rest of the world, but was also as it had been since St. Hegesippus had been investigating the question, and since anyone with whom St. Hegesippus talked could remember. How else could St. Hegesippus say, “In every succession, and in every city, that is held which is preached by the law and the prophets and the Lord,” if there were or in living memory had been some kind of universal turmoil in the Church concerning whether the Apostles had taught presbyterial or episcopal polity? St. Hegesippus is saying that the Churches were in agreement regarding the “true faith,” thus implying that there was no such turmoil concerning presbyterial or episcopal polity.

That is supported by something Eusebius says about what St. Hegesippus records in his five books. Eusebius writes:

In them he states that on a journey to Rome he met a great many bishops [πλείστοις ἐπισκόποις], and that he received the same doctrine from all.¹⁰³

The Greek term πλείστοις is a superlative and is rightly translated as “great many.” Hence St. Hegesippus claimed that on his way to Rome, during which journey he stayed for some time in the Church at Corinth, not only did he meet a great many bishops, he received the same doctrine from them all. Had there been some disagreement regarding polity, such as that between contemporary Presbyterians and Catholics, St. Hegesippus would not have observed what he claims to have observed.

A second point of observation is that according to J. B. Lightfoot, we do have the entirety of St. Hegesippus’s list of bishops of Rome, preserved in the works of St. Epiphanius of Salamis (AD 310 – 403), who utilized St. Hegesippus’s list.¹⁰⁴ St. Epiphanius writes:

In any case, the succession of the bishops at Rome runs in this order: Peter and Paul, Linus and Cletus, Clement, Evaristus, Alexander, Xystus, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius, and Anicetus, whom I mentioned above, on the list.¹⁰⁵

If that is in fact the preserved list from St. Hegesippus, then his list is not, as Brandon claims, “limited in its scope and in determining the identity of a bishop,” and thus these are not “reasons to avoid concluding that Hegesippus is writing about the existence of a monarchical episcopate connected to Peter in Rome.” In sum, none of the data Brandon points to here is in any way evidence that St. Hegesippus’s list is anything less than entirely truthful.

b. St. Irenaeus

(1.) Brandon’s two mistakes

Brandon’s treatment of St. Irenaeus’s list of bishops of the Church in Rome is informed primarily by the Lutheran minister and theologian Peter Lampe. Brandon writes:

First, Lampe mentions the section from Irenaeus where he states, “Eleutherus does now, in the twelfth place from the apostles” as evidence that the number twelve–the Apostolic number–is an essential element of the list. The twelve apostles are followed by the twelve bearers of tradition. Lampe notes that the list could have as easily started with Peter (or Paul, which we will address momentarily), but that would interrupt the symmetry of the list and so it begins with Linus. Second, Lampe points out that the sixth member on the list happens to be named “Sixtus.” What is even more interesting about this is that the note concerning Sixtus, that he was the “sixth appointed” is in the present tense and is a constituent part of the list prior to Irenaeus. What does this mean? Because the number twelve is an essential feature to the list and because the mention of “Sixtus” as the halfway marker is also a constituent component of the list Irenaeus is using, that means that list could not have been composed prior to the bishopric of Eleutherus.

Brandon’s argument here goes like this:

(1) St. Irenaeus says that Eleutherius (the bishop of Rome at the time St. Irenaeus was writing) is “in the twelfth place from the apostles.”

(2) The number twelve is an essential element in St. Irenaeus’s list.

(3) The list could have begun with Peter, but that would interrupt the symmetry of the list, so the author had it begin with Linus.

(4) The sixth member of the list is named “Sixtus,” and the verb used here specifying that he was the “sixth appointed” is in the present tense.

(5) Sixtus’s being the sixth is a “constituent part” of the list.

Therefore,

(6) The list “could not have been composed prior to the bishopric of Eleutherus.”

Then Brandon assures his readers that this does not mean that St. Irenaeus was “intentionally lying.” Hidden between the conclusion of the argument and the subsequent reassurance that this does not mean that St. Irenaeus was “intentionally lying” is the very clear implication that the list is false, but not intentionally false; it is merely a “fictive construction.”¹⁰⁶

But that conclusion (i.e., that the list is false) does not follow from the conclusion of the argument, i.e., from line (6). Here is the way to see that.¹⁰⁷ Imagine for the sake of argument that the list is entirely and completely accurate. Now, why could the list not have existed before St. Eleutherius became bishop of Rome? The answer is this: only because the list includes the name Eleutherius. There is no a priori reason why the sixth bishop in Rome after St. Peter could not have been called Sixtus, or why the list could not use the present tense in saying that Sixtus was the sixth bishop established. Eusebius, for example, says of the succession in Antioch, “Theophilus was well known as the sixth from the apostles.”¹⁰⁸ If St. Irenaeus possessed an already existing list of bishops in the Church at Rome, and just before the name Sixtus he added the words ἔκτος ἀπὸ τῶν ἀποστόλων καθίσταται [is established sixth from the Apostles], this would in no way imply that the list itself was contrived. In other words, even if St. Irenaeus added the words highlighting Sixtus being the sixth from the Apostles, nevertheless, because of the ILD principle this would not be evidence that St. Irenaeus made up the list, or that the list is false.

Nor is there any a priori reason why if the sixth bishop has the name Sixtus, there cannot subsequently be a twelfth bishop, for the same reason that John Quincy Adams being the sixth U. S. President did not prevent Zachary Taylor from being the twelfth U. S. President. Nor is there any reason why a truthful list of successive bishops cannot be made while the twelfth bishop is in office, just as nothing prevented people from making a complete and truthful list of U. S. Presidents while Zachary Taylor was in office. Therefore the only reason the list could not have existed before St. Eleutherius became bishop of Rome is that the list includes the name Eleutherius.

Brandon makes two mistakes here. First, he treats the sixth person’s name being ‘Sixtus’ as evidence that the list is false. This is a mistake for two reasons: first, Lampe does not place any significance on the sixth bishop being named “Sixtus;” second, “Sixtus” does not mean “sixth” in Latin, but is the Latin transliteration of a Greek name, Xystos (Ξυστος). (See also St. Hegesippus’s list above, where the spelling is Xystus.) So first, Lampe does not place any significance on the name Sixtus, because his purpose is simply to note that St. Irenaeus mentions any name at the “half-way mark” of sixth. Here is all that Lampe says on that point: “Also, that with S[ixtus] the ‘half-way mark’ is noted (“as sixth, S[ixtus] is appointed”) shows the framework of twelve members to be intentional, already in the composition of the list before Irenaeus.”¹⁰⁹ Lampe does not say that Sixtus’s own name is significant, but rather that he is one of two bishops explicitly identified by number in the list, and that Sixtus’s number is half the number of Eleutherius (“als sechster wird Sixtus eingesetzt”).¹¹⁰ When Lampe summarizes his argument against the authenticity of Irenaeus’s list on the following page of his book, he does not mention Sixtus’s name at all, but only the significance of the list containing twelve names and ending with Eleutherius.¹¹¹ We respond to this argument below.

The Crypt under Église St-Irénée, Lyon

The second reason why Brandon’s emphasis on the name of “Sixtus” is mistaken is that the name does not even mean “sixth.” The Latin word for sixth is of course sextus. In contrast, “Sixtus” is simply one way to transliterate the Greek name Xystos (Ξυστος) into Latin. In fact the majority of manuscripts of Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses testify to a reading other than Sixtus: “xustus” (Claromontanus [C]), “xystus” (Claromontanus, later correction), and “syxtus” (Arundelianus [A], Salamanticensis [S]). Only the youngest manuscript has “sixtus” (Vossianus [V]). Strangely, the manuscript Vaticanus (Q) has “sextus,” perhaps a copying mistaken attributable to the scribe seeing the ordinal in the same sentence.¹¹² “Sextus” was in fact an ancient Roman name. There was, for example, a Sextus Pompeianus (Cic. Att. 12.37.4) and a Sextus Amerinus (Cic. Rosc. Am. 6.15).¹¹³ The variant form was “Sestus.” But when “Sestus/Sextus” was transliterated into Greek, it was spelled Sestos or Sextos (Σεστος, Σεξτος).¹¹⁴ In contrast, the actual Greek spelling of Sixtus’s name is preserved in the Greek fragment of St. Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses 3.3.3 from Eusebius of Caesarea’s Historia Ecclesiastica 5.6. Eusebius also witnesses to the Greek name of the sixth bishop of Rome at HE 4.4 and 5, and 5.25. In each case, the sixth bishop of Rome is Xystos (Ξυστος).¹¹⁵ The name in Greek can perhaps mean “polished” or “shaved,” but not “sixth,” which in Greek is simply hectos (εκτος).

The Greek provenance of the name of the sixth bishop of Rome helps us make sense of two facts. The first fact is that subsequent popes continued to take the name Sixtus, for how much sense does it make to be named “Sixth the Second,” “Sixth the Third,” and “Sixth the Fourth?” Instead, Sixtus II, III, and IV were taking the Greek name of the sixth bishop of Rome after St. Peter. The second fact is that the Greek initial “x” in Xystus’ name was preserved in the memory of the Latin-speaking part of the Church. Two ancient lists of martyrs are included in the Roman Canon of the Latin Rite. One of these lists includes Sixtus, which is actually a reference to Pope St. Sixtus II, who died a martyr in AD 258.¹¹⁶ Obviously, Sixtus II took the same name as Sixtus I. Though the modern English translation of the Roman Canon spells the name as “Sixtus,” the Latin of both the 1962 (Tridentine) and 1970 (Novus Ordo) Roman Missals is Xystus. Going even further back, the 1570 Roman Missal spells it Xistus.¹¹⁷ The Martyrologium Romanum, the Church’s official list of feast days for the saints, spells the name of the first three popes with the name “Sixtus” — all of them saints — as Xystus.¹¹⁸ Other evidence points to an awareness in the Catholic tradition of the Greek origin of the name. At least seven inscriptions originating during the pontificate of Sixtus IV (d. 1484) spell his name as Xystus or Xistus.¹¹⁹ In sum, the name is originally Greek and does not mean “sixth.”¹²⁰

The second mistake Brandon makes here is confusing intentional accidents of the list with essential elements of the list, and thus treating these intentional accidents as essential to the order between all the members of the list. The emphasis on the sixth and twelfth members of the list by someone contemporary with St. Eleutherius does not make the numbers six and twelve essential to the order existing between all the members of the list, such that the list could not have been made from a list of the eleven bishops preceding St. Eleutherius, or could not subsequently be added to later when in AD 189 St. Victor became the next bishop of Rome. In other words, the relation between six and twelve may have been essential to the emphasis intended by the person compiling the list in the time of St. Eleutherius, but it was not essential to the order between all the members of the list. And this is why St. Irenaeus’s list could have been compiled from a previously existing list of the eleven bishops from St. Linus to St. Soter, and the emphasis on the sixth and twelfth bishops is not evidence that the list is false or a “fictive construction.”

So the false inference in Brandon’s argument regarding St. Irenaeus’s list of bishops of Rome is from the fact that a list that includes St. Eleutherius as bishop of Rome could not have existed before St. Eleutherius became bishop of Rome, to the conclusion that the rest of the list could not have existed as a list before St. Eleutherius became bishop of Rome, and therefore must have been made up by St. Irenaeus or a contemporary of St. Irenaeus. That’s the inferential mistake. Otherwise, since the list of U. S. Presidents including President Obama could not have existed before President Obama became President, it would follow that the earlier part of the list of presidents would be false, but not intentionally false. That, however, is clearly not a truth-preserving inference, and neither is Brandon’s inference from (6) to the implied conclusion that St. Irenaeus was lying (just not “intentionally lying”) or speaking falsehood. The premises of the argument do not entail that conclusion. Nor are they evidence for the truth of the conclusion, because they are fully compatible with the falsity of the conclusion, and no less likely given the falsehood of the conclusion and thus because of the ILD principle explained above.

(2.) Selective arguments from silence

Next Brandon writes:

One may conceivably respond by claiming that the list Irenaeus used c. AD 180 could have used other ancient sources which originated from apostolic times, making the list a construction from 180 while maintaining its first century sources. Such a response, however, is unlikely and is an invalid argument from silence.

After having repeatedly made use of arguments from silence earlier in his essay, here Brandon disallows an objection on the basis that it is an argument from silence, and is thus “invalid.” But proposing some explanation or event behind what is stated is not an argument from silence. An argument from silence uses silence to argue for the non-existence or non-occurrence of something. Of course a proposed explanation or event behind what is stated can be false or unjustified, but it is not an argument from silence. Proposing what lies behind an historical silence is not the same as arguing to the non-existence of x on the basis of silence. For this reason, because speculating about what St. Irenaeus may have depended on is not using silence to argue for the non-existence or non-occurrence of anything, it is not an argument from silence.

Why is it “unlikely,” according to Brandon, that St. Irenaeus was relying on older lists or records? Because, he writes, “we do not possess any succession lists with this specificity [from] the first or early second century.” In other words, if we presently do not have any succession lists preserved from the first or early second centuries, then, reasons Brandon, neither could St. Irenaeus. The problem with that line of reasoning is that the conclusion does not follow from the premise. There are many ancient works that no longer exist, simply because they were not preserved. But their not being preserved does not entail that they never existed, or that subsequent generations did not have have copies of these ancient works. Again, that would be a kind of argument from silence.¹²¹

When one of us pointed out in Comment #30 under Brandon’s post that Brandon’s thesis proposes that St. Irenaeus commits a “grand mistake” embraced by the whole Christian world with nary a protest, Brandon replied:

First of all, we don’t know what level of protest Irenaeus’s list was meet with.¹²²

So when silence serves Brandon’s purpose, he treats it as counting as evidence, but when silence does not serve Brandon’s purpose, he dismisses it as not showing the non-existence of the thing in question, in this case a worldwide protest over the novelty introduced by St. Irenaeus and imposed on the whole world. That’s an example of ad hoc special pleading.

Regarding Brandon’s claim that we do not possess any [previous] “succession lists” with that specificity, we actually do. We have part of St. Hegesippus’s list in Eusebius, and, if Lightfoot is correct, the whole list preserved in Epiphanius. Brandon discounts that list as “concerned [only] with the succession of doctrine.” But as we have explained above, Brandon’s claim that St. Hegisippus’s bishop list is untrustworthy is unjustified. So we have one example prior to St. Irenaeus of a person around AD 165 making a list of the succession of bishops in Rome up to Pope Anicetus.

So do we have any reason to believe that either St. Hegesippus’s or St. Irenaeus’s account of the list of bishops in Rome is untrustworthy? No, as we have shown by going through each piece of data to which Brandon has pointed, we do not. Brandon is treating these lists as untrustworthy, while at the same time treating other Church Fathers and sources as reliable (e.g. St. Clement, Hermas, St. Justin, Didache). As shown above, for example, Brandon relies on the Muratorian Fragment which he claims is “c. AD 170-400 though it certainly appears to be closer to 170 than 400,” to show that the Shepherd was written around AD 140, while at the same rejecting the lists of Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus. He presumes the historical reliability of St. Clement and Hermas while discrediting St. Ignatius as “fixated on the importance of the bishop.” In essence, what Brandon is doing here is simply stipulating that St. Irenaeus and St. Hegesippus are untrustworthy sources regarding the succession of bishops in Rome, because what they say does not fit Brandon’s theology. And that is both ad hoc special pleading, and unjustified.

(3.) St. Irenaeus’s two ‘mistakes’

Brandon attempts to justify disbelieving St. Irenaeus’s list by pointing to two alleged mistakes St. Irenaeus made: first, according to Brandon, St. Irenaeus mistakenly believed that Christ “lived to be past his fifties while the Gospels tell us that Jesus was in his thirties,” and second, St. Irenaeus mistakenly believed that Sts. Peter and Paul founded the Church in Rome. Regarding the first claim, as I (Bryan) have pointed out elsewhere:

A person’s credibility regarding the Apostolic Tradition does not depend on being infallible about all the details of Christ’s life, including His age at death. … [St. Irenaeus] never says that Jesus was fifty [or older] when He died. If you look at what at what he actually says, you won’t find a statement that is false, unless you read into it what he does not say. He is making a theological argument, based on the fact that Jesus exceeded the age of thirty, against those who were claiming that Jesus was crucified at the age of thirty. But this does not entail that St. Irenaeus believed Jesus was not thirty-three when He died. Even if it is true that such language (i.e., “Thou art not yet fifty years old”) is fittingly applied to one who is already past the age of forty, it does not entail that St. Irenaeus believed that Jesus was actually older than forty if St. Irenaeus believed that (a) the Jews were not attempting to claim that Jesus was already in His forties, but were attempting to claim by way of an a fortiori argument that He was not even yet to *that* period, and (b) that the one who has exceeded the age of thirty already begins thereby to taste of older age, which is only manifested more fully as one advances from forty to fifty. So given that this more charitable reading is available, it would be uncharitable to presume unnecessarily that he was ignorant on this point. But again, even if he did believe that Jesus was older than forty, this does not discredit him as a patristic witness.¹²³

Regarding the second claim, I (Bryan) have discussed this already in two places. In 2010 I wrote:

[B]y “founding the Church” at Rome, St. Irenaeus does not mean that St. Paul was the first Christian in Rome, or that believers were not already assembling together in Rome until St. Paul arrived in Rome. When speaking of founding the Church at Rome, St. Papias and St. Irenaeus are referring to establishing its apostolic foundation as an apostolic [particular] Church. The ‘founding’ is not temporal per se, but missional.¹²⁴

And in 2011, I (Bryan) wrote:

When St. Irenaeus says that St. Peter and St. Paul laid the foundation for the particular Church at Rome, he doesn’t mean that they were the first Christians there, or that only when Sts. Peter and Paul arrived did the Christians meet together. Only persons who didn’t believe in (or know about) apostolic succession would think that’s what St. Irenaeus meant. He means, of course, establishing the Church at Rome as an apostolic Church, and thus having bishops ordained by an Apostle. It could not be a Church until either an Apostle was present, or a bishop was established there by an Apostle, or by bishops having succession from the Apostles.¹²⁵

Brandon later qualifies his claim regarding St. Irenaeus saying that Sts. Peter and Paul founded the Church at Rome, writing:

I’ve not argued that Irenaeus statement is necessarily false. The only thing I’ve said is that we need to be careful how we understand this statement because if we force it to be read in an overly literal fashion it creates problems.⁵⁰

We completely concur. Brandon has interpreted ‘founded’ in a Protestant sense, and thus misread St. Irenaeus. This is why Brandon thinks that St. Paul’s reference to the church that meets in the house of Prisca and Aquila disproves St. Irenaeus’s claim (Rom 16:5). But this overlooks the distinction between a particular Church, which is also called a diocese today, and a house-church, and thus Brandon’s criticism begs the question. Simply noting that the word “church” occurs in Romans 16 does not settle the issue, nor does pointing out what was as obvious to St. Irenaeus as it is to us, namely, that there were Christians in Rome before St. Paul or St. Peter ever arrived there. Regarding Brandon’s claim that the fact that Christians in Rome met in synagogues until the Edict of Claudius disproves St. Irenaeus, he misunderstands St. Irenaeus’s point, namely, that the Roman Christians acquired apostolic succession from Sts. Peter and Paul.

In the section of Against Heresies in which the list of Roman monarchical bishops is located St. Irenaeus is discussing the succession of bishops from the Apostles. He is seeking to show that the Apostles did not pass along secret doctrines, for if they did, the men succeeding the Apostles would have received it. Hence in 3.3.1, he says: “We can enumerate those who were appointed by the Apostles as bishops in the churches as their successors even to our time, men who taught or knew nothing of the sort that they madly imagine.” St. Irenaeus claims that these successions could be listed for every Church, but uses the succession from “only one of them, the church that is greatest, most ancient, and known to all, founded and set up by the two most glorious apostles Peter and Paul at Rome…” (3.3.2) What St. Irenaeus says in 3.3.1 about the bishops being the successors of the Apostles informs the proper interpretation of what he means in 3.3.2 and 3.3.3 when he speaks of two particular Apostles founding a Church. To found a Church means for an apostle to leave at least one bishop in oversight of that city: “After founding and building up the church, the blessed apostles delivered the ministry of the episcopate to Linus…” (3.3.3) Such a Church would thereby have an apostolic foundation insofar as the episcopal line had direct contact with an apostle at some point, insuring that the doctrine Christ imparted to the Apostles Apostles would also have been handed on in that city. St. Irenaeus’s point in this section of AH is to prove that there is not a body of secret doctrines from the Apostles that is unknown to the successors of the Apostles. Hence after giving the succession of the bishops of Rome he adds, “This is a complete proof that the life-giving faith is one and the same, preserved and transmitted in the church from the apostles up till now.” When we understand ‘founded’ as St. Irenaeus understood ‘founded,’ it becomes clear that the Roman Church having been founded by Sts. Peter and Paul does not entail either that there were no Christians or presbyters in that city prior to the founding of that Church, or that that St. Irenaeus thought there were no Christians or presbyters in Rome prior to the founding of the Church there.

(4.) Differences in the successions lists of the bishops in Rome

Then Brandon claims that the differences between the various accounts of the succession in Rome are a reason to doubt the truth of St. Irenaeus’s list. Brandon notes that Tertullian tells us that St. Peter ordained St. Clement. Then Brandon writes:

The only problem with this is that when we compare it to the list from Irenaeus we notice that Irenaeus lists Linus, Anacletus, then Clement. …

… Tertullian proposes a different belief about who Peter ordained to his episcopal role.

This “problem” is easily solved in much the way that Brandon is used to solving apparent discrepancies between the Gospel accounts of the life of Christ. Nothing prevented St. Peter from ordaining multiple men at the same time with the third grade of Holy Orders. But as already explained, having the third grade of Holy Orders within a particular Church does not entail having supreme jurisdictional authority over that particular Church. Hence Sts. Cletus and Clement could have been auxiliary bishops during St. Linus’s episcopate. What lies behind Brandon’s mistake here is his conflation of jurisdictional authority and the third grade of Holy Orders. Because he does not distinguish them, he mistakenly assumes that if St. Peter ordained St. Clement, then that conflicts with St. Irenaeus’s claim that St. Linus was the first bishop of Rome after St. Peter. Distinguishing jurisdictional authority and the third grade of Holy Orders allows one to see that there is no necessary conflict at all. But because according to St. Jerome there was some confusion among Christians in St. Jerome’s time regarding whether St. Linus or St. Clement was “second after the apostle,” therefore Brandon writes::

The competing traditions show us that we need to interact with the Fathers knowing that there are mistakes and discrepancies.

Indeed, undoubtedly there are mistakes and discrepancies in the patristic writings. But none justifies calling into question the veracity of St. Irenaeus’s list, or the claim by all nine lists we have, i.e., (1) from St. Hegesippus through St. Epiphanius,¹²⁶ (2) from the ancient Roman Canon of the Mass,¹²⁷ (3) from St. Irenaeus,¹²⁸ (4) from Julius Africanus (who composed the five books of his Chronographiai between AD 212 and 221, and which Eusebius claimed to have in its entirety) through Eusebius, (5) from St. Jerome,¹²⁹ (6) from the third century Poem against Marcion,¹³⁰ (7) from St. Hippolytus in the Liberian Catalogue,¹³¹ (8) from St. Optatus,¹³² (9) and from St. Augustine,¹³³ that there was a succession of bishops in Rome from St. Peter, any more than it justifies calling into question every patristic claim, something Brandon does not do, because to do so would be to embrace ecclesial deism to the full.¹³⁴ And all of the nine lists list St. Linus as the first after St. Peter.¹³⁵ In fact, the minor discrepancies between the lists of Roman bishops only add evidential strength to the truth that there was such a succession, because they suggest the independence of the testimonial sources for that succession rather than complete dependence on a single list, just as the variations in the Gospel accounts do not detract from the veracity of the story they tell of the life of Christ, but support it by showing each of the four sources to be in some respect an independent witness.

(5.) The testimony of St. Irenaeus’s arguments

St. Irenaeus himself states that he knows more than merely the list of bishops in Rome; he claims to know about the practices of the previous bishops of Rome, all the way back to St. Sixtus, when he writes the following to St. Victor, bishop of Rome in the last decade of the second century regarding a dispute about when to celebrate Easter, and thus when to commence and end the Lenten fast:

And this variety among the observers [of the fasts] had not its origin in our time, but long before in that of our predecessors, some of whom probably, being not very accurate in their observance of it, handed down to posterity the custom as it had, through simplicity or private fancy, been [introduced among them]. And yet nevertheless all these lived in peace one with another, and we also keep peace together. Thus, in fact, the difference [in observing] the fast establishes the harmony of [our common] faith. And the presbyters preceding Soter in the government of the Church which you now rule— I mean, Anicetus and Pius, Hyginus and Telesphorus, and Sixtus— did neither themselves observe it [after that fashion], nor permit those with them to do so. Notwithstanding this, those who did not keep [the feast in this way] were peacefully disposed towards those who came to them from other dioceses in which it was [so] observed although such observance was [felt] in more decided contrariety [as presented] to those who did not fall in with it; and none were ever cast out [of the Church] for this matter. On the contrary, those presbyters who preceded you, and who did not observe [this custom], sent the Eucharist to those of other dioceses who did observe it.¹³⁶

First notice that St. Irenaeus twice here refers to the monarchical bishops of Rome as “presbyters.”¹³⁷ Again, this shows that when the patristic authors Brandon cites refer to “presbyters” in the Church of Rome, this does not rule out the existence of monarchical bishops at those time, because such bishops too are presbyters, and can be included in the list of presbyters ruling the Church at Rome.¹³⁸ Second, notice that St. Irenaeus here, presumably writing from Lyon, France, as the bishop of the Church at Lyon, traces the episcopal predecessors of St. Victor back from St. Soter to St. Sixtus, who was the bishop of the Church at Rome from AD 115-125. There were only two bishops (Sts. Evaristus and Alexander I), and roughly eighteen years (AD 97-115) between the episcopates of St. Clement and St. Sixtus. St. Irenaeus is here not only claiming to know how these bishops [from St. Sixtus to St. Soter] themselves practiced the Lenten fast, and what these bishops did not permit the members of the diocese to do regarding the Lenten fast. Irenaeus is also claiming to know what these bishops allowed visiting Christians from other dioceses to do in Rome regarding the Lenten fast, how these bishops were disposed toward these visiting Christians, and even that these bishops sent the Eucharist to these visitors.¹³⁹

St. Irenaeus’s argument here to St. Victor could carry persuasive force only if the premises he uses were known to St. Victor or were in some way verifiable by St. Victor. And a fortiori by living memory the bishop of Rome and the Church at Rome would know more about its own recent history than would the bishop of Lyon, all other things being equal. St. Irenaeus’s argument thus presupposes that the Church at Rome also knew these truths about its own history, and that St. Irenaeus knew that Pope Victor knew or could verify these truths concerning its own history. Otherwise, St. Irenaeus’s argument would carry no weight at all with the bishop of Rome. So Brandon’s claim that St. Irenaeus’s succession list is false and made up, makes no sense of the narrative between St. Irenaeus and St. Victor, because it would require the Christians in the Church at Rome to be massively deceived about their own history, so deceived that the deception could be used in an argument by an outsider to oppose what St. Victor was doing.

(6.) False dilemmas

Then Brandon says:

Instead of establishing a list of succession in an official episcopal office Irenaeus is particularly focused on the doctrine handed on to the bearers of the tradition.

Here, just as with St. Hegesippus, Brandon makes use of an implicit but false dilemma: if a person is focused on the doctrine being handed down, then that person cannot also be focused on truthfully reporting the episcopal succession. Hence therefore that person’s report of such a succession is unreliable. The false dilemma is that either the person cares for the truth of the doctrine, or cares for the truth concerning the succession, but cannot at the same time be concerned about both. This false dilemma is a way of attacking a person’s character, but it hides the personal attack under the dilemma, by affirming that the person is truly concerned about some good thing, i.e., the truth of the doctrine. To see how this false dilemma attacks the person’s character, imagine that you have two daughters, and a visitor tells your younger daughter that because you love your older daughter, you do not love the younger daughter, and that your words expressing love to your younger daughter therefore cannot be trusted. When we put it plainly like this, it is clear that the visitor is not only engaged in a logical fallacy (since his conclusion does not follow from his premise), he is also engaged in a personal attack against you. But this is precisely what Brandon is doing to St. Irenaeus. He is claiming that because St. Irenaeus is focused on doctrine, therefore St. Irenaeus’s words about the succession of bishops in Rome are false and unreliable. And that is no less of a personal attack upon St. Irenaeus than what the visitor in our hypothetical would be doing if he were saying this about Brandon to Brandon’s own children. It is a violation of the Golden Rule, in this case passing itself off as ‘scholarship.’ A personal attack is still a personal attack, even if one puts the label ‘scholarship’ on it.

A second false dilemma is that either a list of twelve bishops that emphasizes the sixth and twelfth bishop is false, or it would not exist. This false dilemma requires that we choose between these. Regarding the numbers six and twelve in the list, Brandon is following Lampe. And as explained above, Lampe is here assuming that the number twelve was a priori essential to the creation of the list. Lampe is using that assumption as a support for his conclusion that the list is a fictive construction designed by St. Irenaeus to fall into a pattern of twelve, rather than intended to be an historically accurate account of the actual episcopal succession in Rome from St. Peter to the time of St. Irenaeus. In this way Lampe’s a priori assumption is doing the argumentative work, because the historical evidence itself does not produce that conclusion without that assumption. And his assumption is question-begging; it presupposes that it could not have been the case that actually there had been twelve successive bishops leading the Church at Rome from the time of St. Peter, and that St. Irenaeus wrote his list in a way that highlighted that number while remaining entirely truthful and reliable as an historical witness regarding the succession of those twelve bishops in Rome. Here the false dilemma is the implicit assumption that the list cannot be both truthful and have twelve members, the sixth one being referred to as the sixth one. That is, we are told implicitly that we have to choose between there being twelve members, and it being a true list, that it cannot be both true and have twelve members.

Brandon’s false dilemma operates here in the same way that higher critics use St. Luke’s account of Jesus prophesying the fall of Jerusalem in order to date St. Luke’s gospel after AD 70, presupposing that there is no supernatural, and thus that his gospel could not have been written prior to AD 70. But such a presupposition assumes the impossibility of divine prophecy. If God exists and is omniscient and atemporal, and thus supernatural prophecy is possible, then the prophecy concerning the fall of Jerusalem could have been made prior to AD 70. Likewise, if there truly were twelve bishops of Rome up to St. Eleutherius, then when approaching St. Irenaeus’s list we are not forced to choose between the list having twelve members (and thus a sixth member), and the list being true. Nor must we choose between St. Irenaeus having a commitment to pure doctrine, and his having a commitment to historical accuracy. Most of us would take offense if others approached our speech or writings in that way, as though if we showed concern for the truth of our claims about atemporal matters, then all our claims about temporal matters could be treated as false or suspect. And yet this is precisely what Lampe and Brandon do to Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus.

Of course we have no good reason to believe that St. Irenaeus made no errors in what he wrote. But neither do we have any good reason to believe that the list he set down was erroneous. In short, no data Brandon has provided in his essay gives any reason to doubt the veracity of the lists given by Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus. What is doing the work in ‘weakening’ their accounts is not any evidence or good argumentation, but only slightly veiled and entirely unjustified personal attacks on the moral character of these two saints.

(7.) Evidence in St. Irenaeus’s account of the Gnostics

As St. Irenaeus reveals in his dialogue with Pope Victor that he knows more about the succession of bishops in Rome than merely a list of names, so also in his account of the Gnostics he reveals further knowledge of the earlier popes. Moreover, the apologetic and polemical anti-Gnostic nature of the writings in which St. Irenaeus makes these references to early Roman bishops adds additional evidential support to the veracity of his historical claims concerning the early Roman bishops, as we explain below.

First, in his account of the Gnostic heretic Cerdo, St. Irenaeus writes:

Others of them [Carpocratians] employ outward marks, branding their disciples inside the lobe of the right ear. From among these also arose Marcellina, who came to Rome under [the episcopate of] Anicetus, and, holding these doctrines, she led multitudes astray.¹⁴⁰

Cerdo was one who took his system from the followers of Simon, and came to live at Rome in the time of Hyginus, who held the ninth place in the episcopal succession from the apostles downwards. He taught that the God proclaimed by the law and the prophets was not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the former was known, but the latter unknown; while the one also was righteous, but the other benevolent. 2. Marcion of Pontus succeeded him, and developed his doctrine.¹⁴¹

He specifies that Marcellina came to Rome under the episcopate of St. Anicetus (AD 155-166), and Cerdo came to live in Rome during the time of St. Hyginus (AD 136-140), and identifies St. Hyginus as the ninth in the episcopal succession from the Apostles. Of course that would make St. Hyginus’s eighth in the succession of bishops after the Apostles, numbering St. Linus first after the Apostles, as St. Irenaeus numbers the bishops in Book III. Elsewhere in Book III, St. Irenaeus writes:

For Valentinus came to Rome in the time of Hyginus, flourished under Pius, and remained until Anicetus. Cerdon, too, Marcion’s predecessor, himself arrived in the time of Hyginus, who was the ninth bishop. Coming frequently into the Church, and making public confession, he thus remained, one time teaching in secret, and then again making public confession; but at last, having been denounced for corrupt teaching, he was excommunicated from the assembly of the brethren. Marcion, then, succeeding him, flourished under Anicetus, who held the tenth place of the episcopate.¹⁴²

Here notice that St. Irenaeus describes St. Hyginus as “the ninth bishop,” refers to Pius as serving between St. Hyginus and St. Anicetus, and then describes St. Anicetus as one who “held the tenth place of the episcopate.” St. Hyginus was ninth from the Apostles, but St. Anicetus, who was therefore eleventh from the Apostles, “held the tenth place of the episcopate.” St. Irenaeus is clearly distinguishing between nth place from the Apostles, and nth place in the episcopate. More broadly, St. Irenaeus is using the periods of time served by each successive bishop of Rome as historical markers by which the time when particular events occurred can be specified, much as the Romans used the reigns of Roman emperors to do the same. St. Hyginus was bishop from AD 136-140, St. Pius was bishop from AD 140-155, and St. Anicetus was bishop from 155-166. St. Irenaeus’s work, Against Heresies, was written between AD 175-185, so St. Irenaeus is writing about events that took place within his own lifetime, because as a young man he was an auditor of St. Polycarp, who was martyred in AD 155. In his letter to Florinus, St. Irenaeus describes his memories of listening to St. Polycarp:

For I distinctly remember the incidents of that time better than events of recent occurrence … I can describe the very place in which the Blessed Polycarp used to sit when he discoursed … his personal appearance … and how he would describe his intercourse with John and with the rest who had seen the Lord, and how he would relate their words … I can testify in the sight of God, that if the blessed and apostolic elder had heard anything of this kind, he would have cried out, and stopped his ears, and said after his wont, ‘O good God, for what times hast thou kept me that I should endure such things?’ … This can be shown from the letters which he wrote to the neighbouring Churches for their confirmation….¹⁴³

So although St. Irenaeus may not have been in Rome at the time these events occurred, in writing about the arrival of the Gnostics in Rome, he is writing about events that occurred within his own lifetime. Tertullian, though approximately twenty to thirty years younger than St. Irenaeus, corroborates St. Irenaeus’s statements in his work titled Against the Valentinians, Tertullian writes:

We know, I say, most fully their actual origin, and we are quite aware why we call them Valentinians, although they affect to disavow their name. They have departed, it is true, from their founder, yet is their origin by no means destroyed; and even if it chance to be changed, the very change bears testimony to the fact. Valentinus had expected to become a bishop, because he was an able man both in genius and eloquence. Being indignant, however, that another obtained the dignity by reason of a claim which confessorship had given him, he broke with the church of the true faith.¹⁴⁴

Valentinus came to Rome expecting to become a bishop, but he was indignant when “another obtained the dignity.” That “another” was St. Anicetus, who became pope in AD 155. If there had been a plurality of presbyter-bishops with equal authority, this other man’s becoming bishop would not be cause for Valentinus to become indignant, because there would not be reason that another presbyter-bishop could not be added to their number. This indicates that in AD 155, even the Gnostics knew there was a monepiscopacy in Rome.

The testimony of St. Irenaeus and Tertullian is supported also by St. Cyprian of Cartharge, and St. Epiphanius. St. Cyprian of Carthage writes:

And this, too, while as yet the more terrible plagues of heresy had not broken forth; while Marcion of Pontus had not yet emerged from Pontus, whose master Cerdon came to Rome—while Hyginus was still bishop, who was the ninth bishop in that city—whom Marcion followed, and with greater impudence adding other enhancements to his crime, and more daringly set himself to blaspheme against God the Father, the Creator, and armed with sacrilegious arms the heretical madness that rebelled against the Church with greater wickedness and determination.¹⁴⁵

And St. Epiphanius writes:

One Cerdo succeeds these and Heracleon—a member of the same school, who took his cue from Simon and Satornilus. He was an immigrant from Syria who came to Rome and appeared there, utter wretch that he was, as his own scourge and the scourge of his followers…. So these people, who had found the way and yet wanted to get hold of the reflection which had been formed in their imaginations, not only lost the nourishment which God had, as it were, graciously placed in their mouths, but drew destruction upon themselves as well. Cerdo, then, lived in the time of bishop Hyginus, the ninth in succession from the apostles James, Peter and Paul…. After a short time in Rome he imparted his venom to Marcion, and Marcion thus became his successor. (The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Bk 1, Against the Cerdonians, Sect. 41)

Marcion was born around 110 AD. His father was a bishop of Sinope in Pontus. Marcion was made a bishop (but not the diocesan bishop) in his home town. He was eventually expelled from his own church by his father, when he committed a grave sin with a virgin. The Against All Heresies fragment, which is attached as an appendix to the works of Tertullian, but may have been written by St. Justin Martyr, records that Marcion was excommunicated from the Church in Pontus “because of a rape committed on a certain virgin.”¹⁴⁶ After he was not allowed to re-admittance to the Church in Pontus, he traveled to Rome, arriving sometime around 140 AD. St. Epiphanius says that Marcion “arrived at Rome itself after the death of Hyginus, the bishop of Rome” but before the election of Pius.¹⁴⁷ He met with the elders [presbyteros] of the Church, who had been taught by the disciples of the apostles, and sought admission to the Church. This, of course, is around the very same time Hermas wrote the Shepherd, according to Brandon. Given that Hermas wrote around AD 140, St. Epiphanius indicates that the presbyters in Rome at that time were not presbyters in the Presbyterian sense. They may have been presbyter-bishops or mere presbyters, but either way, they were part of an episcopal polity.

According to Tertullian when Marcion sought entry to the Church of Rome, he made a donation of two hundred sesterces, which is a significant sum of money.¹⁴⁸ This money was later returned.¹⁴⁹ But the presbyters were not willing to receive him. St. Epiphanius explains:

And since they were unwilling to receive him, he asked them plainly, ‘Why will you not receive me?’ ‘We cannot without your worthy father’s permission,’ was their answer. There is one faith and one concord, and we cannot oppose our excellent colleague, your father. Becoming jealous then and roused to great anger and arrogance Marcion made the rent, founding his own sect and saying, ‘I am going to tear your church, and make a rent in it forever.’ He did indeed make a rent of no small proportions, not by rending the church but by rending himself and his converts.¹⁵⁰

In AD 144 Marcion was excommunicated from the Church at Rome, which was then under the episcopacy of Pope Pius. This date marks the beginning of the Marcionite sect.¹⁵¹ Marcion started his own sect, with bishops, priests, and deacons, again indicating that the polity he knew was episcopal, not Presbyterian.¹⁵² The work titled Dialogues of Adamantius, composed sometimes around AD 300, indicates that Marcion’s followers referred to him as a bishop.¹⁵²

Meg. Marcion was my bishop (episcopus ).
Ad. Out of whom, Marcion having died, a great many bishops, or rather, false-bishops have they been among you. Why doesn’t any of them make use of a name, but only Marcion’s, who even brought about a schism in the one church?¹⁵³

In the West, his sect continued to exist for at least 300 years after his excommunication; in the East, it lasted even longer.¹⁵⁴ About ten years after his excommunication, he encountered St. Polycarp in Rome, and asked St. Polycarp if he recognized him, to which St. Polycarp famously responded, “I do know you, the first-born of Satan.”¹⁵⁵

Valentinus was from Egypt. Cerdo was from Syria. Marcion was from Pontus. Why did they come to Rome? Because they understood, as Simon Magus had understood, that this was the place most efficiently to spread their beliefs. All three of these who came to Rome sought to become the bishop of Rome, in order to take control of the Church. We already mentioned above the statement from Tertullian regarding Valentinus’s indignance that he was not selected bishop. Marcion too was “seized with jealously” when he was not selected for bishop of Rome, but Pope Pius was selected.¹⁵⁶ That is why it is probably no accident that he arrived in Rome during the interregnum, and sought to grease the process with a large financial donation.

The point, however, is not merely to tell the story of the interaction of these Gnostics with the Church in Rome. The point is that if on any historical point St. Irenaeus had been in error concerning the actions of the Gnostics in relation to the bishops of Rome, the Gnostics would have used such an error at least rhetorically to discredit St. Irenaeus’s entire argument. Therefore St. Irenaeus could not afford, apologetically speaking, to be making up “fictive constructions’ regarding the early succession of bishops in Rome, because any such errors would have undermined the argumentative power of his entire apologetic and polemical endeavors. St. Irenaeus would not in AD 180 make up claims regarding Pius taking the episcopacy in AD 140 after Hyginus in a polemic against Gnostics for the same reason that Brandon would not make up historical claims regarding events that happened in 1974, in a polemical article against Catholics written in 2014. The reason is obvious; he would thereby discredit his whole article, because Catholics old enough to remember those events (and whose parents were old enough to remember events much older), would call him on it, and thereby destroy the entire credibility of his article. So the polemical context in which St. Irenaeus makes these historical claims about the interaction of the Gnostics with the early bishops of Rome gives evidential strength to his claims, and does not allow them to be dismissed as “fictive constructions.”

(8.) Which: the Petrine pattern or massive rejection of the patristics?

Claiming on the basis of non-evidential silence that St. Irenaeus is distorting history regarding the early bishops of Rome would require us on the same basis to treat many other recognized saints as dishonest distorters of history, saints such as St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – 215), who, in the sixth book of his Hypotyposes, written around AD 190, very close to the same time St. Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies, claimed that Peter and James and John “did not contend for glory, but made St. James the Just, bishop of Jerusalem.”¹⁵⁷ St. Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem from AD 350 – 386, and thus one who would know the internal living memory of the Church in Jerusalem refers to St. James the Just as “James the bishop of this Church.”¹⁵⁸ But claiming that St. Clement of Alexandria is untrustworthy about Sts. Peter and James [the brother of John] and John making St. James the Just the first bishop of Jerusalem would require us to believe that St. Clement of Alexandria is also untrustworthy about Mark writing down St. Peter’s Gospel, and that the whole of St. Clement’s testimony is untrustworthy, all other things being equal.¹⁵⁹ If, however, St. Clement of Alexandria is trustworthy about St. Peter’s role in making St. James the Just the first bishop of Jerusalem, then we have a good reason to expect that St. Peter would also establish an episcopal office in Rome.

St. Clement of Alexandria is not alone in arguing that the succession of bishops in Jerusalem was not a second century development. According to Eusebius, by the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt (AD 132-136), there had already been fifteen successive bishops of the Church at Jerusalem. He writes:

The chronology of the bishops of Jerusalem I have nowhere found preserved in writing; for tradition says that they were all short lived.

But I have learned this much from writings, that until the siege of the Jews, which took place under Adrian, there were fifteen bishops in succession there, all of whom are said to have been of Hebrew descent, and to have received the knowledge of Christ in purity, so that they were approved by those who were able to judge of such matters, and were deemed worthy of the episcopate. For their whole church consisted then of believing Hebrews who continued from the days of the apostles until the siege which took place at this time; in which siege the Jews, having again rebelled against the Romans, were conquered after severe battles.

But since the bishops of the circumcision ceased at this time, it is proper to give here a list of their names from the beginning. The first, then, was James, the so-called brother of the Lord; the second, Symeon; the third, Justus; the fourth, Zacchæus; the fifth, Tobias; the sixth, Benjamin; the seventh, John; the eighth, Matthias; the ninth, Philip; the tenth, Seneca; the eleventh, Justus; the twelfth, Levi; the thirteenth, Ephres; the fourteenth, Joseph; and finally, the fifteenth, Judas.

These are the bishops of Jerusalem that lived between the age of the apostles and the time referred to, all of them belonging to the circumcision.¹⁶⁰

That is, the Church at Jerusalem had already installed its fifteenth successive bishop, and according to Brandon the Church in Rome would not have its first bishop for at least fourteen more years in AD 150.

St. Mark’s Cathedral, Alexandria

Likewise, we know that St. Peter, writing from Rome, had adopted St. Mark almost as a son (1 Peter 5:13). Mark, having been discipled by St. Peter, and written down the Gospel St. Peter preached, went to Alexandria under St. Peter’s instruction, and founded the Church there. Eusebius writes:

And they say that this Mark was the first that was sent to Egypt, and that he proclaimed the Gospel which he had written, and first established churches in Alexandria. … When Nero was in the eighth year of his reign, Annianus succeeded Mark the Evangelist in the administration of the parish of Alexandria.¹⁶¹

When St. Mark went to Alexandria, he established an episcopacy, whose first occupant, after himself, was Annianus.

The Apostolic Constitutions gives this same testimony concerning the origin of the bishops of Alexandria:

XLVI. Now concerning those bishops which have been ordained in our lifetime, we let you know that they are these:— James the bishop of Jerusalem, the brother of our Lord; upon whose death the second was Simeon the son of Cleopas; after whom the third was Judas the son of James. Of Cæsarea of Palestine, the first was Zacchæus, who was once a publican; after whom was Cornelius, and the third Theophilus. Of Antioch, Euodius, ordained by me Peter; and Ignatius by Paul. Of Alexandria, Annianus was the first, ordained by Mark the evangelist; the second Avilius by Luke, who was also an evangelist. Of the church of Rome, Linus the son of Claudia was the first, ordained by Paul; 2 Timothy 4:21 and Clemens, after Linus’ death, the second, ordained by me Peter. Of Ephesus, Timotheus, ordained by Paul; and John, by me John. Of Smyrna, Aristo the first; after whom Stratæas the son of Lois; 2 Timothy 1:5 and the third Aristo. Of Pergamus, Gaius. Of Philadelphia, Demetrius, by me. Of Cenchrea, Lucius, by Paul. Of Crete, Titus. Of Athens, Dionysius. Of Tripoli in Phœnicia, Marathones. Of Laodicea in Phrygia, Archippus. Of Colossæ;, Philemon. Of Borea in Macedonia, Onesimus, once the servant of Philemon. Of the churches of Galatia, Crescens. Of the parishes of Asia, Aquila and Nicetas. Of the church of Æginæ, Crispus. These are the bishops who are entrusted by us with the parishes in the Lord; whose doctrine keep always in mind, and observe our words. And may the Lord be with you now, and to endless ages, as Himself said to us when He was about to be taken up to His own God and Father. For says He, Lo, I am with you all the days, until the end of the world. Amen.¹⁶²

St. Jerome likewise tells us that St. Mark went to Alexandria, and started the Church there.¹⁶³ And St. Gregory Nazianzus, a contemporary of St. Athanasius writes that “he [i.e. St. Athanasius] is led up to the throne of Saint Mark, to succeed him in piety, no less than in office.”¹⁶⁴ So if these witnesses are reliable in their report that St. Peter sent St. Mark to Alexandria, and St. Mark by St. Peter’s instruction there founded the line of bishops of Alexandria, then we have at least two outside cases in which St. Peter was involved in establishing an episcopal office: Jerusalem, and Antioch. This gives us greater reason to believe that he would do in Rome as well, unless we are prepared to dismiss all these sources as well.

But then there is Antioch. The Chronography that Julius Africanus published in 221 and which Eusebius used in compiling his Church History apparently listed St. Evodius as the first bishop of Antioch. From this source Eusebius writes, “At this time Ignatius was known as the second bishop of Antioch, Evodius having been the first.”¹⁶⁵ Origen concurs, writing the following between AD 238 and 234 in his Homilies on Luke:

I found an elegant statement in the letter of a martyr — I mean Ignatius, the second bishop of Antioch after Peter.¹⁶⁶

Eusebius’s Chronicle

And around AD 380, St. Jerome, in his translation of Eusebius’s Chronicle, writes that in the fourth year after the 205th Olympiad (AD 42), “Primus Antiochiae episcopus ordinatur Evodius” (Evodius is ordained the first bishop of Antioch). That can be seen on the last line at the bottom of the page at the right from the fifth-century Bodleian manuscript at Oxford, which may easily be a first copy of St. Jerome’s translation.¹⁶⁷ (Click on the graphic for a larger version.) At the bottom of the page the last two lines are as follows:

primusantiochiaeepiscopusor
dinatureuodius

When the spaces between the words are included, it is “Primus Antiochiae episcopus ordinatur Evodius” (Evodius is ordained the first bishop of Antioch).

In AD 392-393 St. Jerome, to whom Brandon appeals in opposition to St. Ignatius regarding the office of bishop,¹⁶⁸ writes of St. Ignatius:

Ignatius, third bishop of the church of Antioch after Peter the apostle, condemned to the wild beasts during the persecution of Trajan, was sent bound to Rome, and when he had come on his voyage as far as Smyrna, where Polycarp the pupil of John was bishop, he wrote one epistle To the Ephesians, another To the Magnesians, a third To the Trallians, a fourth To the Romans, and going thence, he wrote To the Philadelphians and To the Smyrneans and especially To Polycarp, commending to him the church at Antioch.¹⁶⁹

Though Brandon appeals to St. Jerome to argue against monepiscopacy, St. Jerome testifies that St. Ignatius was the third bishop of the Church of Antioch after St. Peter, which, in combination with St. Jerome’s earlier record of St. Evodius being “ordained the first bishop of Antioch,” implies that according to St. Jerome, St. Peter was the first bishop of Antioch.

Similarly, Socrates Scholasticus in the 430s writes the following in his Historia Ecclesiastica:

Ignatius third bishop of Antioch in Syria from the apostle Peter, who also had held intercourse with the apostles themselves, saw a vision of angels hymning in alternate chants the Holy Trinity. Accordingly he introduced the mode of singing he had observed in the vision into the Antiochian church; whence it was transmitted by tradition to all the other churches.¹⁷⁰

And St. John Chrysostom, who was born in Antioch in 347, testifies in a homily to the Christians of Antioch that St. Ignatius was ordained by St. Peter:

And if you will, let us come first to the praise of his episcopate. Does this seem to be one crown alone? Come, then, let us unfold it in speech, and you will see both two, and three, and more produced from it. For I do not wonder at the man alone that he seemed to be worthy of so great an office, but that he obtained this office from those saints, and that the hands of the blessed apostles touched his sacred head…..For just as any one taking a great stone from a foundation hastens by all means to introduce an equivalent to it, lest he should shake the whole building, and make it more unsound, so, accordingly, when Peter was about to depart from here, the grace of the Spirit introduced another teacher equivalent to Peter, so that the building already completed should not be made more unsound by the insignificance of the successor. We have reckoned up then five crowns, from the importance of the office, from the dignity of those who ordained to it, from the difficulty of the time, from the size of the city, from the virtue of him who transmitted the episcopate to him.¹⁷¹

And Theodoret, also from Antioch, and bishop of Cyrrus (about 83 miles northeast of Antioch), writes the following in his Dialogues:

You have no doubt heard of the illustrious Ignatius, who received episcopal grace by the hand of the great Peter, and after ruling the church of Antioch, wore the crown of martyrdom.¹⁷²

If St. Ignatius was ordained bishop of Antioch by St. Peter, and was the third bishop of Antioch, St. Evodius being the second after St. Peter, then we have the makings of a clear pattern. St. Peter establishes a monepiscopacy in Jerusalem and installs St. James the Just as Jerusalem’s first bishop, and then St. Peter establishes a monepiscopacy in Antioch, and installs St. Evodius as its first bishop in the early-mid 40s. Then from Rome St. Peter sends St. Mark to Alexandria, and there by his instruction St. Mark founds the episcopacy in Alexandria. Sometime later St. Peter ordains St. Ignatius, and designates him to succeed St. Evodius as the bishop of Antioch. In that case we have even more reason to expect that St. Peter would also establish an episcopal office in Rome, again, unless we are prepared to dismiss all these sources as well.

Moreover, we have some evidence that St. Peter travelled to Pontus, the region in the northeast part of present-day Turkey, extending up to the southern part of the Black Sea.¹⁷³ At least two patristic sources say that St. Peter travelled to Pontus. St. Epiphanius of Salamis writes,

Paul even reached Spain, and Peter often visited Pontus and Bithynia.¹⁷⁴

And St. Jerome writes,

Simon Peter the son of John, from the village of Bethsaida in the province of Galilee, brother of Andrew the apostle, and himself chief of the apostles, after having been bishop of the church of Antioch and having preached to the Dispersion — the believers in circumcision, in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia— pushed on to Rome in the second year of Claudius to overthrow Simon Magus[.]¹⁷⁵

But this leads us to Marcion, who was also from Pontus. Concerning Marcion, Tertullian writes the following:

After him emerged a disciple of his, one Marcion by name, a native of Pontus, son of a bishop, excommunicated because of a rape committed on a certain virgin.¹⁷⁶

And St. Epiphanius of Salamis writes:

He [Marcion] was a native of Pontus—I mean of Helenopontus and the city of Sinope, as is commonly said of him.¹⁷⁷

What does this have to do with St. Irenaeus’s testimony concerning the succession of bishops in Rome from St. Peter? Marcion was born around AD 110.¹⁷⁸ His father was Philologus, the bishop of Sinope in Pontus, a “distinguished old man” who excommunicated his son for seducing / raping a virgin, after which Marcion came to Rome shortly after the death of Pope St. Hyginus (AD 136-140).

So putting all the Pontus data together we see the following. In AD 140 the bishop of the Church in Sinope in Pontus was a “distinguished old man.” If Marcion’s father was 70 years old in AD 140, then he would have been around 37 years old when St. Ignatius was martyred, and around 30 years old when the Apostle John died. He would have been born in AD 70, just two or three years after St. Peter’s martyrdom. We have patristic testimony that St. Peter went to Pontus, and the next thing we see from the Church in Pontus is that a child born in Pontus around or shortly after the time of St. Peter’s death becomes the monepiscopal bishop of the Church in Pontus.¹⁷⁹ Once again, as in the cases of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, we find that where Peter went, he left behind an episcopacy.

What about Corinth? Tertullian shows that in AD 200 there was an Apostolic Seat in Corinth. He writes:

Come now, if you would indulge a better curiosity in the business of your salvation, run through the apostolic Churches in which the very thrones [cathedrae] of the Apostles remain still in place; in which their own authentic writings are read, giving sound to the voice and recalling the faces of each. Achaia is near you, so you have Corinth.¹⁸⁰

Tertullian thus testifies that an apostolic throne was established by the Apostles in Corinth, and existed still in his own time. About thirty years earlier, that apostolic cathedra was occupied by St. Dionysius, bishop of Corinth. In a Letter to Pope Soter, written in approximately AD 170, and later quoted by Eusebius, St. Dionysius writes:

You have also, by your very admonition, brought together the planting that was made by Peter and Paul at Rome and at Corinth; for both of them alike planted in our Corinth and taught us; and both alike, teaching similarly in Italy, suffered martyrdom at the same time.¹⁸¹

As bishop of the Church at Corinth in AD 170, St. Dionysius’s testimony concerning the Church’s recent history and living memory carries great evidential weight. He teaches that both Sts. Peter and Paul alike planted in Corinth.

Although St. Clement of Rome does not refer to a bishop in Corinth in his letter to the Corinthians at the end of the first century, St. Hegesippus (c. 110 – c. 180) does refer to bishop in Corinth in the middle of the second century. He records that the Corinthians “continued in the true faith until Primus was bishop in Corinth.”¹⁸² Eusebius says the following:

There is extant an epistle of this Clement which is acknowledged to be genuine and is of considerable length and of remarkable merit. He wrote it in the name of the church of Rome to the church of Corinth, when a sedition had arisen in the latter church. We know that this epistle also has been publicly used in a great many churches both in former times and in our own. And of the fact that a sedition did take place in the church of Corinth at the time referred to Hegesippus is a trustworthy witness.¹⁸³

Eusebius first says that St. Hegesippus is a trustworthy witness of the fact that a sedition did take place in the Church of Corinth “at the time referred to.”¹⁸⁴ Then Eusebius writes:

It is fitting to hear what he says after making some remarks about the epistle of Clement to the Corinthians.

2. His words are as follows: And the church of Corinth continued in the true faith until Primus was bishop in Corinth. I conversed with them on my way to Rome, and abode with the Corinthians many days, during which we were mutually refreshed in the true doctrine.¹⁸²

Notice that according to Eusebius, in St. Hegesippus’s writings his claim that “the church of Corinth continued in the true faith until Primus was bishop in Corinth” follows “some remarks about the epistle of Clement to the Corinthians.” Hence there are three possibilities. Either St. Hegesippus is referring to the time period leading up to the occasion under which St. Clement wrote his letter to the Corinthians (c. AD 90s) or he is referring to a time period subsequent to St. Clement’s letter but significantly prior to the time when St. Hegesippus visited Corinth, or he is referring to the present condition of the Church at Corinth at the time he visited that Church. If the first, then there was already a bishop in Corinth at the time St. Clement wrote his letter. If the second or third, what St. Hegesippus writes implies that the episcopacy of Primus is in continuity with the previous polity.

Here’s why. If the Apostles had established a Presbyterian polity in the Church of Corinth, and such was the condition when St. Clement wrote his letter to the Church of Corinth, then the subsequent rise of a monarchical bishop in Corinth would have been a departure from the true faith. But St. Hegesippus says that on his way to Rome he met with a “great many bishops,” [πλείστοις ἐπισκόποις] and that he “received the same doctrine from all” [τὴν αὐτὴν παρὰ πάντων παρείληφεν διδασκαλίαν].¹⁸⁵ So St. Hegesippus cannot be saying that the formation of an episcopacy in Corinth was a departure from the true faith, because he clearly believed that the episcopacy was part of the true faith. Because St. Hegesippus “abode with the Corinthians many days,” he thus became directly acquainted with the Corinthians’ living memory of their own Church history. This is undoubtedly part of the reason Eusebius refers to him as a “trustworthy witness” [ἀξιόχρεως μάρτυς] regarding the Corinthian sedition. He had listened to the account of the sedition, quite likely, from persons who had participated in it! So what is implied by St. Hegesippus’s account as one who knew first-hand the Corinthians’s own living memory is not only that Primus being the bishop of Corinth was fully compatible with the “true doctrine” in which he was refreshed while there, and which agreed with what he had received from the “great many bishops” he had met in his journey,” but also that both he and the Church at Corinth saw its having a bishop as in keeping with the Tradition that the Churches had received from the Apostles.

So we have evidence that St. Peter went to Jerusalem, Antioch, Pontus, and Corinth, and subsequently we find an episcopal seat in each of those four places. We have evidence that St. Peter sent St. Mark to Alexandria, and subsequently we find an episcopal seat there. That is five episcopacies, each started by St. Peter or by his instruction. This pattern shows us that it is reasonable to believe that St. Peter did the same when he went to Rome, even when non-evidential silence in the sparsity of surviving historical records written between AD 68 and AD 150 leaves the episcopacy-in-Rome question less clear than we might wish. To avoid the conclusion that the pattern of St. Peter’s activities indicates that episcopacies can be found very shortly after at least five places St. Peter visited, and thus that we can expect him to have established also an episcopacy in Rome, one would have to disbelieve not only the testimony of St. Irenaeus, but all the patristic witnesses cited above.

(9.) Evidence in St. Irenaeus’s own history

The notion that the monepiscopacy was not from the Apostles would also require denying St. Irenaeus’s own context, i.e., the truth of the teaching on Church polity he had received as a young man from St. Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, and the legitimacy of the episcopal office in the Church of Lyon St. Irenaeus had received from St. Pothinus, who was born around the year AD 87, and died at the age of ninety, in about AD 177. Eusebius writes, “Pothinus having died with the other martyrs in Gaul at ninety years of age, Irenæus succeeded him in the episcopate of the church at Lyons.”¹⁸⁶ Of his martyrdom Eusebius writes:

The blessed Pothinus, who had been entrusted with the bishopric of Lyons, was dragged to the judgment seat. He was more than ninety years of age, and very infirm, scarcely indeed able to breathe because of physical weakness; but he was strengthened by spiritual zeal through his earnest desire for martyrdom. Though his body was worn out by old age and disease, his life was preserved that Christ might triumph in it.

When he was brought by the soldiers to the tribunal, accompanied by the civil magistrates and a multitude who shouted against him in every manner as if he were Christ himself, he bore noble witness.

Being asked by the governor, Who was the God of the Christians, he replied, ‘If you are worthy, you shall know.’ Then he was dragged away harshly, and received blows of every kind. Those near him struck him with their hands and feet, regardless of his age; and those at a distance hurled at him whatever they could seize; all of them thinking that they would be guilty of great wickedness and impiety if any possible abuse were omitted. For thus they thought to avenge their own deities. Scarcely able to breathe, he was cast into prison and died after two days.¹⁸⁷

Saint Pothinus

Bishop St. Pothinus, who was already twenty years old when St. Ignatius was martyred, and was about thirteen years old when the Apostle John died, clearly believed in the monepiscopacy, and believed that it was apostolic. Brandon’s thesis would require holding not only that St. Irenaeus lied about the episcopal succession in Rome, but that bishop St. Pothinus lied about it as well, and that St. Polycarp did too.

Brandon might object that he is not claiming that St. Irenaeus “lied,” but merely that St. Irenaeus mistakenly read the monepiscopacy back into the history of the Church at Rome. But if Brandon is claiming that St. Irenaeus had before him a list of successive sets of simultaneously serving presbyter-bishops each having equal authority, and he arbitrarily picked a succession of names from that list, and designated them as monepiscopal bishops, then Brandon is claiming that St. Irenaeus lied, even if Brandon himself is not using that term. St. Irenaeus did not lie about the episcopal succession in Rome only if the list of twelve names he wrote down was the same list he had received by testimony, by parchment, and/or by direct observation. But if St. Irenaeus received from others this list of twelve bishops extending back to St. Peter, then this list he received stands as an independent historical piece of positive evidence to the episcopal succession in Rome. So if Brandon is not claiming that St. Irenaeus lied, then the list of twelve (excepting perhaps the more recent bishops Sts. Eleutherius and Soter) already existed as an independent piece of direct evidence of the episcopal succession in Rome from St. Peter. Just as telling a lie requires telling more lies to cover it up, so an accusation of lying requires compounding the accusations, not only regarding whatever else the accused said, but also regarding all that was said by his contemporaries agreeing with and confirming what he said. So the widespread evidence regarding both the monepiscopacies throughout the world at the time, as well as the evidence for their apostolic origin, must also be treated as resulting from lies or deception. One cannot simply dismiss St. Irenaeus while embracing the rest of the patristic testimony concerning the episcopacy, because they stand in agreement. To accuse St. Irenaeus of lying, therefore, is to accuse all the Church Fathers who address this subject of lying or perpetuating lies.

The error here is the inverse of the Gnostics error. The Gnostics error was its claim that there was some secret that the Apostles did not tell the Churches. By contrast, instead of claiming that there was some secret the Apostles did not tell, and to which only the later Gnostics were privy, Brandon’s thesis implies that what the Apostles said about the proper ecclesial polity became a secret to the universal Church by the second half of the second century, such that all the Church Fathers, and the whole entire Church forgot and abandoned in less than a century what the Apostles had taught concerning proper polity. But if we accept the patristic evidence concerning St. Peter’s participation in the establishment of a monepiscopacy in Jerusalem, and his establishing a monepiscopacy in Antioch, then to accept Brandon’s thesis we have to believe that when St. Peter arrived to Rome he abandoned his established practice and switched to a Presbyterian form of government. In short, given Brandon’s thesis we must choose between the inverse-Gnostic error, and an ad hoc thesis that at the very least makes monepiscopacy an apostolic option, and makes St. Peter and St. Paul (for he too was active in setting up the Church in Antioch) reject their previous pattern of Church of polity. That is the consequence that follows from Brandon’s treatment of St. Irenaeus.

