It looks like just about everyone who wanted to say something about my “Real Ellipsis” piece has done so by now, so now is as good a time as any to respond.
***QUOTE***
Steve,
1.Concerning point ix you misunderstand what is taking place at baptism. You seem to think that nothing happens to the water at baptism but that is in fact incorrect. The water is in fact blessed during baptism. But the emphasis in your criticism is incorrectly focused. The true importance of baptism is that the person, and not the water, is changed. At baptism an ontological change takes place upon the person baptized so that they are at that moment and always will be a baptized person. That is not to say that they cannot later renounce the faith but even if they do renounce the faith that does not mean that their baptism is therefore erased.
2.Concerning your last paragraph and the Catholic "gerrymandering of Scripture". This seems to be a very harsh criticism you are laying on Catholics.
3.From your statements I am assuming that you are in fact are not Catholic, whether that be Roman or Orthodox.
4.Therefore, I would like to know what gives you the right to make such bold claims.
5.From where does your 'church' come?
6.Why are you fighting so harshly against something that you do not truly understand?
7.You are trying to attack the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist using only the Bible. But if you understood Catholic theology then you would know that not everything comes from the Bible.
8.When non-Catholics try to attack the Church with the Bible they operate on an unspoken assumption that the Bible descended on a Golden Thread from Heaven at the moment Christ ascended to the Father. But this is untrue. In the Great Commission Jesus told His Apostles to “make disciples of all nations…teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” Jesus did not write the Bible as some sort of rule book like Muhammad supposedly wrote the Koran.
9.Instead, He taught His disciples. He gave them the teaching of eternal life and they, here at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel are instructed by the Lord to teach others. That is what Apostolic Succession is about.
10.Those who are in Succession to the Apostles are to teach the same Gospel that the Apostles taught
11.and this is shown forth by the physical laying on of hands in ordination.
12.This is how the Gospel was handed down until the New Testament was written and compiled and it is still handed down in this manner.
13.Now, needless to say, some things which were and are handed down are not in the Bible.
14.The books and letters of the New Testament were written for specific purposes and were not intended to be the end all be all of how to live your life as a Christian.
15.The things that have been handed down from the Apostles which are not contained in Holy Scripture are now a part of Holy Tradition. If you truly want to attack the Church’s understanding of the Eucharist then that is where you need to look for ammunition.
16.(By the way, who do you think compiled the Bible to begin with?
17.And have you ever asked yourself where your own faith tradition comes from?
18.Does it stretch back to Jesus and His Apostles?)
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2005/10/real-ellipsis.html
# posted by FrJeff
***END-QUOTE***
For clarity of analysis and ease of reference, I’ve taken the liberty of numbering Jeff’s leading points. Nothing has been edited out of the original. My numbering in reply to his points will peg the original order of presentation.
Before delving into the details, it is worth noting that, to judge by his boss (the dapper Bishop Iker, one part prelate to two parts Ronald Coleman or Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) as well as his blog, Jeff is an Anglo-Catholic, much disgusted by the liberal activists and spineless conservatives in his own denomination.
Anglo-Catholicism is very precarious outpost from which to be lobbing bombs. The Elizabethan settlement is a theological compromise born of political compromise, while Anglo-Catholicism is another theological compromise. What you end up with is, as we shall see, a very unstable position.
1.Yes, I understand about holy water. I’m also conversant with the dogma of baptismal regeneration. That, however, does nothing to obviate my original point. In transubstantiation there is said to be an ontological change in the composition of the communion elements whereas, in baptism, there is said to be an ontological change, not in the composition of the water, but in the object of the rite or baptismal candidate—effecting an indelible mark upon the soul. There is no transubstantiation of the water, only the wine and the bread.
So the asymmetry remains. And it is odd that the efficacy of communion depends on this ontological change in the medium, whereas the efficacy of baptism does not so depend.
2.Yes, my criticism was very harsh. But what Jeff is quoting comes at the conclusion of a 10-point argument. It doesn’t just emerge out of thin air. I laid a foundation for my criticism, however harsh.
3.No, I’m not Catholic or Orthodox. I’m a Calvinist.
