Conservative Roman Catholics return to the vomit from their non-scholar Scholar Heroes

This thread has died down, but I still owe a few responses to someone from the comments here.

Trosclair said (#16): Cullmann is a fine source, I agree. But his reasons for accepting the canon yet rejecting the Apostolic authority found in the 2nd century Church rests on his assumption that Christ was ignorant about his own Church. Even the greatest of scholars can base their ecclesiology on what is a faulty assumption, i.e., Christ’s ‘ignorance.’

I responded: I haven’t read all of Cullmann, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that he argued for this. More likely, given that he was arguing against Bultmann, who was asking questions about, and making comments on, what Jesus actually knew. But this is the place for a whole ‘nother discussion.

Trosclair then replied: (#46) I have read very little of Cullmann, but I recently came across an interesting critique of his work that was fresh in my mind when we started our discussion. Concerning Cullmann’s PETER: DISCIPLE, APOSTLE, and MARTYRS and Cullmann’s rejection of apostolic succession, Stanley Jaki writes: “In Cullmann’s case a most revealing consequence of that allegedly biblical notion of time is the error which he attributes to Jesus concerning the time of his second coming! See pp. 201 and 207 in the English translation of the first and second editions, respectively.” (AND ON THIS ROCK, 51) I don’t have Cullman’s book, so I am strictly trusting authority here. If you have this book by Cullmann, I would be interested to hear your take on Jaki’s interpretation.

To show just how far Roman Catholics will go in (a) creating and (b) perpetuating not just “urban legends”, but outright falsehoods, I’m looking at Stanley Jaki’s “And On This Rock: The Witness of One Land and Two Covenants”, Front Royal, VA: Christendon Press, Third Enlarged Edition, ©1997).

Trosclair quotes Jaki accurately, but mis-cites the page number. It comes from a footnote on page 40. Here is his larger contention. Noting that “in the Old Testament, only God is called rock”, he goes on to say:

This is not to suggest that the Old Testament usage of the word “rock” failed to be recalled for such tactics in Oscar Cullmann’s famous book, Peter: Disciple, Apostle, and Martyr, first published in 1952 [and expanded and re-issued in 1961]. This book is a classic in cutting both ways and also in undercutting itself. On the one hand, it dealt the coup de grace to the traditional Protestant interpretation that Christ meant Peter’s faith and not Peter himself in speaking of him as rock. On the other hand, it presented Peter as a primus inter pares, or one of the triumvirate of which James and John were the other members, a conclusion clearly destructive of the Roman Catholic position. But by erecting a chasm between the apostolic and the postapostolic church [FN], it undercut the consistency of the times of all Christians, Catholic and Protestant, with the Church founded by Christ on the apostles. Among those ties is the New Testament itself as a document whose divinely inspired character can be assured only by a Church teaching in the name of Christ.

And the [FN] at that point goes on to say: “In Cullmann’s case a most revealing consequence of that allegedly biblical notion of time is the error which he attributes to Jesus concerning the time of his second coming! See pp. 201 and 207 in the English translation of the first and second editions, respectively.”

So in the first comment, Trosclair translated that as Cullmann having “based his ecclesiology” on “the assumption” “that Christ was ignorant about his own Church” “a faulty assumption, i.e., Christ’s ‘ignorance.’” But the problem for Trosclair is, this is not actually this on which Cullman “based his ecclesiology”.

Cullmann is discussing a topic that is much discussed, especially among older New Testament scholars: What Jesus knew, and when he knew it. Cullman says:

The fellowship that Jesus founded even in his life time does of course point to the future. Only after his death will it develop, will it be ‘built up’ in the real sense. We have seen that the Messianic consciousness must lead to the founding of the Church. For Jesus, however, this consciousness involves the necessity of his death. Therefore his death is the real starting-point of the new people of God …. But here the question arises whether for Jesus the time immediately after his death is the time of the complete fulfillment or whether, before the end comes, the time of anticipation begun by his earthly work will still continue for a while, and continue as the period of the church. Matthew 16:17 ff. implies this second assumption. Before we deal with the question whether this agrees with the general expectation of Jesus as we are able to deduce it from the Synoptic Gospels, we still must study a very important utterance of Jesus (Cullmann 204).

And that is Mark 14:57: “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with human hands and in three days will build another, not made with hands.’”

In response to this, Cullmann said, “Jesus had in view a fellowship when he announced that he would again erect the destroyed temple [From Mark 13:2].

We have already seen, indeed, that it was already common in Jewish terminology to apply to the people in the image of the building. IN the New Testament area this usage is quite common; the Church is the temple or the ‘spiritual house’, as it is called in [1 Peter 2:5-8]. … It must be assumed, in keeping with the Synoptic tradition, that Jesus proclaimed the building of a temple not made by human hands. By this he can only have meant the new people of God that he intended to found … We have seen that according to this saying this future must still fall in this age, since otherwise the contrast between heaven and earth would have no meaning. This very fact, however, gives occasion for the final objection which is raised against the genuineness of the [Matthew 16:17] passage. It is claimed that if Jesus spoke of a future realization of the people of God, to follow after his death he can only have meant its final realization in the Kingdom of God. Those other promises, such as the saying concerning the temple, must in such a case be understood to mean that with the death of Jesus the consummation of the Kingdom of God already occurs. Since, however, in Matthew 16:17 ff., the ekklesia is already realized in the present age, it is alleged that there exists here a contradiction, and therefore this saying cannot come from Jesus (206).

This is one of those cases where Jaki, though he was a scholar of Physics, was out of his league. His statement about Cullmann erring is actually a case of Cullmann rescuing Roman Catholicism out of the hands of critical scholars like Bultmann, and bringing “the Christ of faith” back into line with “the Christ of history”. Cullmann’s work. And he rescued this statement about Peter from liberal oblivion, and, I’d venture to say that, even in this case, Roman Catholics are indebted to Cullmann.

As to the statement on pg 207 of Cullmann’s work, one might suggest that Jaki is actually misrepresenting him. The statement of Cullmann’s, referring to Mark 2:18, Mark 14:28, and Mark 14:62, is that “Jesus distinguishes between the moment when the Son of Man will sit at the right hand of God and the one when he will come again on the clouds of Heaven. To be sure, Jesus does not reckon with a duration of Millennia, but he does assume that there will be a rather brief period of time between his resurrection and return, as becomes clear from what he says in expectation of the approaching end” (207).

This is the statement of which Jaki says “In Cullmann’s case a most revealing consequence of that allegedly biblical notion of time is the error which he attributes to Jesus concerning the time of his second coming!”

Cullmann is not making an error, any more than Peter is making an error when he says “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” [Cullmann actually notes that this concept of Time, which he later explores in his work Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time, “does not concern us in our study” (207)].

So to recap, Jaki (and Trosclair citing him) turn something which “does not concern us in our study” into a foundational piece of his argument, when it is no such thing. And further, Jaki misconstrues what Cullmann is actually saying as an error, when it is not.

So from Jaki, it’s pure vomit, and from Trosclair, well, it’s lapping up the vomit. This only goes to show how far even Templeton Prize-winning Roman Catholic conservatives, such as Stanley Jaki, are willing to go in order to buttress their thread-hanging papacy. And how far conservative Roman Catholics, eager to find any word to say against Cullmann, are eager to slurp up this kind of vomit.