Further, as explained above, because St. Irenaeus’s purpose is indeed polemical in his intention of refuting the Gnostics, if there had been no succession of bishops, St. Irenaeus would be setting himself up for immediate refutation by those Gnostics. He could set forth the list confidently as an effective polemic only if what he was saying was public knowledge, or accessible as public knowledge, i.e., the memories, records, tombs, and even relics of these bishops were well-known among the Christians of Rome.¹⁸⁸ The only way to remove this contextual evidence is to stipulate that not only were Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus untrustworthy witnesses regarding the episcopal succession in Rome, but that St. Clement of Alexandria, Julius Africanus, Origen, Eusebius, St. Jerome, St. John Chrysostom, Socrates Scholasticus, and Theodoret were also untrustworthy witnesses regarding the first-century episcopacy in Jerusalem. In short, if we want to reject the testimony of St. Irenaeus, we have to be prepared to reject the testimony of the other Church Fathers as well, and thereby embrace the ecclesial deism that implicitly underlies such a large-scale rejection of the patristics.¹⁸⁹

5. Fractionation

(a.) Why fractionation is not evidence of the non-existence of the episcopacy

In our section above on St. Justin Martyr, we noted that one of Brandon’s two observations drawn from St. Justin Martyr was that of fractionation, and we indicated there that we would discuss that topic in this session. Appealing to St. Justin, Brandon uses the following quotation as evidence for “fractionation,” which he then treats as evidence against there being a monarchical bishop in Rome:

Rusticus the prefect said, Where do you assemble? Justin said, Where each one chooses and can: for do you fancy that we all meet in the very same place? Not so; because the God of the Christians is not circumscribed by place; but being invisible, fills heaven and earth, and everywhere is worshipped and glorified by the faithful. Rusticus the prefect said, Tell me where you assemble, or into what place do you collect your followers? Justin said, I live above one Martinus, at the Timiotinian Bath; and during the whole time (and I am now living in Rome for the second time) I am unaware of any other meeting than his. And if any one wished to come to me, I communicated to him the doctrines of truth.¹⁹⁰

In response to this Brandon writes:

Instead, Justin is describing the worship of a house church worship setting. The absence of a Roman bishop in Justin’s writing as well as in the writing of Justin’s opponents provides us with even greater evidence from silence.

This account that Brandon cites from St. Justin is from no earlier than AD 165, because St. Justin was martyred in AD 165. So what then should we make of the account of St. Polycarp meeting with St. Anicetus, bishop of Rome, in AD 155, quoted above in the section on St. Polycarp? Brandon is trying to use an argument from silence (which, in his section on St. Irenaeus he refers to as “invalid”) from something written no earlier than AD 165, while existing positive evidence of an event that took place in AD 155 indicates that there was a monepiscopate in Rome in AD 155. Recall from our preliminary principles section above that “a single positive may overturn any number of negatives.” To avoid refutation of his argument here, Brandon would have to claim that St. Irenaeus contrived the meeting between St. Polycarp and St. Anicetus. But that would have backfired on St. Irenaeus, for if there had been no such meeting between St. Polycarp and St. Anicetus, St. Irenaeus’s argument to St. Victor would have been undermined, for his argument presupposes that St. Victor was aware of or could verify for himself that there had in fact been such a meeting. So St. Irenaeus must have known that the Church in Rome knew that St. Polycarp had met with St. Anicetus.

This is one example showing why Brandon’s fractionation data is not evidence for the absence of a monarchical bishop in Rome. The ‘fractionation’ he describes is perfectly compatible with there being a bishop in Rome, as shown by there already being such a bishop in Rome at least ten years prior to the state of fractionation to which Brandon appeals as evidence that there was no monarchical bishop of Rome.¹⁹¹ So St. Justin’s implication that there were multiple house churches in Rome, each having its own “presider,” “lector” and “deacons” is fully compatible with there being a head presbyter-bishop over the Church in Rome.

In his section on fractionation Brandon first refers to his review of Lampe from January 24, 2014, before offering a summary paragraph. Brandon places much weight on this fractionation thesis as evidence that there was no monarchical bishop in Rome.

Brandon’s fractionation argument runs like this. During the first and second centuries there was great diversity in the city of Rome. The meeting of Christians in large gatherings was unsafe, on account of persecution, and so Christians met mostly in house churches throughout the city. This lack of a central meeting place “shows that no monarchical episcopate existed,” and that the monarchical episcopate developed later.

Brandon is correct that there was great diversity in Rome at the time, and that the meeting of Christians in large gatherings was dangerous, and that Christians mostly met in house churches. There are at least two problems with his argument. One problem with his argument is that the conclusion is a non sequitur; that is, the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Just because there was great diversity in Rome, and Christians in Rome mostly met in house churches, it does not follow that there was no bishop sitting on the seat of St. Peter. From internal evidence alone, uninformed by the full scope of available evidence, the difference between the likelihoods of the competing explanatory theses is inscrutable without presupposing precisely what is in question, and thus, according to the ILD principle this fractionation data is not evidence that there was no monarchical bishop in Rome at the time. A second problem with his argument is that he provides no principled difference between the fractionation conditions sufficient to demonstrate the non-existence of a monepiscopacy, and the fractionation conditions sufficient to demonstrate the non-existence of a presbytery. Without such a criterion, it is ad hoc special pleading to treat fractionation that would be incompatible with the existence of a presbytery as evidence against there being a monepiscopacy.

In his review of Lampe, Brandon provided thirteen pieces of data to which he appealed as evidence showing that there was no monarchical bishop in Rome during the first two centuries. However, as I [Bryan] showed in my response to Brandon’s review of Lampe, each of these thirteen pieces of evidence is fully compatible with there being a monarchical bishop in Rome, and therefore is not evidence that there was no monarchical bishop of Rome.¹⁹² Those thirteen pieces of data are the following:

Regarding (1), (2), (3), and (7), these are each fully compatible with there being a monarchical bishop in Rome, as shown by contemporary Catholic practice in any diocese. Likewise, regarding (4), the Church in Rome initially owned no property, but over time came to own property, as Christians donated their houses to the Church to be used as places of worship. This too, however, is fully compatible with there having been a monarchical bishop even prior to Church ownership of land or buildings. Regarding (5), as we discuss in more detail below, the fact that there were houses churches in Rome is fully compatible with there being a monarchical bishop in Rome, just as for the same reason the plurality of parishes in any present city does not show that there is no monarchical bishop over the Church in that city. Regarding (6), there being Christians in Rome who had come from Asia Minor and continued to follow the Quartodeciman tradition is fully compatible with there being a monarchical bishop in Rome, as St. Irenaeus demonstrates in his letter to St. Victor, discussed above. Regarding (8), even to this day heretics freely leave the Church while there is a monarchical bishop. Hence heretics freely leaving the Church does not show that there was no bishop, because it is fully compatible with there being a bishop. Regarding (9), this would count as evidence against a monarchical bishop only if one assumes that bishops would not allow divergent eschatological views. And that is a question-begging assumption. Bishops typically allow divergent views on unsettled matters, unless or until this causes problems or divisive disputes. At this point in time (prior to St. Augustine), the eschatological questions had not yet been settled in the Church. Hence this diversity of eschatological opinion is fully compatible with there being a monarchical bishop in Rome. Reasons (10), (11), and (13) have been addressed above. Regarding (12), this too is an argument from silence, and thus is fully compatible with there being a monarchical bishop in Rome. The authors who describe this dispute wrote that there was a succession of bishops in Rome from St. Peter. Tertullian wrote of Marcion in his work Against Marcion, but wrote of the succession of bishops in Rome from St. Peter in chapter 32 of his Prescription against Heretics.¹⁹³ St. Irenaeus wrote about Marcion in Against Heresies, I.27, as explained above, but also of the succession of bishops in Rome from St. Peter in Book III of his Against Heresies.¹⁹⁴ So it is disingenuous to use selectively their not mentioning a bishop of Rome in their focused account of Marcion when in fact they do state elsewhere that there was a bishop of Rome during the time of Marcion. Hence, given the ILD principle, none of these pieces of data is evidence of there being no bishop of Rome.

Continuing in his section on fractionation, Brandon then offers some unsubstantiated speculative claims about the conception of schism in the third century, claiming both that it applied to whoever did not have the buildings and altar, and that schism was “quite impossible.” Then he quotes from an article by Allen Brent in which Brent, referring to the dispute between Hippolytus and St. Callistus between AD 217 and 222, claims, “If the dispute had been between two contenders to a single episcopal chair, as in the case of later antipopes, it is curious that Hippolytus set out his account of the dispute in no such terms.” Brandon follows that quotation with these words:

In other words, there was no single episcopal office in Rome because the conflict testifies that the opponents were not combating one another over a disputed episcopal chair.

The mistake Brandon makes here is again an “invalid” argument from silence. Because Hippolytus (who was not a saint at the time, and in fact held a heretical view concerning the Trinity) did not frame his dispute with St. Callistus as a struggle over the Chair of St. Peter, therefore, concludes Brandon, “there was no single episcopal office in Rome.” That is another non sequitur, because the conclusion does not follow from the premise.

First, recall that Brandon’s thesis is that “Rome was organized as a presbytery until the middle to later part of the second century.” Brandon acknowledges that there was a monepiscopate in Rome during the second half of the second century. His whole speculative argument against the veracity of the succession lists of Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus is that they were reading back into the past the monarchical episcopacy they themselves saw in the Church at Rome of their own time, i.e., the second half of the second century. But here Brandon contradicts himself by attempting to argue from the conflict between Hippolytus and St. Callistus (AD 217 and following) to the conclusion that there was no episcopal office in Rome even in the first quarter of the third century.

Second, Brandon’s argument from silence does not satisfy the fourth criterion for an argument from silence within a text to carry evidential weight, namely, that we have good reason to believe that the author has no overriding reason for concealing the entity or event. The argument goes like this. Because Hippolytus did not set out his dispute with St. Callistus in terms of “two contenders to a single episcopal chair,” therefore, concludes Brandon, “there was no single episcopal office in Rome.” The particular silence from which Brandon is arguing is Hippolytus’s silence regarding the episcopal chair as the object of their dispute. But does a person contending with the bishop of Rome have any reason not to frame his dispute as a rebellion against a divinely established office of authority? Obviously, yes. So we do not have good reason to believe that Hippolytus would lay out the dispute as a struggle against episcopal authority, if in fact that is exactly what it was. And therefore the silence to which Brandon appeals here carries no evidential weight in support of the thesis that there was no monepiscopacy in Rome at this time.

Third, as stated above, “a single positive may overturn any number of negatives” and “a single sound refutes all silences.” Therefore, all the positive evidence regarding the existence of a monarchical bishop in Rome prior to AD 217, the very evidence causing Brandon to cut off his thesis at AD 150, trumps the silence in Hippolytus’s dispute with St. Callistus. Not only that, but Hippolytus himself, when describing the narrative of St. Callistus, refers specifically to “the episcopal throne.” Hippolytus writes,

Callistus attempted to confirm this heresy—a man cunning in wickedness, and subtle where deceit was concerned, (and) who was impelled by restless ambition to mount the episcopal throne. … But after a time, there being in that place other martyrs, Marcia, a concubine of Commodus, who was a God-loving female, and desirous of performing some good work, invited into her presence the blessed Victor, who was at that time a bishop of the Church, and inquired of him what martyrs were in Sardinia. And he delivered to her the names of all, but did not give the name of Callistus, knowing the acts he had ventured upon. … Now (the governor) was persuaded, and liberated Callistus also. And when the latter arrived at Rome, Victor was very much grieved at what had taken place; but since he was a compassionate man, he took no action in the matter. Guarding, however, against the reproach (uttered) by many—for the attempts made by this Callistus were not distant occurrences—and because Carpophorus also still continued adverse, Victor sends Callistus to take up his abode in Antium, having settled on him a certain monthly allowance for food. And after Victor’s death, Zephyrinus, having had Callistus as a fellow-worker in the management of his clergy, paid him respect to his own damage; and transferring this person from Antium, appointed him over the cemetery. … Thus, after the death of Zephyrinus, supposing that he had obtained (the position) after which he so eagerly pursued, he excommunicated Sabellius, as not entertaining orthodox opinions.¹⁹⁵

Hippolytus here speaks of “the episcopal throne,” singular, not plural, as something St. Callistus attained. But according to Hippolytus at the beginning of the story this throne belonged to “blessed Victor,” who was at that time a “bishop” of the Church. Marcia came to him to find out the list of martyrs who had been exiled to Sardinia, and he had this list. He also “took no action” when St. Callistus returned, even though apparently he had the authority to do so. Then Hippolytus again shows St. Victor’s authority in noting that St. Victor sent St. Callistus to work in Antium (about 30 miles south of Rome) and established a monthly allowance for him. If St. Victor had been bishop only of a house church, he could not have exiled St. Callistus out of the city of Rome, but only out of the parish in which that house church was located.

Upon St. Victor’s death (c. 199), according to Hippolytus, St. Zephyrinus took his place as bishop, and appointed Callistus (then still deacon) to care for the cemetery which became known as the Catacomb of Saint Callistus.¹⁹⁶ This was the first substantial property owned by the Church in Rome,¹⁹⁷ and shows that the monepiscopacy that we see clearly in the second half of the second century could operate without the possession of Church property. And upon St. Zephyrinus’s death, St. Callistus mounted or ascended the “episcopal throne” in AD 217. Through attaining this office, St. Callistus was able then to excommunicate the modalist Sabellius. That would be no problem for Sabellius if there had been more than one “episcopal throne” of the Catholic Church in Rome, for then he could just walk over to the next house church, and continue receiving the Eucharist. Hippolytus strongly opposed Sts. Zephyrinus and Callistus at the time, but even so he reveals the succession of bishops, writing:

At that time, Zephyrinus imagines that he administers the affairs of the Church — an uninformed and shamefully corrupt man. And he, being persuaded by proffered gain, was accustomed to connive at those who were present for the purpose of becoming disciples of Cleomenes. But (Zephyrinus) himself, being in process of time enticed away, hurried headlong into the same opinions; and he had Callistus as his adviser, and a fellow-champion of these wicked tenets. But the life of this (Callistus), and the heresy invented by him, I shall after a little explain. The school of these heretics during the succession of such bishops, continued to acquire strength and augmentation, from the fact that Zephyrinus and Callistus helped them to prevail.¹⁹⁸

The story as described by Hippolytus thus indicates in multiple ways that there was a succession of monarchical bishops in Rome, from St. Victor, to St. Zephyrinus, to St. Callistus, and that this episcopal office gave its occupant the authority to exile an offending Christian from the city of Rome, and to excommunicate heretics. St. Irenaeus wrote a letter to Pope Victor, urging him to expel the writings of Florinus, a [mere] presbyter in the Church at Rome, who had fallen into the Valentinian error; a fragment of that letter exists to this day.¹⁹⁹ The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church notes the following: “Among other incidents of Victor’s pontificate were the deposition of the presbyter Florinus for defending Valentinian doctrines and the excommunication of the leather merchant, Theodotus, the founder of Dynamic Monarchianism.”²⁰⁰ Concerning this heretic Theodotus, Eusebius provides an account recorded by a contemporary of Pope Zephyrinus:

I will remind many of the brethren of a fact which took place in our time, which, had it happened in Sodom, might, I think, have proved a warning to them. There was a certain confessor, Natalius, not long ago, but in our own day.

This man was deceived at one time by Asclepiodotus and another Theodotus, a money-changer. Both of them were disciples of Theodotus, the cobbler, who, as I have said, was the first person excommunicated by Victor, bishop at that time, on account of this sentiment, or rather senselessness.

Natalius was persuaded by them to allow himself to be chosen bishop of this heresy with a salary, to be paid by them, of one hundred and fifty denarii a month.

When he had thus connected himself with them, he was warned oftentimes by the Lord through visions. For the compassionate God and our Lord Jesus Christ was not willing that a witness of his own sufferings, being cast out of the Church, should perish.

But as he paid little regard to the visions, because he was ensnared by the first position among them and by that shameful covetousness which destroys a great many, he was scourged by holy angels, and punished severely through the entire night.Thereupon having risen in the morning, he put on sackcloth and covered himself with ashes, and with great haste and tears he fell down before Zephyrinus, the bishop, rolling at the feet not only of the clergy, but also of the laity; and he moved with his tears the compassionate Church of the merciful Christ. And though he used much supplication, and showed the welts of the stripes which he had received, yet scarcely was he taken back into communion.²⁰¹

This account again shows the bishop of Rome having authority, such that a mere presbyter (Natalius) in the Church at Rome, would repent not to a group of presbyter-bishops, but to one monepiscopal bishop, namely, Pope Zephyrinus.

Tertullian likewise confirms this awareness by the bishops of Rome of their ecclesial authority when, writing after AD 213 during his Montantist period concerning St. Zephyrinus, he says the following:

For after the Bishop of Rome had acknowledged the prophetic gifts of Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, and, in consequence of the acknowledgment, had bestowed his peace on the churches of Asia and Phrygia, he, by importunately urging false accusations against the prophets themselves and their churches, and insisting on the authority of the bishop’s predecessors in the see, compelled him to recall the pacific letter which he had issued, as well as to desist from his purpose of acknowledging the said gifts. (Against Praxeas, c. 1)

Tertullian, writing in criticism of St. Zephyrinus, points out that St. Zephyrinus, in condemning Montanism, was “insisting on the authority of the bishop’s predecessors in the see.” This indicates that Pope St. Zephyrinus appealing to his authority as bishop, an authority known to be possessed by his predecessors, by which authority he made this judgment against Montanism. None of this would be intelligible if Brandon were correct that there was no monepiscopacy in Rome during the time of Hippolytus.

Hippolytus even gives evidence that disagrees with Brandon’s claim that “the opponents [i.e., Hippolytus and St. Callistus] were not combating one another over a disputed episcopal chair,” for Hippolytus says of St. Callistus, “supposing that he had obtained (the position) after which he so eagerly pursued.” In other words, St. Hippolytus does not say that St. Callistus occupies some chair and Hippolytus occupies another chair. Rather, by saying “supposing that he had obtained,” Hippolytus indicates that he does not entirely accept that St. Callistus is the rightful occupant of the chair. So when Brandon writes, “the Hippolytus affair seems to corroborate [the notion that] … the entire Roman Church was not ruled over by a monarchical bishop,” the data in question actually shows exactly the opposite. And if, as scholarship has contended, the Liberian Catalogue mentioned above draws the first two centuries of its list from that of Hippolytus, then not only did Hippolytus believe there to be an episcopal succession in Rome, he actually left a record of it, a record preserved in the first part of the Liberian Catalogue.

Hippolytus was the first antipope in Church history,²⁰² having set himself up as a rival to St. Callistus after St. Callistus received the episcopal throne in AD 217. Brandon’s mistake here is treating an historical condition in which there is an antipope, as described from the point of view of that antipope, as though it is evidence that at that time there was not yet a monepiscopacy in Rome.

This episcopal throne of which St. Hippolytus writes around AD 217 is the same throne of which Tertullian wrote of around seventeen years earlier, saying:

Come now, if you would indulge a better curiosity in the business of your salvation, run through the apostolic Churches in which the very thrones [cathedrae] of the Apostles remain still in place; in which their own authentic writings are read, giving sound to the voice and recalling the faces of each. Achaia is near you, so you have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi. If you can cross into Asia, you have Ephesus. But if you are near to Italy, you have Rome, whence also our authority derives. How happy is that Church, on which Apostles poured out their whole doctrine along with their blood, where Peter endured a passion like that of the Lord, where Paul was crowned in a death like John’s [the Baptist], where the Apostle John, after being immersed in boiling oil and suffering no hurt, was exiled to an island.”²⁰³

What Hippolytus indicates about the bishops of Rome occupying the episcopal chair fits precisely what Tertullian’s earlier statement implying that there was in Rome a throne of the apostles, from which they had taught, and from which their successors continued to teach apostolic doctrine. For all these reasons, the case of Hippolytus not only does not support Brandon’s thesis, but argues against it.

In the comments following his essay, Brandon returns to his claim that the existence of house churches in Rome indicates the non-existence of a monarchical bishop. He writes:

The reason something like a presbyterian model (notice that I have not capitalized it so as to bring in confusion) is the most accurate way to label the Roman church is because the church did have a consciousness of a catholicity. Even though there were house churches they regarded one another as members of the Christian body and part of the church at Rome. The presbyterian label is used because it explains how 1st Clement could be written, how Hermas could have his book read throughout the entire city of Rome as well as having someone from the church take his book and distribute it to others. These and factors are the reason that the presbyterian model provides the best explanatory power.²⁰⁴

As has now been shown above, the existence of house churches in Rome, St. Clement’s letter, and Hermas’s book being read throughout the house churches in Rome, are all fully compatible with there being a bishop in Rome on the Chair of St. Peter. Because of the ILD principle these are not evidence for Brandon’s thesis. Brandon concedes their compatibility with the falsehood of his thesis in the subsequent comment, writing:

Your final statement … seems to say that the existence of house churches does not rule out the possibility of oversight of a bishop. I want to be as clear as possible: this is a conceptual possibility, but a conceptual possibility is not an historical argument. I’ve attempted to set forth a hypothesis based on the evidence that we have about church structure and that is that what we see is a plurality of leaders. Everything we see points towards leadership of the churches by house-churches while oversight over those churches was conducted when the churches would gather together and attempt to persuade false teachers against promulgating their doctrines. In order to see if this conceptual possibility is likely, an argument needs to be made showing how this possibility comports with the data we have about first and second century Roman Christianity.⁴⁰

Brandon thus grants that “the existence of house churches does not rule out the possibility of oversight of a bishop.” His argument, however, is that the data points to there being a plurality of leaders. Of course, Catholics too grant that there were a plurality of leaders. So again this is not evidence for the presbyterial thesis and against there being an episcopal polity in the Church at Rome. As Paul Owen writes:

There seems to be the presumption that if there were a plurality of house churches in a city, they could not have been under the authority of a singular bishop (whose approval would be required for the sanctioning of their eucharists). But that does not at all follow. A bishop would not have to be bodily present in each specific assembly in order for them to be under his care, for presbyters could be appointed to stand in the place of the bishop in each gathering in any given city (cf. Smyrn. 8:1).²⁰⁵

For this reason, given the ILD principle, none of the actual data Brandon points to is evidence that there was no monarchical bishop in Rome. This can be shown as well by the co-presence of the house churches during the period of time when Brandon agrees that there was a monarchical bishop in Rome. Just before the Edict of Milan in A.D. 313 there were more than twenty tituli (i.e., house churches) in Rome, each with its own priest (i.e., presbyter). Brandon refers to “the list of 40 churches [in Rome] given by Optatus of Mileve in 312 CE.”²⁰⁶ The tituli were originally ecclesiae domesticae (“house churches”) that had later come to be called individually domus Dei (“house of God”), and then finally tituli.²⁰⁷

Santa Maria in Trastevere

Recall that Brandon’s goal in writing his essay was “to prove that the Church of Rome was ruled by presbyters (and not by a monarchical bishop) until c. 150 AD.” But the house churches to which he appeals as evidence that there was no monarchical bishop in Rome continued to be used as the primary places of worship in Rome from AD 150 even to 312.²⁰⁸

Even in AD 312, no church building had been built in Rome as a parish church; the existing churches in Rome at the time were all houses that had been converted into churches; they were at that time called tituli. The first church building built in Rome as a church was St. John Lateran Cathedral Basilica, which Constantine gave to Pope Miltiades in AD 312, and which Pope Sylvester consecrated as a cathedral on November 9, in AD 324.²⁰⁹ So if the presence of active house churches in Rome were actually evidence of there being no monarchical bishop in Rome, then the presence of house churches from AD 150 to 312 would be evidence that there was no monarchical bishop in Rome from AD 150 to 312. But we know (and Brandon agrees) that there was a monarchical bishop in Rome from AD 150 to 312. Therefore, the existence of house churches in Rome in the late first and early second centuries is not evidence that there was no monarchical bishop in Rome during that time.

Moreover, in AD 336 there were at least twenty eight house churches under Pope St. Julius I, again confirming that the presence of house churches in a city is fully compatible with the existence of a jurisdictional monepiscopacy in that city, and that the existence of house churches in Rome in the late first and early second centuries is not evidence for the non-existence of a monarchical bishop during that time period. In fact the house churches continued to be used for at least a century after Constantine, as is made clear in the video below:

So the existence and use of house churches in Rome in the late first and early second centuries is not evidence that there was no Chair of St. Peter or monepiscopal bishop in Rome during that time.

(b.) Fractionation as Diocesan Parishes: An Alternative Perspective

An inscription in S. Pudenziana

The oldest of the ecclesiae domesticae (house churches) “in accordance with the most ancient Roman traditions, … were those of Aquila and Prisca on the Aventine and the Ecclesia Pudentianae on the Viminal.”²¹⁰ An old internal tradition in the Church at Rome holds that when St. Peter came to Rome, he stayed at the house of the Pudens who is referred to by St. Paul in 2 Timothy 4:21. This Pudens is mentioned in St. Paul’s letter along with St. Linus as saints present with St. Paul in Rome who send their greeting to St. Timothy. According to this tradition, Pudens had been baptized by St. Peter, and was a leading figure in the Church at Rome, along with St. Linus. St. Peter stayed in the house of Pudens for some time (at least six or seven years, according to one tradition), and this house was used continually as a house church even into the fourth century, and restored by Pope Siricius toward the end of the fourth century.²¹¹ This house church came to be known as Titulus Pudentis, and later came to be called the Santa Pudenziana, possibly after Puden’s daughter Pudenziana. From the earliest times in Roman Christian memory this church, located about two miles east of the Vatican, has been believed to be the most ancient church in Rome. Three thousand Christian martyrs lie buried in a well under it, interred there by Sts. Pudentiana and Praxedes.

The marble slab marking Pope Pius’s
dedication of Santa Pudenziana

According to tradition, a chapel in the Ecclesia Pudentianae was consecrated for Christian worship by Pope Pius I at some point between AD 141 and 145.²¹² During the papacy of Pope St. Damasus (366-83) a basilica was built on top of the house (domus) of Pudens, called the Basilica di Santa Pudenziana. And archaeology has confirmed that there is a first or second century domus (house) below this Basilica.²¹³ The first-century origin of this house-church as a church is supported by its historic liturgical relation to St. John Lateran Cathedral. George Edmundson writes:

The Peter Chapel in Santa Pudenziana

The wooden altar at the St. John Lateran again has been in continuous use there since the fourth century, when it was removed from St. Pudentiana, and that despite the fact that Pope Sylvester in 312 A.D. ordered that all altars should henceforth be of stone. Many indeed had been so before, for the word titulus which signifies a consecrated parish church implies its possession of a stone altar. In the Church of St. Pudentiana at the present time there is preserved within the altar a single wood plank reputed to have been left at that church as a memorial when the altar itself was removed. When Cardinal Wiseman was titular cardinal of St. Pudentiana he had the plank examined and found that the wood was identical with that of the altar at the Lateran Church. The reason of its preservation was the tradition that this altar had been used by St. Peter when he celebrated the Eucharist in the oratory in Pudens’ house. When St. John Lateran replaced St. Pudentiana as the Cathedral Church of Rome the bishop and the altar moved there together.²¹⁴

The removal of the wooden altar from Santa Pudentiana to St. John Lateran indicates that the Church at Rome had preserved the memory of the location of St. Peter’s first mass in Rome in that house.

Just over a mile southwest of Santa Pudenziana is Santa Prisca, the other church of the oldest ecclesiae domesticae mentioned above, namely, that of Aquila and Prisca on the Aventine, located about two miles southeast of the Vatican. Concerning this church, the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on St. Prisca says:

The marble slab marking
the altar where St. Peter first
celebrated the Eucharist in Rome

There still exists on the Aventine a church of St. Prisca. It stands on the site of a very early title church, the Titulus Priscoe, mentioned in the fifth century and built probably in the fourth. In the eighteenth century there was found near this church a bronze tablet with an inscription of the year 224, by which a senator named Caius Marius Pudens Cornelianus was granted citizenship in a Spanish city. As such tablets were generally put up in the house of the person so honoured, it is possible that the senator’s palace stood on the spot where the church was built later. The assumption is probable that the Prisca who founded this title church, or who, perhaps as early as the third century, gave the use of a part of the house standing there for the Christian church services, belonged to the family of Pudens Cornelianus. Whether the martyr buried in the Catacomb of Priscilla belonged to the same family or was identical with the founder of the title church cannot be proved. Still some family relationship is probable, because the name Priscilla appears also in the senatorial family of the Acilii Glabriones, whose burial-place was in the Catacomb of Priscilla on the Via Salaria. The “Martyrologium Hieronymianum” mentions under 18 January a martyr Priscilla on the Via Salaria (ed. De Rossi-Duchesne, 10). This Priscilla is evidently identical with the Prisca whose grave was in the Catacomb of Priscilla and who is mentioned in the itineraries of the seventh century.²¹⁵

There is thus some evidence connecting Santa Prisca to the family of Pudens, and thus connecting the two house churches that later became known as Santa Pudenziana and Santa Prisca. In addition, fourth century records going back to AD 311 show that a feast of the Chair of St. Peter was being celebrated annually by Christians in Rome on the twenty-second of February, even before Constantine’s conversion. The Calendar of Philocalus, which lists events back to the year 311 includes this entry:

“VIII Kl. Martias: natale Petri de cathedra” (eighth day before the Calends of March, the birthday [i.e., feast] of the Chair of Peter).

And the Martyrologium Hieronymianum includes the following regarding the eighteenth of January:

XV Kl. Feb. Cathedra sancti Petri apostoli qua primo Roma sedit.²¹⁶

So even prior to Constantine, the Church in Rome was celebrating at least one, possibly two feasts of the Chair of St. Peter, one on January 18, and the other on February 22. This indicates at least that the Chair of St. Peter was something highly regarded by the Church at Rome. During the fourth century the feasts of the Chair of St. Peter were held at the Vatican Basilica and in a cemetery on the Via Salaria:

This double celebration was also held in two places, in the Vatican Basilica and in a cemetery (coemeterium) on the Via Salaria. At both places a chair (cathedra) was venerated which the Apostle had used as presiding officer of the assembly of the faithful. The first of these chairs stood in the Vatican Basilica, in the baptismal chapel built by Pope Damasus; the neophytes in albis (white baptismal robes) were led from the baptistery to the pope seated on this ancient cathedra, and received from him the consignatio, i.e., the Sacrament of Confirmation. Reference is made to this custom in an inscription of Damasus which contains the line: “una Petri sedes, unum verumque lavacrum” (one Chair of Peter, one true font of baptism). St. Ennodius of Pavia (d. 521) speaks of it thus (“Libellus pro Synodo”, near the end): “Ecce nunc ad gestatoriam sellam apostolicæ confessionis uda mittunt limina candidatos; et uberibus gaudio exactore fletibus collata Dei beneficio dona geminantur” (Behold now the neophytes go from the dripping threshold to the portable chair of the Apostolic confession; amid abundant tears called forth by joy the gifts of Divine grace are doubled). While therefore in the apse of the Vatican Basilica there stood a cathedra on which the pope sat amid the Roman clergy during the pontifical Mass, there was also in the same building a second cathedra from which the pope administered to the newly baptized the Sacrament of Confirmation. The Chair of St. Peter in the apse was made of marble and was built into the wall, that of the baptistery was movable and could be carried.²¹⁷

The feast of January 18 was held in the Catacomb of Priscilla on the Via Salaria, about four miles northeast of the church of Santa Prisca, and also four miles northeast of the Vatican. This catacomb (or the villa above it at the time) is outside the city, and was celebrated as the place “ubi prius sedit sanctus Petrus, ubi Petrus baptizabat” (where Saint Peter first sat, where Peter baptized).²¹⁸ But in the fourth century the feast of February 22 was held in St. Peter’s Basilica, where each year the Chair on which the Apostle Peter had sat was brought out from the baptismal chapel Pope Damasus had built, and venerated.

From whence did Pope Damasus move this Chair to St. Peter’s Basilica in the latter part of the fourth century? We do not have a direct historical account of the movement of the Chair. However, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the “Chair of St. Peter,” there is some evidence that Pope Damasus may have moved this Chair from the Santa Prisca church:

We come now to the question, where stood originally the chair shown and venerated in the Vatican Basilica during the fourth century? On the strength of ancient tradition it has been customary to designate the church of Santa Pudenziana as the spot where, in the house of the supposed Senator Pudens, the two great Apostles not only received hospitable entertainment, but also held Christian services. But the legends connected with Santa Pudenziana do not offer sufficient guarantee for the theory that this church was the cathedral and residence of the popes before Constantine. At the close of his Epistle to the Romans (xvi, 5), St. Paul mentions a place where religious services were held, the house of Aquila and Prisca (ten kat oikon auton ekklesian — now Santa Prisca on the Aventine). Aquila and Prisca are first among the many to whom the Apostle sends salutations. Aquila’s connexion with the Catacomb of Priscilla is still shown by the epitaphs of that burial place. In 1776 there was excavated on the Aventine, near the present church of Santa Prisca, a chapel with frescoes of the fourth century; in these frescoes pictures of the two Apostles were still recognizable. Among the rubbish was also found a gilded glass with the figures of Peter and Paul. The feast of the dedication of this church (an important point) still falls on the same day as the above-described cathedra feast of 22 February; this church, therefore, continued to celebrate the traditional feast even after the destruction of the object from which it sprang. In the crypt of Santa Prisca is shown a hollowed capital, bearing in thirteenth-century letters the inscription: BAPTISMUS SANCTI PETRI (Baptism of Saint Peter), undoubtedly the echo of an ancient tradition of the administration of baptism here by Peter. In this way we have linked together a series of considerations which make it probable that the spot “ubi secundo sedebat sanctus Petrus” (where Saint Peter sat for the second time), must be sought in the present church of Santa Prisca; in other words, that the chair referred to by St. Damasus was kept there in the period before Constantine. It was there, consequently, that was celebrated the “natale Petri de cathedrâ,” (birthday of the chair of Peter) set for 22 February in the calendars beginning with the year 354. It follows also that this is the cathedra referred to in the oldest testimonia which speak of the chair from which Peter taught at Rome. The (third-century) poem, “Adversus Marcionem“, says (P.L., II, 1099):

Hâc cathedrâ, Petrus quâ sederat ipse, locatum
Maxima Roma Linum primum considere iussit.

(On this chair, where Peter himself had sat,
great Rome first placed Linus and bade him sit.)

This same episcopal Chair, apparently, was referred to by St. Cyprian in the middle of the third century,²¹⁹ by St. Hippolytus in the early third century, by Tertullian around AD 200,²²⁰ and by the Muratorian Fragment in the second half of the second century referring to the existence and occupation of the Chair in the AD 140s.

So we have an almost continuous line of positive documented testimonies regarding the presence in Rome of an episcopal Chair purported to be the Chair of St. Peter, and indicating a monepiscopal office from which authoritative judgments were made, from the fourth century to the first half of the second century. This preservation of the Apostolic Chair was not unique to Rome. According to Eusebius, Jerusalem preserved the cathedra of St. James. He writes:

The chair of James, who first received the episcopate of the church at Jerusalem from the Saviour himself and the apostles, and who, as the divine records show, was called a brother of Christ, has been preserved until now, the brethren who have followed him in succession there exhibiting clearly to all the reverence which both those of old times and those of our own day maintained and do maintain for holy men on account of their piety.²²¹

The Church in Alexandria also preserved the Chair of St. Mark.²²² The point is not that the Chair of St. Peter was located in the house church that became Santa Prisca’s from the end of the first century until the fourth century. Nor is the point that this Chair was located in one or more house churches from the time of St. Peter until it was moved to St. Peter’s Basilica by Pope Damasus in the fourth century. Rather, the point is that in every instance in which the Chair of St. Peter in Rome is mentioned in the first four centuries, it refers to an office of episcopal authority functioning at that time. And just as the Chair could exist and be revered for two and a half centuries in house churches until Christianity was legalized under Constantine, so the episcopal office represented by the Chair could exist and function for two and a half centuries in and through house churches until the time of Constantine. Moreover, just as the necessity of working within and through house churches does not nullify the existence of the monepiscopacy in Rome from AD 150 to AD 312, so likewise the necessity of working within and through house churches does not nullify the existence of the monepiscopacy in Rome from the time of St. Peter until AD 150.

Additional historical data is also part of the broader context for rightly understanding the ‘fractionation’ data to which Brandon appeals. The Liber Pontificalis, which was compiled in the fifth or sixth century from prior documents, including the Liberian Catalogue and the Leonine Catalogue, records that St. Linus ordained eighteen presbyters. Regarding St. Cletus, it records that by the direction of blessed St. Peter he “XXV presbiteros ordinauit in urbe Roma” (ordained twenty-five presbyters in the city of Rome). The Liber Pontificalis records that “fecit VII regiones, diuidit notariis fidelibus ecclesiae” (he made seven districts and assigned them to faithful notaries of the church) for the purpose of recording the acts of the martyrs, and ordained “presbiteros X, diaconos II” (ten presbyters, two deacons). Giovani Battista de Rossi has shown in his Roma Sotterranea that each of these seven districts was composed of two of the municipal regions in which Caesar Augustus had divided the city.²²³ Regarding Pope St. Evaristus, the Liber Pontificalis records “Hic titulos in urbe Roma diuidit presbiteris et VII diaconos ordinauit” (He divided the tituli [i.e., parish churches] in the city of Rome among the priests, and ordained seven deacons). Each bishop of Rome would not only ordain presbyters and deacons for the churches in Rome, but would also ordain bishops for the surrounding cities.²²⁴

This positive account, though the earliest surviving documents are from the fifth and sixth centuries, shows that there is another available explanation of the ‘fractionation’ data to which Brandon appeals. The plurality of house churches in Rome is not evidence that there was no monepiscopacy in Rome because such a plurality is exactly what is present where a bishop is shepherding his particular diocese under conditions in which Christianity is illegal, and the hierarchical unity these house churches enjoy on account of the bishop is not visible to the secular eye. For example, the Octavius of Minucius Felix was written no earlier than AD 176, because of its reference to Fronto, who died shortly after AD 175.²²⁵ It can therefore be dated broadly between AD 176 and AD 250. So the Octavius was written during the time when, according to Brandon, there was already a monepiscopate in Rome. However, notice the way in which Christian worship appeared from the perspective of a Roman pagan named Caecilius:

I purposely pass over many things, for those that I have mentioned are already too many; and that all these, or the greater part of them, are true, the obscurity of their vile religion declares. For why do they endeavour with such pains to conceal and to cloak whatever they worship, since honourable things always rejoice in publicity, while crimes are kept secret? Why have they no altars, no temples, no acknowledged images? Why do they never speak openly, never congregate freely, unless for the reason that what they adore and conceal is either worthy of punishment, or something to be ashamed of? Moreover, whence or who is he, or where is the one God, solitary, desolate, whom no free people, no kingdoms, and not even Roman superstition, have known? The lonely and miserable nationality of the Jews worshipped one God, and one peculiar to itself; but they worshipped him openly, with temples, with altars, with victims, and with ceremonies; and he has so little force or power, that he is enslaved, with his own special nation, to the Roman deities. But the Christians, moreover, what wonders, what monstrosities do they feign!–that he who is their God, whom they can neither show nor behold, inquires diligently into the character of all, the acts of all, and, in fine, into their words and secret thoughts.²²⁶

Clearly, as described by a pagan, during the time in which Brandon acknowledges there was a monepiscopacy in Rome, the Christians worshipped in a clandestine manner. The official status of Christianity within the Roman empire changed in AD 311 when the Edict of Toleration was issued, ending the Roman persecution of Christians. This was followed shortly by the Edict of Milan in AD 313, legalizing Christianity.²²⁷ So one way to understand how the bishops of Rome lived prior to AD 150 is to examine how they lived between AD 150 and 311.

The Crypt of the Popes

Pope St. Caius (AD 283-296), for example, apparently lived at least some of his pontificate in his own house, which was connected to the house of the presbyter Gabinus (or Gavinius), where St. Susanna, Pope Caius’s niece, was martyred.²²⁸ He was buried in the catacomb of St. Callistus, and in the 1800s the famous archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi discovered in this catacomb the broken tablet bearing his name, marking the place where his body had been laid. In 1622 Pope St. Caius’s relics were moved from the catacomb of St. Callistus to the Roman Church of San Caio (Saint Caius), which had been built on his house. Until Christianity was made legal, no buildings intended for Christian worship could be built. For this reason, from AD 150 to the time of Constantine, a period of 161 years during which Brandon acknowledges there was a monepiscopacy in Rome, each bishop of Rome lived either in a house or a house-church that had been dedicated secretly by the Christians as a church, and carried out his episcopal function from that ‘fractionated’ condition. During that 161 year period, the carrying out of the episcopal function was not made impossible or improbable by the plurality of house churches and the non-existence of a publicly designated cathedral building owned by the Church. And yet this is exactly the sort of data from AD 70 – 150 to which Brandon appeals as though it were evidence that there was no monepiscopacy in Rome prior to AD 150.

In his work titled “The Apostolic Tradition,” which St. Hippolytus of Rome wrote around AD 215, he describes the pattern of the clerical practice in Rome, writing:

The deacons and elders shall meet daily at the place which the bishop appoints for
them. The deacons especially should not fail to meet every day, except when illness
prevents them. When all have assembled, they shall teach all those who are in the
assembly. Then, after having prayed, each one shall go to the work assigned to him.²²⁹

This was written while Christianity was still illegal, and around the same general time when Minucius Felix wrote his Octavius, quoted above, regarding the clandestine way in which Christians in Rome worshipped, with no cathedral, no publicly designated church buildings, and no publicly designated diocesan center. The presbyters and deacons would meet daily at a place designated by the bishop. After a time of teaching and prayer, each would then go to the work assigned to him. This indicates that the bishop governed the diocese but not in a public way. He would designate the place for the presbyters and deacons to meet, and they were under his authority, with particular work he assigned to each one. But from an outward, public perspective, the Church in Rome would appear fractionated, while internally it was under the authority of a monepiscopal bishop. Indeed, although St. Hippolytus wrote his “Apostolic Tradition” around AD 215, as discussed above, Brandon appeals to St. Hippolytus’s “Refutation of all Heresies,” written around AD 225, to argue that there was no monepiscopacy at that time. So this shows that the fractionation to which Brandon appeals, not only in AD 225, but also from AD 68 through AD 150, is fully compatible with there being a monepiscopacy in Rome, and is not evidence for the non-existence of a monepiscopacy in Rome during that time. In this sort of way, during that whole time period, the bishop of Rome could exercise authority over the presbyters and deacons functioning in the house-churches in each of the parishes within the diocese of Rome.

Pope Damasus Inscription

Another piece of evidence is found in relation to the tombs of the leaders of the Church at Rome. What we do not find in the tombs is evidence that at any time in the history of the Church at Rome, including prior to AD 150, there were at the same time multiple leaders of equal supreme authority and honor. There is no burial record of two or more presbyter-bishops that had served simultaneously with equal supreme authority, and whose tombs were subsequently honored and memorialized equally by the Church at Rome. There is no evidence that the tombs of the [mere] presbyters who served prior to AD 150 were ever accorded the same degree of honor as were those of the bishops of that time period. Nor does the evidence show any shift in the burial custom of Church leaders who served prior to AD 150, and those who served from AD 150 and following. The Liber Pontificalis records not only that St. Peter was buried in the Vatican necropolis, but also that eleven of the thirteen popes of the first two centuries were buried there as well: St. Linus, St. Cletus, St. Evaristus, St. Xystus, St. Telesphorus, St. Hyginus, St. Pius, St. Anicetus, St. Soter, St. Eleutherius, and St. Victor.²³⁰ This public claim indicates that at the time, these tombs were known to be located in the Vatican. In 1615, workers digging near the tomb of St. Peter discovered a burial slab marked “Linus.” Unfortunately the slab was broken, so that the letters “Linus” could have been part of a longer name.²³¹ George Edmundson writes the following about that excavation:

Excavations made near the Great Altar of St. Peter’s in the early seventeenth century by Paul V and Urban VIII revealed many interesting facts. A large coffin was found made of great slabs of marble containing a mass of half-charred bones and ashes, ponting to the probability that Peter was interred close by the remains of the martyrs who had perished as living torches at the Neronian Vatican fête. All round the ‘Confessio’ in which the Apostle’s relics were supposed to rest were placed coffins side by side against the ancient walls, containing bodies swathed in Jewish fashion. On the slabs that covered them were no inscriptions, save in one case where the name Linus could be deciphered.²³²

Whether these coffins uncovered in the seventeenth century were those of the bishops of Rome during the first two centuries, we do not know. That these bodies were “swathed in Jewish fashion” would fit this explanation. But the identity of the bodies of these bishops was sufficiently known to the Church at Rome at an earlier period that even in 1132, Pope St. Xystus’s (AD 115-125) remains could be located, and transported to the city of Alatri, as we explain below.

Brandon’s thesis requires that we posit that around AD 150 the Church at Rome not only falsely and retroactively elevated the honor of the tombs of one presbyter-bishop over the others in each fictional papal term of service from AD 68-150, but also that in her cult of the dead she falsely demoted all the other presbyter-bishops who had possessed equal authority to the ‘popes,’ and served simultaneously with them up to AD 150. Brandon’s thesis presupposes that the alleged falsification of Church history of which he accuses Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus was as simple as making a list composed of names of known prior presbyter-bishops. But Brandon’s accusation requires a conspiracy on a grand scale, by which the Christians of the Church at Rome posthumously and arbitrarily demoted the honor of the tombs of all but one of the presbyter-bishops in each ‘fictional’ papal period, while arbitrarily but unanimously elevating the honor of the tomb of one such presbyter-bishop.²³³

And we know that the Christians in Rome took seriously the veneration of Christian saints. In AD 107 Christians in Rome took up the remains of St. Ignatius, and triumphantly carried them back to Antioch. They who did so wrote, “For only the harder portions of his holy remains were left, which were conveyed to Antioch and wrapped in linen, as an inestimable treasure left to the holy Church by the grace which was in the martyr.”²³⁴ This is why the native Antiochian St. John Chrysostom, speaking in a homily to the Antiochian Christians in the late fourth century, could actually point to the bones of St. Ignatius:

When, therefore, he [St. Ignatius] made an end of life there, yea rather, when he ascended to heaven, he departed henceforward crowned. For this also happened through the dispensation of God, that he restored him again to us, and distributed the martyr to the cities. For that city received his blood as it dropped, but you were honoured with his remains, you enjoyed his episcopate, they enjoyed his martyrdom. They saw him in conflict, and victorious, and crowned, but you have him continually. For a little time God removed him from you, and with greater glory granted him again to you. And as those who borrow money, return with interest what they receive, so also God, using this valued treasure of yours, for a little while, and having shown it to that city, with greater brilliancy gave it back to you. You sent forth a Bishop, and received a martyr; ye sent him forth with prayers, and you received him with crowns; and not only ye, but all the cities which intervene. For how do ye think that they behaved when they saw his remains being brought back? What pleasure was produced! How they rejoiced! With what applause on all sides they beset the crowned one! For as with a noble athlete, who has wrestled down all his antagonists, and who comes forth with radiant glory from the arena, the spectators receive him, and do not suffer him to tread the earth, bringing him home on their shoulders, and besetting him with countless praises: so also the cities in order receiving this saint then from Rome, and bearing him upon their shoulders as far as this city, escorted the crowned one with praises, celebrating the champion, in song; laughing the Devil to scorn, because his artifice was turned against him, and what he thought to do against the martyr, this turned out for his behoof. Then, indeed, he profited, and encouraged all the cities; and from that time to this day he enriches this city, and as some perpetual treasure, drawn upon every day, yet not failing, makes all who partake of it more prosperous, so also this blessed Ignatius fills those who come to him with blessings, with boldness, nobleness of spirit, and much courage, and so sends them home.

Not only today, therefore, but every day let us go forth to him, plucking spiritual fruits from him. For it is, it is possible for him who comes hither with faith to gather the fruit of many good things. For not the bodies only, but the very sepulchres of the saints have been filled with spiritual grace. For if in the case of Elisha this happened, and a corpse when it touched the sepulchre, burst the bands of death and returned to life again, (2 Kings 13:21) much rather now, when grace is more abundant, when the energy of the spirit is greater, is it possible that one touching a sepulchre, with faith, should win great power; thence on this account God allowed us the remains of the saints, wishing to lead by them us to the same emulation, and to afford us a kind of haven, and a secure consolation for the evils which are ever overtaking us. Wherefore I beseech you all, if any is in despondency, if in disease, if under insult, if in any other circumstance of this life, if in the depth of sins, let him come hither with faith, and he will lay aside all those things, and will return with much joy, having procured a lighter conscience from the sight alone.²³⁵

The disposition of the Christians of Smyrna toward St. Polycarp was the same, as the account of his martyrdom recounts:

Accordingly, we afterwards took up his bones, as being more precious than the most exquisite jewels, and more purified than gold, and deposited them in a fitting place, whither, being gathered together, as opportunity is allowed us, with joy and rejoicing, the Lord shall grant us to celebrate the anniversary of his martyrdom, both in memory of those who have already finished their course, and for the exercising and preparation of those yet to walk in their steps.²³⁶

The Altar in the Basilica of S. Clemente, Rome

Given this attitude toward the remains of her heroes, the Church in Rome would not fail to give due honor and remembrance to her leaders, as was the custom of Roman culture. But the burial records from the Church of Rome never show two or more presbyter-bishops having served with supreme ecclesial authority at the same time. They show only the existence of a monepiscopacy. Pope St. Clement’s (AD 88-97) remains rest in the Basilica San Clemente in Rome, which was built over a first century house church that may have belonged to St. Clement’s family or patron.²³⁷ Of this Church, one of the twenty-five original tituli in Rome St. Jerome wrote in 392-392, “nominis eius [Clementis] memoriam usque hodie Romae exstructa ecclesia custodit” (a church built at Rome preserves the memory of his [Clement’s] name unto this day).²³⁸ If this house church belonged to the family of St. Clement, it is possible that he may have lived there during his episcopacy. But there is no burial record or relics of other presbyter-bishops who served simultaneously with St. Clement, and possessed authority equal to him.

Similarly, regarding Pope St. Alexandria (AD 105-115), the Liber Pontificalis records: Qui etiam sepultus est uia Numentana, ubi decollatus est, ab urbe Roma non longe, miliario VII, V nonas Mai (He also was buried on the via Numentana, where he was beheaded, not more than seven miles from the city of Rome). A subterranean cemetery of Sts. Alexander, Eventulus, and Theodulus was discovered at this location in 1855, and some archaeologists think this is the tomb of Pope Alexander.

Pope Sixtus’s (AD 115-125) remains presently are divided betwen the Cathedral of Alatri, about fifty miles east-southest from Rome, and the Cathedral of Alife, about 69 miles further southeast. His remains were transported to Alatri from Rome in a public and celebrated way in AD 1132. Each year on the Wednesday after Easter, as explained at the first link, the Christians of Alatri and Alife process through the city of Alatri carrying a statue of Pope St. Sixtus, as can be seen in the following video of that procession in 2012:²³⁹

We have spoken above in some detail about Pope St. Anicetus (155-166). Valentinus was indignant that St. Anicetus, rather than himself, had been elected. St. Anicetus was the bishop when St. Polycarp came to Rome, when they discussed the date of Easter, and celebrated the Eucharist together. He was therefore in a similar position to St. Irenaeus, in having directly conversed with one who was discipled by apostles. St. Anicetus was the bishop when St. Hegesippus arrived in Rome. He was the bishop when St. Justin Martyr was martyred in AD 165. What about his burial?

The Sarcophagus of Pope St. Anicetus
The Altemps Palace (Piazza Navona), Rome

Pope St. Anicetus (AD 155-166) was originally buried next to St. Peter in the Vatican, but later his remains were moved to the cemetery of St. Callistus. In 1604 Pope Clement VIII gave permission for his remains to be exhumed. Duke Giovanni Angelo placed his body in a chapel in his palace in Altemps, where it remains to this day.²⁴⁰ (See the graphic at right.)

At some point in the third century, the bodies of Sts. Peter and Paul were moved to the catacombs at what is now known as the catacombs of S. Sebastiano Fuori le Mura [St. Sebastian Outside the Walls]; the Constantinian church built on the site was originally called the Basilica Apostolorum. The temporary transfer of their bodies to this catacomb is supported by the fourth-century inscription of Pope Damasus in the catacomb, the Liber Pontificalis, and archaeological evidence showing about 190 ancient pilgrim graffiti with invocations to Sts. Peter and Paul such as “Paule et Petre petite pro Victore” (“Paul and Peter, pray for Victor”) and “Paule Petre in mente habete Sozemenum” (“Paul and Peter, keep Sozemenum in mind”). Many are signed, and one shows a consular date that translates to AD 260.²⁴¹

Pope Damasus’s inscription on one of the marble plaques over the place they were laid is as follows:

Hic habitasse prius sanctos cognoscere debes
Nomina quisque Petri pariter Paulique requiris.
Discipulos oriens misit quod sponte fatemur,
Sanguinis ob meritum Christum qui per astra secuti
Aetherios petiere sinus regnaque piorum
Roma suos potius meruit defendere cives
Haec Damasus vestras referat nova sidera laudes.²⁴²

which translates as:

Here, you should know, previously abided saints,
Their names, you may learn, were Peter and likewise Paul.
The East sent these Disciples, which we freely acknowledge
For Christ’s sake and the merit of His blood they followed Him through the stars
They sought the heavenly realm and the kingdom of the righteous.
Rome was deemed worthy to preserve them as her citizens.
May Damasus offer them these verses, new stars, in their praise.

The Liber Pontificalis, under the record of Pope Cornelius (AD 251-253), records the following:

Hic temporibus suis, rogatus a quodam matrona Lucina, corpora apostolorum beati Petri et Pauli de Catacumbas leuauit noctu : primum quidem corpus beati Pauli accepto beata Lucina posuit in praedio suo, uia Ostense, iuxta locum ubi decollatus est ; beati Petri accepit corpus beatus Cornelius episcopus et posuit iuxta locum ubi crucifixus est, inter corpora sanctorum episcoporum, in templum Apollinis, in monte Aureum, in Vaticanum palatii Neronis, III kal. Iul. (In his time, at the request of a certain matron Lucina, he [Cornelius] took up the bodies of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul from the Catacombs by night. First the body of the blessed Paul was received by the blessed Lucina, and placed in her own garden on the via Ostiensis, beside the place where he was beheaded. The body of the blessed Peter was received by bishop Cornelius and placed beside the place where he was crucified, between the bodies of the holy bishops, in the shrine of Apollo, on Mons Aureus, in the Vatican by the palace of Nero, June 29.)

“Paul and Peter, pray for Victor”
In the Catacomb of St. Sebastian

The “corpora sanctorum episcoporum” referred to here cannot be the bodies of the third century bishops, because none of the third century bishops before St. Cornelius [i.e., St. Zephyrinus (199-217), St. Callistus (217-22), St. Urban (222-30), St. Pontian (230-35), St. Anterus (235-36) and St. Fabian (236-50)] were buried in the Vatican.²⁴³ So the bishops referred to here must be from the first and second century. It would not make sense to start burying Church leaders next to the body of St. Peter only after AD 150. The burial of the bishops of the second half of the second century in the Vatican indicates that the practice in Rome of burying Church leaders in the Vatican next to St. Peter had continued from the first century. Moreover, the comment by Caius to Proclus, at the beginning of the third century adds a context related to the early Church of Rome’s understanding of the relation of her bishops to St. Peter. About a hundred and thirty years after the deaths of Sts. Peter and Paul, Caius writes:

But I can show the trophies of the apostles. For if you will go to the Vatican or to the Ostian way, you will find the trophies of those who laid the foundations of this church. (Church History II.25.7)

St. Peter had been buried in the Vatican, near where he had been crucified upside down. But St. Paul had been buried on the via Ostiensis, at the place now marked by the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. None of the bishops of Rome in the first two centuries were buried next to St. Paul. Of the thirteen bishops of Rome following St. Peter in the first two centuries, all except St. Clement (who was exiled, and died in the Black Sea), and St. Alexander (who was beheaded seven miles from Rome) were buried in the Vatican next to St. Peter. This indicates that from the beginning these bishops, and the Church that buried them, saw themselves as carrying on St. Peter’s office. If St. Peter and St. Paul had exercised a Presbyterian polity with parity of authority over the Church at Rome, we would expect the presbyter-bishops of Rome to be buried next to both St. Peter and St. Paul. The fact that the bishops of Rome were buried only beside St. Peter, and not beside St. Paul, already implies a monepiscopal polity.

If the location and identity of the “corpora sanctorum episcoporum” (bodies of the holy bishops) from the first and second centuries were known to the author and audience of the Liber Pontificalis, a fortiori they were known to the third century Christians in Rome. These leaders were considered saints. For example, St. Irenaeus knew of the glorious martyrdom of St. Telesphorus by the Emperor Hadrian in AD 136.²⁴⁴ When the persons in question have all been buried in a publicly accessible and regularly visited cemetery within the previous century, revising history about them is not as easy as making up a list on paper. When the cult of the saints is added to that picture such that the names and locations of the bodies of all the Church leaders of the previous one hundred years are well known and visited as regularly as the Christians of Rome visited the tomb of St. Peter and celebrating mass over their remains, re-writing Church history from a Presbyterian to a monepiscopal polity, by making up a false list of bishops, is practically impossible. It would require changing all the tombs from being groups of Presbyterian leaders who served together with equal supreme jurisdictional authority, to that of successive monepiscopal bishops. And because of the cult of the saints, such a change would require the conspiratorial cooperation of all the Christians of Rome to go along with the plan. In short, Brandon’s thesis involves a conspiracy theory on a grand scale, in which all the Christians of Rome (a city swarming with the coming and going of travelers and pilgrims) to keep silent about this revision of history and alteration of all the tombs of her leaders from her first eighty years of existence (AD 70 to AD 150).

At this point it is worth returning to something Brandon claims in section II of his essay, a section titled “II. The Protestant and Catholic Interpretive Paradigms.” There he writes:

Is it true that our disagreement about the value of the historical evidence is attributable to our competing Protestant/Catholic interpretive paradigms? The fact is that the acceptance of fractionation in Roman Christianity and the development of the office of the episcopate (in the threefold sense) are nearly unanimous in modern Roman Catholic scholarship. We will look at the evidence in the next section (and it must be viewed on its own right), but some of the statements from Roman Catholic scholars will serve to show that this is not a Protestant idiosyncrasy.

Brandon’s point, in response to Michael Liccione, is that to arrive at his [i.e. Brandon’s] conclusion from the historical evidence, one does not need to presuppose the Protestant paradigm. Brandon’s support for this claim is the fact that certain Catholic scholars arrive at positions very much like his own regarding early polity in Rome and elsewhere. But Michael never claimed that in order to arrive at Brandon’s Presbyterian conclusion concerning early Church polity, one must presuppose the Protestant interpretive paradigm. Rather, what Michael Liccione claimed is that the impossibility of demonstrating (which is a technical term) the truths of apostolic succession in the early Church and St. Peter being the first bishop of Rome is not a problem in the Catholic paradigm, because the motives of credibility need not get us to the level of demonstration, but only to moral certainty through a preponderance of the evidence. So regarding the “acceptance of fractionation in Roman Christianity and the development of the office of the episcopate (in the threefold sense),” there are two things to say.

First, there is a way of understanding the development of the office of the episcopate that is perfectly orthodox; we have laid out that way in some detail both in this present article and in Tim Troutman’s article “Holy Orders and the Sacrificial Priesthood.” According to this account, the apostles first ordained bishops and deacons, just as St. Clement describes, and then as the apostles died off, these bishops ordained mere presbyters to assist them, and preserve the threefold order that had existed under the apostles. Conceptually, even the development of jurisdictional monepiscopacy would not be contrary to Catholic orthodoxy.

Second, if by ‘fractionation’ one conceives of a particular Church with many parishes and no bishop, then drawing from the data the conclusion that the Church in Rome was fractionated during its first eighty or so years is not necessarily the result of a Protestant interpretive paradigm, only poor reasoning from the historical data. If, however, by ‘fractionation’ one conceives of the diversity described above, which is fully compatible with there having been a monepiscopacy in Rome, then this interpretation too is not necessarily the result of a Protestant interpretive paradigm. So either way, we agree with Brandon that arriving at a fractionation interpretation of the historical data is not necessarily the result of making use of or relying upon the Protestant interpretive paradigm.

Nevertheless, the Catholic faith and practice is not gnostic; it is deeply and inextricably bound up with matter, bones, tombs, lives, families, death days, calendars, monuments, relics, feast days and memorials. It also always incorporated the communion of the saints and the cult of the dead. For this reason, Brandon’s proposal is conceivable only from a non-sacramental, non-material, non-liturgical point of view, such that all that is necessary to revise radically and essentially the previous eighty years of Church history is for someone like St. Hegesippus or St. Irenaeus to make up the revision on paper. In this way, what Brandon proposes of St. Irenaeus presupposes a gnostic conception of Catholic faith, precisely what St. Irenaeus so vigorously battled. The faith and practice of the early Christians in Rome, bound up with matter and history in the way just described, makes this revisionary thesis incompatible with the historical data. Not only does the broader context and positive data explain the ‘fractionation’ data as the mode of operation of monepiscopacy during a time when Christianity was illegal, but the data also shows that Brandon’s thesis would require much more than St. Hegesippus or St. Irenaeus putting down some names on paper. It would require a grand conspiracy, comparable to getting all the employees of NASA to fake the Moon landing, and no one coming forward to reveal it, and no outsider finding out. Only by way of a positivist historical methodology that violates at least one of our four principles can such a thesis seem plausible, as we explain below.

6. Evaluative Summary

a. Summary of evaluation of Brandon’s argument

At this point we have analyzed and evaluated every piece of historical data Brandon brought forward in support of his thesis. We have examined every piece of data Brandon presented from the book of Acts, the Pastorals, the Catholic Epistles, as well as from 1 Clement, St. Ignatius, St. Polycarp, the Shepherd of Hermas, and St. Justin Martyr. We have showed that each piece of data is not only fully compatible with the truth of Catholic doctrine, but also that given the ILD principle, none of this data is evidence for Brandon’s thesis. That is true not only for the data taken individually, but also taken conjunctively, again, because of the ILD principle. Likewise, we showed that none of the data to which Brandon points in relation to Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus is evidence that the lists of bishops of Rome they provided are not truthful. Finally, we showed that the fractionation data to which Brandon appealed is not evidence that there was no monepiscopacy in Rome between the death of St. Peter and AD 150.

How then does Brandon reach his conclusion? Reading through our evaluation of each piece of data to which Brandon appeals shows a pattern involving the repetition of a few mistakes. One repeated mistake is failing to recognize ways in which the data fits an alternative paradigm, and thus treating such data as evidence for his own position, in violation of the ILD principle. For example, Brandon writes:

My argument is that all of the relevant data explicitly states that the Roman church was led by a plurality of presbyters.”⁵⁷

If that were actually the thesis of Brandon’s essay, then every Catholic could affirm it, because there being a plurality of presbyters is fully compatible with there being a bishop accompanied by many mere presbyters, or multiple bishops (one having supreme jurisdictional authority) accompanied by mere presbyters.

A second repeated mistake is attempting to use silence as evidence when that silence does not satisfy all the conditions necessary for silence to carry evidential weight, as we have shown repeatedly above.

A third common mistake is artificially restricting the scope of relevant data to create silence, and then using an argument from that constructed silence to infer discontinuity with proximate data, in violation of the fourth principle we laid out above. Brandon does this, for example, in attempting to argue that St. Polycarp was not a bishop. He does this as well by arbitrarily limiting the relevant data regarding the polity of the early Church in Rome only to five patristic texts composed prior to AD 165, and then using arguments from non-evidential silence in those texts to discredit and reject positive data from both the second half of the second century, and from the early third century, that fills in the silence of those earlier works concerning the succession of bishops from St. Peter. Brandon writes:

My case is that there is absolutely no evidence that anything like a bishop exists. … First of all, I am not “extrapolating from silence.” I’m taking the evidence we do have and forming conclusions based on that evidence.¹²²

Brandon creates the appearance of there being “absolutely no evidence” for anything like a bishop in Rome not only by failing to notice how that data would fit with there being such a bishop (e.g. St. Clement’s actions with regard to the Church at Corinth), but also by restricting what counts as evidence only to a handful of texts written during the early second century, using non-evidential silence within those texts, and disallowing or discrediting all other proximate data that informs and contextualizes that silence.

This is a positivist methodology of historiography, presupposing that there is no evidence for an event or entity at time t, unless there exists presently documents written at time t about that event or entity. Positivism in general is a stance of disbelief in certain legitimate ways of knowing, and the attempt to prohibit these ways of knowing from being treated as legitimate or able rightly to relate us epistemically to reality. For this reason, positivism in general is a form of skepticism. Positivist historical methodology is likewise a philosophical form of skepticism, because it artificially and unjustifiably disallows proximate data to count as evidence. Brandon adopts this philosophy in practice by arbitrarily restricting the temporal scope of data allowed to count as evidence, and then treating anything written outside that stipulated temporal scope as untrustworthy for providing insight into the conditions within that time period, and therefore the positive evidence from proximate data is made to seem to be refuted by arguments from non-evidential silence drawn from the data inside that restricted temporal scope. In this way the method presupposes discontinuity, and thus its results entail discontinuity. The discontinuity it ‘finds’ is loaded into its very methodology.