4.As to my “right” to make such bold claims,
i) This is a very American way of framing the issue. Not: what is right and wrong, but: what gives you the right to say this or do that.
The question is simply one of truth and falsehood. That’s what gives me the right. I don’t need a special right to say what is right. I’d only need a special right to say (or do) what is ordinarily wrong.
ii) Jeff is also jumping into the middle of an ongoing debate. I’ve written a great deal on the subject of Catholicism, with extensive quotation from the primary source materials.
iii) What gives me the right is the 10-point argument I laid out. My point of departure was the CCC. I subjected the reasoning of the CCC on the Eucharistic reading of Jn 6 to rational scrutiny.
You might as well ask what gave the Catholic church the right to say what it did. More to the point, however, is that the CCC lays out an argument for its position, citing various prooftexts and given assorted supporting arguments, and all I did was to mount a counterargument.
If an institution gives you reasons for what it believes, then those reasons are liable to rational scrutiny. Are they good reasons or bad reasons?
iv) I’d note that Jeff simply disregards my 10-point argument and chooses to raise a different set of objections. He’s welcome to change the subject, but to act as if I said nothing in justification of my conclusion, when, in fact, he ignores what I said, is less than intellectually impressive.
5.As to where my own “church comes from,” this is the first of several tripwire questions he’ll tries to lay across my pathway.
i) It isn’t clear why that way of framing the issue is the least bit relevant to the question at hand. Even if I myself had nothing better to offer, it doesn’t follow that Rome is right. The case for Catholicism rises and falls of its own dead weight.
ii) Jeff’s question also turns crucially on the definition of the “church.” The church is a theological construct. How we define the church depends on what evidence is feeding into our definition, on what evidence we regard as relevant to the definition of the church.
iii) Speaking for myself, the church is the people of God throughout human history, united by a common faith and a common grace. Because the elect are flesh-and-blood beings, with friends and family, the church has a visible face as well. The inauguration of the church goes back to the very first generation of men (Gen 4:26).
The content of the faith and its outward expression will vary depending on the stage of progressive redemption and revelation.
What was Abraham’s church? What church did Abraham attend?
The Mosaic fellowship had a fairly high degree of internal organization, whereas the NT church consisted of informal house-churches or cell-groups, loosely affiliated with one another. The fellowship of the patriarchs was, likewise, a familial affair, consisting of the covenant with Abraham, along with the chieftain and his clan, as well the house servants and field hands.
iv) So the church is variously exemplified in time and space.
6.
i) Jeff is assuming, without benefit of argument, that I just don’t understand Catholicism.
ii) I oppose Catholicism both because Catholicism is wrong and because Catholicism is a very influential error.
7.Here Jeff raises a rather obtuse objection. My particular criticism wasn’t based on sola Scriptura. Rather, my criticism was tracking the form of argument offered by the CCC. But because Jeff is too intellectually indolent to ever interact with my 10-point presentation, the structure of my argument goes right over his head.
In the part I cited, the CCC offers a number of Scriptural prooftexts in support of its claim. Either those prooftexts implicate the claim, or they do not.
Remember, this is not how I chose to frame the debate. I didn’t lead with Scripture or sola Scriptura. I am simply responding to the CCC on its own terms. It is the CCC that is quoting from the Bible, not me.
That, then, raises the question of whether its appeal to Scripture is exegetically sustainable.
8.Jeff has a very counterintuitive take on the Great Commission. If the duty of the
Apostles is to teach a set of dominical commandments, then the Bible is, to that extent, a rulebook. What are dominical commandments if not a set of divine rules to live by?
Certainly the Bible is more than a rulebook, but no less than a rulebook.
9.
i) How is teaching the Gospel synonymous with apostolic succession? Apostolic succession is a dogma with a highly specified content:
"In order that the full and living Gospel might always be preserved in the Church the apostles left bishops as their successors. They gave them their own position of teaching authority."35 Indeed, "the apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved in a continuous line of succession until the end of time."36
http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s1c2a2.htm
This is hardly interchangeable with teaching the Gospel. You cannot validly infer anything that narrow and specific from the terms of the Great Commission.
ii) It is very awkward for an Anglican to invoke apostolic succession. If the claims of Rome are true, then the Anglican Communion is schismatic--and if her claims are false, then the line of succession is, at best, episcopal, but non-apostolic.