For this reason the evidence concerning the Church in Rome from AD 70 to AD 165 cannot rightly be interpreted in isolation. That is, if all the other particular Churches had bishops, then it would be very odd that the Church in Rome had none, especially given that the first records of the monepiscopacy in Rome show it to be fully present, and show no evidence of a break with a presbyterial past, and all the records from AD 70 to AD 165 are fully compatible with there being a monarchical bishop in Rome. That’s an explanatory problem for the positivist historiographical approach to the succession of bishops in Rome. Because of his positivist methodology, Brandon claims that it is a “fact” that “there are no successors to the Petrine office.”²⁴⁵ He seems not to realize that this “fact” is a result of a number of mistakes in historical methodology.

A fourth mistake is the selective use of data, resulting in special pleading. In addition to the cases already cited, Brandon makes selective use of data in the following cases. In Comment #59 Brandon relies on St. Jerome (who died in the fifth century), over against St. Ignatius of Antioch, who died around AD 107, to argue against the threefold distinction in office. Brandon selectively uses the Shepherd of Hermas, affirming what he says about presbyters, but denying the “communion of saints” doctrine revealed in the opening narrative between Hermas and Rhoda. When Paul Owen pointed out in Comment #50 the same problem regarding the silence of John in Revelation 2-3 concerning the existence of officers in those churches, Brandon replied:

We can certainly assume there were church officers in the churches that John writes to because we see them mentioned everywhere in Scripture.⁵⁰

In the case of Revelation 2-3, Brandon allows proximate data to fill in the silence. But in the case of the silence of the five patristic texts from the early second century regarding the succession of bishops in Rome, Brandon does not allow proximate data to fill in the silence. That’s special pleading.

Also in Comment #59, in response to Paul Owen pointing out that the same appeal to silence, from St. Paul’s not mentioning presbyters in Romans 16, would vitiate Brandon’s claim that there were presbyters in the Church of Rome, Brandon writes in reply:

Making a suppositions about the leadership position of the owner of a house gathering and assuming that Clement is a bishop in Rome are in a completely different category, however. We can make assumptions about the former because Paul often addresses leaders in churches and those whom he addresses seem to play an important role in the church. In terms of the latter though, there is no mention of a monarchical bishop, much less that the author of Clement was that person. It is possible but it is not plausible.¹⁵⁴

Brandon thinks we can justifiably “make assumptions” in this case (i.e., Romans 16) that there were presbyters there, because St. Paul “often addresses leaders in churches.” So Brandon allows evidence from other places in St. Paul’s writings to inform St. Paul’s silence in Romans 16 concerning the existence of presbyters in Rome. Yet Brandon does not allow evidence from other places (e.g. Jerusalem, Antioch, Smyrna, etc.) and texts to inform our interpretation of the plurality of presbyters mentioned in Hermas. Again, that is special pleading.

A fifth mistake is presupposing what is unique to the Protestant paradigm, in order to argue for the Protestant paradigm. For example, Brandon uses the BDAG lexicon in Comment #102 to deny that St. Peter held the episcopal office, and thus begs the question against the Catholic paradigm by methodologically preferencing the lexicon over the Tradition in the way I [Bryan] explained in 2010.²⁴⁶ In Commment #127, responding to Paul Owen, Brandon writes, “I agree with BDAG, generally speaking, while you agree with BAGD.”²⁴⁷ By contrast, on the question of the apostolic occupancy of the episcopal office St. Cyprian writes:

But deacons ought to remember that the Lord chose apostles, that is, bishops and overseers; while apostles appointed for themselves deacons after the ascent of the Lord into heaven, as ministers of their episcopacy and of the Church.²⁴⁸

And likewise St. Chrysostom in his Homily 3 on the Acts of the Apostles similarly shows that that the episcopal office held by the Apostles, including Judas, and then by Matthias, is continued in the bishops, including St. Chrysostom himself.²⁴⁹ This belief is part of the Tradition preserved in the Church Fathers, namely, that the episopacy held by the Apostles is carried on by the bishops. Brandon seeks to answer this question by way of a lexicon, as if the Tradition is either unreliable or has nothing to say about the question. But that methodology begs the question, by presupposing something approaching “solo scriptura.”²⁵⁰

Given that the Apostles exercised distinct episcopē in the churches, the “silent period” regarding bishops in Rome, i.e., the period between the deaths of the apostolic leaders of the Church in Rome (Sts. Peter and Paul, note the latter’s deference to “another man’s foundation”) and the compilation of St. Irenaeus’s list, is reduced to less than 120 years (68 to 180 AD), and less than 100 years for St. Hegesippus’s list, not the 150 or 180 years that Brandon routinely claims. During this fewer than 100 years in which a bishop-presbyter in Rome with distinctive episcopē is not explicitly mentioned in documents written during this time period, we find the activity of St. Clement who in writing or transmitting the letter to the Corinthians on behalf of the Church of Rome acts in a manner analogous to St. James at the Council of Jerusalem in drafting the letter to the Church in Antioch on behalf of the Apostles and presbyters at the Council. It is commonly acknowledged that St. James was an early example of the monarchical episcopate in Jerusalem, as we show below, so this similarity between his activity and that of St. Clement is at least suggestive of a similar office. Given that St. Clement wrote around AD 100, this places him roughly in the middle of the “silent period,” and so virtually eliminates the gap.

As for the other monarchical or ruling bishops in Rome during this period, in addition to taking into account the positive evidence provided by Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus we should consider the general paucity of Christian documents from this era. The silence on which Brandon seeks to build a case against monepiscopacy in Rome is a “slim” silence due to the small pool of data. In sum, once the terminological issues are addressed and the monepiscopate is considered in relation to the three-fold office of Apostle, bishop-presbyter, and deacon (as preserving this three-fold structure), Brandon’s case is reducible to an argument from silence during a roughly one hundred year period for which we have very little documentary evidence of any kind, let alone documentary evidence intended to address polity in Rome during this period. Unfortunately for his argument and his own ecclesiology, the strength of this point as an argument against an early Roman episcopacy is equivalent to its strength as an argument against an early Roman presbyterate.

b. The Original Challenge

In the first section of his essay Brandon explains that he is attempting to meet the challenge found in Sean Patrick’s post titled “Modern Scholarship, Rome and a Challenge.” The specific challenge Sean put forward in that post was excerpted from a comment I (Bryan) made on September 10, 2009, located on page 12 of the comments under Jason Stellman’s post titled “Newman on the Development of the Papacy,” on his old blog “De Regnis Duobus.” Those comments are no longer accessible. The challenge is the following:

Can you name one piece of historical evidence that meets these two conditions:

(1) it shows that there was no monarchical bishop in Rome until the second half of the second century, and;

(2) it is stronger evidence than is the list of St. Irenaeus (Against Heresies III.3.3)

(Please show why it is stronger evidence than is St. Irenaeus’s list.)”

Does the historical evidence Brandon provides here meet that challenge? The answer to that question is clear from what we have shown above. Not only is there no historical evidence that Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus fabricated their lists of bishops in Rome, but none of the historical data to which Brandon appeals is evidence for his thesis. Because none of the historical data he puts forward meets the challenge, all the appeals he makes to scholars turn out to reduce to an argument from authority. As St. Thomas Aquinas points out, however, although the argument from authority based on divine revelation is the strongest, “the argument from authority based on human reason is the weakest.”⁴¹ Nor do these opinions by contemporary scholars satisfy the original challenge, because contemporary opinions are not historical evidence.

Here again is another instance of special pleading, as we shall explain. Toward the end of the first section of his article, Brandon writes:

Finally, I also want to press back on the notion that Christians cannot utilize the discoveries of those who hold unorthodox beliefs. The fact that Lampe does not hold to biblical inerrancy is irrelevant to his discussion of Roman Christianity. There is nothing that Lampe says in terms of Roman ecclesiology that threatens any of the confessional standards of Reformed churches.

The fact that Lampe may believe doctrine “X”, “Y”, or “Z” is of no consequence to his arguments unless someone can propose a legitimate connection. If we want to discuss his perspective on the “pseudo-Pauline” epistles, that is a noble task, but there is nothing about Lampe’s conclusions there that impacts his belief about the monarchical episcopate. If someone believes otherwise they would need to demonstrate why Lampe’s belief in “X” is connected with his belief that the church at Rome had presbyterian church governance. Furthermore, as I will show, there would be no way for the Catholic to consistently apply this principle when utilizing the few remaining scholars who reject Lampe’s theory of the fractionation of Roman Christianity.

Of course we agree that Christians can “utilize the discoveries” of persons who hold unorthodox beliefs. And we agree that Lampe’s belief or disbelief in doctrines “X,” “Y,” or “Z,” does not ipso facto nullify his arguments or refute his claims about other matters. But within the specialized field of historical criticism in relation to the bible and early Christian history, there is well known evidence of a methodologically and ideologically motivated preference for a hermeneutic of discontinuity with ancient testimony or tradition, in favor of intra-guild theories constructed with the historico-critical tools of the trade. Thus when the appeal to scholars reduces to an argument from authority, as it does in Brandon’s article, then when one appeals to scholars when it suits one’s purpose, but rejects scholarship when it does not suit one’s purpose, one is engaged in ad hoc special pleading. Brandon does this, for example, when he counts contemporary academic noses, while dismissing scholars like Felix Cirlot and Gregory Dix, as one of us explained in the comments.²⁵¹ He does this when he rejects historical-critical scholars who attempt to raise and spin various data points so as to drive a wedge of discontinuity between the alleged “Jesus of history” (a de-mystified Jesus) and the “Jesus of faith” as witnessed in the New Testament documents, while embracing the conclusions of certain patristic scholars guided by the very same presuppositions of discontinuity when those conclusions are favorable to his Presbyterian thesis regarding Church polity. The ad hoc selective use of the appeal to scholarship is fallacious. It was precisely this problem that motivated the “original challenge” in the first place, back in 2009. So as to avoid that ad hoc argument from authority, we must stick with the historical evidence, and see if any of it overturns the testimony of St. Irenaeus. As we have shown here in this present work, the answer to that question is still “no.”

Paul Owen explains this well:

Irenaeus was in a better position to know such things than any modern scholar trying to reconstruct the history. At least that’s my opinion. Same goes for Tertullian. There is no patristic memory of there being only a collection of presbyters in Rome up to the time of Eleutherus (allegedly the first bishop in the catholic sense). The texts from which modern scholars infer that idea are not trying to answer that question. Whenever any patristic writer does actually intend to speak to that issue, they give more or less the same answer.²⁰⁵

The reason why trusting scholars over persons who were there “just doesn’t smell right” is because doing so is theologically loaded.²⁵² The strength of a testimony is proportional to the proximity of the witness to the event, all other things being equal. This is why St. Irenaeus’s testimony concerning the succession in Rome is not trumped by the opinions of contemporary scholars who live over eighteen hundred years later than did St. Irenaeus, especially given what we have shown above concerning the historical data to which these scholars have appealed. If, as Tertullian argued, the testimony of the Gnostics was to be rejected because they arose a hundred years after Christ, and therefore did not have the credibility of the Apostles and those disciples who learned from the Apostles, a fortiori what should we say of the comparative value of the appeal to the opinions of persons two thousand years removed?

c. Apostolic Succession

Brandon thinks that the data to which he has appealed somehow falsifies the Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession. In the section titled “VIII. Objections and the implications” in his article, Brandon writes:

One can see why, if my thesis is correct, namely, that there was no sacramental apostolic succession with the bishop possessing the authority to pass on this charism, that Roman Catholicism would not be on any better epistemological ground than Protestantism. As Cross and Judisch put it, this authority cannot be acquired through providence—it must be passed on in history through the laying on of hands of the bishops. The absence of this succession is acidic to their conception of the church and undermines their thesis, that apostolic succession is the only means for differentiating between Divine revelation and human opinion. Consequently, this article has falsified the thesis of the Judisch and Cross article by undermining the major premise that Catholics can appeal to apostolic succession while Protestants cannot.

The focus of Brandon’s argument has been to show that there was no monepiscopal bishop in Rome until AD 150. Even if he had shown that, that would not have shown that there was no apostolic succession in the Church at Rome during that time period, precisely because the non-existence of a monepiscopal bishop in Rome would not entail the non-existence of a plurality of presbyter-bishops, distinct in Holy Orders from mere presbyters. And as explained above, apostolic succession in its sacramental sense requires only the third grade of Holy Orders; it does not require that there be only one bishop with supreme jurisdictional authority in a diocese. But even if Brandon had shown that during that time period there was no monepiscopacy in Rome, and no sacramental succession in Rome until AD 150, this still would not entail that the doctrine of apostolic succession is false, or that there is no apostolic succession, even in Rome, because it would not refute the fact of apostolic succession in all the other particular Churches during this same time period, and would not rule out Rome acquiring Holy Orders after AD 150.²⁵³ The point is that refuting the doctrine of apostolic succession would require much more than constructing an argument from silence during a seventy year period in a particular city. Brandon, however, has shown none of this, as our analysis of his data has explained. So the entirety of Catholic doctrine remains wholly intact.²⁵⁴

Brandon makes the same sort of claim elsewhere in the comments. In Comment #39 he writes:

I’m arguing this sacramental notion of Apostolic Succession is falsified by what we know about the organization of the Roman church.²⁵⁵

How does Brandon reach this conclusion? He clarifies in Comment #51:

Leadership in the church was instituted, but my argument has been that it was not sacramental episcopal succession. And if it was not episcopal succession this subverts the arguments made by the traditional Catholic argument.²⁵⁶

Later, in Comment #73, he writes:

As such, if my argument about the presbyterian manner of church government (which excludes monarchical episcopacy and a threefold view of ministry) is correct then it necessarily follows that the Roman Catholic does not have Apostolic Succession as a principled means to distinguish human opinion from Divine revelation.²⁵⁷

In addition to his flawed argument from silence, what fundamentally lies behind Brandon’s belief that he has shown that the Catholic Church does not have apostolic succession is his mistaken assumption (explained above) that references in the patristic literature to presbyters and rule by presbyters is evidence of Presbyterian polity. This assumption is based on a failure to recognize not only that bishops are presbyters, but also that references to presbyters does not entail that there is no distinction between presbyter-bishops and mere presbyters. So his assumption is question-begging (i.e., presupposes precisely what is in question), and thus he arrives at a Presbyterian polity by presupposing a Presbyterian conception of the office of ‘presbyter.’ That’s a form of circular reasoning, unintended, of course, but circular nonetheless.

He reaches his conclusion by conflating jurisdictional monepiscopacy and the third grade of Holy Orders, such that in his mind, if he can show that there were no jurisdictional monepiscopacy in the Church at Rome from AD 68 to the middle of the second century, then he will have shown that there could be no sacramental succession in the Church at Rome during that time. But in actuality, even if there had been no jurisdictional monepiscopacy in the Church at Rome from AD 68 to the middle of the second century, there could still have been sacramental succession in the Church at Rome during that time, because the third grade of Holy Orders is not equivalent to jurisdictional monepiscopacy. This is why Brandon mistakenly infers from the existence of a plurality of presbyters to the refutation of the Oath Against Modernism.²⁵⁸

The mistaken premise underlying that inference is that monepiscopal jurisdiction just is “the episcopacy,” when in actuality, in Catholic doctrine “the episcopacy” is the third grade of Holy Orders. So even if he were to have shown the non-existence of the monepiscopacy in Rome from AD 68 to AD 150, this would leave the doctrine of apostolic succession intact. But as we have shown in the previous section, none of the data to which Brandon appeals is evidence that there was no monespiscopacy in Rome during that time period.

The unique authority of the bishop of Rome depends on his having received the unique authority Christ gave to St. Peter, represented in the Chair of St. Peter. The episcopate, however, did not have to originate with St. Peter in order for the Catholic Church to be the Church Christ founded. The apostles were themselves overseers of the Church, as was Christ Himself (1 Pet. 2:25), and so the episcopate was not limited to St. Peter, because the other apostles did not receive their episcopal authority from St. Peter, but from Christ. Hence while Catholic doctrine depends on St. Peter’s establishing an episcopal office in Rome, one which he himself held while ministering in the Church at Rome, Catholic doctrine does not depend on St. Peter himself ordaining anyone. While episcopal ordination requires the laying on of hands, the unique authority of the pope is not necessarily received through the laying on of hands by one having that authority, but rather by succeeding to the episcopal chair established in Rome by St. Peter.

Moreover, since all the implications Brandon lays out in the “VIII. Objections and the implications” section of his article depend on the data to which he appeals being evidence for this thesis, especially on his having successfully refuted the doctrine of apostolic succession, and because we have shown in our previous section above that this data is not evidence for his thesis, therefore there is no need for us to address these implications, because we have refuted their premises.

III. Resolution: Continuity and Paradigms

A. Documentary Witness of the Early Church Concerning the Episcopate

1. Brief introduction to the documentary witness

In section II, we evaluated a wide range of data deriving from a relatively narrow time frame in response to Brandon’s thesis. That time frame ranged from the post-ascension ministry of the apostles to the middle or end of the second century. Through the application of the ILD principle, as well as the two relevant principles for determining the evidential value of silence, we have shown that all of the evidence Brandon cites in support of his thesis is fully compatible with the existence of a jurisdictional monoepiscopate in Rome from the time of the death of St. Peter to the middle of the second century. Accordingly, the truth of Brandon’s second premise has not been established, thereby rendering his overarching argument unsound. However, so long as inquiry is limited to the narrow evidentiary time frame pertinent to Brandon’s thesis, the Catholic position may appear as one explanation among others wherein the respective difference in likelihood for the truth of one explanation over another is inscrutable; thereby leaving any principled reason for preferring one explanation over another underdetermined. Hence, in order to discover whether such apparent underdetermination can be resolved in one direction or another, it is necessary to test explanations against the principle of proximate evidence as outlined in II.b.1 above. This section, therefore, will present the earliest explicit testimony of the Christian community concerning the apostolic origins of the episcopate in general, and the existence and authority of the Petrine succession in particular. Examination of such proximate evidence will make apparent which explanation of the restricted data set, Brandon’s or that of the Catholic Church, best comports with the proximate testimony of the early Church found immediately outside the narrow scope of inquiry explored thus far.

We present here a non-exhaustive selection of testimonies from the early Church in two sections. Section one provides documentary witness to the apostolic origins of the episcopate throughout the Christian world, including the episcopate at the Church in Rome from the first through the fourth centuries, accompanied by clarifying contextual comments. Section two provides a simple listing of textual witnesses to the early Church’s recognition of both the existence and authority of a unique Petrine succession, from the first through the sixth centuries.

2. Presentation of the documentary witness

(a.) Proximate Evidence for the apostolic origins of the episcopate

According to the universal testimony of the Church Fathers, the Apostles had received authority from Christ Himself, and the Apostles then handed on their authority to their successors. We find evidence of this succession in all the apostolic Churches.

(1.) First Century

St. Clement of Rome, writing sometime toward the last part the first century, describes what the Apostles did, writing:

The Apostles have preached the gospel to us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ [has done so] from God. Christ therefore was sent forth by God, and the Apostles by Christ. Both these appointments, then, were made in an orderly way, according to the will of God. Having therefore received their orders, and being fully assured by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and established in the word of God, with full assurance of the Holy Ghost, they went forth proclaiming that the kingdom of God was at hand. And thus preaching through countries and cities, they appointed the first fruits [of their labours], having first proved [i.e., tested] them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterwards believe. Nor was this any new thing, since indeed many ages before it was written concerning bishops and deacons. For thus says the Scripture in a certain place, I will appoint their bishops in righteousness, and their deacons in faith.²⁵⁹

St. Clement first explains that the preaching of the Apostles by having received Christ’s authorization and commission is a continuation of the preaching of Jesus, by the authorization and commission of God the Father. This authorization and commission means that one speaks for the other, and therefore that accepting the sending One requires accepting those He sends, while rejecting those He sends entails rejecting the One who sent them. Having that pattern as the basis for their own authorization, the Apostles then, by this same authority they had received, appointed men whom they had tested, to be bishops and deacons of those who would come to believe in Christ.

Then in chapter 43 of his epistle to the Corinthians, St. Clement refers to the example of Moses, who had to deal with rivalry and contention concerning the priesthood and authority. St. Clement describes how Moses placed the twelve rods in the tabernacle, knowing all the while that Aaron’s rod would blossom. Moses did this not to learn which tribe ought to have the priesthood, but according to St. Clement, “he acted thus, that there might be no sedition in Israel.” In other words, Moses did this so that all the people would know who rightfully held the priesthood, and in this way would have no excuse for sedition. Then St. Clement shows that the Apostles (whom St. Clement knew personally) likewise knew “with perfect foreknowledge” that there would be contention over authority in the Church. So the Apostles did something that would show the people who had the rightful authority in the Church, and thus leave men without excuse with respect to sedition. He writes:

Our Apostles also knew, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be strife on account of the office of the episcopate. For this reason, therefore, inasmuch as they had obtained a perfect fore-knowledge of this, they appointed those already mentioned [i.e., bishops and deacons], and afterwards gave instructions, that when these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed them in their ministry. We are of opinion, therefore, that those appointed by them, or afterwards by other eminent men, with the consent of the whole Church, and who have blamelessly served the flock of Christ, in a humble, peaceable, and disinterested spirit, and have for a long time possessed the good opinion of all, cannot be justly dismissed from the ministry. For our sin will not be small, if we eject from the episcopate those who have blamelessly and holily fulfilled its duties. Blessed are those presbyters who, having finished their course before now, have obtained a fruitful and perfect departure [from this world]; for they have no fear lest any one deprive them of the place now appointed them.²⁶⁰

According to St. Clement, in order to show the people who had the rightful authority in the Church, the Apostles publicly appointed bishops and deacons, so that everyone would know who were the rightful successors of the Apostles. In addition, the Apostles instructed these bishops to do the same when they too approached death, so that “other approved men should succeed them [i.e., the first generation of bishops] in their ministry.” Here we see the principle that underlies apostolic succession. Teaching and governing authority in the Church is given from the top-down, that is, from Christ, to the Apostles, and then to their successors. Since no one can give what he does not have, those who have not received such authorization cannot give it. Not only that, but in order to prevent sedition, these appointments, like Christ’s authorization of the Apostles, were made in an orderly way, because “all things must be done properly and in an orderly manner.” (1 Cor. 14:40) By ordaining their successors in this public and orderly way, no one could claim ignorance of who was the rightful ruler, as a justification for sedition or schism.

This same pattern of succession can be found from the beginning in all the apostolic Churches. According to Eusebius (c. AD 263–339), after the martyrdom of St. James the Righteous, who became the bishop of Jerusalem, Symeon, the son of Clopas was found to be worthy of “the episcopal throne of that see.”²⁶¹ When Symeon was martyred under the emperor Trajan in A.D. 106 or 107, “his successor on the throne of the Jerusalem bishopric was a Jew named Justus.”²⁶² Eusebius goes on to list the succession of bishops in Jerusalem until the siege of Hadrian (AD 133):

But since the bishops of the circumcision ceased at this time, it is proper to give here a list of their names from the beginning. The first, then, was James, the so-called brother of the Lord; the second, Symeon; the third, Justus; the fourth, Zacchæus; the fifth, Tobias; the sixth, Benjamin; the seventh, John; the eighth, Matthias; the ninth, Philip; the tenth, Seneca; the eleventh, Justus; the twelfth, Levi; the thirteenth, Ephres; the fourteenth, Joseph; and finally, the fifteenth, Judas. These are the bishops of Jerusalem that lived between the age of the apostles and the time referred to, all of them belonging to the circumcision.²⁶³

Eusebius gives us a succession of fifteen bishops that sequentially occupied the “episcopal throne” of the Church at Jerusalem, until the time of Hadrian.

Regarding the succession from St. Mark in the Church at Alexandria, Eusebius writes:

In the fourth year of Domitian, Annianus, the first bishop of the parish of Alexandria, died after holding office twenty-two years, and was succeeded by Abilius, the second bishop.²⁶⁴

Domitian came into power in AD 81. So according to Eusebius, Annianus died about AD 85, having held the episcopacy in Alexandria since around AD 63. Then Eusebius writes:

It was during the first year of [Trajan’s] reign that Abilius, who had ruled the church of Alexandria for thirteen years, was succeeded by Cerdon. He was the third that presided over that church after Annianus, who was the first. At that time Clement still ruled the church of Rome, being also the third that held the episcopate there after Paul and Peter. Linus was the first, and after him came Anencletus. At this time Ignatius was known as the second bishop of Antioch, Evodius having been the first. Symeon likewise was at that time the second ruler of the church of Jerusalem, the brother of our Saviour having been the first. …²⁶⁵

Later he writes:

About the twelfth year of the reign of Trajan the above-mentioned bishop of the parish of Alexandria died, and Primus, the fourth in succession from the apostles, was chosen to the office.²⁶⁶

Trajan took office in AD 98, and so according to Eusebius, it was during this year that Abilius, the second bishop of Alexandria, was succeeded by Cerdon. Cerdon was bishop of Alexandria until about AD 110, at which time he was succeeded by Primus. At this time, St. Clement was still bishop of the Church at Rome. Primus was succeeded by Justus (121-129), who was succeeded by Eumenes (129-141), who was succeeded by Mark II (141-152), who was succeeded by Celadion, (152 – 167)²⁶⁷ then Agrippinus (167 – 178), and then Julian (178-189), and then Demetrius (189-232), who died at the age of 106. Demetrius is the bishop who appointed Origen to teach at the Catechetical school in Alexandria, and then later (around 230) condemned Origen (for self-castration and, possibly, heresy). Demetrius was the first bishop of Alexandria to establish other bishoprics in Egypt.

Concerning St. Clement of Rome, Eusebius writes:

In the third year of the reign of the emperor mentioned above, Clement committed the episcopal government of the church of Rome to Evarestus, and departed this life after he had superintended the teaching of the divine word nine years in all.²⁶⁸

According to Eusebius, St. Clement served as bishop of Rome until about AD 101, while St. Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch after Evodius who was the first bishop of the Church of Antioch. Concerning St. Ignatius, Eusebius writes:

And at the same time Papias, bishop of the parish of Hierapolis, became well known, as did also Ignatius, who was chosen bishop of Antioch, second in succession to Peter, and whose fame is still celebrated by a great many.²⁶⁹

On this account, St. Ignatius was the second bishop of Antioch after St. Evodius, about whom little is known. Evodius, apparently, was ordained by the Apostle Peter, who according to the account in Acts 12, seems to have gone immediately to Antioch after being released from jail by the angel. St. Ignatius is thought to have been an auditor (hearer) of the Apostle John, who died around AD 100. St. John Chrysostom (c. AD 347 – 407), who grew up in Antioch, taught that St. Ignatius had been ordained at the hands of Apostles, including St. Peter.

On his way to Rome in the year AD 107, St. Ignatius composed seven epistles, five of which were addressed to Churches of various cities along the way, one to the Church at Rome, and one composed to St. Polycarp (AD c. 69 – 155), the bishop of Smyrna. St. Polycarp knew St. Ignatius (they had met face to face) and wrote about St. Ignatius’s epistles in his To the Philippians. Smyrna was the first place that St. Ignatius stopped on his way from Antioch to Rome. There he wrote his letters to the Churches at Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles and Rome. When St. Ignatius arrived at Troas, he wrote his letters to the Church at Philadelphia and to the Church at Smyrna, and he also wrote his letter to St. Polycarp. Because the life and ministry of St. Ignatius stands as a bridge between the age of the apostles and the post-apostolic Church, and also because each of these seven letters bear witness to the nature and structure of the Church at the beginning of the second century; it is important to consider his testimony in detail.

In To the Ephesians, St. Ignatius refers to Onesimus as the bishop of the Ephesians (c. 1). Then he writes:

It is therefore befitting that you should in every way glorify Jesus Christ who has glorified you, that by a unanimous obedience you may be perfectly joined together in the same mind, and in the same judgment, and may all speak the same thing concerning the same thing,” [1 Corinthians 1:10] and that, being subject to the bishop and the presbytery, you may in all respects be sanctified. (c. 2)

Notice here that he enjoins the Christian faithful in Ephesus to be subject to their bishop and the presbytery, as the means by which they may all be in “unanimous obedience.” He speaks of bishops being already established all over the world, writing:

“For even Jesus Christ, our inseparable life, is the [manifested] will of the Father; as also bishops, settled everywhere to the utmost bounds [of the earth], are so by the will of Jesus Christ.” (c. 3)

Then he continues in chapter 4, writing:

“Wherefore it is fitting that you should run together in accordance with the will of your bishop, which thing also you do. For your justly renowned presbytery, worthy of God, is fitted as exactly to the bishop as the strings are to the harp. Therefore in your concord and harmonious love, Jesus Christ is sung. And man by man, become a choir, that being harmonious in love, and taking up the song of God in unison, you may with one voice sing to the Father through Jesus Christ, so that He may both hear you, and perceive by your works that you are indeed the members of His Son. It is profitable, therefore, that you should live in an unblameable unity, that thus you may always enjoy communion with God.”

Notice that unity and harmony are, for St. Ignatius, made possible by hierarchical order. St. Ignatius is not teaching that unity takes place by a ‘flattening’ of authority to some form of egalitarianism. Rather, for St. Ignatius, it is precisely in the harmony of each person acting in accordance with his appointed office that true harmony is made possible.

Then in chapter 5 he writes:

For if I in this brief space of time, have enjoyed such fellowship with your bishop — I mean not of a mere human, but of a spiritual nature — how much more do I reckon you happy who are so joined to him as the Church is to Jesus Christ, and as Jesus Christ is to the Father, that so all things may agree in unity!”

Here St. Ignatius again shows how being united to one’s divinely appointed ecclesial authority is analogous to the union of the Church with Jesus, and the union of Jesus to God the Father. Just as the gospel has come to men in an hierarchical fashion (from the Father, to the Son, from the Son to the Apostles, from the Apostles to the bishops), so likewise one’s present union with God the Father is through an harmonious hierarchy: first with the bishop, through union with him to the Apostles, through union with them to Jesus Christ, and through union with Him to God the Father.

Then in chapter 6 St. Ignatius writes:

“Now the more any one sees the bishop keeping silence, the more ought he to revere him. For we ought to receive every one whom the Master of the house sends to be over His household, (Matt 24:25) as we would do Him that sent him. It is manifest, therefore, that we should look upon the bishop even as we would upon the Lord Himself. And indeed Onesimus himself greatly commends your good order in God, that you all live according to the truth, and that no sect has any dwelling-place among you. Nor, indeed, do ye hearken to any one rather than to Jesus Christ speaking in truth.”

Notice the relation between following the bishop, preserving unity and avoiding any sect. For St. Ignatius, Christians receive and follow the bishop because He is sent by Jesus. And the bishop is sent by Jesus by having been sent by the Apostles, not by a secret inward call from heaven.

In To the Magnesians, chapter 2, Ignatius writes:

Since, then, I have had the privilege of seeing you, through Damas your most worthy bishop, and through your worthy presbyters Bassus and Apollonius, and through my fellow-servant the deacon Sotio, whose friendship may I ever enjoy, inasmuch as he is subject to the bishop as to the grace of God, and to the presbytery as to the law of Jesus Christ, [I now write to you].

Notice that the deacon is subject to the bishop (as by analogy to God the Father) and also to the presbytery (as by analogy to Jesus Christ).

In chapter 3, he writes:

Now it becomes you also not to treat your bishop too familiarly on account of his youth, but to yield him all reverence, having respect to the power of God the Father, as I have known even holy presbyters do, not judging rashly, from the manifest youthful appearance [of their bishop], but as being themselves prudent in God, submitting to him, or rather not to him, but to the Father of Jesus Christ, the bishop of us all. It is therefore fitting that you should, after no hypocritical fashion, obey [your bishop] in honour of Him who has willed us [so to do], since he that does not so deceives not [by such conduct] the bishop that is visible, but seeks to mock Him that is invisible. And all such conduct has reference not to man, but to God, who knows all secrets.

Chapter Three in this way gives us an insight into the thought of St. Ignatius regarding the hierarchical way of being united with God in love and obedience. When Christians submit to the bishop, they are not submitting ultimately to the bishop himself, but ultimately to God the Father, because it is God who has sent and appointed the bishop as His representative. Christians thus serve God by way of following their divinely appointed shepherd, the bishop. To disobey the visible bishop (or feign obedience to him) is to disobey the Bishop who is invisible (i.e., God the Father).

In chapter 4 he writes:

It is fitting, then, not only to be called Christians, but to be so in reality: as some indeed give one the title of bishop, but do all things without him. Now such persons seem to me to be not possessed of a good conscience, seeing they are not steadfastly gathered together according to the commandment.

Some Christians, according to St. Ignatius, recognize a person as having the title ‘bishop’, but disregard their bishop in their activities, as if he has no authority. This behavior, claims St. Ignatius, is not in accordance with the commandment pertaining to the assembling of believers. Believers are supposed to assemble in union with their bishop.

In chapter 6 he writes:

Since therefore I have, in the persons before mentioned, beheld the whole multitude of you in faith and love, I exhort you to study to do all things with a divine harmony, while your bishop presides in the place of God, and your presbyters in the place of the assembly of the apostles, along with your deacons, who are most dear to me, and are entrusted with the ministry of Jesus Christ, who was with the Father before the beginning of time, and in the end was revealed. Do ye all then, imitating the same divine conduct, pay respect to one another, and let no one look upon his neighbour after the flesh, but do ye continually love each other in Jesus Christ. Let nothing exist among you that may divide you; but be ye united with your bishop, and those that preside over you, as a type and evidence of your immortality. (our emphases)

This paragraph again shows how St. Ignatius understands the basis for a divine harmony in the Church. There is an hierarchical order of bishop, presbyters, and deacons. They are united to each other in that hierarchy, and the laity are united to them in obedience and love.

In chapter 7 he writes:

As therefore the Lord did nothing without the Father, being united to Him, neither by Himself nor by the apostles, so neither do ye anything without the bishop and presbyters. Neither endeavour that anything appear reasonable and proper to yourselves apart; but being come together into the same place, let there be one prayer, one supplication, one mind, one hope, in love and in joy undefiled.

Here again we see that the unity St. Ignatius urges believers to maintain is based on an hierarchical order that comes from God the Father, through His Son Jesus Christ whom He sent, then through the Apostles whom Christ sent, and then through the bishops whom the Apostles appointed.

In chapter 13 he writes:

with your most admirable bishop, and the well-compacted spiritual crown of your presbytery, and the deacons who are according to God. Be subject to the bishop, and to one another, as Jesus Christ to the Father, according to the flesh, and the apostles to Christ, and to the Father, and to the Spirit; that so there may be a union both fleshly and spiritual.

Notice again St. Ignatius’s hierarchical conception order and unity. The unity of a plurality in which the plurality is in some sense preserved is always a unity of order. There is an order in the Trinity. So likewise, there is an order in the Church, of deacons to presbyters, and presbyters to the bishop.

In To the Trallians, St. Ignatius writes in chapter 2:

For, since you are subject to the bishop as to Jesus Christ, you appear to me to live not after the manner of men, but according to Jesus Christ, who died for us, in order, by believing in His death, you may escape from death. It is therefore necessary that, as you indeed do, so without the bishop you should do nothing, but should also be subject to the presbytery, as to the apostle of Jesus Christ, who is our hope, in whom, if we live, we shall [at last] be found. It is fitting also that the deacons, as being [the ministers] of the mysteries of Jesus Christ, should in every respect be pleasing to all. For they are not ministers of meat and drink, but servants of the Church of God. They are bound, therefore, to avoid all grounds of accusation [against them], as they would do fire.

Here again we see St. Ignatius distinguish the offices of bishop, presbyter, and deacon. He explains that the Christians are to be subject to their bishop as to Jesus Christ. They are to do nothing apart from their bishop, that is, nothing pertaining to the Church. They are to be subject to the presbytery as to the apostle of Jesus. So the authority of Christ and the Apostles continues in the Church, according to St. Ignatius, through the offices of bishop and presbyter. The deacon holds a different order. The deacon is distinct from the bishop and presbyter in the third place after the bishop and the presbyter. The deacon is not a minister of the “mysteries” (i.e., the sacraments), because he is not a priest. Deacons are not “ministers of meat and drink” (i.e., the Body and Blood of Christ). They are servants of the bishop, and in this way servants of the Church of God.

In chapter 3 he writes:

In like manner, let all reverence the deacons as an appointment of Jesus Christ, and the bishop as Jesus Christ, who is the Son of the Father, and the presbyters as the sanhedrim of God, and assembly of the apostles. Apart from these, there is no Church. Concerning all this, I am persuaded that you are of the same opinion. For I have received the manifestation of your love, and still have it with me, in your bishop, whose very appearance is highly instructive, and his meekness of itself a power; whom I imagine even the ungodly must reverence, seeing they are also pleased that I do not spare myself.

Here again the deacon is to be honored as an “appointment of Jesus Christ” while the bishop is to be honored (by comparison) as if Jesus Christ. This is a very early explanation of what it means for the bishop or priest to be in Persona Christi. The presbyters are to be honored as “the sanhedrin of God, and assembly of the apostles.” By describing the presbytery in both these ways, St. Ignatius draws a connection between the magisterial authority under the Old Covenant and that of the New Covenant, showing that under the New Covenant, the presbyters have succeeded the Sanhedrin, and by implication the bishop has the place of the high priest. He again in this chapter we see the three-fold distinction in Holy Orders, from bishop, presbyter, and deacon.

In chapter 13, he writes:

Fare well in Jesus Christ, while you continue subject to the bishop, as to the command [of God], and in like manner to the presbytery.

St. Ignatius seems to believe that with the death of the Apostles, he as a bishop must remind the Christians that the apostolic authority continues in the succession of bishops whom the Apostles appointed. Only in this way can unity be preserved and heresy avoided.

In To the Romans, St. Ignatius writes in a very different manner from the tone in his other letters. He never enjoins the Christians at Rome to submit to their leaders. Instead he asks them to pray for him. It is worth recalling that at this time there was a recognized primacy in the three apostolic churches: Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria. They held a primacy not because of their size or importance, but because of their relation to St. Peter.²⁷⁰ But St. Ignatius here shows deference to the Church at Rome, in contrast to the tone he adopts in his other letters. This seems to be an indication of his recognition of the primacy had by the Church at Rome, even among the three apostolic Churches, since he himself was the bishop of the Church at Antioch.

In chapter 2 he identifies himself as “the bishop of Syria,” writing “that God has deemed me, the bishop of Syria, worthy to be sent for from the east unto the west.” He clearly does not see himself as one among many different equal bishops of Syria. Then in chapter 9 he writes, “Remember in your prayers the Church in Syria, which now has God for its shepherd, instead of me.” His role as “the bishop of Syria” has been to shepherd the believers in Syria. It is not that while he was the bishop of Syria the Church there in Syria did not have God as its shepherd. What he means here is that now (upon his absence from Syria) the Church in Syria has only God as its shepherd (or bishop).

From Troas, St. Ignatius wrote To the Philadelphians. In chapter 4 of this epistle, he writes:

Take heed, then, to have but one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to [show forth] the unity of His blood; one altar; as there is one bishop, along with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants: that so, whatsoever you do, you may do it according to [the will of] God.

St. Ignatius here enjoins the believers in Philadelphia to be united to their bishop, so that they may have only one Eucharist and in this way show forth the unity of Christ’s blood. St. Ignatius here again clearly distinguishes between the three offices: bishop, presbyter and deacon.

In his epistle To the Smyrnaeans, St. Ignatius writes in chapters 7-8:

But avoid all divisions, as the beginning of evils. See that you all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father, and the presbytery as you would the apostles; and reverence the deacons, as being the institution of God. Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast; but whatsoever he shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be secure and valid.

How are divisions to be avoided (which are the beginning of evil)? For St. Ignatius, the answer is: Follow the bishop even as Jesus Christ follows God the Father, and follow the presbytery as one would the apostles, and reverence the deacons as being the institution of God. Here St. Ignatius highlights the three primary Holy Orders as having been established and perpetuated by God, so that to follow those holding these Holy Orders is to follow God. Likewise, according to St. Ignatius there is a very important relation between Holy Orders and the other sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. Only that Eucharist is proper which is administered by the bishop or by one to whom the bishop has entrusted it (i.e., a presbyter under him). According to St. Ignatius, the same is true of baptisms. The people are to follow the bishop. Where the bishop is, there is the Catholic (i.e., universal) Church.

In chapter 9, he writes:

It is well to reverence both God and the bishop. He who honours the bishop has been honoured by God; he who does anything without the knowledge of the bishop, does [in reality] serve the devil.

Here St. Ignatius teaches in the strongest language that those who reject the authority of the bishop are serving the devil. This is because the bishop has been authorized by Christ, by way of the succession from the Apostles. Just as those who reject Jesus are rejecting God the Father, so also those who reject the successors of the Apostles are rejecting the Apostles, and those who reject the Apostles are rejecting Jesus Christ. The bishop is a continuation of Christ’s ministry on earth. So to honor and reverence the bishop is to honor and reverence Christ, and to reject the bishop is to reject the One who sent him, namely, Jesus Christ.

In chapter 12 he writes:

I salute your most worthy bishop, and your very venerable presbytery, and your deacons, my fellow-servants, and all of you individually, as well as generally, in the name of Jesus Christ, and in His flesh and blood, in His passion and resurrection, both corporeal and spiritual, in union with God and you.

Here again he distinguishes the three offices of Holy Orders, corresponding to the high priest, priest, and Levite in the Old Covenant.

Lastly, in his To Polycarp, St. Ignatius, in speaking of the duties of the flock, writes in chapter 6:

Give heed to the bishop, that God also may give heed to you. My soul be for theirs that are submissive to the bishop, to the presbyters, and to the deacons, and may my portion be along with them in God!

Here again, St Ignatius highlights the three-fold distinction in Holy Orders, as well as the nature of the divine authority of those having Holy Orders.

St. Ignatius teaches that the basis for the authority of the bishop, is that Christ sent him. The authorization and sending of the bishops was not merely an internal, private, subjective witness, nor were they authorized by a bottom-up democratic election by the local congregation. Rather, they were authorized and given their mission by the Apostles. Hence, St. Ignatius shows that in his understanding (formed by personal acquaintance with apostles), when the Apostles ordained and commissioned a bishop, it was primarily Christ who was ordaining and commissioning that bishop. And this is the consistent principle we find in the early Church Fathers, that when a bishop having apostolic succession ordains someone, it is Christ who is doing so through the one He authorized to speak and act in His Name. St. Ignatius also clearly and repeatedly distinguishes between the three Holy Orders in the Church: bishop, presbyter, and deacon.

According to Eusebius, when St. Ignatius was martyred (around AD 107), “he was succeeded by Heros in the episcopate of the church of Antioch.”²⁶⁹ Heros was succeeded by Cornelius, who was succeeded by Eros, who was succeeded in the latter part of the second century by Theophilus, who wrote the work Ad Autolychum, which still exists today.²⁷¹ Theophilus was succeeded by Maximus I (AD 182 – 191), who was succeeded by Serapion, who was bishop until AD 211.

In Asia, the apostolic appointment of bishops continued even to the end of the first century. Eusebius relates the following from St. Clement of Alexandria (AD 150-215):

For when, after the tyrant’s [i.e., Domitian’s] death, [the Apostle John] returned from the isle of Patmos to Ephesus, he went away upon their invitation to the neighboring territories of the Gentiles, to appoint bishops in some places, in other places to set in order whole churches, elsewhere to choose to the ministry some one of those that were pointed out by the Spirit.²⁷²

Shortly after AD 96, the Apostle John returned from Patmos to Ephesus, and began to travel to neighboring territories to appoint bishops, and set in order whole churches, and to choose to the ministry some that were pointed out by the Spirit. By “choosing to the ministry” St. Clement of Alexandria is likely referring to St. John choosing some laymen to become presbyters, something distinct from “appoint bishops,” which likely refers to ordaining one presbyter (within a particular Church) to the episcopacy. Among those ordained by the Apostle John at this time was St. Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. Tertullian writes, “For this is the manner in which the apostolic churches transmit their registers: as the church of Smyrna, which records that Polycarp was placed therein by John.”²⁷³ Concerning St. Polycarp, Eusebius writes:

At that time Polycarp, a disciple of the apostles, was a man of eminence in Asia, having been entrusted with the episcopate of the church of Smyrna by those who had seen and heard the Lord.²⁶⁹

And this is confirmed in the epistle of St. Ignatius to St. Polycarp. St. Polycarp was entrusted with the episcopate of Smyrna by one or more apostles. According to less established tradition, the first bishop of Smyrna was Apelles (mentioned in Romans 16:10), followed by Strataes, a brother (or uncle) of Timothy, then Ariston, then Bucolus, the bishop under whom St. Polycarp was raised, first being made a deacon, then a presbyter, and finally, upon the death of Bucolus, bishop.

In Athens, Dionysius the Aeroapagite became the first bishop of the Church there. This we learn from a letter written by a different Dionysius, Dionysius the bishop of Corinth, written around AD 170 to Soter, bishop of the church at Rome from AD 166-175 AD. Dionysius the Aeroapagite was succeeded by Narkissos (who was originally from Palestine) around the year AD 96. Narkissos was succeeded by Publius (who was from Malta). According to St. Jerome, Publius was martyred during the persecution under the Emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138). He was succeeded by Quadratus. There is some dispute as to whether the Quadratus who was bishop of Athens after Publius was the same Quadratus of Athens who was an apologist, and who wrote a letter to Hadrian when the latter visited the city of Athens. The letter helped relax the persecution against the Christians. In the letter he reports that he himself had seen many who were healed by Jesus and even raised from the dead by Jesus.²⁷⁴

In Crete, St. Paul ordained St. Titus to be the first bishop of the churches there. From Dionysius, bishop of Corinth (writing in AD 170) we learn that at that time Philip was bishop of Crete, the church at Goryna being the location of the episcopal see of Crete. It was this Philip, according to Eusebius, whose writings most effectively refuted Marcion’s errors. We learn from Eusebius that Pinytus then became bishop of Crete, and died around AD 180.

St. Paul also ordained St. Timothy the first diocesan bishop of Ephesus. The tradition indicates that St. Timothy served as bishop there until the last decade of the first century, and was martyred. His relics were later moved to Constantinople. Around AD 107, St. Ignatius, in his epistle To the Ephesians, refers to Onesimus as the bishop of Ephesus.²⁷⁵ About AD 190, Polycrates, the bishop of Ephesus, wrote a letter to Victor, the bishop of Rome, in which letter he states that the Apostle John is buried in Ephesus, and the Apostle Phillip is buried in Hieropolis. He also tells us that seven of his relatives had been bishops before him. So Polycrates thus testifies to the connection and continuity between the episcopal office held by Onesimus and later by Polycrates.

Hermas, mentioned in Romans 16:14, is said to have become the bishop of Philippi, and was later martyred. (His feast day is May 9.) Tradition holds that Philemon, to whom the Apostle Paul wrote his epistle, became the bishop of Colossae, where tradition says he was martyred. The earliest tradition shows that Crescens (mentioned by Paul in 2 Tim 4:10) became a bishop in Galatia. Aristarchus, mentioned in Acts, Colossians and Philemon, became the bishop of Thessalonica. According to tradition, Jason, at whose home Paul stayed in Thessalonica (Acts 17; cf. Rom 16:21), became the bishop of Tarsus, Prochorus, one of the seven deacons named in Acts 6, became the bishop of Nicomedia, and Nicolas, another of the seven deacons, is said to have become the bishop of Samaria.

Also according to St. Jerome, St. Philip, one of the seven deacons mentioned in Acts 6, later became the bishop of Tralles. When St. Ignatius composed his epistles, he tells us that at that time Polybius was the bishop of Tralles. Tradition maintains that the bishop of Philadelphia to whom Ignatius refers without naming him in his [Ignatius’s] epistle to the Philadelphians, was Demetrius (mentioned in 3 John 12). Demetrius had been ordained bishop of Philadelphia by the Apostle John. According to tradition Gaius (mentioned in 3 John 1) was the first bishop of Pergamum, followed by Antipas (mentioned in Revelation 2:13). According to that tradition Antipas was martyred by being burned at the stake some time before John wrote the book of Revelation. A piece of Antipas’s skull is now preserved as a relic in the Monastery of St. John the Theologian on the island of Patmos. St. Ignatius also tells us that at that time (AD 107), Damas was the diocesan bishop of Magnesia. Papias (AD 60 – 135), an auditor of the Apostle John, and a friend of Polycarp, became the diocesan bishop of Hierapolis, the place where Philip, one of the Twelve Apostles, was buried.²⁷⁶ Two later bishops of Hierapolis were Apolinarius, who flourished during the time of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-180), and then Abircius Marcellus, who was martyred around AD 200. According to tradition the first bishop of the Church at Laodicea was Archippus (Col 4:17), followed by Nymphan, followed by Diotrophes (3 John 9), followed by Sagaris, who was martyred in AD 166 under Marcus Aurelius. St. Melito, fl. 160s-170s, was the bishop of Sardis. The episcopacy in Corinth has already been discussed in a previous section above.

Everywhere one looks, this same pattern emerges regarding the authorization and commissioning of bishops by the Apostles, and then these bishops continuing this practice in ordaining bishops to succeed them.

In the generation after the Apostles, if someone had asked the question, “By what authority do you do these things?” it is clear that the bishops would have answered by pointing to their ordination, i.e., their having received authorization from the Apostles.

(2.) Second Century

In the same way, the second generation of bishops would have pointed to their having been ordained by those having the succession from the Apostles. We see this most clearly in St. Irenaeus and Tertullian, both writing toward the later part of the second century. In his work “Against Heresies” St. Irenaeus writes:

It is possible then for everyone in every Church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the Apostles which has been made known throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the Apostles, and their successors to our own time . . .²⁷⁷

Here St. Irenaeus explains that the apostolic tradition has been preserved in the Churches which the apostles founded. Moreover, there is no difficulty determining which churches are of apostolic origin (and are therefore sure depositories of the apostolic tradition) since it is possible to trace the line of succession from the current bishops of the Churches back to the apostles themselves. In this way, for those Christians living at the time of St. Irenaeus, knowledge of the content of apostolic teaching was dependent upon the truth and verifiability of episcopal succession. Moreover, apostolic succession entails the principle means by which heretical groups are identified, as St. Irenaeus makes clear when he writes:

For all these [heretics] are of much later date than are the bishops of whom the Apostles handed over the Churches . . . .²⁷⁸

In the same work, St. Irenaeus details the origins of the episcopate within the Church at Rome:

The blessed Apostles [Peter and Paul] , having founded and built up the Church [of Rome], they handed over the office of the episcopate to Linus. Paul makes mention of this Linus in the Epistle to Timothy. To him succeeded Anencletus; and after him, in the third place from the Apostles, Clement was chosen for the episcopate. He had seen the blessed Apostles and was acquainted with them. It might be said that He still heard the echoes of the preaching of the Apostles, and had their traditions before his eyes. And not only he, for there were many still remaining who had been instructed by the Apostles.²⁷⁹

Here St. Irenaeus indicates that the apostles Peter and Paul understood themselves to hold an episcopal office capable of being handed on to others, and in fact did so before their martyrdoms. St. Irenaeus continues:

The true gnosis is the doctrine of the Apostles, and the ancient organization of the Church throughout the whole world, and the manifestation of the body of Christ according to the successions of bishops, by which successions the bishops have handed down the Church which is found everywhere . . . .²⁸⁰

Here St. Irenaeus explains, not only that the Church was organized in an episcopal fashion throughout the whole world from ancient times, but that such organization actually constitutes the [visible] manifestation of the body of Christ.

Further explaining the essential connection between apostolic teaching and apostolic succession, St. Irenaeus writes:

Since therefore we have such proofs, it is not necessary to seek the truth among others which it is easy to obtain from the Church; since the apostles, like a rich man [depositing his money] in a bank, lodged in her hands most copiously all things pertaining to the truth: so that every man, whosoever will, can draw from her the water of life. For she is the entrance to life; all others are thieves and robbers. On this account are we bound to avoid them, but to make choice of the thing pertaining to the Church with the utmost diligence, and to lay hold of the tradition of the truth. For how stands the case? Suppose there arise a dispute relative to some important question among us, should we not have recourse to the most ancient Churches with which the apostles held constant intercourse, and learn from them what is certain and clear in regard to the present question? For how should it be if the apostles themselves had not left us writings? Would it not be necessary, [in that case,] to follow the course of the tradition which they handed down to those to whom they did commit the Churches?²⁸¹

Here St. Irenaeus is teaching that the truth about Christ and Christianity is to be found not by looking to the heretics but by looking to the bishops who were entrusted by the Apostles with the deposit of faith, and to the apostolic Churches which these bishops shepherd. Because the Apostles entrusted the deposit of faith to the bishops, that deposit belongs to those bishops and is guarded and preserved by the succession of bishops in those apostolic Churches.

Earlier in this same work St. Irenaeus had written:

Since, however, it would be very tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions [of bishops] of all the Churches, we do put to confusion all those who, in whatever manner, whether by an evil self-pleasing, by vainglory, or by blindness and perverse opinion, assemble in unauthorized meetings; [we do this, I say,] by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul; as also [by pointing out] the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority—that is, the faithful everywhere—inasmuch as the Apostolic Tradition has been preserved continuously by those [faithful men] who are everywhere.²⁸²

First, it is worth noting that according to St. Irenaeus it is necessary that “every Church should agree with this Church,” meaning that every particular Church (e.g. Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus) must agree with the particular Church at Rome on account of its “preeminent authority” due to its having been founded by St. Peter and St. Paul.²⁸³ But, St. Irenaeus is also saying here that the faith comes down to his time by means of “the succession of bishops.” He is not saying that the faith merely happens to have been preserved in the succession of bishops; he is making a much stronger claim than that. He is saying that the succession of bishops is the normative means by which the deposit of faith can be determined, precisely because the authority of stewardship of this deposit was entrusted to these lines of bishops by the Apostles. His whole argument against the Gnostics would be undermined if he was claiming only that it presently happens to be the case that the genuine deposit of faith is found in the succession of bishops. In that case, it would be pointless to bring up the succession of bishops, for it would offer no more (or less) assurance of finding the genuine deposit of faith there than among the Gnostics.

St. Irenaeus continues:

Wherefore it is incumbent to obey the presbyters [priests] who are in the Church—those who, as I have shown, possess the succession from the apostles; those who, together with the succession of the episcopate [bishop], have received the certain gift of truth, according to the good pleasure of the Father. But [it is also necessary] to hold in suspicion others who depart from the primitive succession, and assemble themselves together in any place whatsoever . . . . But those who cleave asunder, and separate the unity of the Church, [shall] receive from God the same punishment as Jeroboam did.²⁸⁴

We see here that the priests and the bishops have their authority because they “possess the succession from the apostles.” This phrase shows what St. Irenaeus understood concerning the gift the bishops (including himself) had received at their ordination. They possessed something that those not having the succession did not. Through having the succession from the Apostles, they possessed stewardship over the deposit of faith, to guard and preserve it, and to provide the authoritative determination concerning its identity and meaning. By having the succession from the Apostles, they possessed what St. Irenaeus calls “the certain gift of truth.” The priests and bishops are promised (by Christ) the gift of preserving the truth that was entrusted to them by Christ through the Apostles, upon condition of remaining in communion with the successor of the one to whom Christ entrusted the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. In this quotation we see also that St. Irenaeus teaches that we should hold in suspicion those who depart from “primitive succession”—i.e., those who reject apostolic succession, and claim to teach the apostles’ doctrine, but do not have the authority from the Apostles to say what is the Apostles’ doctrine. St. Irenaeus views departure from the succession of bishops as schism, as having in some sense rejected the Apostles who authorized and sent these bishops. The principle is that he who rejects the Apostles, rejects Christ, just as he who rejects Christ rejects the Father who sent Christ. “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me; and he who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.” (Luke 10:16)

St. Irenaeus was himself only one generation removed from the Apostles, because he had known St. Polycarp (AD 69 – 155), who had been ordained by the Apostle John. Concerning St. Polycarp, St. Irenaeus writes:

But Polycarp also was not only instructed by apostles, and conversed with many who had seen Christ, but was also, by apostles in Asia, appointed bishop of the Church in Smyrna, whom I also saw in my early youth, for he [Polycarp] tarried [on earth] a very long time, and, when a very old man, gloriously and most nobly suffering martyrdom, departed this life, having always taught the things which he had learned from the apostles, and which the Church has handed down, and which alone are true. To these things all the Asiatic Churches testify, as do also those men who have succeeded Polycarp down to the present time—a man who was of much greater weight, and a more steadfast witness of truth, than Valentinus, and Marcion, and the rest of the heretics.”²⁸⁵

According to St. Irenaeus, St. Polycarp was instructed by apostles, and by apostles appointed bishop of the Church in Smyrna. During his long life he taught the things he had learned from the Apostles. Surely, if apostolic succession was something the Apostles either did not teach, or taught against, St. Polycarp would have opposed it. But, there is absolutely no evidence that St. Polycarp, or anyone of the second generation bishops, opposed the doctrine and practice of apostolic succession. We have every reason to believe that the doctrine of apostolic succession we find in St. Irenaeus is the doctrine of apostolic succession he had received from men like St. Polycarp, who had themselves received it from the Apostles.

We can see this same idea in Tertullian in his work titled The Prescription Against Heretics, where he writes:

The apostles . . . next went forth into the world and preached the same doctrine of the same faith to the nations. They then in like manner founded churches in every city, from which all the other churches, one after another, derived the tradition of the faith, and the seeds of doctrine, and are every day borrowing them, that they may become churches. Indeed, it is on this account only that they will be able to deem themselves apostolic, as being the offspring of apostolic churches. Every sort of thing must necessarily revert to its original for its classification. Therefore the churches, although they are so many and so great, comprise but the one primitive church, (founded) by the apostles, from which they all (spring). In this way all are primitive, and all are apostolic, whilst they are all proved to be one, in (unbroken) unity, by their peaceful communion, and title of brotherhood, and bond of hospitality, — privileges which no other rule directs than the one tradition of the selfsame mystery.²⁸⁶

According to Tertullian, the authority of the Church corresponds to the origin and organic development of the Church. The Apostles founded Churches and ordained bishops over those Churches. These Churches are apostolic by having been directly founded by the Apostles. Later, other Churches were founded by men sent out by the Churches founded by the Apostles. Tertullian explains that in order for a Church which was not founded by the Apostles to be apostolic, it must have been founded by a Church which is itself apostolic. In this way there is always organic unity between all the priests and bishops, and all the particular Churches. All true Churches can be traced back to the Churches founded by the Apostles, because they have the authorization from the Apostles.

Tertullian again writes:

But if there be any (heresies) which are bold enough to plant themselves in the midst of the apostolic age, that they may thereby seem to have been handed down by the apostles, because they existed in the time of the apostles, we can say: Let them produce the original records of their churches; let them unfold the roll of their bishops, running down in due succession from the beginning in such a manner that [that first bishop of theirs] bishop shall be able to show for his ordainer and predecessor some one of the apostles or of apostolic men,– a man, moreover, who continued steadfast with the apostles. For this is the manner in which the apostolic churches transmit their registers: as the church of Smyrna, which records that Polycarp was placed therein by John; as also the church of Rome, which makes Clement to have been ordained in like manner by Peter. In exactly the same way the other churches likewise exhibit (their several worthies), whom, as having been appointed to their episcopal places by apostles, they regard as transmitters of the apostolic seed. Let the heretics contrive something of the same kind. For after their blasphemy, what is there that is unlawful for them (to attempt)? But should they even effect the contrivance, they will not advance a step. For their very doctrine, after comparison with that of the apostles, will declare, by its own diversity and contrariety, that it had for its author neither an apostle nor an apostolic man; because, as the apostles would never have taught things which were self-contradictory, so the apostolic men would not have inculcated teaching different from the apostles, unless they who received their instruction from the apostles went and preached in a contrary manner. To this test, therefore will they be submitted for proof by those churches, who, although they derive not their founder from apostles or apostolic men (as being of much later date, for they are in fact being founded daily), yet, since they agree in the same faith, they are accounted as not less apostolic because they are akin in doctrine. Then let all the heresies, when challenged to these two tests by our apostolic church, offer their proof of how they deem themselves to be apostolic. But in truth they neither are so, nor are they able to prove themselves to be what they are not. Nor are they admitted to peaceful relations and communion by such churches as are in any way connected with apostles, inasmuch as they are in no sense themselves apostolic because of their diversity as to the mysteries of the faith.²⁸⁷

Tertullian is here saying that the way to distinguish heretics from the orthodox is to get out the records and see whose bishops can trace their succession back to the Apostles. The heretics cannot trace their bishops back to someone who was ordained by the Apostles. The Apostolic Churches, however, can do just that. Tertullian provides two tests to show that the doctrine of the heretics is contrary to that of the Apostles. These two tests are related to each other. One necessarily comes before the other, and depends on the other. First, he uses the test of apostolic succession. “Let them produce the original records of their churches, let them unfold the roll of their bishops ….”. The second test depends on the first test. The second test is comparing whether the ‘faith’ proposed by the heretics agrees with the doctrine held by the Apostles. But to determine whether the doctrine of the heretics agrees with the doctrine of the Apostles, Tertullian does not say, “Look at the Scriptures.” He says that the ‘faith’ of the heretics must be compared to the faith of the Churches which are in agreement with the Churches founded by the Apostles. So the Apostolic Churches (the ones founded by the Apostles and maintaining the succession from the Apostles) are still the standard for what is the apostolic faith. For Tertullian, we know which Churches have the apostolic faith by comparing their doctrine to that of the apostolic Churches, i.e., the ones having the succession from the Apostles. So the second test (comparing the faith of the heretics to that of the Apostles) depends on the first test (apostolic succession). According to Tertullian, the succession of bishops in the Apostolic Churches is what determines the standard for what is the apostolic doctrine, against which to compare the doctrine of these Gnostic heretics.

The requirement of testing the claims of heretics against the faith taught in the Apostolic Churches would make no sense if there were no “charism of truth” in the Apostolic Churches. If ecclesial deism were true, there would be no more reason to expect to find the Apostles’ doctrine in the Apostles doctrine than in the assemblies of the Gnostics. In other words, if Tertullian believed that the Apostolic Churches of his time only happened to contain the Apostles’ doctrine, but were not necessarily the divinely authorized and divinely protected guardians and stewards of the deposit of faith, there would be no reason to point to the Apostolic Churches as the standard by which to locate the Apostles doctrine. That would simply beg the question (i.e., presume precisely what was in question) between the Catholics and the Gnostics, because the Gnostics maintained that the true doctrine of the Apostles had not been passed down to the bishops. So Tertullian’s requirement that apostolic doctrine be determined by conformity to the doctrine taught in the Churches founded by the Apostles presupposes not only that the Apostles did not withhold any revealed doctrine from the bishops they ordained, but also that there is a divine promise of preservation of the faith among those having the succession from the Apostles. In other words, we see here implicitly in Tertullian the same notion in St. Irenaeus of a “charism of truth” that accompanies possessing the succession from the Apostles, in full communion with the successor of St. Peter.

Again Tertullian writes:

From this, therefore, do we draw up our rule. Since the Lord Jesus Christ sent the apostles to preach, (our rule is) that no others ought to be received as preachers than those whom Christ appointed; for “no man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.” Nor does the Son seem to have revealed Him to any other than the apostles, whom He sent forth to preach—that, of course, which He revealed to them. Now, what that was which they preached–in other words, what it was which Christ revealed to them—can, as I must here likewise prescribe, properly be proved in no other way than by those very churches which the apostles founded in person, by declaring the gospel to them directly themselves, both viva voce [with the spoken voice], as the phrase is, and subsequently by their epistles. If, then, these things are so, it is in the same degree manifest that all doctrine which agrees with the apostolic churches—those moulds and original sources of the faith must be accounted true, as undoubtedly containing that which the (said) churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from God. Whereas all doctrine must be prejudged as false which savours of contrariety to the truth of the churches and apostles of Christ and God. It remains, then, that we demonstrate whether this doctrine of ours, of which we have now given the rule, has its origin in the tradition of the apostles, and whether all other doctrines do not ipso facto proceed from falsehood. We hold communion with the apostolic churches because our doctrine is in no respect different from theirs. This is our witness of truth.”²⁸⁶

Tertullian is here saying that no man knows the Father except Christ, and no one knows Christ except the Apostles, and no one knows the Apostles except the bishops whom they appointed. Therefore, no one who is not sent by the bishops should be received to preach. In other words, the imperative for Catholics of the second century is this: Do not accept as your Church authority anyone who is not sent by the bishops (who are themselves sent by the Apostles, who were themselves sent by Christ, who was Himself sent by God the Father). If it does not come from the Apostles and those ordained by the Apostles, then it is ipso facto not to be received. This applies not only to teaching, but also to teachers and preachers.