Yet Jeff is welcome to revisit all those excruciating debates over the canonical status of Usagers and Non-Usagers and Nonjurors and how it’s really the church of Rome that broke off the trunk, and so on and so forth. Since I regard that whole conceptual scheme as ill-conceived, I hardly think it’s worth leveling yet another forest over.
10.Theory and praxis are two different things.
11.An utter non-sequitur. Ordination is no guarantee of orthodoxy.
12.This seems to be an allusion to oral tradition.
i) 1C Jews were not illiterate. The NT doesn’t necessarily represent the first time that the Gospel was committed to writing.
ii) Oral communication is not the same thing as oral tradition.
iii) Jeff offers no argument for equating apostolic “tradition” with subapostolic tradition.
iv) The Catholic church does not rely on oral communication to disseminate its teaching. It employs the written medium (church councils, papal encyclicals, catechisms, &c).
13.
i) What things were handed down? By whom? To whom?
ii) I’d add that, according to the 39 Articles, the only acceptable traditions are traditions “not repugnant to the Word of God” (art. 34).
The 39 Article also have a classic statement of sola Scriptura: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed an article of the Faith, or be though requisite or necessary to salvation” (art. 6).
Is Jeff an adherent to the 39 Articles? Or does he pick and choose--like the liberals?
14. A non-sequitur. The fact that the NT consists of occasional writings doesn’t imply that they are insufficient for the life of the church.
i) For one thing, God, in his providence, occasions the occasions which give rise to the occasional writings.
ii) There’s very stereotypical quality to life. Nature and passion never change. Modern men and women commit the same sins as 1C men and women.
iii) To the extent that Scripture doesn’t prescribe or proscribe a course of conduct for every conceivable hypothetical, that leaves us with more than one right course of action.
15.How does Jeff happen to know that these things were handed down from the Apostles? How does he document the existence and identity or continuity and content of oral tradition?
16.Another trip-wire question. What Jeff is hoping I’ll say is that the “Church” compiled the Bible. But this is a semantic game that trades on many equivocations.
i) The Jews gave us the Bible—not only the OT, but the NT as well, since the NT is a Jewish book no less than the OT. So, in the first instance, the people who gave us the Bible were the people who wrote the Bible.
ii) Jeff wants me to say that the “Church” has handed down the Bible. And I could say that. But what is the “Church”? I could just as well say that Christians have handed down the Bible. That would be entirely correct, and it doesn’t commit one to any particular ecclesiology.
iii) As I write this, my eyes pass over my bookshelves and fall upon a book entitled: Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti, edited by David A. Kent & P. G. Standwood.
So these two men compiled her prose writings for this particular anthology. Does that editorial role confer on them some unique authority to collect and classify her writings? Not at all.
iv) Since I’ve written about the canon on more than one occasion, I need not repeat myself here.
v) Who does Jeff think compiled his canon of the Bible? Assuming that he subscribes to the 39 Articles, his canon is not the same canon as the RC canon or the Orthodox canon of Scripture.
I assume he subscribes to the 39 Articles. Otherwise he’s in no position to attack the liberals within his denomination for their infidelity to the 39 Articles.
17.As to where my theological tradition comes from, this is really two questions bound up in one:
a) There’s the question of where my theological tradition comes from vis-à-vis historical theology.
b) Then there’s the question of where the warrant for my theological tradition comes from vis-à-vis the Bible.
18.The way he poses his final question is prejudicial. Whether what you believe is true or not is independent of whether it “stretches” back in some historical continuum of believers past to its source origin.
For example, the Book of the Law was rediscovered in Josiah’s time (2 Kg 22; 2 Chron 34). So you had a historical break in the process of transmission, skipping over several generations (of Manasseh and Amon). But the veracity of the Law and the validity of faith in the law is irrespective of that historical dislocation.
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