Again Tertullian writes:

Come now, you who would indulge a better curiosity, if you would apply it to the business of your salvation, go through the apostolic churches, in which the very seats of the apostles are still pre-eminent in their places, in which their own authentic writings are read, uttering the voice and representing the face of each of them severally. Achaia is very near you, (in which) you find Corinth. Since you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi; (and there too) you have the Thessalonians. Since you are able to cross to Asia, you get Ephesus. Since, moreover, you are close upon Italy, you have Rome, from which there comes even into our own hands the very authority (of apostles themselves). How happy is its church, on which apostles poured forth all their doctrine along with their blood! where Peter endures a passion like his Lord’s! where Paul wins his crown in a death like John’s where the Apostle John was first plunged, unhurt, into boiling oil, and thence remitted to his island-exile!²⁸⁸

Notice Tertullian’s emphasis on the unique authority of the Church of Rome among all the other apostolic churches, much as we saw in St. Irenaeus’s claim that all the particular Churches should agree with the Church at Rome, on account of its preeminent authority.

And again Tertullian writes:

Since this is the case, in order that the truth may be adjudged to belong to us, “as many as walk according to the rule,” which the church has handed down from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God, the reason of our position is clear, when it determines that heretics ought not to be allowed to challenge an appeal to the Scriptures, since we, without the Scriptures, prove that they have nothing to do with the Scriptures. For as they are heretics, they cannot be true Christians, because it is not from Christ that they get that which they pursue of their own mere choice, and from the pursuit incur and admit the name of heretics. Thus, not being Christians, they have acquired no right to the Christian Scriptures; and it may be very fairly said to them, “Who are you? When and whence did you come? As you are none of mine, what have you to do with that which is mine? Indeed, Marcion, by what right do you hew my wood? By whose permission, Valentinus, are you diverting the streams of my fountain? By what power, Apelles, are you removing my landmarks? This is my property. Why are you, the rest, sowing and feeding here at your own pleasure? This (I say) is my property. I have long possessed it; I possessed it before you. I hold sure title-deeds from the original owners themselves, to whom the estate belonged. I am the heir of the apostles. Just as they carefully prepared their will and testament, and committed it to a trust, and adjured (the trustees to be faithful to their charge), even so do I hold it. As for you, they have, it is certain, always held you as disinherited, and rejected you as strangers—as enemies.²⁸⁹

Tertullian here shows that those who are not in communion with the Apostolic Churches have no right to appeal to Scripture to defend their positions, because the Scriptures belong to the bishops to whom the apostolic writings were entrusted by the Apostles. Since the Scriptures belong to the bishops, those not in communion with those bishops in the universal Church have no right to challenge what the bishops say that the Scriptures teach. The sacred books do not belong to them, but to the bishops to whom the Apostles entrusted them. Since the Scriptures belongs to the bishops and have been entrusted to them, they have the right and authority to determine its authentic and authoritative interpretation.

The arguments given by St. Irenaeus and Tertullian for apostolic succession are not that the apostolic doctrine is more likely to be found among those having the succession from the Apostles. Otherwise, the Gnostics could have treated such arguments as question-begging, that is, as presuming without any justification that the succession of bishops fully received and faithfully preserved the deposit of faith. That is precisely what was in question between the Catholics on the one hand, and the Gnostics on the other hand. In their arguments against the Gnostics, St. Irenaeus and Tertullian are making a much stronger claim. They are claiming that the Apostles publicly authorized certain men (i.e., bishops) to function as official stewards of the deposit of faith, to guard it and explicate it, and charged them to publicly authorize other tested and qualified men to carry on this function of stewardship, in a line of perpetual successions, until Christ returned for His Bride.

According to St. Irenaeus and Tertullian, the Apostles did not merely preach truths of the divine revelation of Christ to the first Christians, and then go to their martyrdom. That would have left the Church susceptible to the Gnostic challenge, with many clamoring voices claiming to speak for the Apostles, and claiming to have texts written by the Apostles. It would have left the sheep without divinely-designated shepherds, entirely at a loss regarding what is the truth concerning Christ and His Gospel. Rather, according to St. Irenaeus and Tertullian, by publicly appointed successors, and giving to them the authority to appoint further successors in perpetuam, the Apostles cut off the Gnostic challenge at the knees, by, in a sense, perpetuating themselves, and so ensuring that no Gnostic challenger could ever have an equal claim to speak for the Apostles. In this way, it is not just an “historical argument.” It is an argument that reaches back into history in order to show why the normative way of determining the truth concerning the apostolic deposit is to unroll the lines of bishops, and see whose go back to the Apostles. Only those bishops have the divine authority from the Apostles to say what does or does not belong to the deposit of faith received from the Apostles.²⁹⁰

The notion of apostolic succession we see clearly in the latter half of the second century in the writings of St. Irenaeus and Tertullian we find also in the middle of the second century. Eusebius tells us that St. Hegesippus, who was already a young man at the time of the time of the death of Antinous (AD 130), came to Rome under Anicetus (155- 166) and wrote in the time of Eleutherius, bishop of Rome from 175 to 189. Eusebius writes:

Hegesippus in the five books of Memoirs which have come down to us has left a most complete record of his own views. In them he states that on a journey to Rome he met a great many bishops, and that he received the same doctrine from all. It is fitting to hear what he says after making some remarks about the epistle of Clement to the Corinthians. His words are as follows:

“And the church of Corinth continued in the true faith until Primus was bishop in Corinth. I conversed with them on my way to Rome, and abode with the Corinthians many days, during which we were mutually refreshed in the true doctrine. And when I had come to Rome I remained there until Anicetus, whose deacon was Eleutherius. And Anicetus was succeeded by Soter, and he by Eleutherius. In every succession, and in every city that is held which is preached by the law and the prophets and the Lord.”²⁹¹

As St. Hegesippus traveled through many different cities in the middle of the second century, he met a great many bishops, and received doctrine from them. He notes that he received the same doctrine from them all. And this is a testimony to the unity of the faith and practice of the Church in the second century. Even though we see heretics (e.g. Marcion, Valentinus) arise within the Church, be excommunicated from the Church, and lead some Catholics to follow them out of the Church, there is no evidence here or elsewhere of a great falling away of the Church. There is no outcry or protest as though some group of Christians within the Church adopted a novel practice of apostolic succession, while some original group of Christians or Churches stood in opposition, maintaining the apostolic practice of ordination from below by congregational election. In St. Hegesippus’s letter we see evidence that in the mid-second century, the faith of the Church is everywhere preserved within the Church. That is significant because in the middle and late second century, we see apostolic succession, as episcopal succession, practiced ubiquitously in the Catholic Church. And this implies that the apostolic succession described at the end of the second century by St. Irenaeus and Tertullian was the same apostolic succession believed and practice in the middle of the second century. And in order for there to have been the kind of widespread agreement St. Hegesippus describes in the middle of the second century, we have very good reason to believe that the mid-second century belief and practice of apostolic succession was itself a faithful continuation of a doctrine and practice established by the Apostles themselves.

Between St. Hegesippus and the testimonies of St. Irenaeus and Tertullian, we find the testimony St. Dionysius. Around AD 170, St. Dionysius, the bishop of Corinth wrote a number of letters to various Churches, and in these letters he describes each Church as having its own bishop.²⁹² In his letter to the Church at Athens, St. Dionysius writes of the recent martyrdom (under the persecution of Marcus Aurelius) of their bishop Publius, and reminds them of the faith of their first bishop, Dionysius the Areopagite, who had been converted to the faith by the Apostle Paul, recorded by St. Luke in Acts 17:34.²⁹² Similarly, a few years later, Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, wrote a letter to Victor, bishop of Rome from 189 to 199.²⁹³ There is no reason to disbelieve that the episcopacy we see in the example of bishop Polycrates at the end of the second century is not the continuation of the episcopacy that St. Paul had established at Ephesus in St. Timothy, and which St. John had maintained when he returned from Patmos.

Around AD 215, St. Hippolytus, a presbyter at the Church of Rome, wrote a work known as the “ Apostolic Tradition.” This is a work intended to record some of the tradition which the Church at Rome had received and always practiced concerning ordination of bishops and presbyters. St. Hippolytus writes:

We have set forth as was necessary that part of the discourse which relates to the spiritual gifts, all that God, right from the beginning, granted to people according to his will, bringing back to himself this image which had gone astray. Now, driven by love towards all the saints, we have arrived at the essence of the tradition which is proper for the Churches. This is so that those who are well informed may keep the tradition which has lasted until now, according to the explanation we give of it, and so that others by taking note of it may be strengthened (against the fall or error which has recently occurred because of ignorance and ignorant people), with the Holy Spirit conferring perfect grace on those who have a correct faith, and so that they will know that those who are at the head of the Church must teach and guard all these things.

St. Hippolytus here states that he is presenting the “essence of the Tradition which is proper for the Churches,” a Tradition that has lasted from the time of the Apostles “until now.” Those at the head of the Church “must teach and guard all these things.” He then presents a description of the rite by which a bishop is ordained:

He who is ordained as a bishop, being chosen by all the people, must be irreproachable. When his name is announced and approved, the people will gather on the Lord’s day with the council of elders and the bishops who are present. With the assent of all, the bishops will place their hands upon him, with the council of elders standing by, quietly. Everyone will keep silent, praying in their hearts for the descent of the Spirit. After this, one of the bishops present, at the request of all, shall lay his hand upon him who is being ordained bishop, and pray, saying:

God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Father of mercies and God of all consolation, you who live in the highest, but regard the lowest, you who know all things before they are, you who gave the rules of the Church through the word of your grace, who predestined from the beginning the race of the righteous through Abraham, who instituted princes and priests, and did not leave your sanctuary without a minister; who from the beginning of the world has been pleased to be glorified by those whom you have chosen, pour out upon him the power which is from you, the princely Spirit, which you gave to your beloved Son Jesus Christ, which he gave to your holy Apostles, who founded the Church in every place as your sanctuary, for the glory and endless praise of your name. Grant, Father who knows the heart, to your servant whom you chose for the episcopate, that he will feed your holy flock, that he will wear your high priesthood without reproach, serving night and day, incessantly making your face favorable, and offering the gifts of your holy Church; in the spirit of high priesthood having the power to forgive sins according to your command; to assign lots according to your command; to loose any bond according to the authority which you gave to the Apostles; to please you in mildness and a pure heart, offering to you a sweet scent, through your son Jesus Christ, through whom to you be glory, power, and honor, Father and Son, with the Holy Spirit, in the Holy Church, now and throughout the ages of the ages. Amen.

We see that one who is to be ordained a bishop can be ordained only by a bishop. We also see an explicit description of the authority of the bishop as a continuation of the authority of the Apostles. The bishop has the responsibility to feed the holy flock, to function as a high priest through the sacrifice he offers in the Eucharist (“the gifts of your holy Church”), having the apostolic power to forgive or retain sins (John 20:23). He also has the authority to assign presbyters and deacons their places in the Church, and to loosen any bond. Next, regarding the ordination of elders St. Hippolytus writes:

When an elder is ordained, the bishop places his hand upon his head, along with the other elders, and says according to that which was said above for the bishop, praying and saying:

God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, look upon your servant here, and impart the spirit of grace and the wisdom of elders, that he may help and guide your people with a pure heart, just as you looked upon your chosen people, and commanded Moses to choose elders, whom you filled with your spirit which you gave to your attendant.

Now, Lord, unceasingly preserving in us the spirit of your grace, make us worthy, so that being filled we may minister to you in singleness of heart, praising you, through your son Christ Jesus, through whom to you be glory and might, Father and Son with the Holy Spirit, in your Holy Church, now and throughout the ages of the ages. Amen.

Of note here is that while the [mere] elders do also place their hands on the candidate to be ordained an elder, they do so not for the same reason or with the same necessity as that of the ordaining bishop. Mere elders cannot ordain, but a bishop can ordain. The other elders also lay hands on the candidate to show their union with the bishop and to join their prayer to that of the bishop, that the candidate may receive the Holy Spirit’s sacramental gift of ordination to the priesthood.

(3.) Third and Fourth Centuries

This same affirmation of the Catholic understanding of apostolic succession is ubiquitous in the third and fourth centuries. For example, St. Jerome, in his letter to Evangelus (date unknown) writes:

When afterwards one [presbyter] was chosen to preside over the others, this was done to remedy schism, lest anyone rend the church of Christ by drawing it to himself. For even at Alexandria from the time of Mark the evangelist up to the bishops Heraclas and Dionysius the presbyters have always named as bishop one chosen from their own number and set in a more exalted position . . .”²⁹⁴

In a similar vein, St. Augustine, responding to the Donatists in 393 wrote:

You know what is the Catholic Church is, and what is cut off from the Vine.
If there are any among you cautious, let them come; let them live in the Root.
Before they become too withered to be liberated from the fire.
For this reason we do not rebaptize, [for baptism] is a sign of unity in the faith.
Not because we see that you are holy, but to hold the only form,
Because the form itself has a branch which is cut off from the Vine.
But what do they profit from a form, who do not live in the Root?
Come, brethren, if you wish to be engrafted in the Vine.
A grief it is when we see you lying thus cut off.
Number the Bishops even from the very seat of Peter.
And see every succession in that line of Fathers.
That is the Rock against which the proud Gates of Hell prevail not. (Psalmus contra Partem Donati. PL 43.30)

Seven years later, responding to a Donatist appeal to episcopal succession, St. Augustine writes:

For if the lineal succession of bishops is to be taken into account, with how much more certainty and benefit to the Church do we reckon back till we reach Peter himself, to whom, as bearing in a figure the whole Church, the Lord said: “Upon this rock will I build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it!” The successor of Peter was Linus, and his successors in unbroken continuity were these:— Clement, Anacletus, Evaristus, Alexander, Sixtus, Telesphorus, Iginus, Anicetus, Pius, Soter, Eleutherius, Victor, Zephirinus, Calixtus, Urbanus, Pontianus, Antherus, Fabianus, Cornelius, Lucius, Stephanus, Xystus, Dionysius, Felix, Eutychianus, Gaius, Marcellinus, Marcellus, Eusebius, Miltiades, Sylvester, Marcus, Julius, Liberius, Damasus, and Siricius, whose successor is the present Bishop Anastasius. In this order of succession no Donatist bishop is found. But, reversing the natural course of things, the Donatists sent to Rome from Africa an ordained bishop, who, putting himself at the head of a few Africans in the great metropolis, gave some notoriety to the name of “mountain men,” or Cutzupits, by which they were known.

Now, even although some traditor had in the course of these centuries, through inadvertence, obtained a place in that order of bishops, reaching from Peter himself to Anastasius, who now occupies that see—this fact would do no harm to the Church and to Christians having no share in the guilt of another; for the Lord, providing against such a case, says, concerning officers in the Church who are wicked: “All whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.” Thus the stability of the hope of the faithful is secured, inasmuch as being fixed, not in man, but in the Lord, it never can be swept away by the raging of impious schism. (Letter 53)

In all the evidence available from the early Church, one finds universal agreement concerning the apostolic origins of the episcopacy. Not a single case can be found in which someone was recognized as holding episcopal authority, but did not receive that authority either from Christ Himself, or from someone who had received authority mediately from Christ, by way of succession from the Apostles. No one could take ecclesial authority to himself, precisely because it is not a human authority, but a divine authority, which therefore has to be given from above. And this is also why no one could receive ordination from someone who had not himself received this authority from Christ directly or from Christ mediately through succession from the Apostles. Knowingly treating an invalid ordination as though it were a valid ordination would be the equivalent of arrogating ecclesial authority to oneself. Because no one can give what he does not have, therefore those not having ecclesial authority could not give it. Only those having ecclesial authority could give ecclesial authority in the act of ordination. Congregations might put forward candidates for ordination, as in Acts 6:1-6 where the whole multitude put forward seven candidates to be ordained as deacons. But in the history of the Church there is not a single known case of ordination “from below,” rather than by apostolic succession.

(b.) Proximate Evidence for the Existence and Authority of the Petrine Succession

The following list of quotations is a representative, though not exhaustive, list of references showing widespread recognition of a Petrine succession as well as the unique ecclesial authority of St. Peter and his successors within the early Church.

(1.) First Century

St. Clement, third bishop of Rome, writes an unsolicited letter of correction and exhortation to the Church at Corinth (80AD) which begins as follows:

The Church of God which sojourns in Rome to the Church of God which sojourns in Corinth, to those who are called and sanctified by the will of God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Grace and peace from almighty God be multiplied unto you through Jesus Christ. Owing to the sudden repeated calamities and misfortunes which have befallen us, we acknowledge that we have been somewhat tardy in turning our attention to the matters in dispute among you, beloved; and especially that abominable and unholy sedition, alien and foreign to the elect of God, which a few rash and self-willed persons have inflamed to such madness that your venerable and illustrious name, worthy to be loved by all men, has been greatly defamed.²⁹⁵

St. Clement goes on to warn the Corinthians that their disobedience to his instruction will be a transgression since it is Christ which speaks through this instruction:

If anyone disobey the things which have been said by Him [Christ] through us, let them know that they will involve themselves in transgression and in no small danger. We, however, shall be innocent of this . . . .²⁹⁶

And again, in the same letter, St. Clement insists that obedience is due to his instruction since what is written is through the Holy Spirit:

You will afford us joy and gladness if, being obedient to the things which we have written through the Holy Spirit, you will root out the wicked passion of jealousy, in accord with the plea for peace and concord which we have made in this letter.²⁹⁷

(2.) Second Century

St. Ignatius, in his To the Romans (AD 107) lauds the Church at Rome, recognizing the Roman Church to hold a “presidency of love”, writing:

Ignatius, also called Theophorus, to the Church that has found mercy in the greatness of the Most High Father in Jesus Christ, His only Son; to the Church beloved and enlightened after the love of Jesus Christ, our God, by the will of Him that has willed everything which is; to the Church also which holds the presidency in the place of the country of the Romans, worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of blessing, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy of sanctification, and, because you hold the presidency of love, named after Christ and named after the Father: her therefore do I salute in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father. To those who are united in flesh and in spirit by every commandment of His, who are filled with the grace of God without wavering, and who are filtered clear of every foreign stain, I wish an unalloyed joy in Jesus Christ, our God.²⁹⁸

St. Ignatius, in the same letter, explains that the Roman Church has taught others and that its teaching is to remain in force:

You have envied no one; but others you have taught. I desire only that what you have enjoined in your instructions may remain in force.²⁹⁹

Hermas, in his work the Shepherd (AD 140), refers to one Clement whose duty it was to communicate with other Churches, writing:

Therefore shall you write two little books and send one to Clement and one to Grapte. Clement shall then send it to the cities abroad, because that is his duty; and Grapte shall instruct the widows and the orphans. But you shall read it in this city along with the presbyters who are in charge of the Church.³⁰⁰

The precise identity of Clement in this passage remains an open question. If the Clement of Hermas is St. Clement of Rome, this passage would seem to reinforce the authoritative role played by the head of the Roman Church among early Christian communities. Yet many scholars date Hermas to approximately AD 140 based upon a passage found within the Muratorian Fragment. Such dating places the writing of Hermas well beyond the known lifetime of St. Clement of Rome. The relevant passage from the Muratorian Fragment reads:

The Pastor [i.e., the Shepherd], moreover, did Hermas write very recently in our times in the city of Rome, while his brother, the bishop Pius, sat in the [episcopal] chair of the Church of Rome. [Pastorem uero nuperrime temporibus nostris in Urbe Roma Hermas conscripsit, sedente cathedra Urbis Romae ecclesiae Pio Episcopo fratre eius.]

Nevertheless, despite the later dating, there remain reasons for thinking that the Clement of Hermas may be identifiable with St. Clement of Rome. It may be that Hermas was written in parts (perhaps by different authors) over an extended period of time, coming finally to completion in the mid second century. In that case, the inclusion of St. Clement of Rome might be explained as a feature pertaining to portions of Hermas written prior to AD 140. Or it may be that the author, utilizing an allegorical form, introduces St. Clement of Rome as a character in the visions because St. Clement was perhaps the most widely known ecclesial figure of the prior generation. However, even if the dating of Hermas based upon the Muratorian Fragment were to render the identification of the two Clements unlikely, the very passage from the Muratorian Fragment upon which the date of Hermas is predicated, constitutes an independent second century witness to apostolic succession in Rome, for it explicitly references one Pius, the brother of Hermas, who “sat in the chair of the Church of Rome.”

St. Irenaeus, in his work Against Heresies (AD 180) explicitly recounts the succession of bishops at Rome, writing:

The blessed Apostles [Peter and Paul] , having founded and built up the Church [of Rome], they handed over the office of the episcopate to Linus. Paul makes mention of this Linus in the Epistle to Timothy. To him succeeded Anencletus; and after him, in the third place from the Apostles, Clement was chosen for the episcopate. He had seen the blessed Apostles and was acquainted with them. It might be said that He still heard the echoes of the preaching of the Apostles, and had their traditions before his eyes. And not only he, for there were many still remaining who had been instructed by the Apostles.³⁰¹

St. Irenaeus, in the same work, explains that because the Roman Church is founded upon Peter and Paul, it serves as a center of unity for the Christian world. He writes:

But since it would be too long to enumerate in such a volume as this the successions of all the Churches, we shall confound all those who, in whatever manner, whether through self-satisfaction or vainglory, or through blindness and wicked opinion, assemble other than where it is proper, by pointing out here the successions of the bishops of the greatest and most ancient Church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul, that Church which has the tradition and the faith which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the Apostles. For with this Church, because of its superior origin, all Churches must agree, that is, all the faithful in the whole world; and it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the Apostolic tradition.³⁰¹

St. Irenaeus, in the same work, explains that St. Clement’s letter to the Church at Corinth was precisely a case of the Church of Rome exercising its duty of fraternal correction. He goes on to recount the succession of bishops at Rome from the time of Clement to his own day, writing:

In the time of Clement, no small dissension having arisen among the brethren in Corinth, the Church in Rome sent a very strong letter to the Corinthians, exhorting them to peace and renewing their faith . . . To this Clement, Evaristus succeeded; and Alexander succeeded Evaristus. Then, sixth after the Apostles, Sixtus was appointed; after him, Telesphorus, who also was gloriously martyred. Then Hyginus; after him, Pius; and after him, Anicetus. Soter succeeded Anicetus, and now, in the twelfth place after the Apostles, the lot of the episcopate has fallen to Eleutherius. In this order, and by the teaching of the Apostles handed down in the Church, the preaching of the truth has come down to us.³⁰¹

Muratorian Fragment (AD 180-200)

The Pastor [i.e., the Shepherd], moreover, did Hermas write very recently in our times in the city of Rome, while his brother bishop Pius sat in the [episcopal] chair of the Church of Rome. And therefore it also ought to be read; but it cannot be made public in the Church to the people, nor placed among the prophets, as their number is complete, nor among the apostles to the end of time.⁸⁰

(3.) Third Century

Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 225), wrote the following in this Prescription Against Heretics, around AD 200:

Come now, if you would indulge a better curiosity in the business of your salvation, run through the apostolic Churches in which the very thrones [cathedrae] of the Apostles remain still in place; in which their own authentic writings are read, giving sound to the voice and recalling the faces of each. Achaia is near you, so you have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi. If you can cross into Asia, you have Ephesus. But if you are near to Italy, you have Rome, whence also our authority derives. How happy is that Church, on which Apostles poured out their whole doctrine along with their blood, where Peter endured a passion like that of the Lord, where Paul was crowned in a death like John’s [the Baptist], where the Apostle John, after being immersed in boiling oil and suffering no hurt, was exiled to an island.²⁰³

Sometime between AD 212 and 219, already a Montantist but revealing nonetheless, Tertullian wrote the following concerning the magisterial authority Christ set up in His Church:

But further, if Christ reproves the scribes and Pharisees, sitting in the official chair of Moses, but not doing what they taught, what kind of (supposition) is it that He Himself withal should set upon His own official chair men who were mindful rather to enjoin — (but) not likewise to practise — sanctity of the flesh, which (sanctity) He had in all ways recommended to their teaching and practising?³⁰²

Tertullian, though already separated from the Catholic Church, argues that Christ would not have set upon His own official chair men who would be like the Pharisees who sat on the seat of Moses, saying one thing yet doing another. Tertullian’s argument aside, what is telling is his reference to Christ’s official chair, as a seat of teaching authority in the Church.

Around AD 225, St. Hippolytus wrote:

Callistus attempted to confirm this heresy—a man cunning in wickedness, and subtle where deceit was concerned, (and) who was impelled by restless ambition to mount the episcopal throne. … But after a time, there being in that place other martyrs, Marcia, a concubine of Commodus, who was a God-loving female, and desirous of performing some good work, invited into her presence the blessed Victor, who was at that time a bishop of the Church, and inquired of him what martyrs were in Sardinia. And he delivered to her the names of all, but did not give the name of Callistus, knowing the acts he had ventured upon. … Now (the governor) was persuaded, and liberated Callistus also. And when the latter arrived at Rome, Victor was very much grieved at what had taken place; but since he was a compassionate man, he took no action in the matter. Guarding, however, against the reproach (uttered) by many—for the attempts made by this Callistus were not distant occurrences—and because Carpophorus also still continued adverse, Victor sends Callistus to take up his abode in Antium, having settled on him a certain monthly allowance for food. And after Victor’s death, Zephyrinus, having had Callistus as a fellow-worker in the management of his clergy, paid him respect to his own damage; and transferring this person from Antium, appointed him over the cemetery. … Thus, after the death of Zephyrinus, supposing that he had obtained (the position) after which he so eagerly pursued, he excommunicated Sabellius, as not entertaining orthodox opinions.³⁰³

The third-century poem, “Adversus Marcionem,” says:

Hâc cathedrâ, Petrus quâ sederat ipse, locatum
Maxima Roma Linum primum considere iussit.

(On this chair, where Peter himself had sat,
great Rome first placed Linus and bade him sit.) (P.L., II, 1099)

In AD 251, St. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage wrote:

There is one God and one Christ, and one Church, and one Chair founded on the Rock [Peter] by the voice of the Lord [et cathedra una super Petrum Domini uoce fundata]. It is not possible to set up another altar or another priesthood besides that one altar and that one priesthood. Whoever gathers elsewhere, scatters.³⁰⁴

About that same year St. Cyprian wrote:

The Lord says to Peter: ‘I say to you,’ He says, ‘that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it. And to you I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatever things you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth, they shall be loosed also in heaven.’ And again He says to him after His resurrection: ‘Feed my sheep.’ On him He builds the Church, and to him He gives the command to feed the sheep; and although He assigns a like power to all the Apostles, yet He founded a single chair, and He established by His own authority a source and an intrinsic reason for that unity. Indeed, the others were that also which Peter was; but a primacy is given to Peter whereby it is made clear that there is but one Church and one chair. So too, all are shepherds, and the flock is shown to be one, fed by all the Apostles in single-minded accord. If someone does not hold fast to this unity of Peter, can he imagine that he still holds the faith? If he desert the chair of Peter upon whom the Church was built, can he still be confident that he is in the Church?³⁰⁵

Concerning the Novatian schism, led by the antipope Novatian, St. Cyprian writes (AD 251-3)

You wrote, moreover, for me to transmit a copy of those same letters to [Pope] Cornelius our colleague, so that he might lay aside all anxiety, and know at once that you held communion with him, that is, with the Catholic Church. … Moreover, Cornelius was made bishop by the judgment of God and of His Christ, by the testimony of almost all the clergy, by the suffrage of the people who were then present, and by the assembly of ancient priests and good men, when no one had been made so before him, when the place of Fabian, that is, when the place of Peter and the degree of the sacerdotal throne was vacant; which being occupied by the will of God, and established by the consent of all of us, whosoever now wishes to become a bishop, must needs be made from without; and he cannot have the ordination of the Church who does not hold the unity of the Church. Whoever he may be, although greatly boasting about himself, and claiming very much for himself, he is profane, he is an alien, he is without. And as after the first there cannot be a second, whosoever is made after one who ought to be alone, is not second to him, but is in fact none at all.

Then afterwards, when he had undertaken the episcopate, not obtained by solicitation nor by extortion, but by the will of God who makes priests; what a virtue there was in the very undertaking of his episcopate, what strength of mind, what firmness of faith — a thing that we ought with simple heart both thoroughly to look into and to praise — that he intrepidly sat at Rome in the sacerdotal chair at that time when a tyrant, odious to God’s priests, was threatening things that can, and cannot be spoken, inasmuch as he would much more patiently and tolerantly hear that a rival prince was raised up against himself than that a priest of God was established at Rome.³⁰⁶

St. Cyprian is very explicit that Christ made St. Peter the ground (or foundation or basis) of the unity of the Church. In giving to St. Peter a primacy, Christ gave to the Church a gift, a means by which to preserve her unity. Otherwise at the first schism there would be no objective way to determine where the Church is, for each faction would seemingly have equal claim to be the continuation of the Church. Christ did not set up the Church so that all of her members must have graduate degrees in theology in order to determine where is the Church, as if even then there would be unity.

St. Cyprian continues, in AD 252, still writing about the Novatian schism:

For neither have heresies arisen, nor have schisms originated, from any other source than from this, that God’s priest is not obeyed; nor do they consider that there is one person for the time priest in the Church, and for the time judge in the stead of Christ; whom, if, according to divine teaching, the whole fraternity should obey, no one would stir up anything against the college of priests; no one, after the divine judgment, after the suffrage of the people, after the consent of the co-bishops, would make himself a judge, not now of the bishop, but of God. No one would rend the Church by a division of the unity of Christ. No one, pleasing himself, and swelling with arrogance, would found a new heresy, separate and without, unless any one be of such sacrilegious daring and abandoned mind, as to think that a priest is made without God’s judgment, when the Lord says in His Gospel, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them does not fall to the ground without the will of your Father.” (Matt. 10:29) […]

Nevertheless, Peter, upon whom by the same Lord the Church had been built, speaking one for all, and answering with the voice of the Church, says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we believe, and are sure that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God: ” (Matt. 15:13) signifying, doubtless, and showing that those who departed from Christ perished by their own fault, yet that the Church which believes on Christ, and holds that which it has once learned, never departs from Him at all, and that those are the Church who remain in the house of God; but that, on the other hand, they are not the plantation planted by God the Father, whom we see not to be established with the stability of wheat, but blown about like chaff by the breath of the enemy scattering them, of whom John also in his epistle says, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, no doubt they would have continued with us.” (1 Jn. 2:19) […]

With a false bishop appointed for themselves by heretics, they dare even to set sail and carry letters from schismatics and blasphemers to the chair of Peter and to the principal Church, in which sacerdotal unity has its source; nor did they take thought that these are Romans, whose faith was praised by the preaching Apostle, and among whom it is not possible for perfidy to have entrance.”³⁰⁷

Notice that for St. Cyprian, the unity of the bishops and priests has its source not only as a past event but as a present grounding or principle in the chair of Peter.

Again, between 251-53, St. Cyprian writes:

But what sort of a thing is this, that, because Novatian dares to do this thing, we are to think that we must not do it! What then? Because Novatian also usurps the honour of the priestly throne, ought we therefore to renounce our throne? Or because Novatian endeavours wrongfully to set up an altar and to offer sacrifices, does it behoove us to cease from our altar and sacrifices, lest we should appear to be celebrating the same or like things with him? Utterly vain and foolish is it, that because Novatian arrogates to himself outside the Church the image of the truth, we should forsake the truth of the Church. … For first of all the Lord gave that power to Peter, upon whom He built the Church, and whence He appointed and showed the source of unity — the power, namely, that whatsoever he loosed on earth should be loosed in heaven. And after the resurrection, also, He speaks to the apostles, saying, “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you. And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and says, unto them, Receive the Holy Ghost: whosesoever sins you remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins you retain, they are retained.” Whence we perceive that only they who are set over the Church and established in the Gospel law, and in the ordinance of the Lord, are allowed to baptize and to give remission of sins; but that without, nothing can either be bound or loosed, where there is none who can either bind or loose anything.³⁰⁸

And during this same time (251-253) he writes:

For if she [the Church] is with Novatian, she was not with [Pope] Cornelius. But if she was with Cornelius, who succeeded the bishop Fabian by lawful ordination, and whom, beside the honour of the priesthood, the Lord glorified also with martyrdom, [then] Novatian is not in the Church; nor can he be reckoned as a bishop, who, succeeding to no one, and despising the evangelical and apostolic tradition, sprang from himself. For he who has not been ordained in the Church can neither have nor hold to the Church in any way. … But if the flock is one, how can he be numbered among the flock who is not in the number of the flock? Or how can he be esteemed a pastor, who — while the true shepherd remains and presides over the Church of God by successive ordination — succeeding to no one, and beginning from himself, becomes a stranger and a profane person, an enemy of the Lord’s peace and of the divine unity, not dwelling in the house of God, that is, in the Church of God, in which none dwell except they are of one heart and one mind, since the Holy Spirit speaks in the Psalms, and says, “It is God who makes men to dwell of one mind in a house.” … But that they [i.e., the Novatians] are said to have the same God the Father as we, to know the same Christ the Son, the same Holy Spirit, can be of no avail to such as these. For even Korah, Dathan, and Abiram knew the same God as did the priest Aaron and Moses. And yet those men had not made a schism, nor had gone out abroad, and in opposition to God’s priests rebelled shamelessly and with hostility; but this these men [i.e., the Novatians] are now doing who divide the Church, and, as rebels against the peace and unity of Christ, attempt to establish a throne for themselves, and to assume the primacy, and to claim the right of baptizing and of offering [i.e., the Eucharistic sacrifice].³⁰⁹

In AD 254, St. Cyprian, in his Letter to Florentius Pupianus, wrote:

There speaks Peter, upon whom the Church would be built, teaching in the name of the Church and showing that even if a stubborn and proud multitude withdraws because it does not wish to obey, yet the Church does not withdraw from Christ. The people joined to the priest and the flock clinging to their shepherd are the Church.³¹⁰

Two years later, in AD 256, when St. Stephen was pope, some of the African bishops were claiming that those persons who had been baptized while in a heresy, needed still to be baptized upon wishing to be received into the Catholic Church, because, according to these bishops, those first baptisms were invalid. St. Cyprian himself held this position and argued for it against Pope St. Stephen, who determined that such persons ought not to be re-baptized, because even though they were baptized while in a heresy, and the baptism was therefore illicit, nevertheless such baptisms were valid.³¹¹

Firmilian, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, wrote to St. Cyprian in AD 256 regarding Pope Stephen, saying the following:

[H]e who so boasts of the place of his episcopate, and contends that he holds the succession from Peter, on whom the foundations of the Church were laid, should introduce many other rocks and establish new buildings of many churches; maintaining that there is baptism in them by his authority. For they who are baptized, doubtless, fill up the number of the Church. But he who approves their baptism maintains, of those baptized, that the Church is also with them. Nor does he understand that the truth of the Christian Rock is overshadowed, and in some measure abolished, by him when he thus betrays and deserts unity. The apostle acknowledges that the Jews, although blinded by ignorance, and bound by the grossest wickedness, have yet a zeal for God. Stephen, who announces that he holds by succession the throne of Peter, is stirred with no zeal against heretics, when he concedes to them, not a moderate, but the very greatest power of grace: so far as to say and assert that, by the sacrament of baptism, the filth of the old man is washed away by them, that they pardon the former mortal sins, that they make sons of God by heavenly regeneration, and renew to eternal life by the sanctification of the divine laver. … For while you think that all may be excommunicated by you, you have excommunicated yourself alone from all; and not even the precepts of an apostle have been able to mould you to the rule of truth and peace.³¹²

Of course Firmilian is claiming that Pope St. Stephen is wrong about re-baptizing heretics. But not only does Pope St. Stephen turn out to have been right, but Firmilian’s letter reveals the way in which Pope St. Stephen conceived of the role and authority of the office signified by the chair of St. Peter.

(4.) Fourth Century

Poem Against the Marcionites (prior to AD 325):

In this chair in which he himself had sat, Peter, in mighty Rome, commanded Linus, the first elected, to sit down . . .³¹³

The Church historian, Eusebius Pamphilus, recounts the succession of bishops at Rome in Book III of his Ecclesiastical History (AD 325), writing:

After the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, Linus was the first that received the episcopate at Rome. Paul makes mention of him in his epistle from Rome to Timothy . . . .³¹⁴

A little further in the same work, Eusebius makes clear that Linus was Peter’s successor:

Linus whom he [Paul] has mentioned in his Second Epistle to Timothy as his companion at Rome, has been before shown to have been the first after peter, that obtained the episcopate at Rome. Clement also, who was appointed the third bishop of this church . . . .³¹⁵

Continuing his account of the Roman succession, Eusebius writes:

After Vespasian had reigned about ten years, he was succeeded by his on Titus; in the second year of whose reign, Linus, bishop of the church at Rome, who had held the office about twelve years, transferred it to Anencletus. . . In the twelfth year of the same reigns [Domitian’s reign], after Anencletus had been bishop of Rome twelve years, he was succeeded by Clement, who, the apostle, in his Epistle to the Philippians, shows, had been his fellow-laborer . . . .³¹⁶

In the same work, Eusebius recounts the earlier testimony of St. Hegesippus, writing:

Hegesippus, indeed, in the five books of commentaries that have come down to us, has left a moist complete record of his own views. . . . ‘And the church of Corinth,’ he says ‘continued in the true faith, until Primus was bishop there. With who I had familiar conversation (as I passed many days at Corinth,) when I was on the point of sailing to Rome, during which time also, we were mutually refreshed in the true doctrine. After coming to Rome, I made my stay with Anicetus, whose deacon was Eleutherius. After Anicetus, Soter succeeded, and after him Eleutherius. In every succession, however, in every city, the doctrine prevails according to what is declared by the law and the prophets and the Lord.’³¹⁷

Pope St. Julius I, in his letter to the Eusebian party in Antioch (AD 341), explains that the jurisdictional authority of the Roman See was of ancient origin, writing:

If, then, any suspicion rested upon the bishop there, notice of it ought to have been written to the Church here [Rome]. But now, after they have done as they pleased, they want to obtain our concurrence, although we never condemned him [Athanasius]. Not thus are the constitutions of Paul, not thus the traditions of the Fathers. This is another form of procedure, and a novel practice. I beseech you, bear with me willingly: what I write about this is for the common good. For what we have received from the blessed Apostle Peter, these things I signify to you.³¹⁸

The Council of Serdica (343-344) in what is today Sophia, Bulgaria highlighted the jurisdictional prerogatives of the Roman See in its third canon as follows:

But if any bishop loses the judgment in some case, and still believes that he has not a bad but a good case, in order that the case may be judged anew, if it pleases Your Charities, let us honor the memory of the apostle Peter, by having those who gave the judgment write to Julius, Bishop of Rome, so that, if it seem proper, he may himself send arbiters, and judgment may be made again by the bishops of a neighboring province. But if the case cannot be shown to be such as to warrant being heard again, let the judgment once given not be set aside, but let the judgment remain as it was given.³¹⁹

The same thought is expressed in canon four which reads:

Bishop Gaudentius said: If it pleases you, it is necessary to make an addition to the decree which the fullness of Your Unalloyed Charity has proposed, so that if some bishop be deposed by the judgment of the bishops sitting in the neighborhood, and if declare that he will seek further redress, another should not be appointed to his see until the bishop of Rome can be acquainted with the case and render a judgment.³¹⁹

The Council concludes with a summary of the acts of the synod by writing to the bishop of Rome with these words:

For this will seem to be best and most fitting indeed, if the priests from each and every province refer to the head, that is, to the chair of Peter the Apostle.”³²⁰

St. Athanasius, the famous defender of Nicene orthodoxy, wrote the following around AD 358:

Thus from the first they [i.e., the Arians] spared not even Liberius, Bishop of Rome, but extended their fury even to those parts; they respected not his bishopric, because it was an Apostolical throne; they felt no reverence for Rome, because she is the Metropolis of Romania ; they remembered not that formerly in their letters they had spoken of her Bishops as Apostolical men. But confounding all things together, they at once forgot everything, and cared only to show their zeal in behalf of impiety. When they perceived that he was an orthodox man and hated the Arian heresy, and earnestly endeavoured to persuade all persons to renounce and withdraw from it, these impious men reasoned thus with themselves: ‘If we can persuade Liberius, we shall soon prevail over all.’³²¹

St. Optatus of Milevisu, bishop of Milevis in Africa, in a work begun in AD 367 writes:

For it was not Caecilian who went forth from Majorinus, your father’s father, but it was Majorinus who deserted Caecilian; nor was it Caecilian who separated himself from the Chair of Peter, or from the Chair of Cyprian l but Majorinus, on whose Chair you sit, a Chair which had no existence before Majorinus himself. … Victor would not have been able, had he been asked where he sat, to show that anyone had been there before him, nor could he have pointed out that he possessed any Cathedra save the Cathedra of pestilence, for pestilence sends down its victims, destroyed by diseases, to the regions of Hell which are known to have their gates gates against which we read that Peter received the saving Keys, Peter, that is to say, the first of our line, to whom it was said by Christ:

To thee will I give the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and these keys the gates of Hell shall not overcome.

How is it, then, that you strive to usurp for yourselves the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, you who, with your arguments, and audacious sacrilege, war against the Chair of Peter? … For it has been proved that we are in the Holy Catholic Church, who have too the Creed of the Trinity; and it has been shown that, through the Chair of Peter which is ours through it the other Endowments also belong to us. … Will you be able to prove that the Chair of Peter is a lie and the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, which were granted him by Christ, with which we are in communion?³²²

Between AD 384 and 387 St. Optatus wrote the following:

But you cannot deny that you know that the episcopal seat was established first in the city of Rome by Peter and that in it sat Peter, the head of all the apostles, wherefore he is called Cephas, the one chair in which unity is maintained by all. Neither do other Apostles proceed individually on their own; and anyone who would set up another chair in opposition to that single chair would, by that very fact, be a schismatic and a sinner. It was Peter, then, who first occupied that chair, the foremost of his endowed gifts. He was succeeded by Linus, Linus was succeeded by Clement, Clement by Anencletus, Anencletus by Evaristus, Evaristus by Eleutherius, Eleutherius by Xystus, Xystus by Telesphorus, Telesphorus by Hyginus, Hyginus by Anicetus, Anicetus by Pius, Pius by Soter, Soter by Alexander, Alexander by Victor, Victor by Zephyrinus, Zephyrinus by Callistus, Callistus by Urban, Urban by Pontianus, Pontianus by Anterus, Anterus by Fabian, Fabian by Cornelius, Cornelius by Lucius, Lucius by Stephen, Stephen by Xystus, Xystus by Dionysius, Dionysius by Felix, Felix by Marcellinus, Marcellinus by Eusebius, Eusebius by Melchiades, Melchiades by Sylvester, Sylvester by Mark, Mark by Julius, Julius by Liberius, Liberius by Damasus, Damasus by Siricius, our present incumbent. I but ask you to recall the origins of your chair, you who wish to claim for yourselves the title of holy Church. (De Schismate Donatistarum, pp. 66-69. ))

St. Optatus shows that schism is defined in relation to the chair of St. Peter, because Christ made Peter the head of the Apostles.³²³

St. Epiphanius, sometime between 374-377AD, recounted once again the succession of Bishops in Rome. In his work Against All Heresies he writes:

At Rome the first Apostles and bishops were Peter and Paul; the Linus, then Cletus; then Clement, the contemporary of Peter and Paul, whom Paul remembers in his Epistle to the Romans. It should surprise no one that others received the episcopate from the Apostles before him, who was the contemporary of Peter and Paul; for He was, at any rate, the contemporary of the Apostles . . . The succession of the bishops in Rome is as follows: Peter and Paul, Linus and Cletus, Clement, Evaristus, Alexander, Sixtus, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius, Anicetus, whom I have already mentioned above in my enumerating the bishops.³²⁴

Pope St. Damasus, in the year AD 382, wrote the following:

The holy Roman Church has been placed at the forefront not by the conciliar decisions of other Churches, but has received the primacy by the evangelic voice of our Lord and Savior, who says: Your are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it; and I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you shall have bound on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you shall have loosed on earth shall be loosed in heaven. … The most blessed Apostle Paul, who contended and was crowned with a glorious death along with Peter in the City of Rome in the time of Caesar Nero — not at a different time, as the heretics prattle, but at one and the same time and on one and the same day: and they equally consecrated the above-mentioned holy Roman Church to Christ the Lord; and by their own presence and by their venerable triumph they set it at the forefront over the others of all the cities of the whole world. The first see, therefore, is that of Peter the Apostle, that of the Roman Church, which has neither stain nor blemish nor anything like it.”³²⁵

The term “See” comes from the Latin sedes, meaning ‘chair.’ This reference to the “first see” is in this way a reference to the primary chair. And this is also the origin of the term ‘Apostolic See,’ which refers to the Chair of the Apostle and the particular Church at Rome.³²⁶

St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, and the one who baptized St. Augustine, wrote the following in AD 388:

You said to Peter when he excused himself from having his feet washed by You: “If I wash not your feet, you will have no part with Me.” (John 13:8) What fellowship, then, can they [i.e., the Novatians] have with You, who receive not the keys of the kingdom of heaven, saying that they ought not to remit sins? And this confession is indeed rightly made by them, for they have not the succession of Peter, who hold not the chair of Peter, which they rend by wicked schism; and this, too, they do, wickedly denying that sins can be forgiven even in the Church, whereas it was said to Peter: “I will give unto you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven.”³²⁷

In his “Commentaries on Twelve of David’s Psalms” (AD 381-397), St. Ambrose writes:

It is to Peter himself that He says: ‘You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church.’ Where Peter is, there is the Church. And where the Church, no death is there, but life eternal.³²⁸

St. Ambrose, along with Sabinus, Bassian and others, wrote a “Synodal Letter to Pope Siricius” in AD 389, part of which reads:

We recognized in the letter of your holiness the vigilance of the good shepherd. You faithfully watch over the gate entrusted to you, and with pious solicitude you guard Christ’s sheepfold, you that are worthy to have the Lord’s sheep hear and follow you. Since you know the sheep of Christ you will easily catch the wolves and confront them like a wary shepherd, lest they despise the Lord’s flock by their constant lack of faith and their bestial howling.”³²⁹

St. John Chrysostom, a priest at Antioch for twelve years before becoming bishop of Constantinople in 398, wrote about the difference in authority between the episcopal chair of St. James in Jerusalem and the chair of St. Peter in Rome:

And why, having passed by the others, does He [Jesus] speak with Peter on these matters? He [Peter] was the chosen one of the Apostles, the mouth of the disciples, the leader of the band; on this account also Paul went up upon a time to enquire of him rather than the others. And at the same time to show him that he must now be of good cheer, since the denial was done away, Jesus puts into his hands the chief authority among the brethren…. And if any should say, ‘How then did James receive the chair at Jerusalem?’ I would make this reply, that He appointed Peter teacher, not of the chair [of Jerusalem], but of the world…. For he [Peter] who then did not dare to question Jesus, but committed the office to another, was even entrusted with the chief authority over the brethren, and not only does not commit to another what relates to himself, but himself now puts a question to his Master concerning another.³³⁰

St. Jerome, in AD 376 wrote:

Since the East, shattered as it is by the long-standing feuds, subsisting between its peoples, is bit by bit tearing into shreds the seamless vest of the Lord…. I think it my duty to consult the chair of Peter…. My words are spoken to the successor of the fisherman, to the disciple of the cross. As I follow no leader save Christ, so I communicate with none but your blessedness, that is with the chair of Peter. For this, I know, is the rock on which the church is built! This is the house where alone the paschal lamb can be rightly eaten. This is the ark of Noah, and he who is not found in it shall perish when the flood prevails…. He that gathers not with you scatters…. If you think fit enact a decree; and then I shall not hesitate to speak of three hypostases. Order a new creed to supersede the Nicene; and then, whether we are Arians or orthodox, one confession will do for us all…. I beg you also to signify with whom I am to communicate at Antioch. Not, I hope, with the Campenses; for they — with their allies the heretics of Tarsus — only desire communion with you to preach with greater authority their traditional doctrine of three hypostases.³³¹

In that same year he wrote the following in a letter to Pope St. Damasus:

The untiring foe follows me closely, and the assaults that I suffer in the desert are severer than ever. For the Arian frenzy raves, and the powers of the world support it. The church is rent into three factions, and each of these is eager to seize me for its own. The influence of the monks is of long standing, and it is directed against me. I meantime keep crying: “He who clings to the chair of Peter is accepted by me.” Meletius, Vitalis, and Paulinus all profess to cleave to you, and I could believe the assertion if it were made by one of them only. As it is, either two of them or else all three are guilty of falsehood. Therefore I implore your blessedness, by our Lord’s cross and passion, those necessary glories of our faith, as you hold an apostolic office, to give an apostolic decision. Only tell me by letter with whom I am to communicate in Syria, and I will pray for you that you may sit in judgment enthroned with the twelve; Matthew 19:28 that when you grow old, like Peter, you may be girded not by yourself but by another, John 21:18 and that, like Paul, you may be made a citizen of the heavenly kingdom.³³²

Between AD 392 and 393 St. Jerome wrote:

Simon Peter the son of John, from the village of Bethsaida in the province of Galilee, brother of Andrew the apostle, and himself chief of the apostles, after having been bishop of the church of Antioch and having preached to the Dispersion — the believers in circumcision, in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia — pushed on to Rome in the second year of Claudius to overthrow Simon Magus, and held the sacerdotal chair there for twenty-five years until the last, that is the fourteenth, year of Nero. At his hands he received the crown of martyrdom being nailed to the cross with his head towards the ground and his feet raised on high, asserting that he was unworthy to be crucified in the same manner as his Lord. He wrote two epistles which are called Catholic, the second of which, on account of its difference from the first in style, is considered by many not to be by him. Then too the Gospel according to Mark, who was his disciple and interpreter, is ascribed to him. … Buried at Rome in the Vatican near the triumphal way he is venerated by the whole world. […]

Novatianus, presbyter of Rome, attempted to usurp the sacerdotal chair occupied by [Pope] Cornelius, and established the dogma of the Novatians, or as they are called in Greek, the Cathari, by refusing to receive penitent apostates.³³³

About that same time, in AD 393, St. Jerome wrote:

The Church was founded upon Peter: although elsewhere the same is attributed to all the Apostles, and they all receive the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the strength of the Church depends upon them all alike, yet one among the twelve is chosen so that when a head has been appointed, there may be no occasion for schism.”³³⁴

In AD 393, writing against Jovinian, St. Jerome remarks:

. . .you will say ‘it was on Peter that the Church was founded’. Well, in another place the same is accorded to all the apostles, and all receive the keys to the kingdom of heaven, the strength of the Church depends equally on all of them; but one among the twelve I chosen to be their head in order to remove any occasion for division.³³⁵

Later, in AD 414, he wrote in a letter to Demetrias:

I think, therefore, that I ought to warn you, in all kindness and affection, to hold fast the faith of the saintly [Pope] Innocent, the spiritual son of [Pope] Anastasius and his successor in the apostolic see; and not to receive any foreign doctrine, however wise and discerning you may take yourself to be.³³⁶

St. Jerome affirmed the role of the chair of Peter in preserving and grounding the unity of the Church. The church in Syria was at that time divided into three factions, and St. Jerome turned to the visible head of the Church (the bishop occupying St. Peter’s chair) to determine which of the factions was part of the true Church, and which were schisms from the true Church. He clearly understand that Christ had foreseen that the Church needed a visible head in order not to provide an occasion for schism. For St. Jerome, the unity of the Church was not based on a continuous miracle operating against nature. Even nature teaches us that where there is no visible head, there will be no end of quarreling and divisions, to the point of disintegration. That is why Christ established a visible head, to provide a principium unitatis (principle of unity) for the Church. To be in communion with that rock upon which the Church is built, is to be in full union with the Church. To spurn that rock is to be in schism.

St. Ephriam, writing sometime in the second half of the fourth century writes the following in his Homilies:

Simon, my follower, I have made you the foundation of he holy Church. I betimes called you Peter, because you will support all its buildings. You are the inspector of those who will build on earth a Church for Me. If they should wish to build what is false, you, the foundation, will condemn them. You are the head of the fountain from which My teaching flows, you are the chief of my disciples. Through you I will give drink to all peoples. Yours is that life-giving sweetness which I dispense. I have chosen you to be, as it were, the first-born in my institution, and so that, as the heir, you may be executor of my treasures. I have given you the keys of my kingdom. Behold, I have given you authority over all my treasures.³³⁷

(5.) Fifth Century

Pope St. Innocent I, writing to St. Jerome in AD 417, says the following:

The spectacle of these terrible evils has so thoroughly roused us that we have hastened to put forth the authority of the apostolic see to repress the plague in all its manifestations; but as your letters name no individuals and bring no specific charges, there is no one at present against whom we can proceed. But we do all that we can; we sympathize deeply with you. And if you will lay a clear and unambiguous accusation against any persons in particular we will appoint suitable judges to try their cases; or if you, our highly esteemed son, think that it is needful for us to take yet graver and more urgent action, we shall not be slow to do so. Meantime we have written to our brother bishop John [bishop of Jerusalem] advising him to act more considerately, so that nothing may occur in the church committed to him which it is his duty to foresee and to prevent, and that nothing may happen which may subsequently prove a source of trouble to him.³³⁸

In the same year, he wrote to the bishops of Africa:

In seeking the things of God . . . preserving the examples of ancient tradition . . . you have strengthened … the vigor of your religion with true reason, for you have acknowledged that judgment is to be referred to us, and have shown that you know what is owed to the Apostolic See, since all of us placed in this position desire to follow the Apostle, from whom the episcopate itself and all the authority of this name have emerged. Following him we know how to condemn evils just as well as how to approve praiseworthy things. Take this as an example, guarding with your sacerdotal office the practices of the fathers you resolve that they must not be trampled upon, because they made their decisions not by human, but by divine judgment, so that they thought that nothing whatever, although it concerned separated and remote provinces, should be concluded, unless it first came to the attention of this See, so that what was a just proclamation might be confirmed by the total authority of this See, and from this source (just as all waters proceed from their natal fountain and through diverse regions of the whole world remain pure liquids of an uncorrupted source), the other churches might assume what [they ought] to teach, whom they ought to wash, those whom the water worthy of clean bodies would shun as though defiled with filth incapable of being cleansed.³³⁹

Pope St. Boniface, the bishop of Rome from 418 through 422, wrote the following to Rufus, bishop of Thessaly on March 11, 422:

To the Synod [of Corinth] … we have directed such writings that all the brethren may know . . . that there must be no withdrawal from our judgment. For it has never been allowed that that be discussed again which has once been decided by the Apostolic See.”³⁴⁰

On that same day, Pope St. Boniface wrote the following letter to the bishops of Thessaly:

The universal ordering of the Church at its birth took its origin from the office of blessed Peter, in which is found both directing power and its supreme authority. From him as from a source, at the time when our religion was in the stage of growth, all churches received their common order. This much is shown by the injunctions of the council of Nicea, since it did not venture to make a decree in his regard, recognizing that nothing could be added to his dignity: in fact it knew that all had been assigned to him by the word of the Lord. So it is clear that this church is to all churches throughout the world as the head is to the members, and that whoever separates himself from it becomes an exile from the Christian religion, since he ceases to belong to its fellowship.”³⁴¹

In his Sermons (AD 391-430), St. Augustine clearly indicates that the unity of the Church is intrinsically tied to the Petrine office when he writes:

Among the apostles almost everywhere Peter alone merited to represent the whole Church. For the sake of his representing the whole Church, which he alone could do, he merited to hear: ‘I will give you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven.’ For it was not one man, but the unity of the Church, which received those keys. In that way, therefore, Peter’s own excellence is foretold, because he acted the part of the unity and totality of the Church herself, when to him it was said, ‘I hand over to you,’ what was in fact handed over to all.³⁴²

St. Augustine points to the chair of St. Peter as one of the things that keeps him in the Catholic Church. He writes in AD 396:

There are many other things which most justly keep me in [the Catholic Church’s] bosom. The consent of peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after His resurrection, gave it in charge to feed His sheep, down to the present episcopate. And so, lastly, does the name itself of Catholic, which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained; so that, though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house. Such then in number and importance are the precious ties belonging to the Christian name which keep a believer in the Catholic Church …no one shall move me from the faith which binds my mind with ties so many and so strong to the Christian religion…. For my part I should not believe the gospel except the authority of the Catholic Church moved me. So when those on whose authority I have consented to believe in the gospel tell me not to believe in Manichæus, how can I but consent? Take your choice. If you say, Believe the Catholics: their advice to me is to put no faith in you; so that, believing them, I am precluded from believing you — If you say, Do not believe the Catholics: you cannot fairly use the gospel in bringing me to faith in Manichæus; for it was at the command of the Catholics that I believed the gospel.”³⁴³

In the following year (AD 397), St. Augustine wrote:

[B]ecause [the bishop of Carthage] saw himself united by letters of communion both to the Roman Church, in which the primacy (principality/supremacy) of an apostolic chair [apostolicae cathedrae principatus] has always flourished, and to all other lands from which Africa itself received the gospel, and was prepared to defend himself before these Churches if his adversaries attempted to cause an alienation of them from him.³⁴⁴

In the year 400, St Augustine wrote:

For if the lineal succession of bishops is to be taken into account, with how much more certainty and benefit to the Church do we reckon back till we reach Peter himself, to whom, as bearing in a figure the whole Church, the Lord said: “Upon this rock will I build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it!” (Matt. 16:18) The successor of Peter was Linus, and his successors in unbroken continuity were these: — Clement, Anacletus, Evaristus, Alexander, Sixtus, Telesphorus, Iginus, Anicetus, Pius, Soter, Eleutherius, Victor, Zephirinus, Calixtus, Urbanus, Pontianus, Antherus, Fabianus, Cornelius, Lucius, Stephanus, Xystus, Dionysius, Felix, Eutychianus, Gaius, Marcellinus, Marcellus, Eusebius, Miltiades, Sylvester, Marcus, Julius, Liberius, Damasus, and Siricius, whose successor is the present Bishop Anastasius. In this order of succession no Donatist bishop is found. But, reversing the natural course of things, the Donatists sent to Rome from Africa an ordained bishop, who, putting himself at the head of a few Africans in the great metropolis, gave some notoriety to the name of “mountain men,” or Cutzupits, by which they were known.

Now, even although some traditor had in the course of these centuries, through inadvertence, obtained a place in that order of bishops, reaching from Peter himself to Anastasius, who now occupies that see — this fact would do no harm to the Church and to Christians having no share in the guilt of another; for the Lord, providing against such a case, says, concerning officers in the Church who are wicked: “All whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.” (Matt. 23:3) Thus the stability of the hope of the faithful is secured, inasmuch as being fixed, not in man, but in the Lord, it never can be swept away by the raging of impious schism; whereas they themselves are swept away who read in the Holy Scriptures the names of churches to which the apostles wrote, and in which they have no bishop. For what could more clearly prove their perversity and their folly, than their saying to their clergy, when they read these letters, “Peace be with you,” at the very time that they are themselves disjoined from the peace of those churches to which the letters were originally written?³⁴⁵

In his Answer to Petilian the Donatist (400-401), we find the following exchange between Petilian and St. Augustine:

Petilianus said: “If you wretched men claim for yourselves a seat, as we said before, you assuredly have that one of which the prophet and psalmist David speaks as being the seat of the scornful. For to you it is rightly left, seeing that the holy cannot sit therein.”

Augustine answered: Here again you do not see that this is no kind of argument, but empty abuse. For this is what I said a little while ago, You utter the words of the law, but take no heed against whom you utter them; just as the devil uttered the words of the law, but failed to perceive to whom he uttered them. He wished to thrust down our Head, who was presently to ascend on high; but you wish to reduce to a small fraction the body of that same Head which is dispersed throughout the entire world. Certainly you yourself said a little time before that we know the law, and speak in legal terms, but blush in our deeds. Thus much indeed you say without a proof of anything; but even though you were to prove it of some men, you would not be entitled to assert it of these others. However, if all men throughout all the world were of the character which you most vainly charge them with, what has the chair done to you of the Roman Church, in which Peter sat, and which Anastasius fills today; or the chair of the Church of Jerusalem, in which James once sat, and in which John sits today, with which we are united in catholic unity, and from which you have severed yourselves by your mad fury? Why do you call the apostolic chair a seat of the scornful? If it is on account of the men whom you believe to use the words of the law without performing it, do you find that our Lord Jesus Christ was moved by the Pharisees, of whom He says, “They say, and do not,” to do any despite to the seat in which they sat? Did He not commend the seat of Moses, and maintain the honor of the seat, while He convicted those that sat in it? For He says, “They sit in Moses’ seat: all therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.” (Matt. 23:2-3) If you were to think of these things, you would not, on account of men whom you calumniate, do despite to the apostolic seat, in which you have no share. But what else is conduct like yours but ignorance of what to say, combined with want of power to abstain from evil-speaking? […]

But if you [i.e., Donatatists] are really men like this, how much better and how much more in accordance with truth do we act in not baptizing after you [i.e., in your manner], as neither was it right that those whom I have mentioned should be circumcised after the worst of Pharisees! Furthermore, when such men sit in the seat of Moses, for which the Lord preserved its due honor, why do you blaspheme the apostolic chair on account of men whom, justly or unjustly, you compare with these?³⁴⁶

St. Augustine writes the following to Pope Sixtus in AD 418:

Wherefore, my venerable lord, and holy brother worthy of being received in the love of Christ, although you render a most excellent service when you thus write on this subject to brethren before whom the adversaries are wont to boast themselves of your being their friend, nevertheless, there remains upon you the yet greater duty of seeing not only that those be punished with wholesome severity who dare to prate more openly their declaration of that error, most dangerously hostile to the Christian name, but also that with pastoral vigilance, on behalf of the weaker and simpler sheep of the Lord, most strenuous precautions be used against those who more covertly, indeed, and timidly, but perseveringly, and in whispers, as it were, teach this error, “creeping into houses,” as the apostle says, and doing with practised impiety all those other things which are mentioned immediately afterwards in that passage. (2 Tim.3:6) Nor ought those to be overlooked who under the restraint of fear hide their sentiments under the most profound silence, yet have not ceased to cherish the same perverse opinions as before. For some of their party might be known to you before that pestilence was denounced by the most explicit condemnation of the apostolic see, whom you perceive to have now become suddenly silent; nor can it be ascertained whether they have been really cured of it.³⁴⁷

Between 419-20, St. Augustine wrote the following:

The new-fangled Pelagian heretics have been most justly condemned by the authority of catholic councils and of the Apostolic See.³⁴⁸

Between AD 420 and 421, St. Augustine wrote:

For who does not see in what degree Cœlestius was bound by the interrogations of your holy predecessor and by the answers of Cœlestius, whereby he professed that he consented to the letters of Pope Innocent, and fastened by a most wholesome chain, so as not to dare any further to maintain that the original sin of infants is not put away in baptism? Because these are the words of the venerable Bishop Innocent concerning this matter to the Carthaginian Council: “For once,” he said, “he bore free will; but, using his advantage inconsiderately, and falling into the depths of apostasy, he was overwhelmed, and found no way whereby he could rise from thence; and, deceived for ever by his liberty, he would have lain under the oppression of this ruin, if the advent of Christ had not subsequently for his grace delivered him, and, by the purification of a new regeneration, purged all past sin by the washing of His baptism.” What could be more clear or more manifest than that judgment of the Apostolical See?³⁴⁹

In a letter to Pope Caelestine, St. Augustine writes the following in AD 423:

First of all I congratulate you that our Lord God has, as we have heard, established you in the illustrious chair which you occupy without any division among His people.³⁵⁰

In AD 426, St. Augustine wrote:

Now Pelagius was either afraid or ashamed to avow this to be his own opinion before you; although his disciple experienced neither a qualm nor a blush in openly professing it to be his, without any obscure subterfuges, in presence of the Apostolic See. … The venerable Pope Zosimus, keeping in view this deprecatory preamble, dealt with the man, puffed up as he was with the blasts of false doctrine, so as that he should condemn all the objectionable points which had been alleged against him by the deacon Paulinus, and that he should yield his assent to the rescript of the Apostolic See which had been issued by his predecessor of sacred memory. The accused man, however, refused to condemn the objections raised by the deacon, yet he did not dare to hold out against the letter of the blessed Pope Innocent; indeed, he went so far as to “promise that he would condemn all the points which the Apostolic See condemned.” … This being the case, you of course feel that episcopal councils, and the Apostolic See, and the whole Roman Church, and the Roman Empire itself, which by God’s gracious favour has become Christian, has been most righteously moved against the authors of this wicked error, until they repent and escape from the snares of the devil…. But I would have you carefully observe the way in which Pelagius endeavoured by deception to overreach even the judgment of the bishop of the Apostolic See on this very question of the baptism of infants. He sent a letter to Rome to Pope Innocent of blessed memory; and when it found him not in the flesh, it was handed to the holy Pope Zosimus, and by him directed to us.³⁵¹

To fellow bishop Auxilius, St. Augustine writes in an undated letter:

I desire with the Lord’s help to use the necessary measures in our Council, and, if it be necessary, to write to the Apostolic See; that, by a unanimous authoritative decision of all, we may have the course which ought to be followed in these cases determined and established.³⁵²

In an undated sermon, St. Augustine writes:

For already have two councils on this question [i.e., Pelagianism] been sent to the Apostolic see; and rescripts also have come from thence. The cause is finished. [causa finita est]; would that the error may sometime be brought to an end as well! [Utinam aliquando finiatur error]³⁵³

On May 8, 431, Pope Celestine, in his Letter to His Legates to the Council of Ephesus, writes the following:

We enjoin upon you the necessary task of guarding the authority of the Apostolic See. And if the instructions handed to you have to mention this and if you have to be present in the assembly, if it comes to controversy, it is not yours to join the fight, but to judge of their opinions.³⁵⁴

On August 11, 431, Pope Celestine wrote to St. Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, delegating him with authority to preside over the Council of Ephesus, saying:

… If he, Nestorius, persist, an open sentence must be passed on him, for a wound, when it affects the whole body, must be cut away at once. … And so, appropriating to yourself the authority of our See, and using our position, you will execute our sentence with exact severity, that either he shall within ten days, counted from the day of your notice, condemn in writing this wicked assertion of his, and shall give assurance that he will hold, concerning the birth of Christ our God, the faith which the Romans, and the church of your holiness, and the universal religion holds; or if he will not do this (your holiness having at once provided for that church) he will know that he is in every way removed from our body.³⁵⁵

At the Council of Ephesus (431) in which Nestorius was condemned, the papal legates said the following:

Philip the presbyter and legate of the Apostolic See said: There is no doubt, and in fact it has been known in all ages, that the holy and most blessed Peter, prince (ἔξαρχος) and head of the Apostles, pillar of the faith, and foundation (θεμέλιος) of the Catholic Church, received the keys of the kingdom from our Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour and Redeemer of the human race, and that to him was given the power of loosing and binding sins: who down even to today and forever both lives and judges in his successors. The holy and most blessed pope Cœlestine, according to due order, is his successor and holds his place, and us he sent to supply his place in this holy synod, which the most humane and Christian Emperors have commanded to assemble, bearing in mind and continually watching over the Catholic faith. For they both have kept and are now keeping intact the apostolic doctrine handed down to them from their most pious and humane grandfathers and fathers of holy memory down to the present time, etc.

Arcadius the most reverend bishop and legate of the Apostolic See said: Nestorius has brought us great sorrow….And since of his own accord he has made himself an alien and an exile from us, we following the sanctions handed down from the beginning by the holy Apostles, and by the Catholic Church (for they taught what they had received from our Lord Jesus Christ), also following the types (τύποις) of Cœlestine, most holy pope of the Apostolic See, who has condescended to send us as his executors of this business, and also following the decrees of the holy Synod [we give this as our conclusion]: Let Nestorius know that he is deprived of all episcopal dignity, and is an alien from the whole Church and from the communion of all its priests.

Projectus, bishop and legate of the Roman Church said: Most clearly from the reading, etc….Moreover I also, by my authority as legate of the holy Apostolic See, define, being with my brethren an executor (ἐκβιβαστὴς) of the aforesaid sentence, that the beforenamed Nestorius is an enemy of the truth, a corrupter of the faith, and as guilty of the things of which he was accused, has been removed from the grade of Episcopal honour, and moreover from the communion of all orthodox priests.³⁵⁶

St. Vincent of Lerins, three years later in AD 434, wrote the following:

For it has always been the case in the Church, that the more a man is under the influence of religion, so much the more prompt is he to oppose innovations. Examples there are without number: but to be brief, we will take one, and that, in preference to others, from the Apostolic See, so that it may be clearer than day to every one with how great energy, with how great zeal, with how great earnestness, the blessed successors of the blessed apostles have constantly defended the integrity of the religion which they have once received.

Once on a time then, Agripinnus, bishop of Carthage, of venerable memory, held the doctrine — and he was the first who held it — that Baptism ought to be repeated, contrary to the divine canon, contrary to the rule of the universal Church, contrary to the customs and institutions of our ancestors. This innovation drew after it such an amount of evil, that it not only gave an example of sacrilege to heretics of all sorts, but proved an occasion of error to certain Catholics even.

When then all men protested against the novelty, and the priesthood everywhere, each as his zeal prompted him, opposed it, Pope Stephen of blessed memory, Prelate of the Apostolic See, in conjunction indeed with his colleagues but yet himself the foremost, withstood it, thinking it right, I doubt not, that as he exceeded all others in the authority of his place, so he should also in the devotion of his faith. In fine, in an epistle sent at the time to Africa, he laid down this rule: “Let there be no innovation — nothing but what has been handed down.” For that holy and prudent man well knew that true piety admits no other rule than that whatsoever things have been faithfully received from our fathers the same are to be faithfully consigned to our children; and that it is our duty, not to lead religion whither we would, but rather to follow religion whither it leads; and that it is the part of Christian modesty and gravity not to hand down our own beliefs or observances to those who come after us, but to preserve and keep what we have received from those who went before us.³⁵⁷

The Church historian Sozomen (c. 370 – d. after 439), of Palestine, wrote the following concerning the activities of St. Athanasius in relation to Pope Juilus (pope from AD 337-52):

Athanasius, on leaving Alexandria, had fled to Rome. Paul, bishop of Constantinople, Marcellus, bishop of Ancyra, and Asclepas, bishop of Gaza, repaired thither at the same time. Asclepas, who was opposed to the Arians and had therefore been deposed, after having been accused by some of the heterodox of having thrown down an altar; Quintianus had been appointed in his stead over the Church of Gaza. Lucius also, bishop of Adrianople, who had been deposed from the church under his care on another charge, was dwelling at this period in Rome. The Roman bishop, on learning the accusation against each individual, and on finding that they held the same sentiments about the Nicæan dogmas, admitted them to communion as of like orthodoxy; and as the care [oversight – kedemonia] for all was fitting to the dignity of his see, he restored them all to their own churches. He wrote to the bishops of the East, and rebuked them for having judged these bishops unjustly, and for harassing the Churches by abandoning the Nicæan doctrines. He summoned a few among them to appear before him on an appointed day, in order to account to him for the sentence they had passed, and threatened to bear with them no longer, unless they would cease to make innovations. This was the tenor of his letters. Athanasius and Paul were reinstated in their respective sees, and forwarded the letter of Julius to the bishops of the East. … The bishops of Egypt, having sent a declaration in writing that these allegations were false, and Julius having been apprised that Athanasius was far from being in safety in Egypt, sent for him to his own city. He replied at the same time to the letter of the bishops who were convened at Antioch, for just then he happened to have received their epistle, and accused them of having clandestinely introduced innovations contrary to the dogmas of the Nicene council, and of having violated the laws of the Church, by neglecting to invite him to join their Synod; for he alleged that there is a sacerdotal canon which declares that whatever is enacted contrary to the judgment of the bishop of Rome is null.”³⁵⁸

Elsewhere in the next book he wrote:

This event was, no doubt, ordained by God, that the seat of Peter might not be dishonored by the occupancy of two bishops; for such an arrangement is a sign of discord, and is foreign to ecclesiastical law.³⁵⁹

Pope St. Leo the Great, who was pope from 440 through 461, wrote the following in the year AD 443:

Leo, bishop of the city of Rome, to all the bishops appointed in Campania, Picenum, Etruria, and all the provinces, greeting in the Lord. … All such persons [men who have married a widow, or a divorced woman], therefore, who have been admitted [to the priesthood] we order to be put out of their offices in the church and from the title of priest by the authority of the Apostolic See: for they will have no claim to that for which they were not eligible, on account of the obstacle in question: and we specially claim for ourselves the duty of settling this, that if any of these irregularities have been committed, they may be corrected and may not be allowed to occur again, and that no excuse may arise from ignorance: although it has never been allowed a priest to be ignorant of what has been laid down by the rules of the canons.³⁶⁰

Pope St. Leo the Great, around the year AD 446, wrote the following:

The connection of the whole body makes all alike healthy, all alike beautiful: and this connection requires the unanimity indeed of the whole body, but it especially demands harmony among the priests. And though they have a common dignity, yet they have not uniform rank; inasmuch as even among the blessed Apostles, notwithstanding the similarity of their honourable estate, there was a certain distinction of power, and while the election of them all was equal, yet it was given to one to take the lead of the rest. From which model has arisen a distinction between bishops also, and by an important ordinance it has been provided that every one should not claim everything for himself: but that there should be in each province one whose opinion should have the priority among the brethren: and again that certain whose appointment is in the greater cities should undertake a fuller responsibility, through whom the care of the universal Church should converge towards Peter’s one seat, and nothing anywhere should be separated from its head. Let not him then who knows he has been set over certain others take it ill that some one has been set over him, but let him himself render the obedience which he demands of them.³⁶¹

Pope St. Leo, to the bishop of Aquileia:

Let them [i.e., the Pelagians] by their public confession condemn the authors of this presumptuous error and renounce all that the universal Church has repudiated in their doctrine: and let them announce by full and open statements, signed by their own hand, that they embrace and entirely approve of all the synodal decrees which the authority of the Apostolic See has ratified to the rooting out of this heresy.³⁶²

Pope St. Leo, writing in July of 445:

To the beloved brothers, the whole body of bishops of the province of Vienne, Leo, bishop of Rome. Our Lord Jesus Christ, Saviour of mankind, instituted the observance of the Divine religion which He wished by the grace of God to shed its brightness upon all nations and all peoples …. But the Lord desired that the sacrament of this gift should pertain to all the Apostles in such a way that it might be found principally in the most blessed Peter, the highest of all the Apostles. And He wanted His gifts to flow into the entire body from Peter himself, as if from the head, in such a way that anyone who had dared to separate himself from the solidarity of Peter would realize that he was himself no longer a sharer in the divine mystery…. The Apostolic See — out of reverence for it, I mean, — has on countless occasions been reported to in consultation by bishops even of your province. And through the appeal of various cases to this see, decisions already made have been either revoked or confirmed, as dictated by long-standing custom.³⁶³

Pope St. Leo wrote to the Council of Chalcedon in 451:

I had indeed prayed, dearly beloved, on behalf of my dear colleagues that all the Lord’s priests would persist in united devotion to the Catholic Faith, and that no one would be misled by favour or fear of secular powers into departure from the way of Truth; but because many things often occur to produce penitence and God’s mercy transcends the faults of delinquents, and vengeance is postponed in order that reformation may have place, we must make much of our most merciful prince’s piously intentioned Council, in which he has desired your holy brotherhood to assemble for the purpose of destroying the snares of the devil and restoring the peace of the Church, so far respecting the rights and dignity of the most blessed Apostle Peter as to invite us too by letter to vouchsafe our presence at your venerable Synod. That indeed is not permitted either by the needs of the times or by any precedent. Yet in these brethren, that is Paschasinus and Lucentius, bishops, Boniface and Basil, presbyters, who have been deputed by the Apostolic See, let your brotherhood reckon that I am presiding at the Synod; for my presence is not withdrawn from you, who am now represented by my vicars, and have this long time been really with you in the proclaiming of the Catholic Faith: so that you who cannot help knowing what we believe in accordance with ancient tradition, cannot doubt what we desire.³⁶⁴

In the same year, the Fathers of the Council of Chalcedon wrote to Pope St. Leo I recognizing him as head of the assembly through his legates:

For if where two or three are gathered together in His name, He says He is there in the midst of them, how much more will He not show His companionship with five hundred and twenty priests, who preferred the spread of knowledge concerning Him to their own home and affairs, when you, as head to the members, showed your good will through those who represented you?³⁶⁵

In AD 461, St. Pope Leo I wrote the following in one of his Sermons:

From the whole world only one, Peter, is chosen to preside over the calling of all nations, and over all the other apostles, and over the Fathers of the Church. Thus, although among the people of God there are many priests and many pastors, it is really Peter who rules them all, of whom, too, it is Christ who is their chief ruler. Divine condescension, dearly beloved, has granted to this man in a wonderful and marvelous manner the aggregate of its power; and if there was something that it wanted to be his common with other leaders, it never gave what it did not deny to others except through him.³⁶⁶

Theodoret, (c. 393 – 457) a native of Antioch, and bishop of Cyrus: wrote the following letter to Pope Leo about AD 449:

To Leo, bishop of Rome. If Paul, the herald of the Truth, the trumpet of the Holy Ghost, had recourse to the great Peter, in order to obtain a decision from him for those at Antioch who were disputing about living by the Law, much more do we small and humble folk run to the Apostolic See to get healing from you for the sores of the churches. For it is fitting that you should in all things have the pre-eminence, seeing that your See possesses many peculiar privileges. For other cities get a name for size or beauty or population, and some that are devoid of these advantages are compensated by certain spiritual gifts: but your city has the fullest abundance of good things from the Giver of all good. For she is of all cities the greatest and most famous, the mistress of the world and teeming with population. And besides this she has created an empire which is still predominant and has imposed her own name upon her subjects. But her chief decoration is her Faith, to which the Divine Apostle is a sure witness when he exclaims “your faith is proclaimed in all the world;” (Rom 1:8) and if immediately after receiving the seeds of the saving Gospel she bore such a weight of wondrous fruit, what words are sufficient to express the piety which is now found in her? She has, too, the tombs of our common fathers and teachers of the Truth, Peter and Paul , to illumine the souls of the faithful. And this blessed and divine pair arose indeed in the East, and shed its rays in all directions, but voluntarily underwent the sunset of life in the West, from whence now it illumines the whole world. These have rendered your See so glorious: this is the chief of all your goods. And their See is still blest by the light of their God’s presence, seeing that therein He has placed your Holiness to shed abroad the rays of the one true Faith.³⁶⁷

Theodoret, in a letter to the presbyter Renatus, writes:

This most holy See [Rome] has preserved the supremacy over all Churches on the earth, for one especial reason among many others; to wit, that it has remained intact from the defilement of heresy. No one has ever sat on that Chair, who has taught heretical doctrine; rather that See has ever preserved unstained the Apostolic grace.³⁶⁸

Bishops Ceretius, Salonius and Veranus, in a letter to Pope St. Leo, concerning his “Tome,” which he wrote in 449:

Moreover we, who specially belong to you, are filled with a great and unspeakable delight, because this special statement of your teaching is so highly regarded wherever the Churches meet together, that the unanimous opinion is expressed that the primacy of the Apostolic See is rightfully there assigned, from whence the oracles of the Apostolic Spirit still receive their interpretations.³⁶⁹

St. Peter Chrysologus (c. 400 – 450), a Greek and bishop of Ravenna, in a letter to Eutyches [an archimandrite of a monastery outside the walls of Constantinople, where he ruled over three hundred monks] about AD 449, wrote the following:

We exhort you in every respect, humble brother, to heed obediently what has been written by the Most Blessed Pope of the City of Rome; for Blessed Peter, who lives and presides in his own see, provides the truth of faith to those who seek it. For we, by reason of our pursuit of peace and faith, cannot try cases on the faith without the consent of the Bishop of the City of Rome”³⁶⁵

The bishops of the Council of Chalcedon wrote the following to Pope St. Leo in AD 451:

We have ratified also the canon of the 150 holy Fathers who met at Constantinople in the time of the great Theodosius of holy memory [AD 381], which ordains that after your most holy and Apostolic See, the See of Constantinople shall take precedence, being placed second: for we are persuaded that with your usual care for others you have often extended that Apostolic prestige which belongs to you, to the church in Constantinople also, by virtue of your great disinterestedness in sharing all your own good things with your spiritual kinsfolk. Accordingly vouchsafe most holy and blessed father to accept as your own wish, and as conducing to good government the things which we have resolved on for the removal of all confusion and the confirmation of church order. For your holiness’ delegates, the most pious bishops Paschasinus and Lucentius, and with them the right Godly presbyter Boniface, attempted vehemently to resist these decisions, from a strong desire that this good work also should start from your foresight, in order that the establishment of good order as well as of the Faith should be put to your account.³⁷⁰

Pope St. Leo wrote later,

But the bishops’ assents, which are opposed to the regulations of the holy canons composed at Nicæa in conjunction with your faithful Grace, we do not recognize, and by the blessed Apostle Peter’s authority we absolutely dis-annul in comprehensive terms.”³⁷¹

(6.) Sixth Century

Pope St. Hormisdas, who was bishop of Rome from AD 514 through 523, wrote the following:

Our first safety is to guard the rule of the right faith and to deviate in no wise from the ordinances of the Fathers; because we cannot pass over the statement of our Lord Jesus Christ who said: “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church” . . . [Matt 16:18] These [words] which were spoken, are proved by the effects of the deeds, because in the Apostolic See the Catholic religion has always been preserved without stain. Desiring not to be separated from this hope and faith and following the ordinances of the Fathers, we anathematize all heresies, especially the heretic Nestorius, who at one time was bishop of the city of Constantinople …. Similarly anathematizing both Eutyches and Dioscorus of Alexandria …. We condemn, too, and anathematize Acacius, formerly bishop of Constantinople, who was condemned by the Apostolic See …. No less do we condemn Peter of Antioch with his followers …. Moreover, we accept and approve all the letters of the blessed Leo the Pope, which he wrote regarding the Christian religion, just as we said before, following the Apostolic See in all things, and extolling all its ordinances. And therefore, I hope that I may merit to be in the one communion with you, which the Apostolic See proclaims, in which there is the whole and the true and the perfect solidity of the Christian religion, promising that in the future the names of those separated from the communion of the Catholic Church, that is, those not agreeing with the Apostolic See, shall not be read during the sacred mysteries.³⁷²

Pelagius I, the bishop of Rome from 556 to 561, wrote the following:

… the Church was founded by Christ our Lord upon the chief of the Apostles, so that the gates of hell might not be able to prevail against it…. If you had read this, where did you believe the Church to be outside of him [the Pope] in whom alone are clearly all the apostolic sees? To whom in like measure as to him, who had received the keys, has the power of binding and of loosing been granted?³⁷³

Pope St. Gregory the Great, who was pope from 540 to 604, wrote the following to John, the bishop of Syracuse:

For as to what they say about the Church of Constantinople, who can doubt that it is subject to the Apostolic See, as both the most pious lord the emperor and our brother the bishop of that city continually acknowledge? Yet, if this or any other Church has anything that is good, I am prepared in what is good to imitate even my inferiors, while prohibiting them from things unlawful. For he is foolish who thinks himself first in such a way as to scorn to learn whatever good things he may see.³⁷⁴

In another letter to Bishop John, Pope St. Gregory writes:

And it is exceedingly doubtful whether he says such things to us sincerely, or in fact because he is being attacked by his fellow bishops: for, as to his saying that he is subject to the Apostolic See, if any fault is found in bishops, I know not what bishop is not subject to it. But when no fault requires it to be otherwise, all according to the principle of humility are equal.³⁷⁵

In a letter to Eulogius, bishop of Alexandria, Pope St. Gregory writes:

Gregory to Eulogius, Bishop of Alexandria.

Your most sweet Holiness has spoken much in your letter to me about the chair of Saint Peter, Prince of the apostles, saying that he himself now sits on it in the persons of his successors. And indeed I acknowledge myself to be unworthy, not only in the dignity of such as preside, but even in the number of such as stand. But I gladly accepted all that has been said, in that he has spoken to me about Peter’s chair who occupies Peter’s chair. And, though special honour to myself in no wise delights me, yet I greatly rejoiced because you, most holy ones, have given to yourselves what you have bestowed upon me. For who can be ignorant that holy Church has been made firm in the solidity of the Prince of the apostles, who derived his name from the firmness of his mind, so as to be called Petrus from petra. And to him it is said by the voice of the Truth, To you I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 16:19). And again it is said to him, And when you are converted, strengthen your brethren (xxii. 32). And once more, Simon, son of Jonas, do you love Me? Feed my sheep (John 21:17). Wherefore though there are many apostles, yet with regard to the principality itself the See of the Prince of the apostles alone has grown strong in authority, which in three places is the See of one. For he himself exalted the See in which he deigned even to rest and end the present life. He himself adorned the See [i.e., Alexandria] to which he sent his disciple as evangelist. He himself established the See [i.e., Antioch] in which, though he was to leave it, he sat for seven years. Since then it is the See of one, and one See, over which by Divine authority three bishops now preside, whatever good I hear of you, this I impute to myself. If you believe anything good of me, impute this to your merits, since we are one in Him Who says, That they all may be one, as You, Father, art in me, and I in you that they also may be one in us John 17:21.³⁷⁶

Summary of Evidence for the Existence and Authority of the Petrine Succession

The testimony of the tradition we find in the Fathers and other early writers indicates a deepening awareness of the significance and authority of St. Peter’s chair, especially in grounding and preserving the fidelity and unity of the Church. But some conception of the authority of this chair seems to have been present even from the second century. And the clearest and most developed conception of this authority seems to have been in the particular Church of Rome, and especially in her bishops. At the same time, there is no comparable set of patristic quotations in which it is claimed that the chair of St. Peter did not hold such authority. So the inquirer is then faced with a dilemma that in a certain respect parallels that each of us faces regarding Christ’s own claims concerning Himself.³⁷⁷ Either the Church at Rome almost immediately fell into serious error regarding her own ecclesial authority and role in relation to the universal Church, and though various bishops at times disagreed with her decisions (e.g. St. Cyprian), no one ‘corrected’ her claim concerning her own authority until the time of Photius in the ninth century, or during all those centuries (and to the present) she was truly what she always claimed to be. The former option leaves us with the paradox that the Apostolic seat widely believed to be the touchstone of orthodoxy in every respect for hundreds of years, was terribly wrong about its own identity, and therefore unsuited to be anyone’s touchstone of orthodoxy. In this way, we are left either with some form of ecclesial deism, or the unavoidable conclusion that the Catholic Church, consisting of all those particular Churches throughout the world in full communion with the episcopal successor of St. Peter in the Apostolic See, is the Church Christ founded, and over which, by His promise, the gates of hell shall not prevail.

St. Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.” (John 6:68) Christ, in response, made these same words apply to St. Peter, by making St. Peter the principium unitatis of the Church. If we were to turn away from St. Peter, to whom should we go? What other visible ecclesial authority has been given St. Peter’s authority and charism? Likewise, if we wish to see all Christians united in full visible unity, we must do so by entering into communion with the one who by Christ’s authorization is the rightful occupant of the chair of St. Peter.

(3) The documentary witness of the early Church and the principle of proximate evidence

(a.) The Proximate Witness of the Early Church and the New Testament

In light of the foregoing documentary evidence of the early Christian centuries with respect to apostolic succession, an important question that arises is whether or not the New Testament texts that touch upon ecclesiology comport with the extra-biblical witness of the early Church. When understood according to the evidence from the early Church Fathers, the meaning of the evidence in Scripture is more apparent. Christ made His Apostles the foundation of His Church. We see this in Ephesians 2:20, where St. Paul explains that the Church is built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone. Just as Christ is a divine Person, before He ascended into Heaven He established authorized persons to stand in His place as stewards of His Church until He returns. In that respect, it is not Scripture that is the foundation of the Church, but the Apostles, even those Apostles who never wrote any Scripture.³⁷⁸

When men have “hands laid” on them by those having authority, in the sacrament of ordination, they receive delegated authority (1 Tim 4.14; 5.22; 2 Tim 1.6; Heb 1.10). This was a continuation in the Church of a practice under the Old Covenant, as Moses laid hands on Joshua (Num 27:15-23, Deut. 34:9); in this way the Spirit which was upon Moses was given to the elders (cf. Num. 11:16-17,25). St. Paul tells Titus to “declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority” (Titus 2:15). But this is not Titus’ own authority; Christ has all authority, and He entrusted His authority to His Apostles, who delegated this same authority to their successors.

The evidence for this can be seen in the New Testament in the clear pattern of authorized succession that has its source in the Godhead. This succession begins with God the Father. Jesus does not speak or act on His own initiative; He does and says only what He was sent to do and say by His Father (John 5:19, 30; 8:28, 42; 12:49-50: 14:10). His teaching is not His own but that of the Father who sent Him (John 7:16). That is why to listen to Jesus is to listen to the Father (John 14:24). The same pattern continues with the Spirit, who is sent by Christ and discloses what belongs to Christ (John 16:14-15). Jesus teaches that this same pattern continues with the Apostles. “He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me” (Matthew 10:40), and “He who listens to you listens to Me, and he who rejects you, rejects Me” (Luke 10:16). To receive the Apostles is to receive Jesus, because Jesus is the one who sent them (John 13:20). Just as the Father had given authority to Jesus, so Jesus gives authority to His Apostles (Luke 22:29-30; Matthew 11:27). Jesus gives to St. Peter the keys of the Kingdom. The Apostles in communion with Peter share in the authority by which their decisions on earth are ratified in heaven (Matthew 16:19; 18:18). St. Paul speaks of the authority which the Lord gave to him as an Apostle (2 Cor 10:8, 13:10). When the Apostles forgive sins, those sins are forgiven; when they retain men’s sins, those sins are retained (John 20:23). This all reveals that Christ had extended to the Apostles a participation in His divine governance of the Church; upon His ascension, He governed through them. As the Father sent Christ, so Christ sent the Apostles (John 17:18; 20:21). The Church was to continue to follow the pattern it had received from the Apostles (2 Tim 1:13) including the pattern of succession of authority.

Just as Christ had authorized the Apostles to teach and govern His kingdom in His name, so the Apostles authorized successors to do the same, entrusting to them the deposit of the faith, and teaching them to do the same to their own successors (2 Tim 2:2; Titus 1:5). We see this already in their filling Judas’ unoccupied “ἐπισκοπὴν” (bishopric; Acts 1:20). If there were no apostolic office, but only twelve individuals chosen by Christ, it would make no sense to choose someone to take Judas’ bishopric after his death.³⁷⁹ The apostolic authorization was given through the laying on of hands (Acts 6:6; 13:3; 2 Tim 1:6; 1 Tim 4:14). And St. Paul warns St. Timothy not to be hasty or incautious when Timothy ordains successors (1 Tim. 5:22). Without this authority received from the Apostles or their successors, those speaking did not speak for the Church, or as Christ’s authorized representatives; they could only speak in their own name (John 5:43). When the Apostles ordained successors, they knew that it was not only they who were doing this, but also the Holy Spirit working through them (Acts 20:28; cf. Acts 14:23).

Consider Acts 15:24, “Since we have heard that some of our number who went out without any mandate from us have upset you with their teachings and disturbed your peace of mind.” If apostolic succession were merely doctrinal, then the Apostles would not have implied that the disturbers needed a mandate from the Apostles. Their lack of an apostolic mandate would be irrelevant, and therefore not even mentioned. The Apostles and elders should simply have said only that the doctrine of the disturbers was not the Apostles’ doctrine. But the Apostles and elders do not merely say that. Instead they provide a mandate to Paul and Barnabas, Silas and Judas called Barsabbas. The “letter” mentioned in verse 23 is the authentication or proof that these men have the necessary mandate from the Apostles to teach and preach in their name, as official legates or ambassadors of the Apostles.

In Romans 10:15, St. Paul writes, “And how shall they preach unless they are sent?” St. Paul indicates that a person needs to be sent, in order to preach. But who can send the preacher? There are two possible answers to that question: the Spirit apart from the Church, or the Spirit speaking in and through the Church. But if someone claims to be sent by the Spirit, apart from the Church, we should not assume he has been sent by God, unless by miraculous signs he demonstrates himself to be divinely authorized. Hence, if someone comes without signs, he cannot give an authorized message unless he has the authorization of the Church. Those who claim that prophecy ceased at the end of the apostolic era, therefore can be authorized to preach only by being sent out by those having the authority to send out men to preach on behalf of the Church. If only ordained people can ordain, then it follows by logical necessity that if anyone is presently ordained, there must be an unbroken succession extending back to the Apostles.³⁸⁰ In this way, Romans 10:15 requires apostolic succession, for those who claim that prophecy ceased at the end of the first century.

Those having this authority from the Apostles could “speak and reprove with all authority.” (Titus 2:15) Titus, for example, was authorized by St. Paul as bishop of Crete, and Timothy as bishop of Ephesus. Eusebius writes, “Timothy, so it is recorded, was the first to receive the episcopate of the parish in Ephesus, Titus of the churches in Crete.”³⁸¹ In the New Testament, we see that to be authorized by the Apostles was to be authorized by Christ, precisely because when the Apostles exercised the divine authority entrusted to them, Christ worked through them (Mt 16:19; Lk 10:16, 2 Tim 1:6) Those who know God listen to those who are “from God,” i.e., have been sent by Christ or by those whom He sent, or by those whom they sent. (1 John 4:6)

Only on the basis of this succession is it right for us to obey and submit (Heb 13:17) to the shepherds of the Church, for in doing so we are submitting to Christ. But those who “take the honor” (Heb 5:4) to themselves, without the succession, are not true shepherds. (John 10:1-2)

Only by this succession of divine authorizations, derived from the Apostles who had themselves received it from Christ, does the Church remain perpetually the “pillar and ground of truth,” (1 Tim 3:15) preserving the apostolic kerygma until the end of the age. (Matthew 28:18-20)

Any person can claim that Christ has given him authority. Any group of people can claim to speak for Christ or speak for the Church. Any group of people can claim to act on behalf of Christ in giving Christ’s authority to an ordained. Anyone can claim to have the Apostles’ teaching. The sacramentality of ordination helps guards the unity and doctrinal purity of the Church. In order to preach in the name of Christ, one must be sent by the legitimate authorities of the Church, i.e., those in sacramental succession from the apostles, just as the apostles could not send themselves but could only be sent by Christ. (cf. Acts 15:24; Romans 10:15; 2 Cor 5:20).

In summary when a reading of the New Testament is informed by the witness of those Christians living just beyond the apostolic era, the universal patristic witness to the apostolic origins of the episcopate appears in perfect continuity with the New Testament itself. Therefore, Brandon’s positing of a radical rupture between the meaning of those New Testaments texts which touch upon issues of ecclesiology, and the actual ecclesiological witness of the early Church requires that he bring forward positive evidence explaining why the documentary witness of the early Church is in fact discontinuous, rather than continuous, with the New Testament texts. Yet, as section II above has demonstrated, Brandon has provided no such positive evidence.

(b.) The Principle of Proximate Evidence and the Evaluation of Paradigms

Recall from section II.b.1 above that the principle of proximate evidence was defined as follows:

When the direct data is such that from this data alone multiple explanations are possible, and the difference between the likelihoods of the explanations is inscrutable without presupposing what is in question, then all other things being equal, the explanation most compatible with data proximate in time and space is to be preferred unless there is independent positive evidence of a discontinuity between the direct data and the proximate data.

In evaluating each piece of data brought forward by Brandon in support of his thesis in sections II.b.2,3,4,5 and 6 above, we have shown by the application of the ILD principle and the principles governing the evidential value of silence, that the likelihood differential for the truth of Brandon’s thesis, over against that of the Catholic thesis, is inscrutable without presupposing precisely what is in question or allowing proximate evidence to inform that silence. Nor has Brandon presented a single piece of positive evidence that would support the hypothesis of a discontinuity in ecclesial governance between the time of the apostles and the proximate witness of the early Church with respect to the apostolic origins of the episcopate either at Rome or elsewhere. Accordingly, restricting the allowable data only to works written within that time frame, and building a thesis on the non-evidential silence within those texts is a violation of the principle of proximate evidence.

By contrast, the Catholic explanation of the evidence raised by Brandon’s challenge is in perfect continuity with the proximate witness of the early Church concerning the apostolic origins of the episcopate both at Rome and elsewhere. Moreover, the Catholic explanation of the evidence which Brandon has brought forward forms an organic and contiguous bridge between the ecclesial texts of the New Testament and the witness of the early Fathers such that the former can be readily understood as having a trajectory ordered to the later. Accordingly, the Catholic explanation of the evidence presented by Brandon’s challenge is continuous with the most proximate documentary evidence concerning the apostolic origins of the episcopate, whereas Brandon’s thesis, manifestly, is not. Therefore, in keeping with the principle of proximate evidence explained in section II.b.1, the Catholic position is to be rationally preferred over Brandon’s thesis of discontinuity.

B. Two Paradigms

Brandon’s post and our response represent two paradigms for interpreting the first- and second-century evidence for the presence of the monarchical episcopacy in the Church generally and in the Roman Church in particular. Above, we have shown that the evidence supplied by Brandon as supporting his paradigm in fact is completely compatible with the Catholic paradigm. Furthermore, Brandon only achieves that support by omitting aspects of the data that do not favor his case, and that favor the Catholic case. In contrast, this section considers three implications of Brandon’s paradigm that would be problematic if it were true. On the other hand, the Catholic approach avoids these same three implications. That the Catholic paradigm avoids these implications is an argument for the superiority of the Catholic paradigm. Hence, the Catholic paradigm’s explanation of the evidence examined in this article is rationally preferable. All the evidence taken together, therefore, does not support Brandon’s argument; instead it supports the paradigm recognizing the presence of a jurisdictional monarchical episcopate in the Church and even at Rome.

From what has been said it is clear that Brandon’s ecclesial thesis and that of the Catholic Church represent two radically divergent paradigms with respect to the proximate and universal witness of the early Church to the apostolic origins of the episcopate, not only at Rome, but elsewhere throughout the early Christian world. In addition to violating the principle of proximate evidence with respect to the ecclesial testimony of the early Fathers generally, Brandon’s thesis also raises several specific historical problems. Below are the three problematic implications for Brandon’s paradigm that are not entailed by the Catholic paradigm.

(1) Deconstructing the Fathers

As the documentary evidence makes clear, everywhere one looks throughout the landscape of the ancient Churches, one finds not only universal testimony to the fact of episcopal governance as a functioning norm by the time of the Fathers themselves, but also a universal testimony to the apostolic origins of episcopal succession, inclusive of detailed succession lists for various ancient Sees, most prominently Rome. Yet, if the episcopal office is not a succession originating with the apostles, as Brandon’s thesis holds, how is one to explain such ubiquitous error on the part of the early Fathers?

One strategy for lending plausibility to Brandon’s thesis is to undermine the force of the widespread patristic testimony concerning the apostolic origins of episcopal succession by positing that nearly all of the patristic references to such origins depend upon one very early, erroneous account; an account which is more or less repeated or interpolated by later authors. In this way, one can avoid attributing direct deception to a multitude of Fathers. On this account, most of the early Fathers would be guilty only of ignorance; themselves being victims of a primordial deception. Positing an early and fundamental error as the source of later claims concerning the apostolic origins of the episcopate is crucial for Brandon’s thesis, since the likelihood of an identical error arising independently in multiple places becomes vanishingly small with every additional independent source of error one admits.

If a man who claims to be an expert archer were to shoot a single bullseye, one might plausibly doubt his claim to expertise, perhaps by appealing to beginner’s luck. However, if he shoots a bullseye repeatedly, denial of the truth of his expertise becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. In a similar way, if there were only one original claim concerning the apostolic origins of the episcopate upon which all others depended, one might plausibly question the truth of apostolic succession, especially if there were positive evidence indicating that the original claim might be false. However, if there should be multiple independent attestations to the fact of apostolic succession, denial of its truth becomes extraordinarily difficult to sustain. However, nothing in the evidence which Brandon has brought forward supports the thesis that the great body of patristic texts which speak to the apostolic origins of the episcopate depend upon one original source. Nor is there any positive evidence which would militate against the truthfulness of any of the accounts we possess. Instead, what we find among the Fathers is testimony that episcopal succession arose from the apostles in a multitude of locations throughout the Mediterranean world. Hence, there is simply no good reason to think that the ubiquitous testimony of the early Church to the apostolic origins of the episcopate is founded upon a single primordial error. That evidential situation entails that the most reasonable course is to accept as truthful the testimony of the Fathers on this point.

Moreover, Brandon’s thesis must necessarily impinge upon the integrity of at least one of the early Fathers. Even if one postulates that the greater part of the documentary witness to the apostolic origins of the episcopate rests upon a single primordial and catastrophic error on the part of one very early Father, intellectual dishonesty must evidently be attributed to that one Father at least. For if, prior to the first promulgation of this foundational error, there really were no such thing as an episcopal succession originating with the apostles themselves, whichever Father first promulgated the notion of apostolic succession, or penned the first bishop list feigning historical support for apostolic succession, would necessarily have been either aware of the outright falsity of his writing or else negligent of the truth through being willing to interpolate his current ecclesial experience backwards as a historical fiction without evidential warrant. Therefore, it would seem that the original promulgation of this error could be accounted for in no other way than by recognizing an intention to deceive, at least by way of gross exaggeration and misrepresentation. While such a scenario is logically possible, it is eminently implausible given what we generally know concerning the integrity of the early Fathers and the persecuted Christian community. It goes without saying that if one were to hold that the error of apostolic succession arose independently in multiple places, then besides being implausible for the reasons given above; such a notion would undermine the integrity, not only of one individual Father, but of however many Fathers were involved in the independent inception of such a grand ecclesial hijacking.

Ultimately, the need to postulate a primordial ecclesial error in order to make sense of the widespread testimony of the early Church, as well as the concomitant necessity of accusing at least one of the early Fathers of deception, flows directly from the more general problem mentioned above; namely, that Brandon’s thesis violates the principle of proximate evidence. By striking contrast, the Catholic paradigm, precisely because it conforms to the principle of proximate evidence, has no need to deconstruct the Fathers by erecting a theory about a network of interdependent patristic errors or attributing intentional deceit to any Church Father.

(2) A Silent Ecclesial Revolution?

Another problem that arises for the thesis that monoepiscopal governance was discontinuous with, and contrary to, the will of Christ and the apostles, is the inability of such a thesis to explain how monoepiscopal governance of the Church became a universal fact by the mid to late second century without giving rise to a single explicit patristic objection to such a novel ecclesial sea change. If ever there were a silence which called for an explanation, this is it. Unlike a silence on some subject encountered within the writings of a single Church Father (such as the various silences evaluated in section II); this silence amounts to a universal hush casting its shadow across the entire documentary corpus of the early Christian centuries. If the apostles themselves founded and organized Churches throughout the Roman Empire without an episcopal structure, how could such a non-apostolic practice have emerged everywhere throughout the Christian world within a hundred years of the last apostle’s death without leaving a single documentary trace of resistance being offered to such an unauthorized power-grab? In the patristic era one finds clear documentary evidence of controversy concerning practices far less fundamental than the structure and governance of the Church. The second century Quartodeciman controversy mediated by St. Irenaeus concerning the date of the celebration of Easter is just one example. That the very structure and governance of the Church could undergo a radical metamorphosis without any indication of struggle against such novelty seems incredible on its face. Nevertheless, in keeping with sound historical practice, the evidential value of such a universal silence must be tested against proper principles for evaluating the evidential weight of silence.

Remember from section II.b.1 above, that in order for an argument from silence within a text to carry evidential weight all four of the following conditions must be satisfied: (a) we know by other means that the author of the text intended the text to provide an exhaustive list of the items or events of the sort to which the unstated entity or event would belong, (b) the author is not the sort of person who would overlook the unstated entity or event, (c) the missing entity or event is not the sort of thing that might be unnoticed or overlooked by the author, and (d) we have good reason to believe that the author has no overriding reason for concealing the entity or event.

With respect to criteria (a), the documentary testimony presented above makes clear that a great many of the early Fathers attest, not only to the fact of monoepiscopal governance in their own day, but also to its apostolic origins; going so far as to recount the succession of bishops from the apostles within various ancient Sees, including Rome. If the emergence of an episcopal form of governance were a novelty contrary to the intentions and practice of the apostles, such a change and any resistance to such change would certainly belong among the many patristic writings which speak to ecclesial issues. In terms of criteria (b) and (c), the Church Fathers themselves were often bishops responsible for guiding their flocks amidst rising heresies. As such, they were by no means indifferent to the history and structure of the Churches since recounting such history was often deployed to expose the chronological and doctrinal novelty of the sects. The same must be said for a Church historian such as Eusebius, whose purpose, precisely as a historian, would certainly include accounting for substantial changes or controversies related to the very structure of the Church. In short, if there really were an early ecclesial revolution, the patristic writers were not the sort of persons to overlook such a revolution, nor would such a revolution be the sort of thing such persons would overlook. Finally, with respect to criteria (d), since the patristic writers directly address the structure and origin of the Church, there is no evidence to suggest that they concealed or repressed witness to a rupture or power struggle related to Church governance between the apostolic age and the mid to late second century. One might suggest that since many of the Fathers were bishops, they might conceal the truth about such a sea change to protect their own position and power. However, to do so involves both a gratuitous skepticism ungrounded in historical fact, as well as an attribution of dishonesty and abuse of power to men otherwise known to be exemplars of holiness.

Since all four criteria are verified, the absence in the patristic corpus of any evidence that monoepiscopal succession represented a novel or controversial rupture with apostolic practice allows for a legitimate inference to the effect that no such rupture ever occurred. Moreover, the force of the inference is especially powerful in this case since the four criteria are met not only with respect to one patristic writer, but with respect to the entire patristic corpus. Furthermore, recall from section II.b.1 that the second principle for evaluating the evidential weight of silence is that “When one text gives a positive account of an event or condition, it trumps the silence of other accounts regarding that event or condition, all other things being equal.” The writings of the Fathers are manifestly replete with explicit testimony to the fact that monoepiscopal governance in the Church is of apostolic origin, without any explicit countervailing testimony to the contrary. Since one sound trumps any number of silences, and since the silence of the Fathers’ concerning rupture or controversy surrounding the structure of the Church passes all four of the criteriological tests for establishing the evidential value of silence, we may safely infer that no such rupture or controversy ever happened.

Just like the need to deconstruct the Fathers discussed above, the need to postulate an entirely undocumented rupture in Church governance between the apostolic age and the patristic era ultimately arises from the more fundamental mistake endemic to Brandon’s thesis, namely, that it violates the principle of proximate evidence. And once again, by striking contrast, the Catholic paradigm, precisely because it conforms to the principle of proximate evidence, has no need to posit such a breach. To the contrary, careful and consistent application of the principles governing the inferential value of silence highlight an evidential situation entailing that the most reasonable course is to accept as truthful the ecclesial witness of the Church Fathers.

(3) Where did the Church Christ Founded go for a Thousand Years?

Brandon’s position is that the Church was founded by Jesus Christ, but that the Church was not originally unified around a visible, apostolic hierarchy of bishops. Instead, the emergence of a visible hierarchy was a second-century development that replaced an original “presbyterial” order in which all presbyters were of equal rank. Since the Catholic Church holds that the hierarchy is of apostolic origin, this later novelty of episcopacy (in Brandon’s sense of a single bishop with supreme jurisdiction) disqualifies the Catholic Church from being the Church that Christ founded. Brandon’s argument assumes that the evidence further proves that Christ, the apostles, and the Holy Spirit did not intend this later development. A Reformed Protestant, however, holds that the forms of governance in the Church can vary without destroying the essence of the Church. Brandon cited the PCA’s Book of Church Order to the effect that Presbyterian governance is of the well-being of the Church (bene esse), but not the being of the Church (esse).

Now the main objective of Brandon’s article is to show that the Catholic Church is not the Church that Christ founded. We are to look for the visible Church elsewhere. Hence in Comment #131 Brandon writes,

Why don’t you see a possible candidate for the church outside of the Catholic Church?¹⁰

In Comment #148 Brandon writes,

I’ve focused on showing that … the RCC is not the community begun by Jesus.⁹³

Further, on the body of his article Brandon says,

If visibility entails hierarchical government as established by Jesus and handed on from the Apostles, it is manifestly clear that Christ did not found a visible church. Of course, Protestants want to affirm the necessity and importance of the visible church.

Brandon affirms in this quotation both that the Church founded by Jesus is necessarily visible, and also that Jesus did not constitute this visible Church with a “hierarchical government.”

This position, however, ultimately destroys either the visibility of the Church or the assertion that the visible Church has no hierarchical constitution. In other words, the two positions are incompatible given the nature of societies, of which the Church is a special case. Brandon must explain where the Church went for the thousand or more years between the emergence of bishops and the emergence of the Reformed and Presbyterian denominations, or he must look for the Church founded by Christ among those bodies with an apostolic hierarchy. One cannot have it both ways, as we explain below. This inability to explain where the Church went ultimately points to the problem of a Docetic ecclesiology in Brandon’s approach to the data. Docetism was a form of the heresy of Gnosticism, and it denied that the Savior suffered in true, visible human flesh for our redemption. Instead, Christ only “seemed” to suffer (δοκεω = “I seem”), but in fact the Savior was only invisible and spiritual. Hence Docetism denies the Incarnation, the scandal of Christ assuming a visible human nature. Since the Church is Christ’s mystical body on earth (Acts 9:4; 1 Cor 12:12-13; Eph 2:15-16; 3:6; Col 1:18, 24), a theology of the Church that either denies or is unable to account for its visibility likewise falls into an ecclesiological Docetism.³⁸²

In contrast to this intrinsic difficulty with accepting Brandon’s ad hoc affirmation of a visible Church with no hierarchy, the Catholic paradigm can account for the same evidence analyzed in the paper above and have no difficulty explaining where the Church founded by Christ went. It subsists in the Catholic Church, whose bishops have apostolic succession and who have maintained communion with the successor of St. Peter, who presides in that particular Church of Rome, with which St. Irenaeus tells us all others must agree. The visible head of the apostolic college, St. Peter, still rules as the visible head of the Church through his successors, the popes of Rome.³⁸³ In this way, the Catholic avoids a Docetic theology of the Lord’s Body, the Church, for he can affirm both the visiblity and the hierarchical constitution of the Church founded by Christ.

What follows here explains why Brandon’s position is ad hoc, namely, that the Church is necessarily visible and that she does not have a hierarchical order in her very constitution or essence. I must first outline a “social ontology,” to borrow a term from Russell Hittinger, in order to explain how the Church is a visible union of persons. That is to say, the Church is a society.³⁸⁴ For the sake of this section, “society,” “social unity,” and “moral body” are synonymous terms. The Church is both a human society and also above all a divine society animated by the Holy Spirit for the sake of our being incorporated into Jesus Christ. Every society has an intrinsic common good and an extrinsic common good. The intrinsic common good is the society’s own order, which enables coordination in the activity of the members. This coordination is necessary for the attainment of the extrinsic common good, namely, the point or end of the society. Now the intrinsic common good is itself ordered to the extrinsic common good. To use an example Hittinger has modified from St. Thomas Aquinas, a crew team has the goal (extrinsic common good) of winning the race, and therefore has an intrinsic order of rowers to the coxswain. Each rower in the crew team has operations which do not belong to the whole crew team. Nonetheless, the crew team has an operation which is not reducible to the operation of the single rowers, the operation of the crew rowing the boat. The intrinsic ordering of the rowers to the coxswain exists in order to achieve the operation of the whole for the sake of the extrinsic common good, winning the race.³⁸⁵

Now the unity that exists in a society differs from that of a substance, which has compositional unity (e.g., the composite unity of body and soul in an animal). In contrast a society is only a unity of order. St. Thomas Aquinas explains the difference between the unity of a natural substance and of a social unity in this way:

It must be known moreover that the whole which the political group or the family constitutes has only a unity of order, for it is not something absolutely one. A part of this whole, therefore, can have an operation that is not the operation of the whole, as a soldier in an army has an activity that does not belong to the whole army. However, this whole does have an operation that is not proper to its parts but to the whole–for example, an assault of the entire army…. There is also a kind of whole that has not only a unity of order but of composition… and according to this unity a thing is one absolutely; and therefore there is no operation of the part that does not belong to the whole.³⁸⁶

What St. Thomas Aquinas means is that the activity of each part of a compositional unity belongs to the whole. Pius XII, in Mystici corporis 61, further explains this important difference between a human society and the compositional unity of a natural substance. In a natural or compositional unity, the parts are “ultimately destined to the good of the whole alone.” The limbs of a dog are destined strictly to the good of the dog as a whole, and the whole supports the the parts for sake of the whole. In contrast, the members of a human society are “in the end directed to the advancement of all in general and of each single member in particular; for they are persons.” Think of the family in this case. The children are oriented to the common good of the family, but that common good also exists for the sake of each and every child in the family. If some member of the family were treated as a means to the end of any of other members, that is evidence of dysfunction and contrary to the human dignity of that member of the family.

A mere set or aggregate of persons is not a society and thus has no real unity. To put it another way, the persons in a set are just parts, not members. When the members of a society change, the society is not necessarily destroyed but can even be sustained, as France or the Church is sustained by member’s being made citizens or being baptized. On the other hand, a mere set or aggregate of persons changes whenever someone leaves or is added to the set, just as a line at the DMV changes whenever someone advances to the next available agent and whenever a new person is added to the back of the queue.³⁸⁷ In the case of a mere set, there is no coordinated activity of the members toward an extrinsic common good and thus no unity of order.

The point, then, is that any social unity by definition has a unity of order in the members. To lack a unity of order is to cease to be a social unity, for there can be no coordinated activity of the whole without a unity of order (intrinsic common good). A mere collection or set of human beings has no social unity in the relevant sense. For this reason, neither “people in a subway car” nor “all individuals who profess the true religion” are descriptions of societies; they are aggregates of parts. A group of persons with unity of order manifests itself as such by coordinated activity of the whole. The crew team’s unity of order is obvious from the rowers being ordered to the coxswain, following her commands and obeying her decisions. If there were no coxswain, there would be no order, and thus there would be no victory. One can see the unity of an army by the parts being ordered to the general, and in the family by the parts being coordinated to the father. In each case, the unity of order exists for the sake of obtaining the extrinsic common good of that society.

Thus, a human society is one and visible precisely because of its intrinsic common good, its unity of order. As Pius XII summarizes this social ontology, “In the moral body [Pius’s term for a human society], the principle of union is nothing else than the common end [extrinsic common good], and the common cooperation of all under the authority of the society for the attainment of that end [intrinsic common good].”³⁸⁸ The Catholic Church is at least that, for she is a human society. Since she is also the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church is much more, for she has “another internal principle” who unites the members of the Church to Christ the Head. This other principle is the Holy Spirit, who dwells in her as a temple.³⁸⁹ As St. Paul says, “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call” (Eph 4:4). The Church is a society that is at once human and divine, being vivified by the Holy Spirit for the sake of a supernatural activity and a supernatural goal. She is thus unlike all other human societies; but she is at least a human society. As Pius taught, “[T]he Church, a perfect society of its kind, is not made up of merely moral and juridical elements and principles. It is far superior to all other human societies; it surpasses them as grace surpasses nature, as things immortal are above all those that perish.”³⁹⁰

For the reason that she is a human and divine society, the Church necessarily has an internal unity of order, “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Eph 2:20-22). The presence of a unity of order within the society of salvation is why to be united to God requires being united to the visible Word, Jesus Christ; and being united to Jesus Christ required the first Christians to be united to the visible head of the Church, Peter at the head of apostolic college (Mt 10:40 [“whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me”]; 16:18-19; 18:15-18). That Peter the apostle was the visible head of the Church is evident from Jesus’ own actions toward Peter: that Jesus gave him the new name meaning “rock” and identified him as the foundation of the Church (Jn 1:42; Mt 16:18), that Peter received the keys of the kingdom of heaven and no other apostle (Mt 16:19; cf. the typological antecedent in Eliakim, the vicegerent of the Davidic kingdom [Is 22:20-24]), that Peter is listed first in the lists of apostles (Mt 10:2; Lk 6:14; Jn 21:2), that Peter often speaks for the Twelve (Mt 16:16; Jn 6:68; Jn 13:24), that Peter is one of the Three and given access to Jesus different from the rest of the Twelve (Mt 14:28 [walking on water]; Mt 17:1ff. [Transfiguration]; Mt 26:37 [Gethsemane]; Lk 24:34, 1 Cor 15:5 [Resurrection]), that Peter’s denial is such a significant failure (Mt 26:31-35; Jn 13:36-38), that Jesus predicts Peter’s special place in restoring the apostles (Lk 22:31,32), that Peter is given a special commission to shepherd the flock of Jesus (Jn 21:15-19), that Peter is the one to stand and preach the moment the Church is established at Pentecost (Acts 2), and that Paul wanted to meet with Peter in particular (Gal 1:18). Peter was undeniably the visible head of the apostolic college both before and after the resurrection of Jesus.³⁹¹ On a Protestant reading, however, the wisdom of Jesus in establishing a visible head of the apostles was not to carry over to the Church after the apostles. A Catholic reading, aware that Jesus prayed for the unity of the apostle precisely so that the Church would be one (Jn 17:20), understands that Jesus intended the office of Peter to carry over past Peter’s death.

The bishops succeed the apostles in carrying out visibly the threefold office of Christ: prophet, priest, and king. The apostles and bishops therefore have been configured to Christ’s threefold office of teaching, ruling, and sanctifying. The bishops together with the pope preserve and interpret the teachings of the faith, govern the Church, and administer sacraments, which unite us to God. Hence we see that the internal order of the laity to the hierarchy in the Church exists for the benefit of each member: that each would be united to God the Father through the Head, Jesus Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.³⁹²

The fact of the Church’s visible unity demands that it have this intrinsic common good of a hierarchy, a unity of the members to a visible head. Hence Jesus chose Twelve apostles, to be the new “tribal heads” in the New Covenant. He also established a visible head over the apostolic college, St. Peter, who was especially bestowed with the “keys of the kingdom of heaven” and told to shepherd the flock of Jesus (Mt 16; Jn 21). In Brandon’s account of order in the first- and second-centuries, not only did the universal Church lose this hierarchical connection to one visible head, but also each particular Church lost a hierarchical ordering to a visible head insofar as no Church was divinely constituted with a monarchical bishop. Instead, there were only sets of presbyters, who themselves were not ordered to one visible head. Instead they somehow ruled in a completely egalitarian manner, like a crew team without a coxswain or head rower.³⁹³

The problem is now apparent: a society may survive the loss of individual members, but it cannot survive the loss of its unity of order. It would cease to be a society and thus cease to be one and visible. Brandon’s position is susceptible to the following dilemma: either (~H) the Church did not have a hierarchical constitution at some point after the Resurrection, or (H) she had a hierarchical constitution after the Resurrection. If (~H), Brandon should explain how a society can remain united and visible without a visible principle of unity. On the contrary, every society has an internal common good comprised of its own order, precisely to coordinate its activity in attaining its external common good. If (H), Brandon should explain where the one, visible Church of Jesus Christ went after the Resurrection and the late second-century. Brandon’s thesis is that the universal emergence of monarchical bishops in communion with the monarchical bishop of Rome was not a continuation of the apostolic hierarchy, but a corruption of an original parity of mere presbyters. Given that thesis, Brandon faces two difficult choices. On the one hand, it could have been that the one, visible Church somehow remained intact despite the change in its unity of order. What social body, then, is the one, visible Church of Christ today? Branch theory won’t cut it precisely because it violates the ontology of societies: the branches are not united in a unity of order. On the other hand, it could have been the case that the visible unity of the Church was destroyed by the change in its unity of order. In this case, where did the one, visible Church of Christ go? She became invisible, if not destroyed. It is impossible on such a supposition to find the one, visible Church anywhere after the second century. In either case, Brandon must identify where the Church went and where she is now. To avoid this question is tacitly to concede that one holds a Docetic ecclesiology.

In contrast, the Catholic paradigm has no difficulty showing that the Church never lost her intrinsic common good, for the college of bishops with the pope at their head are the successors of the apostles with St. Peter at their head. Hence, the one Church founded by Christ, which is his visible Body on earth, is identical with the Catholic Church.

C. Three Objections

Now in this section we consider three potential objections to the aforegoing response to Brandon’s argument. First we will consider two objections related to whether adopting Catholicism is a leap of faith. Then we will consider whether the ILD principle undermines the case for the Catholic Church.

Obj. 1 “Your response to Brandon is even longer than his own article. Let us concede that the Catholic interpretation of the historical data is plausible. Now we face choosing between two plausible and incompatible interpretations of the historical data. This places the undecided reader in the very epistemological situation that Called To Communion criticizes as Protestant and individualistic. The undecided reader must simply choose which interpretation seems right to him, for both seem plausible to him. Such a reader cannot appeal to the Catholic Magisterium without begging the question. For that matter, he cannot appeal to Protestant theology without begging the question. Therefore, the individual cannot escape choosing between the two interpretations on the basis of his own judgment. The tu quoque objection stands: the Catholic is in no different an interpretive position than the Protestant on this point. One must leap in the dark.”

Reply to Obj. 1 Ray, Bryan, and Neal have responded to this objection several times before. That the individual uses his reason and will to examine the evidence takes nothing away from discovering the existence and identity of the Catholic Church, as well as her divine teaching authority. The one who discovers the Catholic Church is in a fundamentally different epistemological situation than the one who arrives at a Protestant confession, because of the difference in the nature of what he discovers. The former discovers a divine authority to which he recognizes he must submit, in the same way that someone would recognize the Lord Jesus as having a divine authority to which one must submit. The latter arrives at only an opinion, and must therefore judge the historical data by his interpretation of scripture to see whether the church of the Fathers is compatible with his own interpretation of the written Word of God.

The motives of credibility help identify the location of any God-given teaching authority, and thereby point toward the Catholic Church. That is not equivalent to the individual determining or judging what God has revealed by the light of his own intellect and then joining or remaining in a community on the basis of that judgment. Adjudicating the motives of credibility by the natural light of reason is not the same as the act of faith. Sifting through the historical evidence laid out above, in comparing their fit with Brandon’s paradigm and the Catholic paradigm, is still part of evaluating the motives of credibility. The Catholic act of faith is a distinct act, following this process, in which one, having recognized by the motives of credibility the identity and divine authority of the Catholic Church as the Church Christ founded, submits oneself to her in faith, as to Christ.

Nevertheless, if true, any tu quoque objection simply proves that we Christians are the most miserable of men. For we claim to have a sure faith in what God has revealed, and yet we have no means by which we can distinguish our own opinions about faith from what faith itself holds with definitive and irrevocable strength. Such a despairing situation does not fit with what we know concerning God’s existence and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore, a despairing situation should seem absurd to us, and the insouciance of the tu quoque objection toward discovering a divinely-established and divinely-protected teaching office should also strike us as absurd.

Obj. 2 “Ok, but then the Catholic seems to admit that the historical data do not prove his position. There is still a leap of faith from the historical data to the Catholic faith. I thought the Catholic position led to certainty.”

Reply to Obj. 2 Demanding that the historical data prove the Catholic position misunderstands the Catholic Church’s teaching on the nature of believing (faith) and the relationship of reason to the act of faith (motives of credibility). The Church does not hold that the truth of any Catholic dogma can be demonstrated from a mere historical examination, such that by unaided reason the examiner is compelled to believe dogmas of faith. So for example, the supernatural origin of the Church and her infallibility in preserving what God has revealed are not proved by a historical examination of the monarchical episcopate. The reason for this is that someone can firmly assent to such dogmas about the nature of the Church only by the theological virtue of faith. This virtue, which is a gift of God’s grace, enables the rational creature to see and believe what he would otherwise be unable to know by the natural light of his intellect. By the supernatural light of faith, a man can adhere to something as true simply because God has revealed it, who is the First Truth and who cannot lie or err. If the man could see the truth of such dogmas by the natural light of his intellect, he would not need to believe on God’s authority, but would simply know it by reason.

At the same time, the Church also knows that for faith to be reasonable, there must be some way of finding the teaching authority through which God communicates his revelation to mankind. Otherwise, asking God for the ability to believe what He has revealed would be a hopelessly arbitrary exercise. Faith would be an arbitrary leap into one worldview and not another. This is called fideism, the position that there is no rational basis for discriminating between genuine and false religious authorities and thus genuine and false revelations. One must simply believe! The parallel intellectual vice is called rationalism, the position that it is only reasonable to accept a revelation when we can see its truth by the natural light of our own intellect.³⁹⁴ In contrast, the Church teaches the reasonability of faith, but also the transcendance of faith. A man needs faith precisely because his own natural light is a limited participation in the light of God’s own truth (Ps 4:7). We cannot know God as He knows himself, and thus to enter into fellowship with God requires that God grant an additional light to our minds.³⁹⁵ This is the light of faith, by which he holds to the truths that God has revealed about Himself and the way of salvation. A man accepts these truths on the basis of an authority divinely authorized to guard and proclaim these truths of faith. That authority is in the Catholic Church.

In order for the assent of faith to be compatible with reason, the discovery of the Catholic Church must be clear enough to the reasonable man that he can have good reasons for accepting the Church’s proclamation. These good reasons the Church calls the motives of credibility: the prophecies of the coming of Christ and the establishment of his Church; the beauty of Jesus himself; the beauty of Catholic life and teaching; the unity of the Catholic Church over two millennia, and her growth over the same period; her resilience in the face of schism, heresy, and the sins of even some of her bishops; the continued working of miracles in her midst; and the incredible holiness and love of her saints. These motives of credibility testify to the presence of a supernatural agency in this human social body. Yet these motives of credibility cannot prove in the strong, demonstrative sense that the Catholic Church is what she claims to be: the visible and supernatural society of salvation founded by Jesus Christ and protected by the Holy Spirit in accordance with the plan of God the Father. They can do so only at the level of moral certitude.

Since the motives of credibility give good reasons for accepting the Church’s claims without proving them with metaphysical certitude, the motives of credibility can be resisted in a way that a metaphysical proof cannot be. A man can say that the evidence does not demonstratively prove the Catholic position, and he would be right. But he would be straining against the trajectory of the evidence, for the same reason that denying the resurrection of Christ strains against the trajectory of the evidence.

Now the historical investigation into the existence of the episcopacy in the early Church would fall under this concept of the motives of credibility. Such an investigation, therefore, cannot prove demonstratively the truth of the Catholic faith. But the investigation can point out to the reasonable man that something consistent, organic, and otherworldly is at work in this society. The historical data we have examined above could show development in the Church’s internal organization, but it also shows a fundamental continuity of the Church’s internal common good from the death of the apostles to now. Her bishops rightly claim to have succeeded the apostles who were chosen and sent by Jesus Christ in the oversight of the Church. The pope, as the bishop of Rome, has succeeded to the office of Peter.³⁹⁶

Of course the historical investigation can be prosecuted and the data handled in such a way that someone is not philosophically forced to give his assent to the Church’s teaching. This does not detract from the reasonableness of the Catholic argument or the weight of the evidence in its support. On the contrary, this argument is part of the motives of credibility which lead the reasonable inquirer by the natural light of reason to moral certainty that the Church is the society of salvation founded by Jesus Christ, God incarnate. The analogy to the resurrection of Christ is fitting as we conclude the Easter season. The case for the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead is rationally compelling, even morally certain, but it is not a metaphysical proof that it happened or that Jesus was who he claimed to be. But to know the case for Jesus’ resurrection and then to avoid accepting who Jesus Christ claimed to be and submitting to His authority is to strain against the trajectory of the evidence. In the same way, no one is rationally forced to accept the Catholic conclusion that the bishops are the successors of the apostles and to submit to their authority. Nevertheless to do so is to strain against the direction in which the evidence points.

Obj. 3 “But the ILD principle undermines the motives of credibility for the Catholic faith. For the ILD principle states that where the differential in likelihood between two interpretations of the data is inscrutable, the data cannot serve as evidence for one thesis over against the other. In this response, Called To Communion has noted on the basis of the ILD principle that the data cited by Brandon do not count as evidence against the Catholic view. In the same way, neither then do they count against Brandon’s view. Therefore the Catholic paradigm is not more plausible than Brandon’s view.”

Reply to Obj. 3 This objection would go through if we had limited ourselves to analyzing the data cited by Brandon, thereby accepting his data set as definitive. Yet even in that stipulated range of data, Brandon has not proved his thesis that there was no monarchical bishop in Rome prior to the late second century. Given that he accepted the burden of proof in his post’s Part I, his argument fails on the basis of this indeterminacy of the data. Brandon has not proved his case, and there is no piece of evidence he cites which is not also compatible with the presence of a monarchical bishop in Rome during this period. This objection, then, attempts to undermine the Catholic position through another tu quoque accusation.

A large part of our response, however, and one of the reasons for its length, is that Brandon’s method of selecting which data are relevant to his inquiry is itself ad hoc and methodologically loaded. He selects certain parts of the sources which seem to favor his thesis, while leaving out clear evidence of episcopacy from the very same sources. This inappropriate method artificially constrains the historical investigation into the existence and nature of the episcopate in the early Church. If one accepts a wider range of data (both within the late first- and early second-century period and within the time period following), Brandon’s thesis does not emerge as equally plausible at all. Instead, the Catholic interpretation is not only more plausible but morally certain, because there exist witnesses to the fact that there had been monarchical episcopates throughout the Church and in particular the Roman Church from the apostles. Earlier ambiguous or underdetermined data does not undermine these witnesses, given the historiographical principle that all other things being equal, one should interpret earlier data in continuity with later testimony. Therefore, the ILD principle does not make the Catholic view only equally plausible in comparison with a “presbyterial” view. In fact, following a sound historical method and a complete data set makes it clear that the Catholic position is morally certain.

IV. Conclusion

To have a sustained and honest dialogue about matters of religious truth is rare, especially when the dialogue begins with disagreement. We are grateful, then, to have enough trust between Brandon and us to have been able to host his article on the historical implausibility of the claims of the Catholic Church regarding the episcopate. He has evinced a desire to understand the Catholic position and respond accordingly, and his effort is a mark of humility and generosity of spirit. His engagement here at CTC has also shown that we all agree that unity among Christians is only possible in the truth, for the Lord Jesus is Himself the truth, and the Spirit the Spirit of truth. May our discussion continue under the guidance of the same Spirit in order that all Christians may be “one flock, one Shepherd” (St. John 10:16).

In response, we have argued first negatively that Brandon’s article does not sustain his conclusion that the governance of the early Church was “presbyterial” in such a way as to exclude both a universal monepiscopate instituted by the apostles and also the particular monepiscopacy at Rome after St. Peter’s sojourn in that city. Either Brandon’s evidence is indeterminate as to the question at hand, or abstracted from the full literary and social context of the early Church. Moreover, even if his conclusion were somehow true, we have shown that it would have disastrous consequences for ecclesiology. Secondly, we have made the positive argument that the Catholic Church’s teaching on the episcopate is more plausible than Brandon’s mere presbyterianism on a full consideration of the historical evidence, as well as on the theological implications. In this way the reader can see that the Catholic tradition accounts for the historical data just as well as, and in fact better than, Brandon’s Presbyterian account. Furthermore, the Catholic tradition surmounts the theological problems that the Presbyterian account generates for itself, while simultaneously being able to express why the Presbyterian account generates precisely those intractable problems. For this reason, the Catholic tradition’s approach to the historical data is demonstrably the superior paradigm when looking for the visible Church in history.

Pentecost Sunday, 2014

1. Ray Stamper is a guest author for CTC. He previously contributed an essay titled “The Catholic and Protestant Authority Paradigms Compared.” He is presently pursuing an MA in theology with a focus in Church History through Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell Connecticut.
2. In Comment #17 Brandon writes, “[T]he point of this article is to prove that the Church of Rome was ruled by presbyters (and not by a monarchical bishop) until c. 150 AD.”
3. First Vatican Council, Sess. 4, Ch. 1.
4. First Vatican Council, Sess. 4, Ch. 2.
5. Mysterium Ecclesiae, 1.
6. Dominus Iesus, 16.
7. Responsa ad quaestiones, Q2.
8. “Christ the Lord founded one Church and one Church only.” Unitatis Redintegratio, 1.)
9. See also Pope St. John Paul the II’s January 27, 1993 General Audience titled “The Bishop of Rome is Peter’s Successor.” In light of that, when Brandon in comment #23, says, “I wanted to point out that Catholics of good repute and in full communion with the Church share my rejection of traditional Catholic claims,” if the “traditional Catholic claims” he has in mind are or include either the claim that St. Peter was not appointed by Christ as prince of all the Apostles, or that it is not by the institution of Christ Himself that St. Peter has perpetual successors in the primacy over the whole Church, or that the papal office did not come from Christ through St. Peter, then such a Catholic is at least in material heresy, and is thus in that respect not in full communion with the Catholic Church. So for any Catholic scholar Brandon cites, if that Catholic is in [at least] material heresy regarding the aforementioned doctrines, then he or she is not in full communion. If, however, that Catholic is in full communion with the Catholic Church, then that Catholic disagrees with Brandon on these points.
10. Comment #131.
11. For an explanation of modus tollens, see “Modus tollens.”
12. On the three degrees or grades (Latin: ‘gradus‘) of Orders, see 1554-1571 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The deaconate is the first grade of Holy Orders, the presbyterate is the second grade of Holy Orders, and the episcopate is the third grade of Holy Orders. The first and second grades of Holy Orders do not include the capacity to ordain anyone. A person having the third grade of Holy Orders does have the capacity to ordain.
13. For the purposes of this essay the term ‘monepiscopacy’ should be considered equivalent to the term “monarchical episcopate.”
14. I (Bryan) explained this in 2010 in the “X. Bishops” section of my reply to Michael Horton’s closing reply in my Modern Reformation interview with him.
15. See the Code of Canon Law on diocesan bishops and coadjutor and auxiliary bishops.
16. For Tertullian’s testimony that St. Clement was ordained by St. Peter, see Prescription Against Heretics, c. 32.
17. Given that St. Cletus followed St. Linus in the order of episcopal leadership, and preceded St. Clement, it is likely that St. Cletus was also ordained either by St. Peter or St. Paul, in which case there were at the same time at least four bishops present and collaborating in the Church at Rome before St. Peter was martyred.
18. See Tim Troutman’s “Holy Orders and the Sacrificial Priesthood.”
19. Comment #131.
20. Cf. Branden Fitelson, “Likelihoodism, Bayesianism, and Relational Confirmation,” Synthese, 156, 3: 473-89.
21. See David Hackett Fischer’s Historical Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (Harper & Row, 1970), 47-48.
22. Cf. John Lange, “The Argument from Silence,” History and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1966), pp. 288–301. See also Timothy McGrew, “The Argument from Silence,” Acta Analytica (2013), 1-14.
23. Accessed May 23, 2014.
24. Artificially restricting the scope of data is a form of what David Hackett Fischer calls “The Fallacy of the Lonely Fact.” See his Historical Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, (Harper & Row, 1970), 109-110.
25. By ‘mere presbyter’ we mean an ordained man having the power to offer the Eucharistic sacrifice, but not having the power to ordain. Such a man has the second grade of Holy Orders, but not the third.
26. Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus, ch. 3.
27. See Tim Troutman’s explanation in Section III of “Holy Orders and the Sacrificial Priesthood.”
28. Cf. Comment #82.
29. “Apostolic Tradition,” 7,8.
30. See, for example, Canon 4 of the Council of Nicea, and c. 1014 of the modern Code of Canon Law.
31. Brandon at least acknowledges (in Footnote 78) that St. Peter went to Rome. For evidence that St. Peter was in Rome, see Comment #360 in the post titled “Joshua Lim’s Story: A Westminster Seminary California Student becomes Catholic.”
32. St. Peter’s statement “You younger men, likewise, be subject to your elders” in 1 Peter 5:5 provides even by age a basis for hierarchy among those ordained, within the same particular Church.
33. The fact that the Apostles repeated in their writings things they had already stated is fully compatible with it being true that if polity had already been established, there would be no absolute need to reiterate polity.
34. Epis. 146.2.
35. Comment #140
36. Apostolic Constitutions, II.4.
37. St. Jerome, Ep. 146.2.
38. Cf. A Harmony of Anglican Doctrine with the Doctrine of the Catholic and Apostolic Church of the East, (A. Brown, 1846, pp. 165-166).
39. Comment #23.
40. Comment #102.
41. Summa Theologica I Q.1 a.8 ad 2.
42. See, for example, Priestly People: A Baptismal Priesthood and Priestly Ministry by Jean-Pierre Torrell, (Paulist Press, 2013). See also Albert Vanhoye, Old Testament Priests and the New Priests According to the New Testament (trans. J. B. Orchard; Petersham, Mass.; St. Bede’s Publications, 1986). See also “Priests of My People: Levitical Paradigms for Christian Ministers in the Third and Fourth Century Church,” a Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Virginia by Brian Alan Stewart. See also page 34 of Harnack’s Constitution and Law of the Church in the First Two Centuries (Williams & Norgate, 1910). The entry ‘Bishop’ in the Catholic Bible Dictionary includes the following, “The early Christians saw the orders of Christian clergy as a fulfillment of the OT hierarchy of high priest, priest, and levite. These offices corresponded, respectively, to bishop, priest, and deacon.” ed. Scott Hahn, (Doubleday, 2009), 121. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “The liturgy of the Church, however, sees in the priesthood of Aaron and the service of the Levites, as in the institution of the seventy elders, a prefiguring of the ordained ministry of the New Covenant.” (CCC 1541.)
43. “The Apostolic Tradition,” 3.4, 7.3, 8.11.
44. Cf. Didascalia Apostolorum chapters VIII – IX.
45. “Canon of the Mass.”
46. Cf. “St. Clement of Rome: Soteriology and Ecclesiology.”
47. 1 Clement, 59:1 and 63:2.
48. Against Heresies, III.3.
49. To the Ephesians, c. 3.
50. Comment #59.
51. To the Magnesians, c.4.
52. Cf. Against Heresies, III.3.
53. Cf. “St. Ignatius of Antioch on the Church.”
54. Brandon does the same with St. Irenaeus, when he treats St. Irenaeus’s claims about the apostolicity of the episcopal office as a mere “assumption,” writing in Comment #13, “His assumption about the Apostolicity of the episcopal office . . . .”
55. Cf. “The First- and Second-Century Papacy: An Answer to Eamon Duffy.”
56. Rom., 9:1, Holmes trans.
57. Comment #109.
58. David Albert Jones, OP, “Was there a Bishop of Rome in the First Century?” New Blackfriars 80 (March 1999): 128-143, at 140; Francis A. Sullivan, SJ, From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church (New York: Newman, 2001), 221: “One cannot build such an argument from the failure of Ignatius to mention a bishop in his letter to the Romans, for there he says nothing about presbyters or deacons either; that letter was very different from his others.”
59. See Martyrium Ignatii.
60. Ign. Rom., 5.
61. St. Cyprian writes about this event in Epistle 81.
62. Smyrn. 8:1.
63. See Bauckham’s entry, “Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings,” in Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments, edited by Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Davids (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1997), 68b-73a.
64. Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 373.
65. Patrick Burke, “The Monarchical Bishop at the End of the First Century,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 7 (1970): 499-518, at 511-12.
66. Cf. “Apostolic Succession” section of my reply to Michael Horton’s last rejoinder in our Modern Reformation interview. See also Comment #133 under Brandon’s post.
67. Regarding St. Jerome’s statement in Epistle 146 (“to Evangelus”) about the selection of bishops by the presbyters in the Church of Alexandria, see footnote #270 in Tim Troutman’s “Holy Orders and the Sacrificial Priesthood.”
68. Cf. Burke, “Monarchical Episcopate,” 513:

    It is taken for granted that the prophets will be mostly wandering prophets; on the other hand, it is also possible for a prophet to settle in a community (13,1). However, a community cannot be certain of always having a prophet, and so they are exhorted to ‘appoint for yourselves bishops and deacons’ to ensure that the teaching is carried out, and also that the Eucharist will be celebrated regularly. The bishops and deacons are entitled to honor because they are a substitute for the prophets and teachers, ‘because they minister to you the ministry of the prophets and teachers. Therefore do not despise them.’ (15,1 and 2)

    This is entirely compatible with either a community’s residential prophet being what we would call “bishops” in the modern sense, or for one of the “bishops” to be a monarchical bishop. That is why Burke’s conclusion does not follow: “Of all the documents which date from this period, the Didache presents us with a picture of the Church most removed from that with a monarchical bishop.” (ibid.) Not only is it compatible with the monarchical episcopate, but Burke himself has pointed out the possible origin of a residential cleric of the third grade of Orders in a prophet taking up residence.

69. Cf. Letter to the Philippians.
70. Burke, “Monarchical Episcopate,” 514-15.
71. Ibid., Gk.
72. Ign. Smyrn. chs. 8, 9; Pol. proe., chs. 1, 6.
73. Cf. “Ignatius, To Polycarp.”
74. Cf. “The Martyrdom of Polycarp.”
75. Comment #17.
76. Against Heresies, III.3.4.
77. Church History, IV.14.
78. “Anicetus conceded to Polycarp in the Church the celebration of the Eucharist, by way of showing him respect; so that they parted in peace one from the other, maintaining peace with the whole Church, both those who did observe [this custom] and those who did not.” (Fragments from the Lost Writings of Irenaeus, 3.)
79. Smyrn. 8:1 Gk.
80. Muratorian Fragment.
81. Vis. 3.5.1 [13:1].
82. 3.5.1 [13:1].
83. Vis. 2.4.1 [8:1].
84. ibid.
85. Vis. 3.3.3 [11:3].
86. 3.4.1 [12:1], Holmes trans.
87. 3.5.2-4 [13:2-4].
88. 3.5.5 [13:5].
89. Presently there are about 5,000 Catholic bishops throughout the world. “Catholic Church grows at a faster rate than the global population.” (Accessed May 28, 2014.)
90. Sim. 9.27.1-3 [104:1-3], our emphases.
91. 3.8.10; cf. 3.8.1-8.
92. Vis. 3.9.10-11 [17:10-11].
93. Comment #148.
94. Comment #155.
95. See the discussion below on historical positivism.
96. An analogous contemporary example can be seen in this excerpt from the Lloyd Bentson vs. Dan Quayle U.S. Vice-Presidential debate in 1988.
97. See also Brandon’s reference to this reason in Comment #23.
98. Of course we are in no way suggesting that Brandon is anti-Semitic. We are speaking of the argument he is using. This argument is not original with Brandon, and he has endorsed it we presume, without realizing its implicit anti-Semitic assumption and basis.
99. See the quotation below from George Edmundson regarding the “bodies swathed in Jewish fashion.”
100. Comment #26 under “Modern Scholarship, Rome and a Challenge.”
101. Comment #127.
102. The notion of a “just so” story is taken from Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.” The “just so story” fallacy refers to the speculative, ad hoc and unsubstantiated narrative constructed to explain an event or entity.
103. Church History, IV.22.1
104. See J. B. Lightfoot, S. Clement of Rome, (MacMillan and Co. London and New York, 1890), 327ff. Lightfoot’s argument has been widely accepted and to the best of our knowledge, has not since been refuted.
105. Panarion, Bk 1, Section 2, Part 27.
106. Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. Michael Steinhauser, ed. Marshall D. Johnson (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003), 406.
107. I (Bryan) addressed this in 2010 in comment #20 of the “Modern Scholarship” thread.
108. Church History, IV.20. St. Jerome concurs, writing,

     Theophilus, sixth bishop of the church of Antioch, in the reign of the emperor Marcus Antoninus Verus composed a book Against Marcion, which is still extant, also three volumes To Autolycus and one Against the heresy of Hermogenes and other short and elegant treatises, well fitted for the edification of the church. (De Viris Illustribus, 25)

109. Lampe, 405. We have corrected the English translation at “Sextus,” for Lampe more correctly wrote “Sixtus” in the first German edition of his book. See Peter Lampe, Die stadtrömischen Christen in den ersten beiden Jahrhunderten. Untersuchungen zur Sozialgeschichte (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1987), 342.
110. Lampe, Die stadtrömischen Christen, 342. Emphasis original.
111. Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus, 406.
112. See critical apparatus in Irénée de Lyon, Contre les hérésies. Livre III. Tome II. Édition critique, texte et traduction, rev. ed., trans. and ed. by Adelin Rousseau and Louis Doutreleau, Sources chrétiennes 211 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2002), 36. For a discussion of the manuscripts, especially Salamanticensis, see also Irénée de Lyon, Contre les hérésies. Livre III. Tome I. Introduction, notes justificatives, tables, Rev. ed., trans. and ed. by Adelin Rousseau and Louis Doutreleau, Sources chrétiennes 210 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2002).
113. Lewis & Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1688b.
114. Aegidio Forcellini, Iosepho Furlanetto, Francisco Corradini, and Iosepho Perin, eds., Lexicon Totius Latinitatis, Tom. VI: Onomasticon, J-Z (Patavii: Typis Seminarii, 1940), p. 621b-622a.
115. Eduard Schwartz and Theodor Mommsen, Die Kirchengeschichte. Eusebius Werke: Zweiter band, Erster Teil, Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller 6.1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), 304, 306, 438, and 496. Rufinus’s Latin translation says Xystus at each place (pp. 305, 307, 439, and 497).
116. See the Catholic Encyclopedia article on “Pope St. Sixtus II.”
117. Manlio Sodi and Achille Maria Triacca, eds., Missale Romanum. Editio Princeps (1570), (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1998), 342.
118. Vatican: Librariae Editricis Vaticanae, 2004. For the entry on St. Sixtus I, see, “Die 3 aprilis,” at p. 217.
119. See Jill E. Blondin, “Power Made Visible: Pope Sixtus IV as URBIS RESTAURATOR in Quattrocento Rome,” Catholic Historical Review 91 (2005): 1-25, at pp. 7, 12n34, 14, 16n44, 19, and 23n62; Roberto Weiss, The Medals of Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484) (Roma, 1961), 32-33.
120. One of us has the personal hypothesis that Xystus became Sixtus in some usage in order to make the name easier to say for non-Greek speakers.
121. An example of this can be found in Eusebius, where he writes:

     At that time there flourished in the Church Hegesippus, whom we know from what has gone before, and Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, and another bishop, Pinytus of Crete, and besides these, Philip, and Apolinarius, and Melito, and Musanus, and Modestus, and finally, Irenæus. From them has come down to us in writing, the sound and orthodox faith received from apostolic tradition. ( Historia Ecclesiastica IV.21. )

     The works of most of these authors are no longer extant, but Eusebius claims that it was from these second century men that the sound and orthodox had come down to him and the Christians contemporary with him.

122. Comment #44.
123. Cf. Comment #37 under the “St. Irenaeus on Justification” thread.
124. Comment #20 under the “Modern Scholarship, Rome and a Challenge” thread.
125. Comment #68 under the “Mary as Co-Redemptrix” thread.
126. St. Epiphanius writes:

     I heard at some time of a Marcellina who was deceived by them [i.e., the Carpocratians], who corrupted many people in the time of Anicetus, Bishop of Rome, the successor of Pius and the bishops before him. For the bishops at Rome were, first, Peter and Paul, the apostles themselves and also bishops — then Linus, then Cletus, then Clement, a contemporary of Peter and Paul whom Paul mentions in the Epistle to the Romans. And no one need wonder why others before him succeeded the apostles in the episcopate, even though he was contemporary with Peter and Paul — for he too is the apostles’ contemporary. I am not quite clear as to whether he received the episcopal appointment from Peter while they were still alive, and he declined and would not exercise the office — for in one of his Epistles he says, giving this counsel to someone, “I withdraw, I depart, let the people of God be tranquil.” (I have found this in certain historical works) — or whether he was appointed by the bishop Cletus after the apostles’ death.

     But even so, others could have been made bishop while the apostles, I mean Peter and Paul, were still alive, since they often journeyed abroad for the proclamation of Christ, but Rome could not be without a bishop. Paul even reached Spain, and Peter often visited Pontus and Bithynia. But after Clement had been appointed and declined, if this is what happened — I suspect this but cannot say it for certain — he could have been compelled to hold the episcopate in his turn, after the deaths of Linus and Cletus who were bishops for twelve years each after the deaths of Saints Peter and Paul in the twelfth year of Nero.)

     In any case, the succession of the bishops at Rome runs in this order: Peter and Paul, Linus and Cletus, Clement, Evaristus, Alexander, Xystus, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius, and Anicetus, whom I mentioned above, on the list. And no one need be surprised at my listing each of the items so exactly; precise information is always given in this way. In Anicetus’s time then, as I said, the Marcellina I have spoken of appeared at Rome spewing forth the corruption of Carpocrates’ teaching, and corrupted and destroyed many there. (The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Bk 1, Against Carpocratians, Sect. 6.)

127. “Communicantes, et memoriam venerantes, in primis gloriosae semper Virginis Mariae, Genetricis Dei et Domini nostri Iesu Christi: sed et beati Ioseph, eiusdem Virginis Sponsi, et beatorum Apostolorum ac Martyrum tuorum, Petri et Pauli, Andreae, Iacobi, Ioannis, Thomae, Iacobi, Philippi, Bartholomaei, Matthaei, Simonis et Thaddaei: Lini, Cleti, Clementis, … (“In union with the whole Church we honor Mary, the ever-virgin mother of Jesus Christ our Lord and God. We honor Joseph, her husband, the apostles and martyrs Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Jude; we honor Linus, Cletus, Clement, …”
128. Against Heresies III.3.
129. Cf. His “De Viris Illustribus,” written between AD 392-393.
130. See here lines 360ff of Book III.
131. The Liberian Catalogue can be found here. The list as far as Pope Pontiananus (AD 230-35) is believed to be the work of St. Hippolytus, who compiled his list in AD 235.
132. See his Against the Donatists, pp. 68-69.
133. Ep. 53.
134. A tenth witness, writing in the early third-century, unknown in name, does not provide the list of names of the bishops of Rome, but states that St. Victor “was the thirteenth bishop of Rome from Peter.” The full quotation reads:

     For they say that all the early teachers and the apostles received and taught what they now declare, and that the truth of the Gospel was preserved until the times of Victor, who was the thirteenth bishop of Rome from Peter, but that from his successor, Zephyrinus, the truth had been corrupted.

     And what they say might be plausible, if first of all the Divine Scriptures did not contradict them. And there are writings of certain brethren older than the times of Victor, which they wrote in behalf of the truth against the heathen, and against the heresies which existed in their day. I refer to Justin and Miltiades and Tatian and Clement and many others, in all of whose works Christ is spoken of as God.

     For who does not know the works of Irenæus and of Melito and of others which teach that Christ is God and man? And how many psalms and hymns, written by the faithful brethren from the beginning, celebrate Christ the Word of God, speaking of him as Divine.

     How then since the opinion held by the Church has been preached for so many years, can its preaching have been delayed as they affirm, until the times of Victor? And how is it that they are not ashamed to speak thus falsely of Victor, knowing well that he cut off from communion Theodotus, the cobbler, the leader and father of this God-denying apostasy, and the first to declare that Christ is mere man? For if Victor agreed with their opinions, as their slander affirms, how came he to cast out Theodotus, the inventor of this heresy? ( Quoted in Eusebius, Church History V.28.)

135. According to the tradition, St. Linus was from Volterra, in Tuscany, about 170 miles northwest of Rome. Later the Chiesa di San Lino (Church of Saint Linus) was built over the place his house had been. To this day the city of Volterra celebrates “La festa di San Lino patrono di Volterra” (The Feast of Saint Linus, patron of Volterra) on his feast day, i.e., September 23, as can be seen in the video at this link.
136. Fragments from the Lost Writings of St. Irenaeus.
137. See also AH IV.26.2.
138. Even St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, is referred to as a ‘presbyter’ by St. Hippolytus. See Refutation of All Heresies, Book VI, c. 37., where St. Hippolytus writes, “For also the blessed presbyter Irenaeus, having approached the subject of a refutation in a more unconstrained spirit, has explained such washings and redemptions, stating more in the way of a rough digest what are their practices.”
139. According to the Liber Pontificalis, Pope Telesphorus (AD 125-136) ordained that the fast of seven weeks should be kept before Easter.
140. Against Heresies, I.25.6.
141. Against Heresies, I.27.1-2.
142. Against Heresies, III.4.3.
143. Fragments from the Lost Writings of Irenaeus.
144. Against the Valentinians, 4.
145. Epistle 73.
146. Against All Heresies, 6.
147. Panarion, Bk. 1 pt. 42, 1:7.
148. Prescription Against Heretics, c. 30.
149. Tertullian writes:

     With regard, then, to the pending question, of Luke’s Gospel (so far as its being the common property of ourselves and Marcion enables it to be decisive of the truth, ) that portion of it which we alone receive is so much older than Marcion, that Marcion himself once believed it, when in the first warmth of faith he contributed money to the Catholic church, which along with himself was afterwards rejected, when he fell away from our truth into his own heresy. (Against Marcion, IV.4.)

150. Panarion, Bk. 1 pt. 42. 2:6-8.
151. Tertullian writes:

     Now, from Tiberius to Antoninus Pius, there are about 115 years and 6-1/2 months. Just such an interval do they place between Christ and Marcion. (Against Marcion, Bk. 1. c. 19.)

     The Marcionites believed that Christ came down in the fifteenth year of Tiberius (AD 14-37), and that Marcion began his sect 115 years after Christ came down.

152. “Marcionites,” in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
153. Dialogues of Adamantius, Bk. VIII.
154. Ibid.
155. Against Heresies, III.3.4.
156. St. Epiphanius writes:

     Finally, seized with jealousy since he could not obtain high rank besides entry into the church, he reflected and took refuge in the sect of that fraud, Cerdo. (Panarion, Bk. 1 pt. 42. 1:8.)

157. Recorded in Eusebius’s Church History, II.1.2. Eusebius also records this in his Chronicle, writing that in the same year Christ was crucified, “Ecclesiae Jerosolymorum primus episcopus ab Apostolis ordinatur Jacobus frater Domini,” (i.e. “The first bishop of the Church of Jerusalem, James the brother of the Lord, is ordained by the Apostles.) To see the Latin in the Bodleian manuscript of St. Jerome’s translation of Eusebius’s Chronicle, see the the second line from the top on this page.
158. Catechetical Lecture 4.
159. Eusebius, Church History, VI.14.6.
160. Church History, IV.5.
161. Church History II.16 & 24.
162. Apostolic Constitutions, Bk. VII, Sect. 4.
163. De Viris Illustribus, 8.
164. Oration 21.
165. Church History, III.22.
166. Homily 6, para.4, on Luke 1:24-32, in The Fathers of the Church: Homilies on Luke, trans. Joseph T. Lienhard, (CUA Press, 2010), 24.
167. That page can be found online at this link.
168. See Comments #59 and #140.
169. De Viris Illustribus, 16.
170. Historia Ecclesiastica VI.8.
171. Homily on St. Ignatius, 2,4.
172. Dialogue 1. View the Greek excerpt of this quotation here.
173. St. Peter had a personal connection by which to go there. Aquila, who was from Pontus (Acts 18:2), had departed from Rome at the edict of Claudius expelling all Jews from Rome (AD 50). According to St. Jerome’s translation of Eusebius’s Chronicle, St. Peter had gone to Rome after leaving Antioch between AD 42-43. So if St. Peter was in Rome from AD 43-50, he would very likely have been acquainted with Aquila, who undoubtedly would have wanted St. Peter to come to his homeland, and share the gospel with his kinsman. After the Jerusalem Council in AD 50, St. Peter likely travelled to Bithynia, Pontus, and Cappadocia, before returning to Rome around AD 54. By the mid to late 50s, when St. Paul’s letter to the Romans was written, Aquila and Prisca were back in Rome, and a church was meeting in their house (Romans 16:5). Again St. Peter would have good reason to know Aquila and Prisca. St. Peter could have visited Pontus either for the first or second time between AD 57-62, before returning for his third sojourn in Rome, at which time, while in Rome, he specifically addresses first the Christians of Pontus in the beginning of his first epistle, where he writes, “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who reside as aliens, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who are chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, by the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to obey Jesus Christ and be sprinkled with His blood.”
174. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Bk 1, Against Carpocratians, Sect. 6.
175. De Viris Illustribus, 1.
176. Against All Heresies, 6.
177. Panarion, I.42.
178. See the “Marcionites” entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
179. And the son of this bishop seems to know something about the importance of the Church in Rome.
180. Prescription Against Heretics, 36, emphases ours.
181. Church History 2:25:8.
182. Historia Ecclesiastica IV.22.
183. Historia Ecclesiastica III.16.
184. In the Greek this line reads: καὶ ὅτι γε κατὰ τὸν δηλούμενον τὰ τῆς Κορινθίων κεκίνητο στάσεως, ἀξιόχρεως μάρτυς ὁ Ἡγήσιππος.
185. Historia Ecclesiastica IV.22.1.
186. Church History, V.5.8.
187. Church History V.1.
188. For example, around AD 200, Caius, who opposed Proclus the Montanist, wrote, “But I can show the trophies [tombs] of the Apostles. For if you will go to the Vatican or to the Ostian Way you will find the trophies of those who laid the foundations of this church.” (As quoted in Eusebius, Hist. Eccles.. II.25.
189. On ecclesial deism, see our article titled “Eccleisal Deism.”
190. Martyrdom of Justin, c.2.
191. Not only that, but if the “Timiotinian Bath” to which St. Justin refers is the “Baths of Novatus,” Novatus being the brother of Timothy, referred to in the “Acts of Pudentiana and Praxedis,” then possibly the house church at which St. Justin worshipped was the Ecclesia Pudentiana built on the Baths of Novatus, and which may have been for some time the residence of the bishop of the Church at Rome. See Edmundson, The Church in Rome in the First Century, 211.
192. My response can be found in Comment #97 under the “Modern Scholarship, Rome and a Challenge” post.
193. Prescription Against Heretics, c. 32.
194. Against Heresies, III.3.3.
195. Refutation of All Heresies, IX.6,7. (our emphasis)
196. This catacomb was rediscovered in 1854 by the Italian archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi. Cf. Wendy J. Reardon The Deaths of the Popes, (Macfarland & Company, 2004), 291.
197. Warren H. Carroll, The Founding of Christendom, Vol. 1, (Christendom Press, 1985), 468.
198. “Refutation of All Heresies,” IX. c. 2.
199. Fragments of the Lost Writings of Ireaneus, 51.
200. Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church Third edition., F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, eds., (Oxford University Press, 1997) 1693.
201. Church History, V.28.
202. See “Antipope” in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
203. The Prescription Against Heretics, 36.
204. Comment #101.
205. Comment #82.
206. Cf. “Extended Review of Peter Lampe’s “From Paul to Valentinus.””
207. “Titulus” in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
208. And even more house churches came into existence after the time Brandon acknowledges a monepiscopacy in Rome existed. For example, in AD 220 Pope Callistus founded a house church now named Santa Maria in Trastevere on a refuge for retired soldiers called the Taberna meritoria. See E.G. Weltin, The Ancient Popes (Westminster, MD, 1964), 96-97.
209. See “St. John Lateran” in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
210. ‘Titulus,’ in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
211. Cf. “Stazione a Santa Pudenziana.”
212. The account of this event can be found on page 299 of Volume IV of the Acta Sanctorum for the month of May. The relevant excerpt reads:

     Eodem tempore Virgo Domini Praxedis accepta potestate rogavit beatum Pium Episcopum, ut thermas Novati, quae jam tunc in usu non erant, ecclesiam consecraret: quia aedificium magnum in iisdem et spatiosum esse videbatur. Quod et placuit sancto Pio Episcopo: thermasque Novati dedicavit ecclesiam, sub nomine beatae Virginis Potentiane [in vico Patricius. Dedicavit autem et aliam sub nomine sanctae Virginis Praxedis] infra urbem Romam; in vico qui appellatur Lateranus: ubi constituit et titulum Romanum: in quo loco consercravit baptisterium sub die IV Idus Maji. (At the same time, Praxedis, Virgin of the Lord, having received power, asked blessed bishop Pius that at the baths of Novati, which even then were not in use, he would consecrate a church: because the building in that same place seemed to be large and spacious. Now that pleased holy Bishop Pius, and at the baths of Novati he dedicated a church under the name of the blessed Virgin Potentiane [in the ward of Patricius. However, he dedicated another church under the name of the holy Virgin Praxedis] within the city of Rome, in the ward which is called Lateranus, where the titulum Romanum is established. In that place he consecrated a baptistery four days before the Ides of May.)

213. See La Basilica Titolare di S. Pudenziana: Nuove Ricerche, by Claudia Angelelli (Pontificia Commissione di Archeologia Sacra, 2010). See also Vitaliano Tiberia’s Il Mosaico di Santa Pudenziana a Roma: Il Restauro, (Ediart, 2003), for an analysis of the art in this church, traced back to just after the time of Pope St. Damasus.
214. George Edmundson, The Church in Rome in the First Century (Longmans, Green, 1913), 248.
215. “St. Prisca” entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
216. See here on page 11 in Martyrologium Hieronymianum: E Codice Trevirensi (Brussels, 1883).

     The entry on the “Chair of St. Peter” in the Catholic Encyclopedia includes the following:

     According to Duchesne and de Rossi, the “Martyrologium Hieronymianum” (Weissenburg manuscript) reads as follows: “XV KL. FEBO. Dedicatio cathedræ sci petri apostoli qua primo Rome petrus apostolus sedit” (fifteenth day before the calends of February, the dedication of the Chair of St. Peter the Apostle in which Peter the Apostle first sat at Rome). The Epternach manuscript (Codex Epternacensis) of the same work, says briefly: “cath. petri in roma” (the Chair of Peter in Rome). (( “Chair of St. Peter” in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

217. “Chair of St. Peter” in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
218. There are two levels in this catacomb, and a large tank in each one, possibly where these baptisms took place. See Marucchi,
     Elém. d’Arch. Chrét. ii. 459.
219. See the citations here.

220. Come now, if you would indulge a better curiosity in the business of your salvation, run through the apostolic Churches in which the very thrones [cathedrae] of the Apostles remain still in place; in which their own authentic writings are read, giving sound to the voice and recalling the faces of each. Achaia is near you, so you have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi. If you can cross into Asia, you have Ephesus. But if you are near to Italy, you have Rome, whence also our authority derives. How happy is that Church, on which Apostles poured out their whole doctrine along with their blood, where Peter endured a passion like that of the Lord, where Paul was crowned in a death like John’s [the Baptist], where the Apostle John, after being immersed in boiling oil and suffering no hurt, was exiled to an island.” (The Prescription Against Heretics, 36).

221. Church History VII.19.
222. Cf. G. Secchi, La cattedra alessandrina di San Marco, (Venice, 1853).
223. Cf. Roma Sotterranea, Vol. III, p. 514ff. This is a subtle and indirect example of the principle that grace builds on nature.
224. The ordination of a bishop required three bishops. The long-standing tradition is that the ordination of a bishop of Rome would be done by the bishop of Ostia, accompanied by the bishop of Albano and the bishop of Porto. The [mere] presbyters in Rome could not ordain anyone, let alone a replacement bishop. The bishop of Rome was usually selected from one of the Cardinal deacons of the Church in Rome, who served in the tituli.
225. See Minucius Felix.
226. Octavius of Minucius Felix, 10.
227. See Galerius and Constantine: Edicts of Toleration 311/313.
228. See the account of the martyrdom of St. Susanna in Acta Sanctorum: Augusti Tomus Secundus, from page 624 through page 632, in which it is implied that Pope St. Caius’s house, which was joined to the house of his niece St. Susanna where she was martyred, belonged to him as his residence while he also held the episcopacy.
229. The Apostolic Tradition, 39.
230. The pagans used the word ‘necropolis,’ meaning, ‘city of the dead,’ for the places where Christians buried their dead; the Christians, however, used their own term, ‘cemetery,’ from the Greek word κοιμάω [koimao], meaning to sleep.
231. Wendy Reardon, The Deaths of the Popes, (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2004) 23.
232. Edmundson, The Church in Rome in the First Century, (Longmans, Green and Co., 1913), 261.
233. The elevation and demotion would be arbitrary because on Brandon’s thesis, no presbyter-bishop had any more authority than any other simultaneously serving presbyter-bishop. The other alternative, that the Christians of Rome engaged in this retrospective elevation and demotion not arbitrarily, but in order to conform to the arbitrary fictional lists of two non-Romans, Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus, makes liars not only of Sts. Hegesippus and Irenaeus, but of all the Christians of Rome in the second half of the second century who, according to this hypothesis, would have knowingly gone along with the conspiracy.
234. The Martyrdom of Ignatius.
235. Homily on St. Ignatius.
236. The Martyrdom of Polycarp, 18.
237. Warren Carroll writes,

     When Cletus died — in 92, according to Eusebius — his successor was Clement, whom Peter himself had ordained. Since the principal patron of Christianity at this time was probably the Emperor’s cousin Flavius Clemens, father of the heirs to the empire, the similarity of the fourth Pope’s name to his is unlikely to be coincidental. (The Founding of Christendom, (Christendom Press, 1985), 448.

238. De Viris Illustribus, 15.
239. A photograph of this event can be seen here. In August of each year the Christians of Alatri attend a similar celebration in Alife, as explained here.
240. See page 473 and 474 in the Acta Sanctorum: Aprilis Tomus Secundus.
241. Regarding this graffiti, see here, and Lietzmann, Hans, (1923), “The Tomb of the Apostles Ad Catacumbas,” Harvard Theological Review 16.2: 147-162.
242. De Rossi, Inscriptiones Christianae urbis Romae septimo saeculo antiquiores. vol. ii. (Ex Officina Libraria Pontificia, 1857), pages 32, 65-66, 89, 105. This volume can be accessed online here.
243. See the Liber Pontificalis, which records the burial location of each pope.
244. Cf. Church History V.6.4.
245. Comment #180.
246. Cf. “The Tradition and the Lexicon.”
247. Paul Owen’s statement in Comment #103 regarding the difference between BAGD and BDAG on this question shows the potential ideologically-loaded (and not theologically neutral) presuppositions at work behind the lexical method.
248. Epist. 64.
249. Homily 3 on the Acts of the Apostles.
250. See “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority.”
251. Comment #30.
252. Comment #103.
253. Of course that would be problem for the Catholic doctrine of papal primacy, but that is a distinct doctrine from the Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession, as I explained in the comments under “Apostolic Succession and Historical Inquiry: Some Preliminary Remarks.”
254. Brandon responds to St. Ignatius’s statement (Rom. 4:3), “I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you. They were apostles; I am but a condemned man: they were free, while I am, even until now, a servant,” by saying that this is evidence against apostolic succession. Brandon writes:

     This passage is further evidence that even episcopal government did not operate under the principles of a bishop succeeding the Apostolic office (as if the authority from the Apostles is sacramentally transferred to the bishop). (Comment #102)

     I (Bryan) addressed this in footnote #68 of my reply to Michael Horton’s last rejoinder in our Modern Reformation interview.

255. Comment #39.
256. Comment #51.
257. Comment #73.
258. In his comments regarding the “Oath Against Modernism,” Brandon says,

     The teaching of the Church in this regard is that the episcopacy was instituted by the “real and historical Christ.”

     However, the Oath Against Modernism states that the “Church” was founded by the “real and historical Christ.” Christ gave episcopal authority to the Apostles, and they gave this authority to the bishops who succeeded them. That is de fide, (Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, 278) as is the superiority of bishops to mere presbyters. (Ott, 453). The question whether the office of mere presbyters was established directly by Christ or by the Church, has not been decided by the Church. (Ott, 453)

259. 1 Clement, 42.
260. 1 Clement, 44.
261. Historia Ecclesiastica III.11.
262. Historia Ecclesiastica III.35.
263. Historia Ecclesiastica IV.5.
264. Historia Ecclesiastica III.14.
265. Historia Ecclesiastica III.21-22.
266. Historia Ecclesiastica IV.1.
267. Historia Ecclesiastica IV.19.
268. Historia Ecclesiastica III.34.
269. Historia Ecclesiastica III.36.
270. According to the tradition, at Rome St. Peter sent St. Mark to found the Church at Alexandria.
271. Eusebius writes, “At that time also in the church of Antioch, Theophilus was well known as the sixth from the apostles. For Cornelius, who succeeded Hero, was the fourth, and after him Eros, the fifth in order, had held the office of bishop.” (Historia Ecclesiastica IV.20.)
272. Historia Ecclesiastica III.23.
273. Liber de praescriptione haereticorum, 32. See also Historia Ecclesiastica III.36.
274. Cf. this fragment.
275. That this Onesimus is the same Onesimus in St. Paul’s epistle to Philemon, see John Knox, Philemon among the Letters of Paul (Chicago, 1935), 50-65, and see F.F. Bruce, Paul, Apostle of the Free Spirit (Exeter, England, 1977), 399-406.
276. St. Jerome, De Viris Illustribus, 18.
277. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 89.
278. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 101.
279. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 90.
280. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 97.
281. Adversus haereses III.4.1.
282. Adversus haereses III.3.2.
283. As for Schaff’s interpretation of this paragraph from St. Irenaeus, his is a novel interpretation; that is not how it has always been understood. Nor does it fit with what St. Irenaeus is saying. St. Irenaeus says nothing about travelers to Rome keeping the Church at Rome orthodox. Travelers to Rome could just as easily have corrupted it with heresies. In fact we know of many Gnostics who went to Rome in the second century (e.g. Marcellina, Cerdon, Valentinus, Marcion), precisely to try to infiltrate the mother Church with their heretical doctrines. The basis St. Irenaeus gives for the “preeminent authority” of the Church at Rome is the succession from St. Peter.
284. Adversus haereses IV.26.2.
285. Adversus haereses III.3.4.
286. Liber de praescriptione haereticorum, 21.
287. Liber de praescriptione haereticorum, 32.
288. Liber de praescriptione haereticorum, 36.
289. Liber de praescriptione haereticorum, 37.
290. St. Augustine wrote, “[I]f you acknowledge the supreme authority of Scripture, you should recognise that authority which from the time of Christ Himself, through the ministry of His apostles, and through a regular succession of bishops in the seats of the apostles, has been preserved to our own day throughout the whole world, with a reputation known to all. (Against Faustus Bk. 33.9)
291. Historia Ecclesiastica IV.22.
292. Historia Ecclesiastica IV.23.
293. Historia Ecclesiastica III.31.
294. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 2 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979), 188.
295. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 7.
296. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 12.
297. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 12.
298. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 21.
299. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 21.
300. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 34.
301. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 90.
302. On Monogamy, 8.
303. Refutation of All Heresies, IX.6,7. (our emphasis).
304. Epistle 39 (43).
305. Treatise on the Unity of the Catholic Church, 1st edition. There is another version of this text, which appears to have been written a few years later, when St. Cyprian was disputing with Pope St. Stephen regarding the re-baptism of heretics. That version can be read here. Dom John Chapman, in the second chapter of his book titled Studies on the Early Papacy, provides good reasons to believe that both versions were written by St. Cyprian. See here.
306. Letter 51.
307. Epistle 54, 14.
308. Epistle 72.
309. Epistle 75.
310. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 234.
311. This same question arose again in the following century with respect to the Donatist schism.
312. Epistle 74. In his 69th Epistle, St.Cyprian writes, “But if he cannot give the Holy Spirit, because he that is appointed without [i.e., outside the Church] is not endowed with the Holy Spirit, he cannot baptize those who come; since both baptism is one and the Holy Spirit is one, and the Church founded by Christ the Lord upon Peter, by a source and principle of unity, is one also. Hence it results, that since with them all things are futile and false, nothing of that which they have done ought to be approved by us.”
313. Poem Against the Marcionites.
314. Christian Frederick Cruse, The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius Pamphilus (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991), 82.
315. Christian Frederick Cruse, The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius Pamphilus (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991), 85.
316. Christian Frederick Cruse, The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius Pamphilus (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991), 100.
317. Christian Frederick Cruse, The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius Pamphilus (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991), 157.
318. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 346.
319. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 308.
320. Denzinger, 57e. “And you [Pope Julius], most dearly loved brother, though absent from us in body, were present in mind concordant, and will . . . For this will be seen to be best, and by far the most befitting thing, if to the head, that is to the see of the Apostle Peter, the priests of the Lord report from every one of the provinces.” (Fragment 2 ex opere Historico [ex Epistle Sardic. Concil. Ad Julium] [before 367 AD]
321. History of the Arians, Part V.
322. The work of St. Optatus.
323. That definition of schism is very similar to what we see today in the Catechism of the Catholic Church; see CCC 2089.
324. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 2 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979), 72.
325. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 406ff.
326. Cf. Holy See.
327. Concerning Repentance, Book 1, 7:33.
328. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 2 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979), 150.
329. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 2 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979), 148.
330. Homily 88 on the Gospel of John.
331. Letter 15 to Pope St. Damasus.
332. Letter 16 to Pope Damasus.
333. De Viris Illustribus, 1, 70.
334. Against Jovianus, Bk I.
335. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 2 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979), 199.
336. Letter 130.
337. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970), 311.
338. Letter 136.
339. Letter to the Council of Carthage, as quoted in Chapman, Studies on the Early Papacy, pp. 146-147.
340. Epistle 13, cited in Giles, Documents Illustrating Papal Authority, pp. 229-230.
341. Epistle 14, to the bishops of Thessaly, cited in Giles, p. 230.
342. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 3 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979), 32.
343. Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus, 4-5.
344. Letter 43.
345. Letter 53.
346. Answer to Petilian the Donatist, Book II, c. 51.
347. Letter 191.
348. On the Soul and its Origin, Bk II, 17.
349. Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, Bk II.
350. Letter 209.
351. On the Grace of Christ, and on Original Sin, Bk II, 19.
352. Letter 250.
353. Sermon 81 on the New Testament.
354. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 3 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979), 184.
355. Pope Celestine, Epistle 11, cited in Giles, pp. 240-41.
356. Council of Ephesus, AD 431.
357. Commonitorium, 6.
358. Ecclesiastical History, Bk III.
359. Ecclesiastical History, Bk IV,15.
360. Letter 4.
361. Letter 14 of Pope Leo I to Anastasius, Bishop of Thessalonica.
362. Letter 1.
363. Letter 10.
364. Letter 93.
365. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 3 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979), 271.
366. William Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers: Volume 3 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979), 275.
367. Letter 52.
368. Letter 116.
369. Letter 68.
370. Letter 98.
371. Letter 105.
372. Cited from Denzinger 171-2.
373. Denzinger, 230.
374. Registrum Epistolarum Bk IX, Letter 12.
375. Registrum Epistolarum Bk IX, Letter 59.
376. Letter to Eulogius, bishop of Alexandria.
377. See C.S. Lewis’ trilemma regarding Christ in his book Mere Christianity.
378. Just as the writing of the Old Testament came after the covenant with Abraham, so the writing of the New Testament came after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection and sending of His Spirit on the day of Pentecost. The people of God existed prior to the sacred writings, because God used members of these communities to write these texts. Therefore the sacred writings could not be the foundation of the Church, for otherwise the Church could not exist until the writings existed.
379. Moreover, the Apostles made use of lots in order to choose Judas’ successor, precisely because they so strongly believed Christ’s promise that the Spirit was guiding the Church, that they trusted His providential guidance of the lots.
380. But if unordained people can ordain, then any believer can ordain any other believer, perhaps even himself. In that case, anyone can celebrate the Lord’s Supper, even in one’s own kitchen.
381. Historia Ecclesiastica III.4.
382. Cf. the section titled “III. Denial of Visibility is Ecclesial Docetism” within our article titled “Christ Founded a Visible Church.”
383. See Leo XIII, Satis cognitum 13.
384. Much of what follows comes from Pius XII, Mystici corporis and Russell Hittinger, “The Coherence of the Four Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine: An Interpretation,” in Pursuing the Common Good: How Solidarity and Subsidiarity Can Work Together, Proceedings of the 14th Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences , ed. Margaret S. Archer and Pierpaolo Donati (Vatican City, 2008), 75-123.
385. Obviously, a boat without a coxswain does not thereby lack a unity of order, for a certain one of the rowers would himself be the one giving commands and making the decisions. He would be a visible head who also rows with the others. Without someone occupying the office of head, the team will not succeed. Indeed, the team would be more of an aggregate of rowers all independently rowing and only accidentally in the same boat.
386. In Ethic. I.5; cf. Hittinger, “Four Principles,” 81.
387. Hittinger, “Four Principles,” 83.
388. Mystici corporis 62.
389. See Mysticis corporis 56-58.
390. Pius XII, Mystici corporis 63
391. And the Fathers concur. See, for example, St Clement of Alexandria’s “Who is the Rich Man that Shall Be Saved?“, XI. See also Origen’s Commentary on Matthew, XIII.31. See also St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catechetical Lectures 2.19; 6.14; 17.27. See also St. Augustine’s On Baptism: Against the Donatists, VII.20. See St. John Chrysostom’s Homily 9 on 1 Thessalonians.
392. Here is Vatican II’s teaching on the office of bishop from the “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” Lumen gentium, 21:

     In the bishops, therefore, for whom priests are assistants, Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Supreme High Priest, is present in the midst of those who believe. For sitting at the right hand of God the Father, He is not absent from the gathering of His high priests,[FN: See Leo the Great, Serm., 5, 3…] but above all through their excellent service He is preaching the word of God to all nations, and constantly administering the sacraments of faith to those who believe, by their paternal functioning (see 1 Cor 4:15). He incorporates new members in His Body by a heavenly regeneration, and finally by their wisdom and prudence He directs and guides the People of the New Testament in their pilgrimage toward eternal happiness. These pastors, chosen to shepherd the Lord’s flock of the elect, are servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God (see 1 Cor 4:1), to whom has been assigned the bearing of witness to the Gospel of the grace of God (see Rom 15:16; Acts 20:24), and the ministration of the Spirit and of justice in glory (2 Cor 3:8-9).

     For the discharging of such great duties, the apostles were enriched by Christ with a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit coming upon them (see Acts 1:8; 2:4; John 20:22-23), and they passed on this spiritual gift to their helpers by the imposition of hands (see 1 Tim 4:14; 2 Tim 1:6-7), and it has been transmitted down to us in Episcopal consecration. [FN: Council of Trent, session 23, ch. 3, quotes the words of 2 Tim 1:6-7 to show that Order is a true sacrament…] And the Sacred Council teaches that by Episcopal consecration the fullness of the sacrament of Orders is conferred, that fullness of power, namely, which both in the Church’s liturgical practice and in the language of the Fathers of the Church is called the high priesthood, the supreme power of the sacred ministry. [FN: In Apostolic Tradition, 3…] But Episcopal consecration, together with the office of sanctifying, also confers the office of teaching and of governing, which, however, of its very nature, can be exercised only in hierarchical communion with the head and the members of the college. For from the tradition, which is expressed especially in liturgical rites and in the practice of both the Church of the East and of the West, it is clear that, by means of the imposition of hands and the words of consecration, the grace of the Holy Spirit is so conferred, [FN: See Apostolic Tradition, 2…] and the sacred character so impressed, [FN: See Council of Trent, session 23, 4, which teaches that the sacrament of Order imprints an indelible character…] that bishops in an eminent and visible way sustain the roles of Christ Himself as Teacher, Shepherd and High Priest, and that they act in His person. [FN: Cyprian, Epist., 63, 14… John Chrysostom, In 2 Tm., homily 2, 4… Ambrose, In Ps., 38, 25-26… Ambrosiaster, In 1 Tm., 5, 19… and In Eph., 4, 11-12… Theodore of Mopsuestia, Hom. Catech., XV, 21 and 24… Hesychius of Jerusalem, In Lev., book 2, 9, 23…] Therefore it pertains to the bishops to admit newly elected members into the Episcopal body by means of the sacrament of Orders.

393. One of us has also written on this in “Philosophy and the Papacy.”
394. One of us has written on this here at CTC in a post titled “Wilson vs. Hitchens: A Catholic Perspective.
395. See St. Thomas Aquinas, STh Ia.12.5.
396. The “list of popes helps illustrate that continuity of succession back to St. Peter.

In his recent encyclical Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis writes, “How many benefits has the gaze of Christian faith brought to the city of men for their common life!”¹ Throughout history, it has been understood to some extent or another that religious faith is a cultural unifier. Faith imparts moral authority to law and creates a society with common cultural assumptions, and thereby guides the State in creating a just society. The elephant in the room, however, is the State itself. What if the elephant doesn’t want to stay in its proper place? What if the elephant breaks through the walls of the room and collapses the entire house upon us all? In an ideal world, the city of man and the city of God work in harmony and create a just society. In our real, less than ideal world, however, relations between Church and State have been constantly marked by tension and struggle.

In his book Church and State in Early Christianity (Ignatius Press, 2006), published in German in 1961 as Kirche und Staat im frühen Christentum: Dokumente aus acht Jahrhunderten und ihre Deutung, Hugo Rahner exhaustively references primary sources in creating a picture of these struggles in the first centuries of the Church’s existence. Understanding these struggles will be helpful to us today as we experience the escalation of these tensions to what, in fact, appears to be the historical norm. In the United States, we have been blessed with a period of respite in which the freedom of the Church has been largely honored by the State. Will these conditions maintain? That is anybody’s guess. We do know that recently the State has shown signs of encroaching upon the freedom of the Church. The Church has fought these battles many times over, and Rahner’s book does us a great service in recording those struggles as well as diagnosing some principles upon which the Church stands when it comes to Church and State relations.

The Age of the Martyrs

“It has often been said that the Church surrendered herself without reserve, ‘in a dream’, as it were, to the dangerous protection offered by the State at the moment in 313 when the Emperor Constantine granted her toleration and freedom.”² Such a critique is made, in my experience, by those who wish to argue to some degree or another that the Roman Catholic Church was a creation of Constantine. According to this narrative, before the intervention of the State into Church affairs, the Church was entirely apolitical, unorganized, and pacifist. Further buttressing the argument are the examples of the general aversion of the Romans to the early Christians. This narrative appeals today to the typical anti-Catholic individual, to the theologically confused Christian who believes that grace destroys nature and so opposes any cooperation between Church and State, to the libertarian who wishes the Church to back out of the public square entirely because of a fear of state domination of the Church, and, of course, to those who simply want the Church to be quiet so the State can get on with whatever manner of oppression it wishes to impose.

We can disprove this narrative quite easily. In fact, in the first three centuries of her existence, from the very beginning, the Church had already established a relationship with the State. Rahner shows that the early Church never offered an unqualified “no” to the State. The change in 313 was less a surrender to the all powerful creative abilities of Constantine to remake the Church in his image and more a hesitant “yes” to further cooperation with the expectation of mutual benefit. The tensions between the Romans and the Christians actually indicate that there was a struggle afoot to define the proper relationship of Church and State in their life together. Rahner writes, “The basically Christian conception of the state as we find it in the sources of the early Church from Tiberius to Constantine can be correctly defined only if one takes into account the variations in the Church’s reply of yes and no to the state.”³ This balance between an unqualified yes or no to the State is what the Church of the martyrs struggled to achieve.

What is the basis of the “no”? Our Lord assures us in John 18:36 that His Kingdom is not of this world. Thus, the Church opposes any government that wishes to impose an idealist and totalitarian vision of human flourishing that is limited to human structures alone. Our Lord makes this clear in His subtle distinction to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s (Mathew 22:21). He also proves His point before Pilate by warning him, “You would have no power over me, unless it were given to you from above.” (John 19:11). The early Church took Our Lord’s words to heart, and when the State attempted to seize the proper role due to the Church, she offered a firm “no.”

The denial of the State needs qualification, however. It is not a blanket condemnation. Rahner cautions, “In the documents of the Church of the martyrs, we rarely hear so stern a denial of the state… but these statements call for comment and cannot be glossed over.”⁴ And later, “We can see the deeper reasons for the no of the ancient Church to the state if we consider the way in which the civil authority held the religious power in subjection.”⁵ There are a few points to consider in this regard: The conflation of the kingly office with the priestly office in Roman politics, and the cult of the Emperor.

To the first, the ancient Roman State believed that the head of State had the right to regulate religious life. The King was at the same time endowed with priestly powers, thus the title “Pontifex.” Although the religious functions were soon taken over by a college of priests, they continued to live in the Regia, the ancient dwelling place of the kings. In so doing, they testified to their continuing belief that they were servants of the State.

To the second point, imported from the tyrant rulers of the East was the concept of the cult of the Emperor.The Church opposed this development. For example, St. Polycarp was martyred for refusing to call the Emperor Kyrios. Tertullian took up the ancient Roman cry to the Emperor to “Remember death,” and thus separated him out as deserving the highest honors due to a mortal but not a god. St. Hippolytus of Rome preached that when it comes to the demand of the State for the honor due only to God, “it is sweeter for us to die than to do what men command.”⁶

Even in the face of steady persecution, the Church refused to disengage from exercising an influence on the State. This engagement, once it successfully defends a proper loyalty to the Kingdom of Heaven, is soon able to offer to the State not only a “no” but also a constructive “yes.”

Upon what foundation is this “yes” built? Rahner writes, “The Christian yes to the state was based on the idea, formulated clearly right from the beginning, that the imperial power, as it was embodied in the person of the emperor, descended directly from the Creator of mankind.”⁷ Even when she is persecuted, the Church never wavers from this understanding. During his trial, St. Donata of Scillium said, “I honor the emperor because he is emperor, but worship can be given only to God.”⁸ St. Apollonius in Rome testified, “The Logos Jesus Christ has taught us to fulfill the law that he has given us, to honor the emperor but to fear only him who alone is immortal.”⁹ In late first-century Rome during the worst of the Emperor Domitian’s persecutions, Pope Clement’s Church prayed, “Make us obedient both to your almighty and glorious name and to all who rule and govern us on earth.”⁹ Tertullian summed up the attitude of the Christians by sarcastically pointing out the folly of the State; “Kind rulers, torture the soul from the body that prays for the emperor.”¹⁰

It is clear that the early Church felt at home in the Roman Empire, thanking the empire for creating the conditions for the spread of the Gospel, praying for the rulers, and steadfastly defending the proper role of the State as having been appointed by God. Soon enough, Christianity had grown into a powerful and influential group. It was at this point that the empire began to treat the Christians as equals. Thus, when Constantine offers an alliance, so to speak, the Church does not accept under compulsion or in a condition of weakness but under the aspect of a partnership. The Church had triumphed through her prayers and her suffering.

The Struggle For Freedom Under Constantine

The Emperor Maximian grudgingly granted toleration to the Christians. The edict was soon expanded by Constantine in 313 at Milan, who wrote that such a measure was “highly consonant with right reason, that no one should be denied leave to follow the rites of the Christians or whatever other religion he thinks appropriate….”¹¹ At this point, the hostilities between empire and Church ceased and freedom of religion was secured. However, Rahner argues that as Constantine slowly increased his support for Christianity, he expected in return a response of servile gratitude. Even though he was able, at least in theory, to support freedom of religion in a pristine form, in practice he proved to be meddlesome and all too willing to bend the Church to the imperial will. If we take his rhetoric at face value, his involvement was not a mere political ploy but rather it came from an abiding belief he was chosen by God to accomplish a mission for the welfare of mankind. Perhaps his famous vision and its attendant message is all we need to in order to understand fully his attitude: “In this sign you will conquer.”

Constantine’s friendship became suffocating, because once the State ceased persecuting the Church it immediately began attempting to use her as one might a tool. The Church had much to offer. She was a principle of unity. She was a moral catechist that taught, among other things, good citizenship. She was capable of playing peacemaker and promoting culture. For the Church, the benefit, of course, was being able to come out into the open and worship in peace as well as being free to proselytize. Soon enough the negatives presented themselves as well. Constantine attempted to settle theological issues by brute force, for instance, in Donatist Africa. He attempted to impose his own, private theologies upon the bishops by exiling those who disagreed. He more or less incubated the Arian heretics and allowed their rebellion to be birthed. Constantine set a pattern that was followed to some degree or another by all subsequent Emperors until the time of Justinian. As much as they claimed to love the Church, their relationship with her was an abusive one and they had no illusions about who was in charge. After Constantine, the Church was a welcome and productive member of the empire, but only on terms set out by the emperor, and so it was that internal theological disagreements escalated into treason to the State.

The spark that lit the fire was Arianism. The ascendancy that the Arians had gained over Constantine’s theological inclinations solidified under his successor Constantius, so much so that St. Athanasius commented, “Though he appears a free man, he is slave of those who have him in their pocket.”¹² Constantius began aggressively pursuing a policy of religious unity on the basis of Arianism. There were many voices raised in defense of freedom, the most enduring of which belonged to St. Athanasius, who was soon sent into one of his many, many exiles. The bishops of the East were constantly pressured to adjust their theology to conform with that of the emperor. Pope Julius (337-352) sent a papal letter detailing the problem, “No longer are judgments delivered in the Church according to the Gospel but with threats of exile and sentences of death. Notice should have been sent to me first for the delivery of a just verdict [in the case of St. Athanasius].”¹³ With the Pope’s approval, a council was called in which the bishops agreed that, for the well being of the State, it is necessary to “Give to each subject full and complete freedom to live without any constraint.”¹⁴

A status quo established itself, with the emperors putting steady pressure on the Church to submit to the State, and the Church putting up as much resistance as she could. Rahner writes, “The struggle went on even when it seemed that the imperial policy toward the Church had taken a turn for the better.”⁹ Christians continued to express their willingness to die rather than submit the Gospel to political review. There are many heroes in the story, including: St. Hilary of Poitiers, St. Basil, St. Ambrose of Milan, and Pope Liberius. It was St. Ambrose who refused to admit the Emperor Theodosius to mass until he had completed public penance on account of his massacre in Thessalonika. Theodosius’s humble response won the Church freedom for a short time. Rahner writes, “The final legendary scene, in which Ambrose sent the emperor out of the presbyterium, is a symbol of the accomplishment of the Western Church….”¹⁵ St. Ambrose continued to press the issue, preaching, “Let the emperor hear the voice of a free priest.”⁹

The Separation of Church and State

One would hope that through the heroic conviction of St. Ambrose and the humble submission on the part of emperors such as Theodosius that the freedom of the Church would have been guaranteed, but alas, the State conducted its attack on the Church persistently and tenaciously, enough to make St. Peter’s visions of roaring lions prowling about take on an urgent meaning.Rahner shows that Theodosius’s successors moved quickly to expand imperial authority, and it fell upon the shoulders of men such as Pope St. Leo the Great to carry on the struggle.

During the 5th century, Rahner identifies two notable developments that affected Church and State relations. The first was the collapse of civil authority in the West, which allowed the papacy temporary respite from the empire. The second was the theological genius of St. Augustine combined with the diplomatic application of his theology by a succession of popes: St. Leo the Great, St. Innocent I, and St. Gelasius.

It was Pope St. Innocent I who, after conferring with St. Augustine, keenly developed the principle of the Primacy of Peter, linking it with universal jurisdiction and arguing that it guarantees the freedom of the Church. He writes, “When there is question of matters of grave importance, they should be referred, after the judgment of the bishop, to the Apostolic See.”¹⁶ Commenting on this, Rahner writes, “Without a unified pastoral authority at the highest level, no uniform law is possible in the Church, and without law there is no freedom.”⁹ He argues that in the eastern Churches, Pope Innocent’s interpretation of universal authority was met with equivocation. Although in the East it was understood that a universal law was necessary, a center of supreme authority was instead established, “with the help of the state, at Constantinople. But this center was essentially different from that in the West because only Rome’s right to guide the whole Church has a theological foundation.”¹⁷

Rahner believes that by building on a shaky foundation the local Churches in the East were made vulnerable to institutional domination by the emperor, writing, “during this period, the East was “withdrawing more and more from papal authority to fall in turn into the hands of the state.”¹⁷ He cites as one example the tragedy of the bishop of Constantinople, St. Chrysostom. Here was a man of equal to St. Ambrose in both courage and ability in fighting for the freedom of the Church, but the results he obtained were far different. Rahner writes, “Chrysostom engaged in a life-and-death struggle against imperial domination of the Church, but compliant bishops [of the State] sentenced him to deposition…”¹⁸ Pope Innocent protested and even sent papal legates to stir up the clergy in defense of St. Chrysostom but all to no avail. Caesaro-papism was alive and well in the East, with the emperor still allowed into the sanctuary, still addressed as a priest, and still capable and willing to suffocate the Church with his personal whims. Pope St. Innocent I writes in a letter to St. Augustine, “I believe that all our brothers and colleagues in the episcopate should refer the case to Peter, that is, to the source of their title and office, and this would be to the common advantage of the churches of the whole world.”¹⁷ In other words, acceptance of valid Church authority at the universal level is a necessary condition for maintaining the unified freedom of the Church in the face of State oppression.

Popes St. Leo and St. Gelasius continued Pope Innocent’s translation of the thought of St. Augustine into practical policy. St. Augustine sums up the situation with insight, “The emperors, who were defeated by the Christians not in an armed struggle but by the power of their own deaths, now, when they pray, lay the splendor of their empire together with the imperial diadem before the tomb of a fisherman.”¹⁹ This, in his eyes, is entirely proper, as he famously preached, “The Apostolic See has spoken; the case is closed.”⁹ There is an authority proper to the Church and an authority proper to the State. St. Augustine writes, “There are a king for temporal life and a King for life eternal.” (Ennarratio in Psalmum)⁹ He continues with a description of the Christian soldiers who served the atheist emperor Julian; “They recognized only a heavenly emperor in matters pertaining to Christ, and when the earthly emperor ordered them to worship idols by burning incense to them, they preferred God to the emperor. But when he ordered them at the moment of battle to charge the enemy, they obeyed him promptly.”²⁰ One of the pressing questions for Christians throughout history is whether we ought to obey an evil government or not. St. Augustine insists that the answer to this question is the answer of the martyrs: Be loyal even to a persecuting State, but never if it means being disobedient to God. Obey the emperor even if he kills you. St. Augustine writes, “Even a monster like Nero received sovereign authority from God’s Providence when he judged human history ripe for such a ruler.” (De Civitate Dei)⁹

St. Augustine gave to the Church precisely the intellectual tools she needed at a providential period in her history, for there were many challenges on the horizon. Soon enough, the Nestorian controversy arose, causing the emperor to berate St. Cyril of Alexandria for his opposition to Nestorius as a “craze for argument and disorder.”²¹ To which he adds the pernicious claim, “You should realize that Church and state are completely one….” (Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum)⁹ The Nestorian controversy was never completely settled in the East; in fact it elicited a response from Eutyches of Constantinople that created its own controversy. The point here is not the content of the theological disagreements themselves but rather the fact that the problems immediately take on political overtones. The government, fearing unrest amongst the citizens, used what it considered justifiable force in ending the argument to the favor of whichever faction happened to be enjoying momentary political favor. Pope St. Leo the Great (440-461) valiantly and tactfully maintained the freedom of the Church in the West. Results in the East were limited. Although the Council of Chalcedon eventually restored theological orthodoxy, it took place only because the new emperor, Marcian, happened to be orthodox himself. At the death of Marcian, attacks upon the Church were immediately renewed and Chalcedon became a disputed Council.

In the West, civil authority at long last collapsed around the year 476. Pope St. Simplicius (468-483) expressed his horror in a letter to Emperor Basiliscus and used the opportunity as a teaching moment on the duties of the State in regard to the Church. He wrote, “If you wish your rule to last, God must not be offended; nothing on earth endures without fulfilling its responsibilities toward heaven.”²² Rahner comments, “No government endures without the true Faith.”⁹ Basiliscus ignored the Pope’s prophetic warning. He swiftly attempted to control the Church and impose an anti-Chalcedon program by pronouncing the Dogmatic Tome of Pope St. Leo to that Council to be anathema. Basiliscus, the self-proclaimed Eternal Emperor, quickly fell from power.

The new Emperor, Zeno, accepted the orthodoxy of Chalcedon but continued to assert a Caesaro-Papist philosophy; and so it went, year after year. Rahner documents in excruciating detail every back and forth of imperial policy, driving home the point that the struggle of the Church for freedom can never cease. There are moments of détente, but there is never lasting peace. As long as there is a State, it will be marked by a disordered passion to grasp lasting power. The State will never be content to rule in its proper sphere of responsibility. Pope St. Symmachus (498-519) likens it to having to pass constantly “through a hail storm.”²³ These events of the 5th century slowly created a wedge between the Church in the West, which remained firmly united with the papacy as it developed the doctrine of universal jurisdiction and thus maintained her freedom, and the Church in the East, which produced many heroic defenders of the Church but nevertheless cracked along fissures opened up by an imperial policy that politicized all theological discussion. The principle of unity in the East became the State, which is a fickle master. In the end, the East was cleft apart by Arianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, Eutychianism, and the like. In the year 518, the Church in the East finally experienced respite when Emperor Justin I made a truce with the papacy and reunification was effected. The papal legates of Pope Hormisdas came to Constantinople on Easter Sunday, 519, and were greeted with joy by the clergy and people. For a time, there was peace, but already the seed of a new struggle was germinating. There was a great celebratory feast at the unification of East and West; at that feast was a young man named Justinian.

The Struggle Against Justinian

Justinian ascended to the throne in 527 and vigorously began to set the empire in order. Justinian was a capable man with an iron will. Before him there would be no victory, no more diplomacy, and so the response of the Church was to guarantee her victory through suffering. After the ascension of Justinian, the monophysite provinces reasserted themselves, leading him into a willingness to compromise theologically for the sake of political unity. The true goal of Justinian was to recreate the ancient power and political unity of Rome. He would accomplish this, among other ways, by controlling the Church. Rahner writes that Justinian believed, “Gospel and empire should become one. The interpretation of the gospel, the definition of the true Faith, the validity of canon law-all this should be left to the emperor’s decision.”²⁴ He would accomplish his goal by theological compromise between competing groups, political suppression, and attempts to subjugate the papacy.

In 536, Pope Agapitus went to Constantinople as an envoy of the Gothic Kingdom in Italy. He and Justinian discussed the Monophysite heresy and it soon became clear that Justinian’s Patriarch in Constantinople, a man named Anthimus, was a heretic. Legend has it that upon realizing his defeat in the realm of theology, Justinian became heated and gave a political ultimatum; “Either you accept my views, or I will have you exiled.” To which Agapitus replied, “As a poor sinner, I was eager to travel to meet Justinian, the most Christian of emperors, but instead I have found a Diocletian. I do not fear your threats.”²⁵

This opened a new phase in the struggle, with the Church caught in between warring political factions who both happened to be heretics: the monophysite influenced Byzantines and the Arian Goths. When Justinian’s conquering army arrived in Rome under General Belisarius in 537, Pope St. Silverius was commanded to appear before him. The Liber Pontificalis records that the Pope was stripped of his pallium and clothed in a monk’s habit. Then Pope St. Silverius disappeared. Justinian had successfully deposed a Pope.

A new pope, a sometime courtier named Vigilius, was installed as a puppet of the empire. Rahner maintains that through the supernatural grace of the Holy Spirit, this new Pope surprised his political masters and grew into a staunch defender of the freedom of the Church. He refused to cooperate in compromising with the Monophysites and for this he was dragged away from Rome to the imperial city. Here, pressure was applied, to which Vigilius proclaimed, “I call on God as a witness, you can imprison me, but you cannot put Peter in chains.”²⁶ The Pope continued to defy the emperor and eventually the State covered itself in shame with a spectacle of violence. The imperial police broke into the monastery where Vigilius had taken refuge, entered the sanctuary where he was, and tried to drag him away from the altar. The attempt failed to recover the person of the Pope for imprisonment. Rather, it obtained an excommunication for the Patriarch of Constantinople from the Pope in response. Justinian next attempted to assassinate Vigilius’s character. Here, Rahner notes, “Vigilius’s character had been refined in the seven-year battle at Constantinople and reveals…how the struggle for freedom not only strengthened the Church and preserved her from sinking into a shabby worldliness but also made men out of weak popes-with the result that ultimate victory could be shown to be the work not of the great but of the grace of Christ, who chooses the lowborn and the despised.”²⁷

Eventually, the old, worn out Pope succeeded in wearying Justinian. He was allowed to return to Rome. He never made it. He died in Syracuse on the way home to the Lateran in the year 555. Rahner writes, “Such was the sad conclusion of the struggle with Justinian – the Pope gone to an unmourned death, continuing friction within the Church and state, something that would be repeated in the course of history. But to Christians this only highlights the fact that the Church is not of this world.”²⁸

Conclusion

I have omitted much in this essay, even by way of summary, and Rahner himself admits that much has been omitted from his book. In his conclusion, though, he manages to make the point of the exercise quite clearly, writing, “After Christ’s death the whole story of the Church evolved inescapably “sub Pontio Pilato,” that is, in relations with the human state… From meditation on the past varying yeses and nos of the dialogue between the Reign of God and the human state, we can learn something about the uses of power – source of life and death – out of which, after Christ, is spun the texture of his Church’s history.”²⁹

Rahner emphasizes two principles cherished by the early Church and still relevant for us today. First, the Church regards the State as a form of social life established by God. As such, the Church is always willing to work with the State: to accept protection, to collaborate in making just laws, and to benefit from a well-ordered society in which evangelization is made easier. The danger is that the State smothers the Church or that the Church becomes too identified with the State. Rahner writes, “In order to avoid violating her basic principles, the Church must be ready for persecution.”³⁰

Following on this point, is the second, best expressed by St. Ambrose, “There is greater happiness in being persecuted by the emperors than in being loved by them.” (De Obitu Valentiniani)⁹ The Church does not seek persecution, but when persecution comes it is to be considered a grace of Christ. St. Ambrose again puts it best; “Because the Church is pure gold, trial by fire does not tarnish her. Her glory can only increase until that day when Christ will establish his kingdom and become the crown of his Church’s Faith.” (Expositio in Psalmum)

After having pondered Rahner’s exhaustive and insightful exposition on Church and State in early Christianity, I pray that a few of my own thoughts will not be too out of place in regard to Church and State in the modern day United States.

It seems as though historically there are two dangers to the freedom of the Church; there are the carrot and the stick. On the one hand is the stick, active hostility from the State which leads to suppression. Take, for example, the refusal of government contracts to Church organizations because they do not promote contraceptives, even if the contract is for an unrelated job such as a charity devoted to ending human trafficking; or the persecution of Church adoption agencies because they will not place children with homosexual couples; or the HHS Mandate which seeks to limit the freedom of the Church to follow the moral law. This is nothing less than active hostility on the part of the State against the Church.

On the other hand there is the carrot, smothering friendship which seeks to control the Church. This potentially leads to rent-seeking behavior: for example, a politician claiming that her pro-abortion stance is “sacred ground” by reason of her personal faith as a member of the Church.There are many who would seek to condone such behavior. Catholic politicians who are public about their faith and yet seek to twist it to their own political agenda are not true friends. The moral authority and the freedom of the Church cannot be compromised in this way and we should fight against the misperceptions this manipulation creates. Another example might be the State’s recent endorsement of homosexual ‘marriage.’ Throughout the history of the United States, the State has recognized that there is one form of marriage that creates strong social cohesion, produces well-adapted future citizens, and protects families, especially women and children. This is marriage between a man and a woman, for better or worse, for the peace and tranquility of both parties until death. From our founding as a nation, the Church has had at least some influence in shaping this definition in harmony with the State, even if one wants to argue that such a role has been limited to bequeathing a common cultural assumption. Soon enough, though, the State allowed legal contraception, and then no-fault divorce, and then homosexual unions. The misguided and willful friendship of the State is destroying marriage from the inside out. Who can make predictions, but seeing as how in other Western nations Churches are facing civil litigation to conform, can we doubt that it might happen here, too?

The Church can respond to these dangers by giving up and retreating to the catacombs. This seems to be a popular plan today amongst libertarians and other social conservatives. Perhaps, they say, if we “get out of the marriage business,” the State will leave us alone. I would say that this is short-sighted for a few reasons. First, history shows that Leviathan never leaves us alone. Second, the struggle must continue not only for the continued freedom of the Church but also for the benefit of all mankind. The Second Vatican Council exhorts Christians

to fulfill their duties faithfully in the spirit of the Gospel. It is a mistake to think that, because we have here no lasting city, but seek the city which is to come, we are entitled to shirk our earthly responsibilities; this is to forget that by our faith we are bound all the more to fulfill these responsibilities according to the vocation of each… May Christians…be proud of the opportunity to carry out their earthly activity in such a way as to integrate human, domestic, professional, scientific and technical enterprises with religious values, under whose supreme direction all things are ordered to the glory of God.” (Gaudium et spes, 43)

Similarly, Pope Francis writes,

Faith is truly a good for everyone; it is a common good. Its light does not simply brighten the interior of the Church, nor does it serve solely to build an eternal city in the hereafter; it helps us build our societies in such a way that they can journey towards a future of hope.” (Lumen Fidei, 51)

In other words, if we take our ball and go home, we all lose. The martyrs became martyrs specifically because they refused to allow the Church to be forever buried in the catacombs. Will the Church suffer for this stance? Yes. This is our service to the world.

Today, as much as ever, the Church must turn to a unified principle of authority that is not beholden to a particular church, a church that can too easily become identified with a particular place or culture. This means that, in the long view, Christian communities organized along lines of individual authority, presbyterial authority, or conciliar authority will fail to maintain their freedom. As history teaches us, the freedom of the Church is only guaranteed by the ministry of St. Peter, which has been set in place by Our Lord for this specific purpose. The Catechism of the Catholic Church succinctly explains the theological principle of the papacy in fulfilling this role: “he is the supreme visible bond of the communion of the particular Churches in the one Church.”³¹ Even in the relatively short period of time during the American experiment, examples to this point are abundant.The majority of Protestant churches have already capitulated or are well along the path to capitulating to State pressure on divorce, marriage, contraception, and abortion. In response, many self-identified conservative Christians have made the individual decision either to retreat from the public square entirely or else have taken refuge in a staid conservatism that engages in vicious culture wars. These battles may or may not be short-lived. One thing is certain, though; these Christian communities continue to splinter as the pressure brought to bear by the State continues to rearrange culture in a way that they are at a loss to deal with. On this matter, I would tend to agree with the prophetic words of Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote that, “our posterity will tend more and more to a division into only two parts, some relinquishing Christianity entirely and others returning to the Church of Rome.”³²

The duty of the Church today as the State pressures her to deny her basic moral teachings and cooperate in evil is to remain engaged by continuing to present a cohesive, alternative vision to the State in which the freedom of the Church is acknowledged and respected. In the language that Rahner has laid out for us; we say “no” to that which would force us to deny the authority of Our Lord but we say “yes” to the continued role of the State in its proper sphere. This is our duty as stewards of this earth and as participants in a social arrangement that is blessed and ordained by God. Pope Francis puts it this way,

[In the Scriptures,] faith is not only presented as a journey, but also as a process of building, the preparing of a place in which human beings can dwell together with one another… The God who is himself reliable gives us a city which is reliable. Precisely because it is linked to love (cf. Gal 5:6), the light of faith is concretely placed at the service of justice, law and peace.³³

Many years ago, Cardinal Ratzinger also addressed this issue. During a speech on the crisis in culture, he said,

The security we need as a precondition of our freedom and our dignity cannot come, in the last analysis, from technical systems of control, but can, specifically, spring only from man’s moral strength: Whenever the latter is lacking or is insufficient, the power man has will be transformed increasingly into a power of destruction.³⁴

The moral strength we need cannot come from the political realm itself. In fact, historically we have seen how when the State attempts to replace the Church, the door to totalitarianism opens wide. Ratzinger says, “Political moralism, as we have lived it and are still living it, does not open the way to regeneration, and even more, also blocks it.”⁹

Michael Rennier

Our freedom to engage culture with an authentic witness and work with a willing State will wax and wane, as it always has. If, however, we are steadfast in maintaining that such a freedom is a natural right, and if we are willing to suffer rather than relinquish it, then neither a persecuting State nor a bullying, friendly State will prevail against a Church that finds her freedom not in the favor of men, but rather locates it in obedience to Jesus Christ our King.

Even if our adoption agencies are forcibly closed, our parochial schools shuttered, our private businesses litigated out of existence for refusing to cooperate with evil; even if we eventually find ourselves, like many of our brethren in other nations, actively persecuted by the State, our churches covered with graffiti, our holy altars vandalized or torn down, may God grant us the willingness to use the very stones of our ruined churches to rebuild our society.

1. Lumen Fidei, 54.
2. Church and State in Early Christianity, 1.
3. Ibid, 3.
4. Ibid, 6.
5. Ibid, 7.
6. Ibid, 11.
7. Ibid, 12.
8. Ibid, 13.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid, 17.
11. Ibid, 39.
12. Ibid, 49.
13. Ibid, 50.
14. Ibid, 52.
15. Ibid, 79.
16. Ibid, 134.
17. Ibid, 135.
18. Ibid, 141.
19. Ibid, 136.
20. Ibid, 137.
21. Ibid, 144.
22. Ibid, 153.
23. Ibid, 158.
24. Ibid, 189.
25. Ibid, 192. See also the Catholic Encyclopedia article titled “Pope St. Agapetus I.
26. Church and State in Early Christianity, 197.
27. Ibid, 201.
28. Ibid, 202.
29. Ibid, 295.
30. Ibid, 299.
31. CCC 1559.
32. Democracy in America, Ch VI.
33. Lumen Fidei 50,51.
34. “Cardinal Ratzinger On Europe’s Crisis of Culture,” a speech delivered on April 1, 2005.

There is an interesting exchange that takes place all the time in evangelical churches, organizations, and Bible studies, especially in the United States. It is that moment when former-Catholics discover an ally, a fellow journeyman who found his or her way out of the Church and into evangelicalism, someone who can relate to the many negative experiences or unbiblical beliefs they endured during their time as Catholics. These conversations can be a great source of encouragement, discovering that others had experienced what we experienced in our path of following Christ.

As a former Catholic who spent years in evangelical and Reformed circles, I myself had my fair share of those conversations. So has Chris Castaldo, an Italian American and former Catholic who worked full-time in the Catholic Church for several years, and has published a book, Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic (Zondervan, 2009). In this book Castaldo explains his own conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism through a series of chapters assessing what he believes to be the five predominant reasons why Catholics leave the Church for evangelical Protestantism, based on two years of research interviewing Catholics and former Catholics across the United States. Castaldo is a graduate of Moody Bible Institute and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and currently serves as Director of the Ministry of Gospel Renewal for the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.

As a descendant of Catholic Irish and Polish immigrants to the United States, I too was raised Catholic but ultimately chose evangelicalism, and later Reformed theology, in my desire to follow Christ faithfully in my search for biblical Christianity. Except, unlike Castaldo, I’ve come to realize that the five reasons typically given by former Catholics, though I am sympathetic to them, are not sufficient to warrant leaving the Church Christ founded, nor were any other reasons I sought to employ in rejecting Rome’s claims. In sharing some reflections on my reversion to Catholicism, I would like to contrast briefly my own experience with that of Castaldo and those he describes in Holy Ground in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of their reasons for abandoning Catholicism and identify a few concerns with their manner of assessing Catholicism’s claims.

Encountering Christ in Evangelicalism

I was born into a Catholic family, though both of my parents would readily admit that they were not devout, did not accept some Church teachings, and were both drawn to elements of evangelical Protestantism. Following my first communion at age eight, my parents left Catholicism and eventually landed in a non-denominational evangelical community. Their decision was at first disconcerting to me, given that their departure from Catholicism was upsetting to our Catholic extended family. However, I witnessed throughout my adolescence a profound change in them as they fell in love with Christ and His Scriptures and appeared to be transformed into more loving, patient people. I too, in my senior year of high school, was exposed to a classmate whose suffering and personal trials were so overwhelming that I cried out to God to make sense of such evil – and found the answer in Christ’s death and resurrection. As for Catholicism, it was something I had come to distrust and question, especially based on the sermons I heard at our evangelical church declaring the Catholic Church to be in grave theological error. By the time I left for college, I was a fervent evangelical, convinced that I had found the purest form of Christianity.

That fervor met a rude awakening in religion classes at the University of Virginia where I was exposed to strong academic criticisms of the historicity and coherence of Scripture by religion professors who took a particular delight in turning the worlds of evangelical students upside down. Unfortunately, I think many evangelical college students come to grips with the disconnect between what their secular university religion classes teach and what they grew up believing, by embracing the modern, almost Kantian dichotomy between academia and their personal faith. I suppose it’s an easy way to avoid the dilemmas we confront in the wake of several centuries of Protestant scholarship defined by historical criticism, source criticism, and form criticism, as well as a strong distrust of the supernatural.

However, I did not view such a dichotomy between the intellectual and spiritual life as intellectually coherent. Either Scripture was historically reliable, Protestant theology logically consistent, and evangelicalism a defensible form of Christianity, or it was time to abandon the whole project. I took it upon myself to go in search of evangelical scholarship that could provide me with an adequate defense of Scripture. What I found was a wealth of evangelical scholarship, some apologetic, some more scholarly, presenting a formidable defense of Scripture’s historicity and veracity. I confess, of course, my natural bias – within evangelicalism I had experienced a dramatic spiritual communion with Christ through prayer and meditation on Scripture, and matured in my love for others. I wanted to prove to myself and others that my faith was not some sort of wish fulfillment.

This leads me to a reflection that would be influential in my eventual return to Catholicism: neither I, nor I doubt many evangelicals, have systematically engaged every single attack on the historicity or veracity of Scripture. At least for myself, I read enough to be satisfied that there were reasonable defenses of Scripture, and moved on with my life. Was that intellectually lazy? Possibly, but we all must do it, to some degree. It is simply impossible to reserve judgment until we address every single challenge presented against Scripture, or any other belief, for that matter. I think to a degree I justified my lack of comprehensiveness by noting the flawed reasoning of those who attacked Scripture: they refused to accept the possibility that the supernatural could exist, and this predisposed them against the content of Scripture, and inclined them to seek flaws within it. To me this seemed intellectually dishonest and unfair. This reflection would in turn be helpful as I considered the claims of Catholicism several years later.

Amidst my studies to defend Scripture, I was introduced to Reformed theology through the Presbyterian Church in America’s (PCA) Reformed University Fellowship (RUF), as well as through authors like R.C. Sproul, D.A. Carson, and J.I. Packer, among many others. This marked a transition in my faith journey. For one, the Reformed faith seemed to make more sense of Scripture in its entirety than did my non-denominational evangelicalism, and explained many passages neglected by other evangelicals. Secondly, the Reformed faith introduced me to Reformed writers such as John Calvin, John Piper, and Michael Horton, whose reflections on Christ, the gospel, and the Scriptures were far more inspiring and intellectually robust than what I had previously experienced. Finally, the Reformed faith and its links to Calvinist scholars of the previous centuries was the answer to my concerns as a history major that American evangelicalism seemed largely disconnected from the history of Christianity. I became a passionate defender of Calvinism, and upon graduation, enrolled in Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) and became a member of a PCA church. I was ready for a lifetime of theological study and service in the Reformed tradition, and had no doubts or concerns with Reformed theology. To put it simply, I was more proud of being Reformed than I was of anything else in my life.

Encountering Problems in Evangelicalism

Several years later, however, I was confronted with an unusual dilemma when my best friend, a student at Covenant Theological Seminary (PCA) in St. Louis, Missouri, started to question the Reformed faith shortly before finishing his Master of Divinity degree. His concerns with the Reformed faith and his interest in Catholicism led me to employ all the tools at my disposal to counteract what I perceived as one of the gravest theological errors, and to prevent my friend from making what I perceived to be possibly the greatest mistake of his life. I should know, of course, because I myself had been a Catholic and had grown up around many Catholic extended family. So I read Reformed critiques of Catholic faith and practice, engaged the faculty at RTS, and consulted the pastors and elders at my PCA Church, several of whom were, like myself, former Catholics. The enterprise, was, I admit, entirely biased. I was seeking to find the “silver bullet” to demonstrate the errors of Catholicism. However, in less than a year, the tables had turned and I was consistently finding myself on the defensive, seeking to defend numerous theological and historical issues, including sola scriptura, sola fide, and the supposed connection between the faith and practice of the early Church and that of the Reformed tradition.

Catholicism, meanwhile, was at least plausible, if still a very unappealing option for a number of theological and personal reasons. Some concerns seemed larger than life. How was I suppose to assess the Catholic claim that Catholic tradition and the the teaching of the Magisterium had authority that was binding on the conscience? Did I have to read, study, and assess prayerfully every official Church document ever written in order to determine whether its doctrine was compatible with Scripture? I’d have to quit my job and devote the rest of my life to such a pursuit. And meanwhile, was I suppose to abstain from communion or resign from my PCA church and become some sort of “independent” Christian until I had resolved these dilemmas? That certainly seemed contrary to Scripture’s calling to unite ourselves to a visible community of Christians (e.g. Hebrews 10:25). I could spend the rest of my life in some sort of theological limbo, only to find some new scholarly analysis throw the whole Protestant experiment into flux, as the New Perspective on Paul has done since the 1970s. Is this really what Jesus intended for us, that every Christian study Scripture, theology and Church history until we are each able adequately to resolve such controversies as justification? And adequate to whom, exactly? The short history of Reformed denominations such as the OPC and PCA and their own battles with the Federal Vision should be enough even for the casual observer to recognize the complexity of these issues. The complexity certainly seemed at odds with the Reformed understanding of the perspicuity of Scripture, where the ordinary individual Christian is supposed to be able to determine from a “plain reading” of Scripture what is necessary for salvation. (WCF 1:7).

My work sent me overseas to Qatar and Thailand for a time. I viewed the trip as an opportunity to clear my mind, read a number of books and articles that Calvinists and Catholics had recommended, and pray through the theological issues apart from the increasingly emotional conversations at church and seminary. While in Thailand, I journeyed to the historic capital city of Ayutthaya for a day-trip, walking among the ruins and exploring the architecture of Buddhist shrines, an unlikely and entirely unfitting location to reflect on Christian theology, I admit. However, by the time I was on the train back to Bangkok, I had concluded that Reformed theology is not an accurate or adequate explanation of Scripture or Christian history. I returned to the United States, and within two weeks had submitted my formal resignation to my PCA church, received the sacrament of reconciliation (my first in about 18 years), and entered into an RCIA program at a local Catholic parish.

Although there were many reasons that precipitated my return to Catholicism, I think the most foundational were my growing concerns with the Protestant understanding of the formation of the canon, and the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. Concerning the formation of the canon I doubt I can add much to Tom Brown’s analysis of the canon question (see his “The Canon Question“), but I will add that I encountered a very unsatisfying answer to my question of why Protestants do not accept the Deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament as Scripture, as Catholics and Orthodox do. The Westminster Confession of Faith’s proof-texts (i.e. Luke 24:27, 44; Romans 3:2; and 2 Peter 1:21) for the rejection of the Apocrypha in WCF I.3 are puzzling and easily refutable, given that none of the passages address the Apocrypha and its inspiration or inerrancy. More substantively, many Protestant and Reformed scholars argue that the Apocrypha contains historical errors and that its theology directly contradicts the rest of Scripture. The claim that the Apocrypha contains historical errors seemed oddly similar to what more liberal Protestant scholars have been saying about the Old and New Testament for several centuries, as I discussed earlier. And the claim that the theology of the deuterocanonical books is at odds with Protestant doctrines such as sola fide (e.g. Tobit 4:11, 12:9) only begged the question, and would have applied no less to James’ epistle in the New Testament. (e.g. James 2:24)

My study of the canon also led me to read and study the Apocrypha myself, something that most Protestants in my experience have never done. What I found was at times notably different in style and content from the Hebrew Bible. However, I also read passages such as Wisdom of Solomon 2:12-20, which would be difficult not to see as a prophecy fulfilled in the passion narratives of the gospels. Indeed, the following passage inspired in me a deeper love for Christ:

“Let us lie in wait for the righteous one, because he is annoying to us; he opposes our actions, Reproaches us for transgressions of the law and charges us with violations of our training. He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the LORD. To us he is the censure of our thoughts; merely to see him is a hardship for us, Because his life is not like that of others, and different are his ways. He judges us debased; he holds aloof from our paths as from things impure. He calls blest the destiny of the righteous and boasts that God is his Father. Let us see whether his words be true; let us find out what will happen to him in the end. For if the righteous one is the son of God, God will help him and deliver him from the hand of his foes. With violence and torture let us put him to the test that we may have proof of his gentleness and try his patience. Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him.” [RSV]

Concerning sola scriptura, I wish to tread lightly, doubting whether I am able to add to Bryan Cross’s, Neil Judisch’s, Matt Yonke’s, David Anders’, and Michael Liccione’s arguments critiquing sola scriptura as neither scriptural, historically defensible, or logically consistent.¹ However, I would like to add a few of my own reflections on the inadequacy of sola scriptura. First, Reformed and other Protestants will often argue that it is better to trust in the authority of Scripture alone as opposed to the Magisterium and Sacred Tradition. However, I found that as a Protestant I trusted the authority of historians, biblical scholars, and theologians to provide me with the most reliable texts, the most accurate translations, and the most historically and culturally faithful interpretations of those texts. And yet I had never met any of these individuals, had only indirect access to how they had gone about their research, and was largely ignorant of the biases they may or may not have brought with them in their work. I started to realize that as a Protestant I was just as much trusting in a “magisterium” of Protestant historians, scholars, and theologians as the Catholic who trusts in the Church.

This has become even more noticeable as evangelical scholars have begun to cast doubt on the inspiration of certain texts in the New Testament, such as Mark 16:9-20 and John 8:1-9, because those passages do not appear in the earliest New Testament manuscripts. This assessment of debated passages of Scripture places a problematic emphasis on palaeographist’s present best determination of the chronology of manuscripts as the primary determinant of authentic Scripture, an imperfect science to say the least. Such a method undermines sola scriptura by seemingly placing the equivalent of magisterial authority in the hands of archaeologists and New Testament scholars, and may influence what future generations of evangelical Protestants view as authentic, inspired, Scripture, especially if further archaeological developments unearth further manuscripts, or Protestant scholars decide to employ some other criteria to determine what is true Scripture.

On a more psychological level, I came to realize that no Christian can possibly approach Scripture without a host of predetermined data points that inform his or her interpretation. There can be no “Scripture alone,” because our interpretive lens will be inherently defined by the sermons we’ve heard, books we’ve read, or theological concepts we’ve been taught. The Reformed Christian, in essence, believes in Scripture plus whatever interpretations he inherits from Calvin plus Warfield plus Bavinck plus whomever has informed his interpretive paradigm. The same can be said for the Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, and even Catholic. However, only the Catholic’s interpretive paradigm allows him to reply to such a charge by saying “yes, exactly, that IS how I interpret Scripture; how could I do any other?”

In turn, although I had many strong reservations about the Catholic Church, I had read enough to see the Catholic interpretation of Scripture as plausible, at the very least. However, more fundamentally, I became persuaded that Jesus Christ was actually bodily present in the Eucharist, a belief informed by Scripture, the writings of Catholic apologists, and the testimony of Catholic friends experiencing spiritual transformation through the sacrament. It was an incredibly strange, but ultimately enlightening experience to observe some of the most intelligent and pious people I knew bowing before and worshiping what I had assumed were simply bread and wine. In the midst of my many remaining doubts, I sensed His call in the sacrament, a pull very similar to my initial conversion to know and love Christ when I encountered evangelicalism. I wanted to receive Him, to be united to Him and to His Church.

Initial Reflections on Castaldo’s Project

Given this short background, let’s consider the reasons given by Castaldo and many other Catholics for their rejection of the Catholic faith in favor of Protestantism. They are: (1) former Catholics want a “full-time faith” rather than Catholicism, which draws a sharp distinction between the responsibilities of the clergy and the laity; (2) former Catholics want a “personal relationship with Jesus,” as opposed to a set of rules; (3) former Catholics want “direct access to God,” rather than accessing Him through the papacy and the priesthood; (4) former Catholics want “Christ-centered devotion,” as opposed to what Castaldo argues are the “aspects of Sacred Tradition [that] can eclipse the Christ-centered message of Scripture; and (5) former Catholics want to be “motivated by grace instead of guilt.” Although Castaldo does not state explicitly that these were his own “top five” reasons for leaving the Catholic Church, he intersperses personal anecdotes related to all five reasons, and never raises any objections to these reasons, suggesting that these were very much at work in his own conversion, and may be considered his own.

As a preface, some of Castaldo’s reasons resonate with me given our similar experiences, but for the reasons I explain below, they are largely irrelevant to the more foundational issues dividing Catholicism and Protestantism. Most notably, much of Castaldo’s research demonstrates that peoples’ experiences in the Catholic Church are incredibly varied, and that what they often experienced as Catholicism was in some sense an inadequate or inaccurate reflection of authentic Church teaching. Multiple times, Castaldo refers to some bad experience in a Catholic parish that pulls someone away from Catholicism and toward evangelicalism, but then qualifies the story by noting that the experience or doctrine is not what the Catholic Church formally teaches. Such bad experiences or poor catechesis are unfortunate, but an assessment of a religion’s veracity should not be based on the subjective experience of individuals in a particular place, but on that religion’s official doctrines and authentic practice. Castaldo may not believe such experiences are sufficient grounds for abandoning Catholicism, but these anecdotes consistently obscure , rather than clarify, the true lines of division between Catholic and Protestant doctrine. If I were to reject Catholicism because a priest tells me Scripture is inconsequential in Catholic doctrine, I would not have rejected Catholicism, but a faulty depiction of it. Likewise, if I were to reject Reformed theology because the female pastor at a PCUSA church encourages me to pray to “mother, child, and womb” instead of the Trinity, all the OPC and PCA pastors who hear of it would likely start pulling out their hair. We are all called to seek the truth in honesty and charity, even when it is obscured by poorly-informed or even dissenting religious practice.

Secondly, Castaldo’s project is not so much a systematic analysis of the historical and theological debates between Catholicism and Protestantism than it is a cultural analysis, discussing the values and practices that shape American Catholics and lead many to become evangelicals. Though this presents an interesting vignette of the Catholic-Protestant debate, it suffers from an inherent weakness: examining what former Catholics want from a Christian community or religious experience, rather than what is true or what they truly need. Castaldo recognizes this weakness, acknowledging that evangelicals sometimes form their beliefs to their own tastes, rather than to Scripture. He even jests that some evangelicals act as if they believe in a Jesus “in running shoes sporting a Sergio Tacchini sweat-suit jogging beside us on the treadmill.” Castaldo’s answer to this problem seems to be a more theologically-robust, biblically-informed, and tradition-friendly evangelical Protestantism, built upon the core tenets of the Reformation (pp. 61, 94-96, 103). Yet Castaldo’s research exposes the degree to which Protestant religious experience suffers inherently from a problematic ecclesial consumerism (see “Ecclesial Consumerism“), according to which one is guided by what one perceives one’s spiritual desires to be, and what one perceives to be the best way to satisfy those spiritual desires, according to one’s own interpretation of Scripture. Fundamentally, this project starts with what the individual Christian consumer wants in his spiritual life, rather than “What did Christ establish?”

Cataldo seeks to combat this tendency by urging individuals to base their conversions to Protestantism on Scripture, rather than on spiritual preference. But implicit even in this model is the assumption that individuals have the interpretive authority to determine for themselves from Scripture how best to worship Christ and form Christian communities. Whether one is determining what is most spiritually beneficial or what Scripture teaches, if one is treating oneself as Scripture’s highest interpretive authority one is implicitly taking to oneself more authority than any semblance of Church hierarchy. In essence, even Castaldo’s attempts to avoid ecclesial consumerism in evangelical Protestantism fail, because not believing in a hierarchical Church founded by Christ makes everyone an authority unto him or herself. Yet if following Christ means following Him not according to our own whims or personal interpretations but via the authorities and shepherds He has established, it is spiritually dangerous to establish religious markers based on personal preferences or private interpretations, lest we become like Cain or Korah, two Old Testament personalities known for prioritizing their own preferences in their worship. Choosing to leave a religious faith or join another based on what we want is in that way a subtle form of idolatry, insofar as one creates ‘church’ in one’s own image, according to one’s own judgment of what one needs spiritually and how best to worship God.

Finally, Castaldo invests notable energy in emphasizing the importance of the visible Church to Catholicism’s theological self-understanding. On several occassions Castaldo summarizes the centrality of the risen Christ’s continuing role in the visible Church to Catholic theology, referring to the Catholic understanding of totus Christus, “total Christ,” according to which Christ is manifested through the Catholic Church and her members (pp. 30-31, 97-98, 132). Castaldo further acknowledges the Catholic critique of Protestant tendencies toward individualism, calling this individualism a “legitimate flaw within evangelicalism,” and urges Protestants to take the importance of the visible Church more seriously (133). However, Castaldo fails to provide a positive Protestant alternative to what is or isn’t the visible Church, something that Jesus (John 17:11) and Paul (1 Corinthians 1:10) seem to have believed was a reality.

At times Castaldo appeals to the divergent doctrines that many Protestants have argued separate the orthodox (historical Protestantism) from the heretical (Catholicism), doctrines such as justification, in order to bolster his five reasons. But then he approvingly cites examples of devout Catholics who followed Christ, such as Ignatius Loyola (pp. 77-79). Castaldo appears to waver between viewing the Catholic Church as a perpetuator of heresy or alternatively as just one of thousands of Christian denominations that compose the visible Church. If the Catholic Church is a legitimate part of the visible Church, Castaldo leaves unresolved how this is to be reconciled with five hundred years of Reformed Protestant theology that has argued otherwise. Moreover, if Castaldo approves of these five reasons, it seems reasonable that evangelicals are free to leave their evangelical denominations or churches if they cease holding the five reasons Castaldo outlines in his book. Indeed, it is possible Castaldo has not provided an exhaustive list, and that there are other things individuals are entitled to receive from their Christian religious communities that, if not provided, justify their exit from the Church for a different religious institution. The absence of a Protestant alternative to Catholicism’s recognition of the necessity of the unified visible Church, and what, if anything, obligates Christians to remain united to it calls into question the role this doctrine plays in Castaldo’s thinking.

Full-Time Faith

The first reason Castaldo gives in Holy Ground for Catholic conversions to Protestantism is that former Catholics want a “full-time faith,” something which Catholicism, with its sharp distinction between the responsibilities of the clergy and laity, supposedly cannot provide. Castaldo argues, “for many, the unfortunate result of such a sharp Catholic clergy-laity distinction is an undermining of Christian calling and purpose.” He qualifies this statement by saying that “this is not to say that Catholics can’t enjoy a lay vocation. Indeed some do. However, for many, encouragement to engage in ministry was nonexistent.” He adds, “from Scripture they came to believe that in Christ they are actually spiritual priests whose ministries are on equal footing with ordained clergy” (p. 39).

It is worth noting firstly that Castaldo’s objection is question-begging in that it assumes that every Christian is called to an ecclesial ministry, and that therefore the Catholic clergy-laity distinction prevents lay Christians from fulfilling their ministerial calling. Catholic teaching indeed does not share this assumption. That issue aside, Castaldo readily admits that Catholicism teaches a form of the “priesthood of all believers, which applies to the entire church.” He even notes two documents from Vatican II that addressed the need for more lay ministry participation: Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity and the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World. Although Castaldo is indeed taking issue with Catholic doctrine on the role of the clergy in the Church, he seems more concerned with the poor or varied application of Catholic doctrine at the parish level.

In my own experience, I have been encouraged by Catholic priests, laymen, and literature to view my family, my work, and the entirety of my life as an “apostolate” where I am called to love, serve, and proclaim the gospel. The Arlington Diocese (where I live) is full of opportunities for laymen to invest whatever skills or passions they possess in the work of the Church: to name but a few, Knights of Columbus, Legion of Mary, Regnum Christi, Opus Dei, RCIA, CCD; the opportunities for service are practically endless. The mission of Opus Dei, in particular, is to “spread the message that work and the circumstances of everyday life are occasions for growing closer to God, for serving others, and for improving society,” and is found in nineteen cities interspersed throughout the United States. Of course I am well aware that I am fortunate enough to live in a diocese well known for being one of the strongest, most devout dioceses in the United States, which may give me an unfair advantage over those in parts of the country with less of a presence of devout Catholics. However, as discussed above, to eschew Catholicism because of its varying practice geographically fails to engage Church teaching adequately and creates a standard for determining religious truth based on an assessment of the relative spiritual strength of a Christian community, rather than the trustworthiness of that religious community’s doctrine and authentic practice. It may be the case that some dioceses offer more opportunities than others for lay ministry – but this is an experiential, rather than a doctrinal concern.

On a different level, however, I can relate to Castaldo’s concern with the alleged Catholic clergy-laity distinction. When I was considering the claims of the Catholic Church, I was put off by the high esteem given to the priesthood and consecrated life – it sometimes did feel, as Castaldo argues, that those unconsecrated Catholics could never reach the degree of holiness or importance reserved for those embracing the religious life. Indeed, one will often hear people refer to the religious life as a “higher calling.” However, I came to see that my fears were illogical and overlooked scriptural distinctions between clergy and laity. For one, Christ himself appointed twelve men as apostles, whom Protestants themselves argue had a level of authority unequaled among the rest of the early Church – as their writings were believed to be inspired by God and inerrant. Was the special authority given to the apostles a threat to the role and significance of other early Christians? Or am I jealous that the apostles received such a high calling I cannot attain, something that remains true for all eternity (Revelation 21:14)?

Furthermore, the Church has never taught that the distinction between the clergy and laity means the work of the laity is unimportant or cannot be spiritually significant and rewarding. Indeed, there is a significant distinction between a calling to Holy Orders or religious life, and the calling to sanctity. We are all called to sanctity, and Holy Orders does not guarantee greater sanctity, nor does a lay vocation entail lower sanctity. The Church teaches that all have the opportunity to grow in sanctity and virtue, and Church teaching on the higher calling of religious vocation does not preclude those called to the lay vocation from receiving the grace needed for sanctification or heroic virtue (CCC 1803-1845). An examination of the many saints revered by the Church demonstrates this clearly. Take for example, Saint Germaine Cousin – a poor French girl in the late sixteenth century who prayed the rosary, attended Mass, and was abused by her father and mother-in-law until the point of death at the age of twenty-two. Her life consisted of no formal “ministry” as we might understand it, and she leaves us no writings. Yet her humility and acceptance of suffering stand as a testament to her faith; so much so that a friend of mine who came into the Church last Easter chose her as her confirmation saint. Or examine Saint Gianna Beretta Molla, an Italian wife, mother, and physician in the twentieth century who refused to undergo an abortion despite a fibroma in her uterus that threatened her life and the life of the child. She died in childbirth, a testament to her faith in the value of human life. These saints, and many others, demonstrate the clergy-laity distinction does not prevent the Church from honoring lay Catholics for their role in the “priesthood of all believers.”

Castaldo’s first objection to Catholicism thus fails on several grounds, including the question-begging nature of assuming that all Christians are called to ecclesial ministry, elevating the subjective experience over doctrine and authentic practice as a means of evaluating Catholicism’s truth claims, and failing to recognize the strong and ongoing tradition of the spiritually significant roles of the laity in the Catholic faith.

Relationship with Christ or A Set or Rules

Castaldo secondly claims that many former-Catholics want a “personal relationship with Jesus,” as opposed to a set of rules, which is what many former-Catholics experience during their time in the Church. From not eating meat on Fridays to confessing one’s sins, the Church has seemingly created an intricate, overbearing system of regulations that are often seen as straying far from the Bible. Instead, Castaldo claims that in their encounter with evangelicalism Catholics find an intimate and inviting relationship with Christ, where He is a close friend (John 15). As before, Castaldo is quick to note that many Catholics have also taught and exemplified the idea of a deep and personal relationship with Christ, including Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Blaise Pascal, Brother Lawrence, Thomas Merton, Therese of Lisieux, and many others (p. 81).

I can easily resonate with Castaldo and other former-Catholics on this subject, because I remember the great freedom I felt in believing that my status before Christ was determined not by my strict adherence to a long list of Church-concocted rules, but by His work on the cross and my trust in it. However, in returning to Catholicism I have found just as much teaching and exhortation to pursue a deep and personal relationship with Christ. When I meet with my spiritual director on a monthly basis, his response to my reflections, concerns, or anxieties is often simply to ask “have you brought it before the Lord?” Castaldo notes the presence of Catholic saints, priests, and writers who fostered an incredibly intimate love for Christ – there are many such people in dioceses throughout the country. Indeed, there is absolutely nothing in Catholic teaching that discourages us from such a pursuit, and everything in Catholic doctrine is ultimately aimed at achieving the deepest possible communion with Christ. For example, the prologue to the Catechism begins:

God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.

So what then of the many rules the Church mandates? Is this not a hindrance to our relationship with Christ, in that we will lose sight of knowing and loving Him in the midst of all these rules? As a former “Christ-Centered” Reformed Christian, I think it is easy to hold this assessment, and I have certainly felt this tension as a Catholic. However, it is worth noting that there are only five precepts of the Catholic Church in the United States: (1) attending Mass on Sundays and the six Holy Days of Obligation; (2) receiving the sacrament of reconciliation once a year; (3) receiving the Eucharist during the Lenten season; (4) observing the prescribed days of fasting and abstinence; and (5) providing for the needs of the Church (CCC 2042-2043). Are these rules “heavy burdens, hard to bear,” unnecessarily laid on the shoulders of the faithful, as Christ condemns in Matthew 23:4? Some of them, such as Sabbath observance and church attendance, are familiar to evangelicals and Reformed – indeed, I knew many Reformed folk who were far stricter in their observance of the Sabbath than what is mandated by the Catholic Church. Other precepts could hardly be considered burdens – to receive the sacrament of reconciliation once a year is unlikely to require more than one or two hours of one’s time, depending on one’s distance from a Catholic parish. Indeed, many Catholics are happy to go to confession monthly, if not more often, as a means of grace in their battle with sin. Likewise, to view the precept to receive the Eucharist during the Lenten season (especially if one is already attending weekly Mass) as a burden would be a strange assessment, especially if it is indeed the body and blood of Christ, the “source and summit of the Christian life” (CCC 1324).

Furthermore, on what basis are these Church-mandated rules to be rejected? If it is because there is no explicit scriptural mandate for Holy Days of Obligation or days of fasting and abstinence, this again begs the question, because it presumes sola scriptura, a problematic doctrine that Called To Communion has addressed elsewhere. As an aside, there is indeed scriptural precedent for the five Catholic precepts mandated in the United States – especially if the Church hierarchy is instituted by Christ and has authority to mandate areas of discipline such as mass attendance or fasting (cf. Acts 15:28-29).

Finally, the Church urges us to view every rule as a means by which to foster closer communion with Christ. The sacrament of confession, rightly understood, is a means by which Christ Himself offers forgiveness, operating through the priest. As the Catechism teaches, “reconciliation with God is thus the purpose and effect of this sacrament” (CCC 1468). Participating in fasts, be they from meat or otherwise, are a means by which we can unite ourselves more deeply to Christ in His sufferings, deepening our spiritual understanding and union with Him, as well as removing ourselves from undue affections for this world. Fasting helps us “acquire mastery over our instincts and freedom of heart,” freeing us to more fully love and appreciate Christ (CCC 2043). Holy Days of Obligation are also intended to deepen our relationship with Christ, as evidenced most recently in the Solemnity of the Mother of God, celebrated on the first day of January. Though Mariological, it is also deeply Christological, with its scriptural reflections on the sonship Christians acquire through Christ (Galatians 4:4-7) and the wondrous circumstances of the incarnation (Luke 2:16-21). Any and all of these precepts holy Mother Church, acting on behalf of Christ, has the authority to establish as a means of forming the spiritual life of her children, thereby sanctifying them through habits of religious practice.

Who Needs a Priest When I Can Pray to God Myself?

The third reason Castaldo gives is that former-Catholics want “direct access to God,” rather than accessing Him through the papacy and the priesthood. He explains that ex-Catholics have concerns with the “visible authority structure rooted in the popes and bishops,” and the pope’s “clerical function, his relationship to the priesthood” (pp. 72-73). He goes on to provide several scriptural proof-texts to argue that in order to “access God’s presence,” we need only the “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5). The argument, essentially, is that the Catholic hierarchy of priests, bishops, and popes is an unnecessary hindrance to direct access to God, and there is no scriptural warrant for the mediatory nature of the priesthood as Catholics understand it.

I confess that this issue was not a major stumbling block in my return to Catholicism, although I remember an elder at my PCA church telling me that he was concerned that in returning to the Catholic Church I had embraced a form of “sacerdotalism” that he viewed as unbiblical and unjustified. Contrary to what non-Catholics, or unfortunately ex-Catholics may believe, there is nothing in Church doctrine that suggests that Catholic laypeople cannot pray on their own, read Scripture on their own, or foster spiritual intimacy with God on their own. Of course ordinarily the sacraments can only be administered by priests or bishops, and the Church does indeed teach that these sacraments are the place where we most fully meet Christ, especially the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Castaldo’s objection was of less concern for me for a few reasons. First, I recognized that the entire Old Testament spoke to a priestly system where some individuals served a mediatory role between God and His covenant people. As one steeped in covenant theology during my time as a Reformed seminarian, it became increasingly strange to believe that with Christ’s role as the perfect great high priest, the priestly system was done away with entirely. Wouldn’t it make more sense, and foster more continuity between Old and New Testaments, for a priesthood to continue, now only greater than that of the old covenant? Indeed, whereas in the old priesthood, priests offered bloody sacrifices for the sins of Israel, and were unable to effectuate God’s redemptive power, priests in the new covenant offer a non-bloody sacrifice, Christ Himself, which is fully effective to forgive sin, unite us to God, and change us within. As I made that intellectual transition, much of the New Testament began to elucidate this idea of a continued priesthood (e.g. 2 Corinthians 5:18; Hebrews 10: 19-22).

Secondly, I was excited, rather than dismayed at the prospect that the priest’s mediatory role could extend to me graces I had hitherto lacked while Protestant. For example, the sacrament of reconciliation does not simply forgive sins. By grace it also strengthens the Christian against whatever sin he or she is struggling with – a very exciting proposition I have found to be true in practice! If Christ established the sacraments, then there is more grace available to us through communion with the Church than through an individualism that makes the Church quite unnecessary.

Finally, I recognized that as a Protestant I had another mediator between myself and God, though few Protestants would ever look at it as such. Whenever I sat down to read Scripture, I read a particular translation offered by a particular group of scholars with a certain theological bent (the NIV, evangelicals; the ESV, Reformed scholars). I had essentially accepted their mediatory role as translators, bringing the vernacular language of the Old and New Testaments to me as an English-speaking American. Not only that, but I had also accepted their mediatory role in determining what is and isn’t Scripture – for example, they had determined to exclude the deuterocanonical books accepted by the Catholic Church. In turn, I had trusted other scholars, theologians, and pastors to mediate to me the meaning of Scripture, especially those passages that were confusing or appeared contradictory. They may not have been priests, but I certainly needed them both to gain access to Christ in His Word, and to understand it properly.

”Christ-centered Devotion”

Castaldo’s fourth reason is that ex-Catholics want “Christ-centered devotion,” as opposed to what he argues are the “aspects of Sacred Tradition [that] can eclipse the Christ-centered message of Scripture,” which he claims is that Jesus is “the one intermediary between God and humanity,” referencing 2 Corinthians 4:6 and 1 Timothy 2:5 (p. 103). Castaldo is referring particularly to such devotions in Catholicism as praying to saints, devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that of the rosary.

I can very much appreciate this argument, as it was a central stumbling block to my return to Catholicism. Even after I started to be convinced that Catholicism had a better explanation for the relationship between Scripture and tradition, and a more biblically faithful theology, when I looked at the Church’s practices, it seemed like Christ often took a backseat to other devotions. To one who wholeheartedly accepted Michael Horton’s “Christ-centered Christianity” as gospel, Catholic devotional life seemed to muddy the waters, if not lead people away from Christ. I wondered, “if we as Protestants have enough trouble keeping our eyes and hearts focused on Christ, won’t devotions to saints and Mary complicate things further?” Even after I had come to accept that asking for Mary’s intercession in the rosary was not a violation of Scripture, I remember thinking “There’s six ‘Our Fathers’ and fifty-three ‘Hail Marys’? How can this be right?” However, a few concepts re-aligned my thinking on Catholic devotion such that I came to realize that Christ still remains the very center of Catholic devotional life.

First and foremost is the centrality of the Eucharist to Catholic devotional life, what the Church has termed the “source and summit” of the Christian life, a topic I intend to address in further detail in a subsequent article. From a Catholic perspective, the Eucharist is Christ himself, and receives far greater honor and attention than anything else in the liturgy or popular devotion. Indeed, unlike Mary or any other saint, the Eucharist is worshipped as God. From the very beginning of my exploration into Catholicism, I came to realize how very central the Eucharist is – it is quite simply impossible to speak too highly of the Eucharist. It is “our daily bread,” the means of salvation, the source of all grace, the remedy for every ill, anxious thought, or sinful habit… and most radically, it is Jesus Himself. There is a reason why every priest and parish is required to offer Mass daily, and why so many spiritual directors, Catholic literature, and Church documents urge Catholics to receive the Eucharist as frequently as possible, and to spend time in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. If the Eucharist is Christ, it’s hard to imagine getting more Christ-centered than that.

As for the rosary and devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary or other saints, it is important to keep in mind that the rosary as well is a Christ-centered devotion. In it, the Catholic asks Mary to pray for him or her to meditate on the mysteries of Christ’s life. Although the Catholic verbally says many “Hail Mary’s” the purpose is not to elevate Mary above Christ, but to allow the repetition of the prayers to enable the Catholic to enter into a meditative form of prayer, focused particularly on Christ. Once I understood this, and tried to pray the rosary with this in mind, I saw Scripture and Christ’s life in a way that richly deepened my knowledge and love of Christ. Certainly in Catholicism one may find misapplications or misinterpretations of Marian devotion, or devotions to other saints, that obscure the centrality of Christ. But to reject Catholicism for misapplications of its teaching is to reject a straw-man, just as if I were to reject Reformed theology because some Reformed theologian or pastor advocated something at odds with traditional Reformed theology or practice.

”Grace Instead of Guilt”

Castaldo’s fifth and final reason for the exodus of Catholics to evangelicalism is that ex-Catholics want to be “motivated by grace instead of guilt” (p. 105). In describing another ex-Catholics’ move to evangelicalism, Castaldo explains that “unlike his rules-oriented experience of the Catholic Church, Andy now enjoyed a personal relationship with Christ by faith.” Other ex-Catholics tell Castaldo, “instead of religion, I now have a relationship with God.” Castaldo asserts, “it’s not necessary for one to first get right with the Catholic Church by observing the sacramental stipulations before receiving salvation from Christ. Rather it comes by faith alone” (p. 111). Castaldo then goes on to explain how the Protestant doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone serves as a counteractive force to guilt, by enabling the Christian to rest in God’s salvific work through Christ’s death and resurrection (p. 116-120).

Of Castaldo’s five reasons, I find this one most compelling, as I reflect on the great comfort that came from my acceptance of the Protestant doctrine that I was saved by grace through faith alone. To accept the Catholic position, an internal spiritual transformation had to occur so as not to be overcome with guilt in the face of the depravity and continuance of my sin. It would be impossible to explain fully my spiritual transformation in rejecting the Protestant model that Castaldo and so many ex-Catholics have come to accept and love, but a more modest endeavor would be to highlight a couple key points. First, it is worth noting that the belief that we are saved by “faith alone” in Christ’s redemptive work may be a doctrine that brings great spiritual consolation, but as other CTC contributors have argued, it is a faulty methodology that compares competing versions of the gospel based on how good they seem to us.² Moreover, if the Protestant conception of justification by faith alone is a novel interpretation that departs from the ancient tradition (cf. “Tradition I and Sola Fide,” and the Catholic understanding is fully compatible with Scripture (cf. “Does the Bible Teach Sola Fide?“), then it seems we should follow the traditional understanding of justification preserved by the Church at the Council of Trent and more recently in the Catechism.

Furthermore, Catholicism does not teach that being “right with the Catholic Church by observing the sacramental stipulations” is the only way one may receive grace from Christ. It teaches that the sacraments are the “ordinary means” by which this takes place. As CCC 819 teaches, wherever Christians participate in the sacraments, or read, meditate, or preach Scripture, they may access the grace of Christ. Reformed theology likewise has a doctrine of “ordinary means,” claiming that Christ comes to Christians through the preached Word of God, but noting the possibility that Christ may use other means as He sees fit, given His sovereignty.

These issues aside, I think the claim that Catholicism presents a theological model more motivated by guilt than grace is a penetrating one that deserves attention. Although the Church does indeed teach that guilt may be a beneficial force in encouraging Christians to avoid sinful behavior, this is seen as the lowest form of obedience to God – as one who “stands before God as a slave, in servile fear” (CCC 1828). Rather, it is far better for the Christian to act as a free son out of a love for God and love for virtue, precisely because the Christian in fellowship with God is filled with thanksgiving and understanding of God’s gracious movements toward the Christian, and wants to worship Him in thought, word, and action (CCC 1822-1828). Former Catholics do Catholic teaching a disservice when they claim that disregard for Church mandated fasting or Holy Days of Obligation should engender guilt by adding to “Jesus’ suffering on the cross” (pp. 115-116). Any rule in Catholicism is oriented towards deepening our love of Christ, growth in holiness, and participation in the divine nature — the exact “personal relationship with Christ,” ex-Catholics yearn to acquire. Adherence to the law, rightly understood, should be a means of growing in the blessed life, rather than a deterrent to it. Furthermore, the Church encourages consistent return to the sacrament of reconciliation – not simply because it is a great blessing and benefit to receive consistently both absolution for sins and the grace to fight sin, but also because it enables Catholics to better form their consciences precisely so they are not racked by guilt or confusion when they fail to honor a fast or forget to attend Mass on a Holy Day of Obligation. The longer I am Catholic, and the more I go to confession, the more I understand my sin, its gravity, and what it does to my relationship with Christ. Again, we must carefully distinguish between the misapplication or poor catechesis often found in Catholicism, and authentic Catholic practice in accord with what the Catholic Church actually teaches.

Finally, Castaldo’s charge seems to place Catholicism and its alleged guilt-inducing rules at odds with the Protestant faith and its emphasis on God’s gracious acceptance of the sinner, not based on adherence to a set of a religious obligations but solely on the basis of divine favor. Yet Castaldo and other former Catholics could hardly be implying that God accepts even the defiant sinner who has no intention of repentance, and intends to continue actively disobeying God’s commands. Certainly even the Protestant would hold that the converted sinner must desire holiness and seek to reject sinful patterns of behavior. It seems then that Castaldo and other former Catholics equate “rules” with “guilt,” in that one “feels guilty” more often in Catholicism, because there are seemingly more rules to violate, or that there are more opportunities to “incur guilt” in Catholicism because of its rules. Determining which system of doctrine to follow based on which offers the fewest rules or incurs the least guilt again returns us to fashioning a religion according to one’s own desires, rather than receiving the religion Christ has revealed through the Church He founded.

”Final Reflections”

In assessing the conversion stories of those who have left Reformed theology for the Catholic Church I have witnessed a trend. Before I returned to Catholicism, I had my own assessments of these Catholic conversions – assuming they were due either to a desire for the “smells and bells” of a deep, historical liturgy, or the possibility that the convert didn’t really understand the Reformed faith. There were many theories I and others proposed to negate these Catholic conversion stories. Now that I am on the other side, I realize how such hypothesizing failed to further ecumenical dialogue, in the same way that accusing Castaldo or other former-Catholics of not understanding Catholicism, or conjecturing as to their hidden motives would be counter-productive. The reasons given by Castaldo’s study are reflective of general trends in the United States, and Castaldo appears both to have his finger on the pulse of this particular subset of evangelicals, and to possess a much more nuanced view of Catholicism than do many evangelicals. I might also add that upon reading his book, I am inclined to believe that Castaldo is a devoted Christian with a serious mind, that he is after the truth of Scripture and of Christ, and that he is desperate to know Christ more.

That said, the two most apparent problems throughout Castaldo’s analysis are (1) the disconnect between what many experience in Catholicism and what the Catholic Church formally teaches, and (2) evangelical ex-Catholics appear to place their own personal interpretations or consumerist demands over the models of religiosity established by Christ in His Church. Regarding the first, that Catholic catechesis in the United States and elsewhere has been so poor for so long is a very sad reality, and I empathize with my many former Catholic brothers and sisters who found great spiritual benefit in evangelicalism since leaving the Catholic Church. However, evangelicalism presents a new series of intellectual and theological dilemmas that are not easily addressed, including the nature of the visible Church, and what reasons may justify severing oneself from the Church. I think Castaldo would agree that choosing a church is not like choosing one’s favorite ice cream – something formed simply by preference. If there is indeed a visible Church, and that Church is the Catholic Church, and if what that Church offers is Christ and what that Church teaches is scriptural, we must beware of abandoning it for any reason, let alone the five offered by Castaldo.

Regarding the second problem, the assessment Castaldo and other Catholics have made in their decision to choose evangelicalism over the Catholic Church reveals an implicit form of ecclesial consumerism that fails to address the possibility that the Catholic Church is the institution founded by Christ, and that what former Catholics think they need may in certain respects be opposed to what Christ Himself wants for them. If Christ has established a clergy-laity distinction, then wanting a Christianity without such a distinction is wanting something contrary to what Christ has established. If Christ through His Church has given us precepts to obey, then wanting a spirituality without such precepts is wanting something contrary to what Christ has established. If Christ has established a priesthood in the New Covenant by which His grace is given to us through sacraments, then wanting a Christianity without sacraments or without any other human beings acting as channels of divine grace is wanting something contrary to what Christ has established. If Christ through His Church has provided devotions that incorporate the communion of the saints, then wanting a Christianity devoid of such devotions is contrary to the form of religion Christ has provided to us through His Church. And if Christ has established laws that induce guilt when they are disobeyed, then wanting a Christianity in which there is no guilt is wanting something other than what Christ has established.

Claire and Casey Chalk

In each case, therefore, we return to the question of whether or not the Catholic Church is the Church Christ founded, and whether Christ teaches and guides the faithful through His Church. I believe evangelicals truly want more of Christ, but our love and desire for Christ should lead us to follow Him and grow in Him in the way He has established. I hope even my Protestant brothers and sisters would agree that Christ knows better than we do what we need. If the Catholic Church is Christ’s Church, then we should follow Him by following His Church, and we may find, surprisingly, that what He provides us through His Church is ultimately what we truly need and want.

1. See “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority,” “The Tu Quoque,” “Mathison’s Reply to Cross and Judisch: A Largely Philosophical Critique,” “Some Preliminary Reflections on Mathison’s Dialectic,” “Hermeneutics and the Authority of Scripture,” “Sola Scriptura vs. the Magisterium: What Did Jesus Teach?,” and “Sola Scriptura: A Dialogue Between Michael Horton and Bryan Cross.”
2. See the blockquoted section in comment #39 of the “Is the Catholic Church Semi-Pelagian?” thread.

Summary: In this article I attempt to explain three different frameworks for interpreting the Church Fathers (patristic literature) and the consequences for adopting one over the others. I first describe each framework in a general manner and then show by way of illustration how these apply to the task of interpreting the Church Fathers. Secondly, I discuss some key texts from the earliest patristic literature (Ignatius of Antioch, Didache, Clement of Rome) that serve as tests cases for the three frameworks. Finally, I argue for one of these frameworks as the most productive and truest to Christian ideals. The themes presented here are treated in more detail in two works: Ignatius of Antioch: A New Translation and Theological Commentary and Clement of Rome and the Didache: A New Translation and Theological Commentary, both of which are published by CHResources.¹

Outline
Introduction
Part One: Three Frameworks for Interpreting the Church Fathers
Part Two: The Earliest Patristic Literature
Part Three: Deciding Between Frameworks

Introduction

Kenneth Howell

This article treats the central problem facing Christian scholars who wish to interpret the early church fathers. The problem concerns how one’s theological framework interacts with, influences, or is influenced by the historical data encountered. My concern is not with extensive documentation but to lay out an argument for consideration and evaluation. Although I will cite various historical facts and times, I will focus on the three earliest expressions of the Christian faith available to us. They are the seven authentic letters of Ignatius of Antioch, the Letter to the Corinthians by Clement of Rome, and the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, commonly known as the Didache.² I will look at the historical data as they relate to three frameworks of interpretation: the Classic Protestant Framework (CPF), the Modern Critical Framework (MCF), and the Classic Catholic Framework (CCF). I offer this as a working document rather than as a finished product.

It is important to gain clarity on what these three frameworks hold in common and what makes them different. Assuming good will on the part of the historian, we can say that the frameworks have in common the original texts to be investigated along with a desire to interpret them accurately within their historical milieu. Yet, two of these frameworks, the CPF and the CCF, have something in common that the MCF lacks, or at least, does not share to the same degree. The first two share the assumption that the documents named above have some relevance to the contemporary understanding and formulation of the Christian faith. In other words, in the CPF and in the CCF, the scholar attempts not only historical description but theological application.

Part One: Three Frameworks for Interpreting the Church Fathers

Classic Protestant Framework (CPF)

Confessional Protestantism attempts to establish its doctrines and practices on the basis of the Bible alone (Sola Scriptura). The notion of Sola Scriptura, however, admits of two interpretations. One, more recently dubbed solo scriptura,³ insists on using the Bible as the only source and criterion of doctrinal formulation. The other interpretation of Sola Scriptura seems closer to the original intention of the magisterial Reformers (Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, etc.). It recognizes the necessity and value of secondary authorities such as historical creeds which summarize and organize the biblical truths. The approach of Sola Scriptura has several advantages. One is that the creeds, whether ancient or modern, tend to be a source and impetus of unity in their respective ecclesial communions while the modern fundamentalist solo scriptura carries within it the seeds of radical disunity and individualism. A second is that those who espouse the classic notion of Sola Scriptura also tend to be more hermeneutically self-conscious than the proponents of solo scriptura who simply and facilely identify their interpretations of the biblical texts with “what the Bible teaches.” The CPF seems much more open to considering alternative interpretations of the Bible and therefore using secondary authorities in attempting to grasp the meaning of the Bible. In this article I will not deal with the solo scriptura position.

Protestants working in the CPF are disposed to consider the secondary authority of the church fathers, not as sources of Christian truth, but as conduits of biblical teaching. This is confirmed when one reads the writings of the magisterial Reformers who often cited the fathers. They made extensive use of the church fathers in their theological argumentation. The CPF looks to the fathers as secondary, confirming authorities to reinforce biblical teachings. To the extent that a particular father reflects, reinforces, and develops biblical doctrine, he is to be embraced. To the extent that he does not reflect biblical teaching, he is to be rejected. The CPF tends to view the ancient church as possessing an incomplete and partial understanding of biblical truth with some fathers (e.g. Augustine) being more faithful to the biblical witness than others (e.g. Leo the Great). Their selection of fathers and texts is not always systematic or consistent but it tends to be guided by a prior understanding of the Bible made possible by the confessional tradition in which they live. Let’s illustrate that with an example.

One commonly hears from classic Protestants that there were at least two different views of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist in the early church, one represented by Ambrose and the other by Augustine. In many Protestant accounts, Ambrose is viewed as holding to a physically realist view of the Eucharist in much the same way that the Roman Catholic Church would later embrace. Augustine, on the other hand, is viewed as holding to a more “symbolic” view in which there is not, or at least not as strictly, an identification of the bread and wine with the body and blood of Christ. This supposed difference is only a specific instance of a more general view among classic Protestants that the early church had some teachers who were closer to the biblical teachings while others were farther away. Who each was and how far some departed from biblical truth are matters of dispute. But in most Protestant accounts, there is little or no sense of the whole church adhering to a unified doctrine at any time of the early church.

Modern Critical Framework (MCF)

The emergence of a Modern Critical Framework (MCF) began in the 18th century when the historical-critical approach to the Bible began in earnest. Historians generally believe that the notion of critical history arose in the 17th century but it was not until the 18th that biblical studies began to adopt this approach in a widespread fashion. The historical-critical method began as a “back to the Bible” movement because its proponents believed that interpretation had become encrusted with a Protestant confessional framework. They thought they were continuing and extending the Reformation’s emphasis on Sola Scriptura by casting aside Protestant confessions in favor of finding the meaning of the Bible in the actual history in which it occurred. The same idea was applied to the church fathers. They wanted to transcend the Protestant-Catholic polemics over the fathers. What emerged over time was an awareness of just how difficult it is to jettison a theological framework when dealing with history.

A monumental watershed in the MCF came with Walter Bauer’s 1934 Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Bauer wanted to cut through some of the assumed interpretations of early church history in his day. One consequence of Bauer’s research was a greater emphasis on the diversity of belief and practice in the early centuries of Christianity. As an illustration of how the MCF works in practice, consider the positions of Boniface Ramsey and Bauer on Ignatius of Antioch. No one doubts that Ignatius of Antioch expressed a hierarchical view of the church with a threefold structure of bishops, presbyters, and deacons. The question is why he held this view and how widespread it was in early Christianity. The answer to the question of why Ignatius sees the structure of the church as he does and of what importance that episcopal structure holds for modern views of the church remains of vital practical importance. One of the most telling differences exists between those who see Ignatius’s witness to the episcopacy as an inherent feature of the early church and those who see his views as one among many that may or may not have been shared by others.

For example, the patristic scholar Boniface Ramsey once wrote, “Just because Ignatius of Antioch, to take one famous example, emphasizes the role of bishop in the early second-century churches of Antioch and Asia Minor does not mean that anyone else felt the same way about the bishop at that time, or even that bishops existed in other churches at such an early period.”⁴ Ramsey here expresses a view common among modern scholars of the early church, a view that has roots in the nineteenth-century liberalism epitomized in the theology of Adolf Harnack and furthered by Walter Bauer.

In this view, Ignatius does not stand as a witness to the faith of the early-second century church but as one holding to a somewhat idiosyncratic view of church structure. Bauer discusses Ignatius and Polycarp in chapter three of his 1934 book.⁵ Bauer assumes without argument that there was no need for a monarchical episcopacy prior to the problems of heresy facing Ignatius. He saw the rise of a hierarchical structure advocated by Ignatius as only necessary when a more collaborative form of church government failed to deal with problems. Bauer tends to see the issue only in terms of the exercise of power.

Bauer’s perspective is alive and well today among patristic scholars of both Protestant and Catholic creeds. In some circles, it is the assumed position that in early Christianity there were only local Christian communities with no single bishop or much, if any, connection to other communities in other places. Bauer still has many intellectual heirs among early church scholars. One of the most radical is Bart Ehrman whom I will mention later but another example is Roger Collins. Speaking of Christianity in Rome, Collins says:

There was … no individual, committee or council of leaders within the Christian movement that could pronounce on which beliefs and practices were acceptable and which were not. This was particularly true of Rome with its numerous small groups of believers. Different Christian teachers and organizers of house-churches offered a variety of interpretations of the faith and attracted particular followings, rather in the way that modern denominations provide choice for worshipers looking for practices that particularly appeal to them on emotional, intellectual, aesthetic or other grounds.⁶

Now it should be evident that the MCF grew out of and extended the CPF of viewing the church in a piecemeal way. The diversity of the ancient church in doctrine, government, and liturgy implied in many classic Protestant accounts is pushed to a greater extent in the MCF. Although classic Protestants may react to the extreme views of a Bauer or Collins, some of them will find solace in seeing early Christians as diverse and different from one another. This stands in stark contrast to the Classic Catholic Framework.

Classic Catholic Framework (CCF)

An honest historian working within the Classic Catholic Framework (CCF) will face all the diverse and varied expressions of Christian belief brought forth from the relevant texts. He will, however, ask different questions about those texts from those who work in the CPF or the MCF. Central to inquiry in the CCF is the notion of witness. Witnesses point to something greater and more enduring than themselves. In the CCF, the goal is to study the relevant witnesses in order to discover the deposit of faith which is the doctrinal content of the Christian faith. This approach assumes continuity across space and time. That continuity may not be total or exhaustive but it has essential qualities and characteristics which are transmitted over time.

With regard to space, the CCF seeks to understand how at any given period of time, the whole church believed in certain doctrines and practiced certain liturgies or pieties. With regard to time, the CCF seeks to trace continuities of doctrine and practice through the ages in order to see how the Christian faith has been faithfully transmitted. One ancient expression of this approach is found in the so-called Vincentian canon. Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century faced exactly the same problem that arose later in the Reformation and that we still deal with today. The problem is how to decide which interpretations of Scripture are acceptable within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy and which are not. Vincent proposed the following criteria in chapter 4 of his Commonitorium:

Now in the catholic church itself we take the greatest care to hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all. That is truly and properly ‘catholic,’ as is shown by the very force and meaning of the word, which comprehends everything almost universally. We shall hold to this rule if we follow universality, antiquity, and consent. We shall follow universality if we acknowledge that one faith to be true which the whole church throughout the world confesses; antiquity if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is clear that our ancestors and fathers proclaimed; consent, if in antiquity itself we keep following the definitions and opinions of all, or certainly nearly all, bishops and doctors alike.⁷

This passage from Vincent is worth sustained meditation. Here Vincent expresses what was widely held in the early church, namely, that the way in which the faith is defined consists of continuity in space (ubique), in time (semper), and in consensus (ab omnibus). It reflects the method used by the early general (ecumenical) councils. At the time of the Reformation, of course, this method was called into question again but the Protestants were not radical individualists. They believed in the objective tenets of the Christian faith as seen in their own councils attempting to define their creeds. They sought consensus among themselves though it was never achieved on a large scale. They sought to root their convictions in the church’s history; thus their appeals to the church fathers.

The Roman Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation was convinced that the Protestants had abandoned the faith “once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 3). A response was necessary. The answer given by the Council of Trent, was “the unanimous consent of the Fathers.” This was another way of expressing the Vincentian canon but applied to the situation facing the Church in the 16th century. The problem posed by the Protestant interpretation of early church history was as follows: how do you know what in the Fathers should be taken as binding and what should not? The Protestant answer was clear if not always easy to apply in practice: measure the Fathers against Scripture. Of course, the learned Roman Catholics believed this was an insufficient answer. How does one know if one’s interpretation of Scripture, which is being used as the criterion of judging the Fathers, is correct? The criterion of “the unanimous consent of the fathers” turned the Reformation’s answer on its head. It said that the way we know what interpretations of the Scriptures are legitimate is by the universality, antiquity, and consensus of the fathers. In this view, what was unanimous among the fathers, such as the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, was binding on the church. What was not unanimous, such as how the creation narratives of Genesis were to be interpreted, was not binding.

Now this Catholic view is rooted in a different conception of the church from that found in CPF. The CCF sees the church as an institution which has been faithful to Christ in every age and generation. This does not imply that there have been no departures from faith, or infidelity to vows, or lack of consistent teaching, but it sees the church as a whole as faithful to Christ. Christ intended to establish a church that would perdure in truth until his second advent. The classic Protestant assumes something similar but tends to locate faithfulness in individuals like Augustine. The Reformed, for example, see themselves as faithful to the Augustinian heritage but not necessarily to the whole ancient church. The Catholic tends to locate faithfulness in the offices (e.g. bishop) of the church as well as in individuals. This is especially true of the Bishop of Rome.

Part Two: The Earliest Patristic Literature (Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, The Didache)

With some understanding of the three frameworks for interpreting the church fathers, now let us examine some primary sources and observe how each would treat the earliest Christian writings. Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, and the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (the Didache) are among the earliest Christian writings outside the NT itself.

When we examine the whole of these sources there is at least one prominent theme which surfaces in all three, the topic of unity. Ignatius of Antioch emphasizes unity more than any other Christian author in the first or second century. What kind of unity does he propound? First, there is clearly a sense of mystical unity with several dimensions: unity in God himself, unity among believers in the church, doctrinal unity, unity in the celebration of the sacraments, unity of the laity with the hierarchy of the church.

In Ignatius’s mind, these different types of unity are intimately intertwined. In Ephesians 5:1, Ignatius writes, “As the Church belongs to Jesus Christ, and as Jesus Christ belongs to the Father, that all may be harmonious in unity.” The unity of the church with Christ is likened to the unity between Christ and the Father, a thought much like Jesus’s words in John 17:21 “that all may be one, Father, as you are in me and I in you that they may be also in us that the world may believe that you sent me.” The unity of the church with Christ is tied to and modeled on the unity in the Trinity.

Unity is so important for Ignatius that he views himself as “a man made for unity.” (Philad 8:1). Why is unity so important? Because “where there is division and anger, God does not dwell.” (ibid.). To this he adds, “I appeal to you to practice nothing from a spirit of factionalism but only what you learned from Christ.” (Philad 8:2).

Second, Ignatius sees mystical unity as expressed and fostered by sacramental unity. It is unity at the same altar which legitimatizes the celebration of the Eucharist. Ephesians 5 cited above expresses it thus:

Let no one deceive you. Unless someone is inside the sanctuary, he does not have the bread of God. If the prayer of one or two has such great power, how much more does the prayer of the bishop and the whole church” (Eph 5:2).

Ignatius here refers to the liturgy of the church where the bread of God can only be found on the altar on which the Eucharist is celebrated. Similarly, The Letter to the Philadelphians is instructive because of its many exhortations to unity. In Chapter 4 this unity is linked to the celebration of the Eucharist:

So be diligent to use one Eucharist for there is [only] one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ and one cup for unity in his blood. There is one altar as there is one bishop together with his presbyters, and deacons, my fellow servants. This is so that whatever you do, you may do in accord with God. (Philad 4:1).

And this text parallels his condemnation of the heretics who abstain from the Eucharist:

They abstain from the Eucharist and from [set times of] prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, that flesh which suffered for our sins but which the Father raised in his kindness. (Smyrn 7:1).

Notice that unity in this text has two shades of meaning. Absenting oneself from the Eucharistic liturgy is a sign of disunity but there is also the lack of doctrinal unity which refuses to “confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ.” These heretics, whoever they were, at least had the integrity to absent themselves from the church’s liturgy because they were not in doctrinal agreement with it. That in itself is an indicator that doctrinal unity and sacramental unity mutually implied one another in the minds of ancient Christians.⁸

Third, mystical and sacramental unity is rooted in hierarchical unity, i.e. unity with the bishop, his presbyters, and his deacons. Careful readers of Ignatius’s seven authentic letters cannot miss his emphasis on the hierarchical structure of the church. His copious use of the terms bishop (episkopos), presbyter (presbuteros), and deacon (diakonos) obviously has to do with the structure of the church. His many exhortations to obedience and submission to the bishop and presbytery (e.g. Eph 2:2; 5:3; Trall 2:1,2; 13:2; Polyc 6:1) reinforce his ideal of a church unified in belief and practice around the central figure of the bishop. The appearance of this strong language of a hierarchical episcopacy at such an early date in the history of Christianity has surprised readers for centuries. The lack of unity and harmony in the church is a grievous sin and requires repentance on the part of those who break it. But “the Lord forgives all who repent if their repentance leads back to unity with God and the council of the bishop.” (Philad 8:1).

The judgment of P.Th. Camelot, a French translator of Ignatius, seems justified when he called the Bishop of Antioch the “doctor of unity.”⁹ I would suggest that the key to understanding Ignatius’ view of the church lies in his broader concept of unity: the unity of God, the unity of Christ, unity with God, with Christ, with the bishop, presbyters, and deacons. This unity is first and foremost a mystical one. It is not a unity within one locale or bishopric; it is an organic unity which flows from God himself and which is communicated through the sacrament of the Eucharist. The structure of the church flows out of that unity.

The question then facing the reader of these letters has to do with how this monepiscopal structure of the church in Ignatius relates to our conception of the church today. It is precisely here that the interpreter’s presuppositions can influence how he assembles and interprets the evidence. Many scholars have seen this emphasis on the monepiscopacy in Ignatius as a departure from the collaborative structure of the church which they see in the NT. As Bart Ehrman put it, “in the early modern period [i.e. Reformation] it was precisely this witness to the monepiscopacy at such an early date that drove scholars to determine whether Ignatius of Antioch had in fact penned all, or some, or any of the letters that appear under his name.”¹⁰ Those who questioned Ignatian authorship were motivated by their prior conception of the church as a more democratic organization in its earliest stages of development. Naturally, those who believed that the NT authorized the episcopacy had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the claims of Ignatian authorship found in the letters.

Now let us consider Clement of Rome. After centuries of study, most scholars agree that we have one document which can be reasonably ascribed to Clement of Rome. The Letter to the Corinthians was probably written in the 90s of the first century by a man whom the whole ancient church regarded as the third bishop of Rome after Peter (after Linus and Anacletus).¹¹ Careful study of this letter of approximately 10,000 words reveals that its main purpose was to correct the church in Corinth in its attempt to oust the ordained leaders of the church. Unlike the schism and heresy which Paul faced when he wrote the Corinthians in the 50s of the first century, the same church was riddled with sedition in the 90s. The overriding concern that the author has is to call the Corinthian church back to unity through submission to its divinely appointed leaders.

Clement’s method in addressing the problem of sedition (rebellion) and schism in the Corinthian church is at least twofold. First, he recounts the history of rebellion and its concomitant sins in the history of humanity as revealed in the OT as a negative example of what to avoid. Second, he reminds his addressees that the structure of the church is divinely given, not a human creation. Consequently, rebellion against God’s chosen servants (bishops and deacons) is a rebellion against God.

For Clement, the church is more than a collection of believers or loosely organized congregations; it possesses a definite structure and order. But what is that structure? Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians is one of the earliest and most important witnesses we possess to the notion of apostolic succession. Clement’s fullest and clearest statement occurs in chapter 44, but he adduces examples and illustrations of good order in earlier chapters to lend support to order in the church. This plan always consists of the elimination of jealousy and envy because the peace and harmony of the church are paramount. But what order is necessary in order to keep unity and harmony in the church? To understand chapter 44, we must begin with chapter 42 of Clement’s letter:

The apostles received the Gospel for us from our Lord Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ was sent from God. So Christ was from God, and the apostles from Christ. So both came by the will of God in good order. Once they received commands, once they were made confident through the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and once they were entrusted with God’s word, they went out proclaiming with the confidence of the Holy Spirit that the kingdom of God would come. Preaching in lands and cities, by spiritual discernment, they began establishing their first fruits, who were bishops and deacons for future believers. And this was nothing new because for many ages it had been written about bishops and deacons, as Scripture says somewhere, “I will appoint bishops for them in justice and deacons in faith” (ClCor ch. 42).

According to Clement, the honor that the lay faithful owe to their pastors lies in the dignity of the offices that derive from Christ himself. In language reminiscent of Hebrews 2:4 (“salvation which at first was spoken by the Lord was confirmed to us by those heard”), Clement ties together the preaching done by the apostles with the appointment of bishops (including presbyters) and deacons. He strengthens the connection between proclamation and church structure in chapter 44:

Our apostles knew from our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be contention over the title of the bishop’s office. For this reason, having received perfect foreknowledge, they appointed those mentioned before and afterwards gave the provision that, if they should fall asleep, other approved men would succeed their ministry. Now as for those appointed by them [the apostles], or by other men of high reputation with the approval of the whole church, that is, those who have ministered without blame to the flock of Christ with humility, quiet, and, beyond perfunctory service, those who are well attested by all for a long time, we do not consider it right to eject them from the ministry. It will be no small sin against us if we eject from the bishop’s office those who have offered the gifts without blame and with holiness. Blessed are the presbyters who have gone before us who had a fruitful and perfect departure for they no longer run the risk of someone removing them from their established position. For we see that you have removed some who have ruled well from a ministry that is honored by their blameless lives (ch. 44).

Here Clement details the structure that gives stability to the church. It was the deliberate intention of the apostles to establish continuity in the church through a succession of offices. He links this foreknowledge to Christ by calling it “perfect.” Apostolic succession consists of the endurance of an office and a procedure for filling that office. When he speaks of those “other approved men” who “would succeed their ministry,” he is clearly stressing the continuity between the apostles themselves and their successors. The task of those who follow is clear; it is to continue and to advance the same ministry that they received. The procedure for filling the office consists of (1) a testing or probation of a man and (2) the approval of the whole church.

I will not be able to deal with the question of whether apostolic succession is taught in the NT. I refer the reader to my book where I argue that the notion of apostolic succession is not absent from the NT.¹² Yet, it should be evident that this early church father believed that structure serves unity, that the way to peace and harmony in the church was to submit to its properly ordained leaders. This maxim, that structure serves unity, is also apparent in Clement’s quotations from what appears to be liturgical prayers in chapter 59-61 of his letter. If we ask why Clement should give extensive quotations from a liturgy in the midst of dealing with a problem of sedition and schism, the answer is twofold. He is using a principle of theology that would later be called Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi (the rule of prayer is the rule of believing). The saying summarizes the belief evident in many church fathers that how the church prays in its public worship is also how it believes in its doctrine. When Clement invoked liturgical prayers, he was doing more than adding flowery garnish to his hard exhortations. He was reminding the Corinthians of what they professed about God. This is evident in how he brackets the liturgical texts:

If some are disobedient to the things said by him through us, let them know that they will involve themselves in not a little transgression and danger. As for us, we will be innocent of this sin and will with intense request and entreaty ask for the Creator of all to preserve the number of his elect throughout the world unharmed through his beloved child Jesus Christ our Lord. It was through him that he called us from darkness to light, from ignorance to the knowledge of his glorious name. (ch. 59:1-2)

This preface makes Clement’s mind clearly known. The liturgy which he is about to quote is linked with a call to obedience and prayer for the preservation of the elect. Then on the other end of the liturgical quotation Clement sums up his letter thus:

We have instructed you well enough, brothers, about those things fitting for our religion and most useful for a virtuous life for those who wish to pursue a holy and just life. We have handled every topic having to do with faith, conversion, authentic love, self-control, discretion, and perseverance, recalling that you should be completely pleasing to the Almighty God in righteousness, truth, and longsuffering. You should be united in love and peace, forgetting evil [done against you] with earnest forbearance just as our forefathers, shown earlier, humbly did the things pleasing to the Father, the Creator God, and to all men. (ch. 62:1-2)

The long liturgical prayer functions to remind the Corinthians of the urgency to restore peace and harmony in the church. But there is another implication. The fact that Clement quotes from a liturgy suggests that the church in Corinth shared the liturgy of the Roman church and therefore that his appeal would be meaningful to his audience. Or, at least, it suggests that Clement knew there were some liturgical patterns to appeal to which could motivate the Corinthians toward unity. It means that at this early date, the church in both Rome and in Corinth were highly liturgical in their worship. We will return to the implications of Clement’s teaching in section three.

The third major source of early Christianity is the Didache, a document consisting of about 2300 words and usually dated in the late first or early second century. Since its discovery in 1873 and subsequent publication, the Didache has been an object of intense investigation. As with the NT itself, this document has been subject to a wide range of interpretations. Still, the text is there for all to read. That text has the character of a church manual rather than a well-crafted letter or treatise. Many scholars believe that it originates from Syria and that our Greek text may be a translation of an earlier Syriac document.

For our purposes, the Didache contains several chapters that bear on our understanding of the liturgy of ancient Christianity. Chapters 7-10 and 14 show the signs of being pastoral directives given to leaders of a community who are responsible for the worship of the church. That these chapters do reflect a standardized liturgy at this early stage of Christian history is indicated by the directives about baptism in the name of the Trinity (chapter 7), and guidelines for corporate fasting and the recitation of the Lord’s prayer (chapter 8). Most striking, however, are the directives on the celebration of the Eucharist in chapter 9, 10 and 14. Here the noun eucharistia takes on a technical meaning of designating a sacrament or liturgical celebration rather than the simple meaning of “thanksgiving” found in the NT. The Didachist’s use is consistent with the usage of Ignatius of Antioch (see above Philadelphians 4:1; Smyrneans 7:1).

In addition, chapters 9 and 10 contain standardized prayers which bear the marks of Eucharistic prayers found in later liturgies. For example, ancient liturgies always contained petitions for the perfect unification of the church, a fact reflected in this early document:

As the broken bread was scattered on the mountains and then gathered into one, thus let your church be gathered from the ends of the earth into your kingdom because yours is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ forever. (Didache 9:4)

Remember, Lord, your church, to rescue it from every evil and to make it perfect in your love, and from the four winds gather it completely sanctified into your kingdom which you have prepared. (Didache 10:5)

Given the profound concern for unity expressed by Ignatius, we are not surprised to find a similar concern in the Didache. But there are other standard liturgical markers as well. “Hosanna to the God of David” that occurs in Didache 10:6 is a literary form that was pervasive in ancient liturgies. Already transliterated by the Jews into Greek from the Hebrew of Psalm 118:25, as seen in Mt 21:9, hosanna was a plea for salvation. Of course, it was entirely appropriate for the entry of the Messiah into Jerusalem (see Mt 21:1-11). By the adoption of this plea into the liturgy, the early church was expressing its awareness that the church still needed the coming of the Savior to rescue it from danger and destruction. And the guidelines regarding worthy reception of the sacrament known from other ancient sources occurs here as well:

Let no one eat or drink from your Eucharist except those who are baptized in the name of the Lord. For the Lord said about this, “do not give holy things to dogs.” (Didache 9:5)

If anyone is holy, let him come. If anyone is not, let him repent. (Didache 10:6)

On the Lord’s day, once you have gathered, break the bread [of the Lord], and hold Eucharist, confess your transgressions that your sacrifice may be pure. Let not anyone who has a quarrel with his friend join you until they reconcile that your sacrifice not be defiled. (Didache 14:1,2)

These prerequisites and warnings not only reflect Paul’s admonition about unworthy reception of the sacrament (see 1 Cor 11: 27), they are linked in ancient texts to the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist. The verses from Didache 14:1,2 quoted above is followed by a quotation from Malachi 1:11,14:

This is what was spoken by the Lord, “In every place and time offer to me a pure sacrifice because I am a great king, says the Lord, and my name is marvelous among the Gentiles.”

This text is quoted later by Justin Martyr in chapter 41 (sec 3) of his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew to emphasize that Christians have the real sacrifice spoken of by the prophet. This doctrine became a universal conviction of the ancient church that the Eucharist was a true sacrifice offered to God.¹³

It is of course possible to delve into each of these points in more depth but this survey of the Didache suffices to show that we have valuable information on the beliefs and practices of ancient Christians not found explicitly within the NT. And these pieces of information are seen and developed in later centuries in a rather consistent manner. Most noteworthy of all is the fact that ancient Christians apparently had a standardized liturgy very early. Perhaps these liturgies were given directly by various apostles or their companions to different churches. In any case, these liturgical indicators belie the contention that early Christian worship was free flowing, unstructured, and unpremeditated. All the available indications are that the churches had structured patterns of worship handed on to them from the very beginning of the church.

The end or goal (telos) of teaching, liturgy, sacraments, and governmental structure was unity. The unity conceived and taught was not a monolithic uniformity but a harmonious interplay of the parts in which each member found his proper place. The church, then as now, was always assaulted with disunity, disaffection, and dissolution. Schism and sedition were constantly knocking at the door. The only answer which could match the threat was God’s freely given grace in word and sacrament combined with a God-ordained structure of worship and government. This was the problem and these were the solutions offered by Ignatius, Clement, and the author of the Didache.

Part Three: Deciding Between Frameworks

Now we can step back and ask if these data from the three earliest Christian sources indicate which, if any, of the three frameworks of interpretation is to be preferred. I will argue that only the Classic Catholic Framework does full justice to these and other church fathers. The answers can be partitioned into two broad categories: content and methodology.

The content of these three sources and ones from later centuries favors a Catholic understanding of the deposit of faith (fides quae creditur). There can be no doubt that unity, both as a fact and as principle, was of prime importance. For Ignatius and for Clement, unity was not a vague wish or sentimental hope but a mystical reality and a moral mandate. No doubt the prayer of “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” escaped from the lips of Christians out of a conviction that unity was truly God’s will and not simply human aspiration. Yet, what kind of unity did they pray for? For them, the answer lies in heaven. The unity of God himself is the ground and animating force of unity in the church. It seems that for these early Christians unity was more than a feeling of fellowship and camaraderie; it was a living presence in the midst of the church, Christ’s body. As a corollary of mystical unity, structural unity was thought to be the means toward a greater realization of the unity given by Christ’s presence in the church.

Catholics and classical Protestants see the church as an ordered society wherein believers live out their faith. Protestants differ among themselves as to the nature and extent of this structure but it is hardly possible to deny that some structure exists in the NT to be perpetuated until the parousia of Christ. For some Protestants the structure of the church is a matter of convention while for others that structure results from a divine mandate. Clearly, in Catholic teaching the structure of the church (episcopacy, presbyterate, diaconate) is of divine origin and must be preserved. Among Protestants who hold to church structure as a matter of divine obedience, the purpose of structure may serve the end of unity but not necessarily.

In Catholic teaching, structure serves, reinforces, and preserves unity because the unity of the church in all its dimensions (mystical, sacramental, governmental) is essential to the church. When the Apostles’s Creed affirms belief in “the holy catholic church” and the Nicene Creed in “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” they are reinforcing in the minds of believers that Christ founded one church whose presence on earth is a sign of the eschatological unity of redeemed humanity with God. The unity of the church is not a dispensable attribute, nor only a goal to reach if humanly possible. Unity is a gift of Christ to the church. That is why schism and sedition are such a heinous sin. They are injuries to the essence of the church. What unity entailed would only become clearer in time but Ignatius and Clement are clear witnesses to what was sparsely indicated in the NT (e.g. John 17; 1 Cor 1:10-18; Eph 4:1-6).

If my reading of Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians is legitimate, it bears directly on our question of which framework best interprets this early church father. The Modern Critical Framework would see Clement as one among many voices in the Roman church and one especially that felt justified in its overreach to impose its authority on a different church in the East. The Modern Critical Framework may even view Clement’s letter as an attempt to grab power. It would see little or no relevance to Christianity today. The Classical Protestant Framework might appreciate Clement’s extensive quotations from the OT (in the Septuagint version) as evidence of how the church father depended on the Scriptures in a manner similar to the methodology of Sola Scriptura. Yet, with the exception of High Church Anglicans and some Lutherans, the Classical Protestant Framework would most likely view Clement’s insistence on apostolic succession as a misguided and unscriptural addition to the core of Christian belief. It might even fault Clement on two counts. One is Clement’s belief that unity demands submission to a hierarchical authority and that a hierarchical structure is necessary to quell sedition. Clement’s second fault would be his adding to scriptural authority the notion of apostolic succession, a needless and unfruitful tradition which detracts from the sufficiency of Scripture. Those working in a Classical Catholic Framework view Clement and his letter as a witness to the early church’s faith in apostolic succession and the primacy of the Roman church. For them, structure serves unity and so they view Clement’s appeal to ecclesiastical structure as a natural outgrowth of the belief in and desire for greater visible unity.

A second implication of our survey of Ignatius, Clement, and the Didache has to do with their connection to one another. If we view Clement’s and Ignatius’s forms of Christianity as separate and unconnected, as the Modern Critical and even the Classic Protestant Frameworks tend to do, then we will not see any relation between the latter’s exhortations to obedience to episcopal authority and the former’s doctrine of apostolic succession. In these frameworks, moral obedience has little or nothing to do with church structure. However, if we view Clement and Ignatius as geographically diverse witnesses to a common faith, as later writers like Irenaeus tend to do, then Ignatius’s call to obedience is tied to something identifiable and concrete, namely, those bishops who were ordained by the apostles or their successors. The former view with its emphasis on diversity exerts a centrifugal force on the modern mind and tends toward ecclesial diversity and dissolution. The latter view with its emphasis on an underlying unity across space, time, and authors exerts a centripetal force on the modern mind and tends toward ecclesial unity.

If we view the liturgical expressions and doctrines in Ignatius, Clement, and the Didache as originating in and limited to the local communities where they are found, as the Modern Critical and even the Classic Protestant Frameworks tend to do, then they can be dismissed as irrelevant to the worship of the modern church, or at best treated as adiaphora which can be utilized or not utilized according to some modern (local) norm. However, if we view these liturgical expressions and doctrines as witnesses to an underlying structure of a common liturgy with local variations on shared themes, then their commonalities can and often do function as liturgical norms for the modern church. The former view exerts a centrifugal force on the modern mind and tends toward ecclesial diversity and dissolution. The latter view exerts a centripetal force on the modern mind and tends toward ecclesial unity.

The second broad category which argues for the superiority of the Classic Catholic Framework has to do with methodology. How does one come to know the proper content of the Christian faith? The simplest answer is provided by the solo scriptura approach but I have not addressed that here because I have assumed its inadequacy. If one looks to the church fathers at all, as the Classic Protestant Framework does, this question is inevitable. How do we know whether the CCF is a better way of interpreting the church fathers than the CPF or the MCF? The answer is illuminating. The CCF reflects better the views and the assumptions of the church fathers themselves. The CCF naturally claims that the doctrine of the Catholic Church is the same as the church fathers but it also maintains that the methodology used by the Church today is the same as or at least in continuity with that of the church fathers. The church fathers sought unity through universality (ubique), historical continuity (semper), and church consensus (ab omnibus). The CPF does not maintain any necessity of being in continuity with the historic church in its universal dimension. It tends to identify with certain strains of patristic thought, not necessarily with the whole. And certainly the MCF does not.

One example is the Arian controversy of the early fourth century. When Arius, a presbyter in Alexandria, began proclaiming, “There was a time when the Word (logos) was not,” the response was not simply that his teaching was against Scripture. It was that Arius was teaching something contrary to the faith of the whole church. That’s what makes sense of the call to and execution of the first ecumenical council of Nicea in 325. The same was true of Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople. When he taught that Mary was not the theotokos, the church responded by proclaiming that this was not the faith of the church. And when the respective councils (Nicea, Ephesus, Chalcedon) were formulating their responses, they appealed to Scripture, to earlier church tradition, and to consensus among the bishops in conscious continuity with the earlier church.

The historian of early Christianity who wishes to argue for the relevance of the earliest writings to our contemporary conception of Christianity is on the horns of a dilemma. He is forced either to accept these doctrines and practices as a natural development of the NT faith or to dismiss them as a devolution and/or aberration from the purity of the NT faith. Accepting these authors and writings as legitimate expressions of Christian belief entails acknowledging the hierarchical nature of church structure, the centrality of the Eucharist in Christian worship, and a number of other catholic notions. Rejecting these early manifestations of catholicity entails the belief that the church was involved in unfortunate (tragic?) departure from the NT faith immediately after the apostolic era. Locating these departures from the purity of the apostolic faith in a later century, be it the fifth or the fifteenth, is not historically or logically possible. The developments that emerged in the subsequent centuries stand in direct continuity with these earliest expressions of the Christian faith. Some may attempt to remain neutral, giving only historical descriptions and generalizations but in that case these students of early Christianity have nothing of relevance to say to the contemporary church.

1. Parts of this article are taken from the books mentioned here.
2. For the sake of brevity and readability I shall not quote many of the relevant texts in detail but the reader is encouraged to examine them in online versions or printed translations.
3. Solo Scriptura is a mixing of English and Latin and does not make any grammatical sense in Latin but does serve to emphasize the point that the advocates of Sola Scriptura wish to make, namely, that their position is not one described in this paper as solo scriptura.
4. Boniface Ramsey Beginning to Read the Fathers (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) p. 10. Ramsey does proceed to outline some common themes among the Fathers but these are more problems they all addressed than beliefs they shared in common.
5. A second edition of Bauer’s book was issued in German in 1964 and was only recently translated into English.
6. Roger Collins, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy (London and New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson/Basic Books, 2009) pp. 15-16.
7. I have taken the translation available at Fordham University’s Internet Ancient History Sourcebook.
8. It is striking that many modern Christians believe that it is perfectly permissible to commune in a church with whose doctrine they do not agree. I have never traced out the history of this notion but I suspect that it is almost entirely unique to the 20th century and explained by the doctrinal indifferentism of contemporary Christianity.
9. Camelot, P. T. Ignace d’Antioche. Polycarpe de Smyrne. Lettres. Martyre de Polycarpe, 4th edn. Sources chrétiennes 10. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969. P. 19.
10. Bart Ehrman The Apostolic Fathers.
11. For discussion of the ancient documents witnessing to Clement as the author, see chapter 1 and 3 of my forthcoming Clement of Rome and the Didache A New Translation and Theological Commentary (CHResources, 2012).
12. See note 11.
13. For a list of patristic selections referring to the Eucharist as sacrifice, see the section titled “Proof of Sacrificial Priesthood” in Tim Troutman’s article titled “Holy Orders and the Sacrificial Priesthood.”

Jason Stellman

Part of me has wished for a while now that I was born early enough to have been a fan of The Clash back in the Seventies. The first song I ever heard by them (several years after its release) was their cover of Sonny Curtis’s hit, the chorus of which goes, “I fought the law, and the law won.” Despite being a fairly law-abiding guy, I can relate to being on the losing side of a battle, only mine was not against the law, but against the Church.

As many of you know, I recently resigned from my pastoral ministry in the Presbyterian Church in America (you can read my resignation letter here, as well as some clarifying posts here and here). My stated reasons for stepping down were that I could no longer in good conscience uphold my ordination vow that as a PCA minister I sincerely accept the Westminster Confession and Catechisms as containing the system of doctrine taught in Holy Scripture. More specifically, I no longer see the Reformed doctrines of Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide as faithfully reflecting what the Bible teaches, which is why I will, Lord willing, be received into full communion with the Catholic Church sometime in the next several months.

The purpose of this piece is not to unpack those claims in detail (there will be plenty of time for that in the future), but rather to provide a little more insight into the process that led up to my resignation, as well as to respond briefly to those who have sought to analyze me and the supposed internal psychological factors that must have led to my making such a drastic decision.

The Lure of Rome?

One of the things I found especially curious (slash bemusing, slash maddening) while reading the diagnoses of my volunteer analysts was the fact that my being drawn to, or lured by, Rome was simply assumed, and that the only real question was what, exactly, was it that ultimately did it. Was it some positive aspect of Catholicism that appealed to me, or was it a nagging drawback of Protestantism that finally proved to be the deal-breaker?

Now, I realize that I went into a period of radio silence during the weeks following my resignation (one that was not exactly self-imposed, but that has turned out to be a blessing), and that this created something of a vacuum that invited speculation on the part of some. But now that I am no longer “off the grid,” I would like to clear something up once and for all:

Catholicism never held any allure for me, nor do I find it particularly alluring now.

Now to be honest there has always been an attraction of a “Wouldn’t-it-be-nice” or “stained-glass-windows-are-rad” variety, but when it came to an actual positive drawing to Rome or a negative driving away from Geneva, there has never been any such thing. In fact, since much of my theological output has been part of the public domain for so long (especially in the form of my preaching, teaching, and writing), this claim of mine can actually be proven. If anyone cares to go back and listen to or read what I was talking about right up until the day I was confronted with the claims of the Catholic Church as they relate to those of Protestantism, the inquirer will easily discover that I was about as staunchly confessional an Old School Presbyterian as anyone would want to meet. There was not even the slightest hint of discontent with my ecclesiastical identity, not a trace of longing for greater certitude, nor a smidgen of regret that my soteriology didn’t have enough works in it.

I will raise the pot even more: I wrote a book whose entire purpose was to demonstrate, in the highest and most attractive terms possible, how ironically boastworthy all the supposed disadvantages of amillennial Protestantism are. Messiness? Lack of infallible certitude? The need for faith over sight? Check, check, and check.

Further still, so far from longing for a type of kinder, gentler Catholicism that I could disguise in Reformed garb, I was the prosecutor in a doctrinal trial against a fellow minister in my presbytery for espousing views that I, and many others, considered dangerously close to being Catholic. No, there was never any desire to place human works anywhere but where the Reformed confessions say they belong: in the category of sanctification and never justification.

In a word, I was as happy and comfortable in my confessional Presbyterian skin as anyone, and the trust I had earned from many well-known and respected Reformed theologians, as well as having graduated with honors from one of the most confessionally staunch and academically rigorous Reformed seminaries in the nation, should be sufficient to dispel any notions that I never really understood Reformed theology in the first place or that I was always a Catholic in Protestant clothing.

Driven, Not Drawn

One of the things that made fighting against the claims of the Catholic Church so frustrating was that there was no single, knock-down-drag-out argument to refute; neither was there an isolated passage of Scripture or silver-bullet issue of theology to deal with. If it had been simply a matter of answering one specific challenge that came from a single direction, the battle would have been much easier to win. But as it happened, there were two distinct issues that were coming under attack (Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide), and the attacks were coming from multiple directions: the biblical, the historical, and, in the case of Sola Scriptura, the philosophical as well.

In the case of Sola Scriptura, I, as a self-described Reformed non-evangelical, considered the distinction between Solo- and Sola Scriptura as absolutely essential to my own spiritual identity. It was the evangelicals who were the heirs of Anabaptism, not the Reformed; it was the evangelicals who espoused “no creed but Christ,” not the Reformed; it was the evangelicals who interpreted the Bible in isolation from history and tradition, not the Reformed. Therefore as one can imagine, when I was confronted with Catholic claims that called this crucial distinction into question, it was a sucker-punch of epic proportions. Needless to say, my confessional brethren and I did not appreciate our ancestral city of Geneva being confused with Saddleback.

But the more I read and wrestled, the more I began to see that Geneva was not being “confused with” Saddleback at all; the two were just different sides of the same coin (or to be more precise with the metaphor, they were sister-cities in the same Protestant county). Readers of this site have no need for the arguments to be rehearsed here, so suffice it to say that, philosophically speaking, it became clear to me that Sola Scriptura could not provide a way to speak meaningfully about the necessary distinction between orthodoxy and heresy (or even between essentials and non-essentials); neither could it justify the 27-book New Testament canon, create the unity that that canon demands, or provide the means of avoiding the schism that that canon condemns.

Historically speaking, the idea that the written Word of God is formally sufficient for all things related to faith and practice, such that anyone of normal intelligence and reasonably good intentions could read it and deduce from it what is necessary for orthodoxy and orthopraxy, is not a position that I see reflected in the writings of the early Church fathers. While there are plenty of statements in their writings that speak in glowing terms about the qualitative uniqueness of Scripture, those statements, for them, do not do away with the need for Scripture to be interpreted by the Church in a binding and authoritative way when necessary.

This discovery in the church fathers is unsurprising if the same position can be found in the New Testament itself, which I now believe it can. To cite but one example, the Church in her earliest days was confronted with a question that Jesus had not addressed with any specificity or directness, namely, the question of Gentile inclusion in the family of God. In order to answer this question, the apostles and elders of the Church gathered together in council to hear all sides and reach a verdict. What is especially interesting about Luke’s account of the Jerusalem Council is the role that Scripture played, as well as the nature of the verdict rendered. Concerning the former, James’s citation of Amos is curious in that the passage in the prophet seems to have little to do with the matter at hand, and yet James cites Amos’s words about the tent of David being rebuilt to demonstrate that full Gentile membership in the Church fulfills that prophecy. Moreover, Scripture functioned for the Bishop of Jerusalem not as the judge that settled the dispute, but rather as a witness that testified to what settled it, namely, the judgment of the apostles and elders. Rather than saying, “We agree with Scripture,” he says in effect, “Scripture agrees with us” (v. 15, 19). And finally, when the decision is ultimately reached, it is understood by the apostles and elders not as an optional and fallible position with which the faithful may safely disagree if they remain biblically unconvinced, but rather as an authoritative and binding pronouncement that was bound in heaven even as it was on earth (v. 28). Despite some superficial similarities, no existing Protestant denomination with an operating norm of Sola Scriptura can replicate the dynamic, or claim the authority of the Jerusalem Council (or of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon for that matter). The fact that the Bible’s own example of how Church courts operate was hamstrung by Protestantism’s view of biblical authority was something I began to find disturbingly ironic.

Moving on to Sola Fide, I found myself wrestling with this issue from both a historical and biblical perspective as well, and this is what ultimately proved to be the coup de grâce for me as a Protestant. As long as I believed that Catholicism mucked up the gospel so severely, its arguments about authority remained merely annoying, like a stone in my shoe that I would eventually get used to (after all, better to be unauthoritatively right about justification than authoritatively wrong about it). But when I began to dig into the issue more deeply and seek to understand Rome on its own terms, I began to experience what some have referred to as a “paradigm crisis.” A severe one.

As a Protestant minister, I had always operated under the assumption that the fullest treatment of the gospel, and of justification in particular, came from the apostle Paul, and that the rest of what the New Testament had to say on these issues should be filtered through him. But as I began to investigate again things that I had thought were long-settled for me, I began to discover just how problematic that hermeneutical approach really was. If justification by faith alone was indeed “the article on which the church stands or falls,” as Reformed theology claimed, then wouldn’t we expect it to have been taught by Jesus himself, somewhere? Moreover, wouldn’t John have taught it, too? And Peter, and James? Shoot, wouldn’t Paul himself have taught the imputation of alien righteousness somewhere outside of just two of his thirteen epistles?

Having realized that I was using a few select (and hermeneutically debatable) passages from Romans and Galatians as the filter through which I understood everything else the New Testament had to say about salvation, I began to conclude that such an approach was as arbitrary as it was irresponsible. I then sought to identify a paradigm, or simple statement of the gospel, that provided more explanatory value than Sola Fide did. As I hope to unpack in more detail eventually, I have come to understand the gospel in terms of the New Covenant gift of the Spirit, procured through the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ, who causes fruit to be borne in our lives by reproducing the image of the Son in the adopted children of the Father. If love of God and neighbor fulfills the law, and if the fruit of the Spirit is love, having been shed abroad by the Spirit in our hearts, then it seems to follow that the promise of the gospel is equivalent with the promise of the New Covenant that God’s law will no longer be external to the believer, but will be written upon his mind and heart, such that its righteous demands are fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. And again unsurprisingly, when I turned to the early Church fathers, and especially Augustine, it was this very understanding of the gospel that I encountered over and over again.

Conclusion

While the case for the Catholic Church may not be immediately obvious or easily winnable, the fact remains that Rome’s claims are philosophically compelling, historically plausible, and biblically persuasive. Yet despite the claims of most Reformed believers who, when wrestling with the issue of people like me leaving Geneva for the supposedly-greener pastures of Rome, insist that such a move betrays a “quest for illegitimate religious certainty,” the fact is that if it is a sense of personal and psychological certitude that one is searching for, Catholicism will more than likely disappoint. Ironically enough, Protestantism provides more certitude for the seeker than Catholicism does, since the ultimate basis for the truthfulness of its claims is one’s agreement with one’s self and one’s own interpretation of Scripture. But if what you are searching for is not subjective certitude but the Church that Jesus founded, the Catholic Church’s case for being that Church, when harkened to with charity, humility, and faith seeking understanding, is as compelling as it is disruptive.

And make no mistake, the Catholic Church is disruptive. It is audacious and confrontational, sucker-punching and line-in-the-sand drawing. Like the Lion Aslan from C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, it is not a tame Church, and will make no promise not to devour and discomfit its subjects as they partake of its life-giving water, causing them to constantly bend the knee and cede their worldly wisdom to the foolishness of the cross. In the words of Aslan to Jill, who expressed fear about letting down her guard to drink from the water by which he stood, “There are no other streams.” Or the words of Peter to Jesus when asked if the Twelve would forsake Him because of His difficult and demanding message, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

The Catholic Church, wistfully alluring? Hardly. Tidy and tame? Not by a long shot, for once discovered it demands that the seeker relinquish the one thing above all others that offers him confidence, namely, his own autonomy. In fact, submitting oneself to the authority of the Catholic Church is the most harrowing experience a person will ever endure, which is why the suggestion that converts from Geneva to Rome are simply opting for a feel-good, fairy-tale romance betraying an “over-realized eschatology” and desire to skip blissfully down the yellow-brick road to heaven, utterly trivializes the entire ordeal.

In a word, I fought the Church, and the Church won. And what it did was beat me, but it didn’t draw me, entice me, or lure me by playing upon some deep, latent psychosis or desire on my part for something Protestantism just couldn’t provide. Catholicism went from being so obviously ridiculous that it wasn’t even worth bothering to oppose, to being something whose claims were so audacious that I couldn’t help opposing them. But what it never was, was attractive, and in many ways it still isn’t.

But what Catholicism is, I have come to discover, is true.

(Update: See also “How the Church Won: An Interview with Jason Stellman” – eds.)

Joshua Lim

It is hard to pinpoint any single factor that led to my conversion. Before coming to an actual decision point, I had never considered Catholicism to be an option for anyone in search of truth; even when I was most open to it, I would have sooner turned to agnosticism than to Rome. And yet, here I am, a Roman Catholic — and a happy one, at that.

In order to understand why I converted to Catholicism, it is perhaps best to begin with my move from broad evangelicalism to a more traditional expression of Protestantism. I was born and raised in the Presbyterian church. During high school, thanks to one devoted pastor, I began to study the Bible seriously and ended up leaving the Presbyterianism of my youth and becoming a Baptist. The Baptist church I subsequently joined was generally Calvinist and was composed of college students and young adults who were very fervent in their devotion to the Lord. The pastor and elders highly emphasized sola scriptura, community, holy living, revival, and missions. Doctrinally, there was no commitment to any traditional symbol of the Protestant faith, simply a brief ‘statement of faith’ as found on most conservative evangelical church websites. While theology was prized, there was, in my opinion, an anti-intellectual ethos, and the study of too much theology, which was often held in contrast to the Bible, was sometimes frowned upon. This stemmed, in part, from an identification between one’s interpretation of scripture (in this case, the pastor’s) with scripture’s ‘plain meaning.’ The sacraments, which were called ‘ordinances’ — the former term being far too Catholic — were celebrated three times a year and most of the sermons were typically centered around individual piety. Despite the relatively small size of the church, or perhaps because of it, there was a sense that, in many ways, we were the only truly biblical church. Every other church erred in some way or another, and even those who were seemingly close in  terms of doctrine and practice were never fully embraced — and this unspoken suspicion tended to be mutual.

Over time, I began to grow uncomfortable with the arbitrariness of such a small and isolated church structure (the pastor seemed to have as much authority as the pope); this, combined with my own Luther-like angst caused by the almost solely sanctification-driven sermons (as well as a youthful zeal on my part) ultimately pushed me toward the more traditional Reformed expression of Protestantism. By the end of my junior year in college, I had read through books like Calvin’s Institutes, Zacharius Ursinus’s Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology, and even Herman Bavinck’s four-volume Reformed Dogmatics; I was also beginning to delve more deeply into Reformed covenant theology. Eventually, through the writings of Geerhardus Vos and Meredith Kline, I ended up rejecting Dispensationalism; further study led me to the writings of Michael Horton, who emphasized the centrality of the preached Word as well as the regular administration of the Sacraments (which were, in good Protestant form, two: baptism and communion). I came to greatly appreciate the sacraments as well as the liturgical form of worship in contrast to the often inconsistent and subjectivistic tendencies of the majority of evangelicalism. Moreover, my law-induced angst was alleviated by the gospel of free justification sola gratia et sola fide. Rather than being moved from fear of the law (proving that I truly was ‘truly elect,’ as it were), I was, at least conceptually, moved by gratitude out of my free justification to obey the Law with joy and freedom; I found a greater sense of the objectivity of Christ’s historical accomplishment on my behalf–something that I had not appreciated until I encountered the doctrine of justification in the Reformed confessions.

Yet, it was not very long until my Nietzschean drive for truth was left desiring something more. During my senior year of college, I somehow decided to read through Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. I was aware of Van Til’s severe criticisms of the innovative Swiss theologian, yet I found myself drawn to him as he was and in many ways continues to be the Reformed theologian of modernity. Barth’s version of Reformed Protestantism differed substantially from what I was accustomed to in the Reformed symbols. Though Barth vehemently denounced Catholicism, I still found a certain Catholic tendency, an ecumenical spirit, if you will, throughout his work. It was his writing that gradually opened me up to actually listen to opposing views; not in such a way that made me invulnerable to criticism–reading opposing views through my own lenses–but rather attempting to understand each view according to its own perspective and presuppositions. I also began to read the Bible in this way; rather than interpret the text in such a way so as to accommodate a certain notion of justification sola fide, I tried to understand how other traditions understood Scripture; and I often found these competing interpretations to be, in their own right, very compelling.

This, no doubt, left me highly dissatisfied with the Reformed confessionalism that I had come to love. The appeal to Protestant ‘tradition’ on the one hand, against the broad evangelicals, and to sola scriptura on the other, against Catholics, seemed to place confessional Reformed theology in a highly precarious position. In seminary, I would often hear invectives against the anabaptist impulse in much of Evangelicalism–what the anabaptists allegedly lacked was the tradition that Calvin and Luther as well as the many other Protestant Scholastics had never intended to let go of; what’s more, almost every problem with contemporary evangelicalism as well as modernity was genealogically traced back, never to the magisterial reformers, but those all-too-easy-to-blame, anabaptists. While I initially believed these narratives to be true, it became harder for me to see such distinctions as anything but an arbitrary defense mechanism. It seems almost impossible to deny that certain impulses within anabaptism sprang up from ideas latent in Luther’s own magisterial reformation.

Against this anabaptist problem, the proposed ‘Reformed’ solution was quite simple: the Reformed confessions had to be restored to their proper place. Yet, it was unclear how such a recovery could not immediately devolve into the in-fighting typical of Reformed denominations (indeed, it seems impossible to even get to the point where such a devolution could occur). At least on this point, it seems that Charles Finney had a degree of truth on his side: the confessions do seem to function, at least in practice, as something like a ‘paper pope.’ It is either this, or the confessions hold no authority at all. The via media, that Reformed churches and their confessions only have a ‘ministerial’ authority does not solve anything since it is unclear what this even means, as is only more evident in controversies in P&R denominations that ceaselessly result in more and more denomination splits. If the confessions do not have, at least in practice, the same authority as the Magisterium, it does not seem that they have any authority at all. The moment someone disagrees with the confession or a given interpretation of the confession on biblical grounds, they no longer need to submit themselves to that governing body. In other words, one can consistently use Luther’s “Here I stand” speech in order to avoid church discipline–and it would be hypocritical for any Protestant denomination to condemn one who appeals to his own conscience and Scripture. And that this has actually happened throughout history is not difficult to substantiate.

These irresolvable doubts led me to the slough of despond. On the one hand, I could not return to broad Evangelicalism because of its naive biblicism (condemned both by confessional Protestants as much as by Rome), but on the other hand, I could not remain a confessional Reformed Christian. Barth was of little help here. His constant criticism of all human knowledge, a consistent overflow of the Protestant notion of total depravity mixed with Kantian skepticism, led to a point where no one church or person could be trusted–for God is ever the Subject and can never be made into an ‘object’ that is controlled by man. Though Barth was undoubtedly reacting to the Protestant Liberalism of his time, his own christocentric solution only held things in abeyance without giving a permanent solution. Ultimately, by insisting so heavily on the event character of revelation, the focus on the actual content of revelation itself could only be blurred. As one Catholic theologian put it, Barth’s  “insistent cry of ‘Not I! Rather God!’ actually directs all eyes on itself instead of on God. Its cry for distance gives no room for distance.”¹

Rather than turn to that dreaded Catholicism, the epitome, it seemed to me, of all that I had grown tired of in Protestantism, I was gradually led down a deeper path of agnosticism. Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion, that it was simply man speaking in a loud voice seemed unavoidably true. It is not simply that Reformed Christianity is wrong and some other denomination is right, or even that all denominations are right; rather, if one small group of Christians could claim to have the truth to the exclusion of some or many others, and if this boiled down to an arbitrary construct of a man’s or a group of men’s imaginings (i.e., their interpretation of Scripture), then I could no longer believe that any Christian denomination had the truth. Moreover, I could only believe that this sort of arbitrary selection of dogma could only be what has occurred throughout the history of Christianity. In other words, the truth of Christ’s deity, of the Triune nature of God, the two natures of Christ, etc. were all only a matter of human debate (all of which were ultimately determined by different men vying for political and social power). In other words, the Liberal protestants were at least right about something, ‘orthodoxy’ has been and will forever be hopelessly arbitrary. To disagree with this and remain a ‘confessional’ Protestant is the greatest hypocrisy.

Needless to say, by the time I entered seminary, I was somewhat disillusioned by Protestantism as well as Christianity. I was hanging on by a thread and found myself constantly searching for reasons to pray or even believe that this version of Christianity was the version of Christianity. Though I was initially convinced that the Protestant Scholastics held the answer to modern Protestantism’s ails, I gradually realized that even with the revered Protestant Scholastics, a sense of arbitrary human invention, as much as it was despised, was still conspicuously present–simply saying that one holds God’s word over and against human invention doesn’t get rid of the very human aspect of asserting such a human belief and statement. Martin Luther and John Calvin went from looking like heroic men of God to men who were victims of their own delusion; though they believed themselves to be sent by God, it seemed that they were just two more men who were ‘reforming’ a church according to their own interpretations of Scripture formed by the philosophies and culture of their time. If all men are, as Luther and Calvin interpret Scripture to say, helplessly corrupt and depraved, how can I trust anyone? Why should I trust what Martin Luther says that the Bible teaches, or what John Calvin says the Bible teaches or any of the Reformed confessions, for that matter? Is it not the height of naiveté, even hypocrisy, to believe that everyone is totally depraved and yet continue to trust that any human interpretation of Scripture is somehow guaranteed by the Holy Spirit? Is it not more honest to say, with Nietzsche and Foucault, that all men are simply driven by a will to power? And if this is true, no human institution including the allegedly ‘ministerial’ denominations of Protestantism can be trusted because they are simply structures through which those having power can manipulate and control those who do not–indeed, this remains one of Protestantism’s perennial assaults on Rome.

The feeling of regret that many claim accompany those who decide to enter the Catholic Church (how Newman allegedly felt) is what I experienced after I had become Reformed. What is somewhat ironic is that with the disappointment following one’s journey into any Protestant denomination, one encounters those who appeal to the fact that the church is always in via, on the way, and therefore no matter what disappointments one encounters, one should remain faithful to Christ’s church. Yet, along with this admonition there is also the Protestant conviction that one should not remain in any church that does not have the marks of the true church: the preaching of the gospel and the proper administration of the sacraments. It was during this time, while I sought to remain faithful to my local Reformed church, that I encountered a measure of difficulty attempting to convince some close friends, who did not feel that they were receiving what they should have from this particular church, to remain in it. My Reformed belief in the relative importance of the visible church was in conflict with the Reformed emphasis on the importance of one’s individual conscience. Thus, while I wholeheartedly agree with the sense of importance attached to remaining accountable to a visible body, to feel this way as a Protestant seems to be entirely contradictory. Luther felt that it was necessary to separate from the Catholic Church, Zwingli from Luther, the Anabaptists from the Magisterial Reformed, the Calvinists from Arminians, and on and on–all on the conviction that I have the correct interpretation of Scripture: “Here I stand, so help me God.” In other words, I am able to understand and deal with imperfect Christians and an imperfect local body only from a Catholic perspective–where the objectivity of the Church is not dependent on the pastor’s ability to preach a sermon, but on the real presence of the Lord, Jesus Christ. Any sort of corruption one finds in the Catholic Church is found outside the Catholic Church as well. The question is whether the Church remains who she is no matter how those who constitute her visible body fail and err.

It is impossible to live in any sane manner with such suspicions and doubt as I had; and, admittedly, I have found few, save perhaps Luther, who suffered from such intense suspicion as I did. Yet, I did not have either Luther or Calvin’s confidence to trust my own interpretation of Scripture above that of the myriad of opposing interpretations. I knew as a matter of fact that if I had somehow encountered Methodism or Pentecostalism in a notable way prior to being ‘convinced’ of Reformed theology, I would have read the biblical text in a significantly different way, and would most certainly have been convinced of the veracity of that interpretation over the Reformed one. Simply attributing my ‘correct’ view to God’s grace seemed far too simple and easy, not to mention the fact that most groups, Calvinist or not, make this same appeal – “Lord, I thank Thee that I am not like them.”

So what could I do? My foot had almost slipped, I was on the brink of giving up on Christianity altogether. Even though I wanted to believe that it was all true, I simply could not bring myself to do so. Every time I attempted to pray to God, I could not help but feel somewhat embarrassed and ashamed for thinking that I would be heard. I tried to appreciate the gospel of justification; the fact that my salvation was not based on any of my own effort or works, but over time it became harder and harder to delineate between God declaring me righteous through the ministry of the Word each Sunday, versus me simply trying to convince myself psychologically that things were OK. When my professors or the minister would point to the benefit of the Lord’s Supper, it was hard to convince myself that it had any value since it was the visible Word, but nothing more or less than that. Yes, one is strengthened in faith by partaking of the Lord’s Supper–but it is not literally Christ’s body and blood, only sacramentally so, which is only further explained through vague terms such as ‘sacramental union,’ which no one actually seems to know the meaning of, only that it is neither Catholic nor Zwinglian. Issues such as this caused me to question the notion that confessional Reformed Protestantism was somehow more ‘traditional’ than broader evangelicals. If there was historical continuity with the early Church, for instance, it seemed to be purely superficial. Yes, the sacraments were celebrated, baptism was administered to children, but the reasons why they were celebrated or administered differed substantially from that of the early Church. In other words, even if there was seeming continuity with tradition, the reasons behind such a continuity were just as innovative and arbitrary as the rest of evangelicalism.

It was during this time of doubt that I came across a few Catholic theologians at a conference on Protestant and Catholic theology. These were not the first Catholics that I had met; prior to this encounter, I had dialogued with a rather intelligent Catholic (though he knew very little about Reformed Protestantism–which, at the time, enabled me to ignore his arguments) at a nearby coffee shop over a span of about two years. Moreover, there were constant online debates with Catholics on different blogs that I participated in. Yet, perhaps because of my realization of the shortcomings of Reformed theology, it was at this point that I tried to really understand Catholic theology from a Catholic perspective — as much as this was possible for someone who was raised to distrust Catholicism. Through something of a providential meeting, I was able to sit down and talk to Dominican friars; I posed questions regarding nature and grace, the ascension, the Creator-creature distinction, as well as historical questions (e.g., the Avignon papacy)–I basically brought up the key problems with Catholicism that I had learned about in seminary; much to my surprise, the Dominican friars answered my questions in a more than satisfactory manner and, as it became evident through the duration of the conference, presented a very compelling understanding of nature and grace and, concomitantly, theology and philosophy.

During the several months following this conversation, I kept in touch with these theologians and they provided answers to my numerous questions. For the next five months or so, I buried myself in books, Catholic and Protestant. I carefully read Peter Martyr Vermigli’s work on predestination and justification; Vermigli was an Augustinian friar prior to his conversion to the Protestant movement, and so his book represented something of a final vestige of hope. To my surprise, I came away from the book even more convinced of the truth of Catholicism. I read Heiko Oberman’s work on the medieval nominalism of Gabriel Biel and its immense influence on Luther’s theology. Through my study, I realized that much of my doubt and skepticism stemmed from certain philosophical assumptions that I had unwittingly adopted regarding knowledge of God and reality through Luther’s theologia crucis–and much of the philosophical issues that I had stemmed from my understanding of theology’s relation to philosophy. The inextricable link between philosophy and theology became evident to me. One cannot have a ‘pure theology,’ just as one cannot simply believe the Bible without simultaneously interpreting it; philosophy will always be there whether one acknowledges it or not–and those who claim to have no philosophy in distinction from their theology must necessarily elicit a certain sense of suspicion, much like the suspicion aroused by fundamentalists who claim simply to be reading the Bible.

It was during this time that I found a source of intellectual solace in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. I had already been introduced to him a year before and had taken a class on him in seminary; at this point, I had already read through a quarter of his Summa Theologiae (through which I was disabused of the notion that Aquinas was doing ontotheology), but I was still somewhat suspicious of his view of grace and the Law. Nevertheless, I decided to give it another go and read the Summa Theologiae straight through. In St. Thomas I discovered a much more compelling reason to believe in God, and the Angelic Doctor’s careful delineation between what could be known by nature (e.g., God’s existence) and what could only be known through grace helped me to re-assess my now receding skepticism (which, going farther back than Kant, was ultimately grounded in Luther’s allergy to the deus nudus that all the Scholastics were allegedly trying to get an illicit glimpse of via philosophy). Along with Luther’s distinction between a theologia gloriae and a theologia crucis, went the notion of justification sola fide as well as the doctrine of sola scriptura. Only through nominalist philosophical lenses, it seemed to me, could justification be conceived of as something purely extrinsic (resulting in a view that the Christian was simul iustus et peccator). In other words, in the same way that Reformed theologians typically accuse the Church Fathers of being unduly influenced by Greek philosophy, I found that the Reformers were guilty of adopting, in an even more uncritical fashion, the philosophy of their time without any sense of open acknowledgement; on the contrary, they ignored their assumptions and identified their interpretation of the Bible with the Bible–against the ‘speculations’ of the medieval theologians.

Moreover, I realized that many of the positive impulses that I had discovered in Reformed theology were found in exceeding measure in the Catholic Church. Contrary to the claim that the Catholic Church (or Eastern Orthodoxy) represents something of an extreme to which people merely seeking unwarranted certainty go to (painting the Reformed church as something of a via media— a claim made by Anglicans and Methodists as well), I found that the Catholic Church tended to provide a much more balanced and consistent approach to Scripture as well as Tradition. Moreover, the problem of individualism pervasive in evangelical theology, or the vague community-centered ecclesiology of more emergent churches, there seemed to be the proper balance, not in Reformed theology which only seemed to combine the two resulting in a conglomeration of people who each considered themselves to be experts in theology in contrast to ‘broad evangelicals,’ but in the Catholic Church: plurality in unity. Far from the One sublimating the many, I found that the confession of One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church entailed a true sense of unity as well as a true sense of distinction between each member of the Church.

Moreover, I was surprised to find very little, if any, signal of that pride stemming from works-righteousness that Luther and the Reformers had warned against. Yes, these people believed that they had to cooperate with God’s grace, but this did not mean that Christ was somehow less necessary or that their works were somehow the cause of God’s grace. These were Christians who confessed at every celebration of the Mass: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” Any sign of that Judaizing tendency of boasting before God was absent.

After spending several months meeting privately with a Norbertine Father, I was recently received into the Catholic Church. Throughout this journey I have come to appreciate and love the Catholic Church. As many Protestants warn, there are certain difficulties that the Catholic convert must necessarily face. The contemporary Catholic Church in America is far from perfect. Liturgically, there are, at least in Southern California, very few parishes that celebrate Mass the way Catholics should; there are numerous liberal Catholics who don’t submit to the Magisterium (to the delight of Protestants), the list seems endless. But none of this is actually new for the Church; things have always been so. These issues have not moved me from the conviction that the Catholic Church is the true Church; on the contrary, they have only increased my faith that this must be the true Church. If Christ could continue to work to build his Church with such a history of failings on the part of the laity, various priests, bishops, and even popes, surely this Church must be sustained by God himself; despite the passage of over two millennia, the Church continues to hold and to teach in substance what it has always held and taught. Unlike much of Protestantism which no longer believes what even the magisterial Reformers once held to be fundamental tenets of the faith (Trinity, inerrancy, etc.), the Catholic Church remains unmoved, not by virtue of her own strength, but by virtue of the grace of the Holy Spirit preserving the Church. Though I was initially turned off by the fact that most Catholics don’t know as much as I would like them to (ultimately, due to my own pride), yet I am constantly humbled by the devotion of seemingly simple Catholics whose love for the Lord and faith in his presence in the Eucharist manifest true child-like faith. On more than one occasion I have been moved by the idea that were Christ here today, these would be the people who would follow him without food or drink in order to hear his teaching and receive his flesh and blood without question or doubt. Though I once criticized these foolish sheep from a distance, I am glad finally to be considered one of them.

1. Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, p. 84.