Robert Wilken is a historian who converted from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism decades ago. He's sometimes mentioned in lists of converts to Catholicism. He appeared on Marcus Grodi's television program "The Journey Home" on EWTN. You often find Catholic scholars making comments like these ones from Wilken's book on the first millennium of church history:
"As the controversy over the dating of the Pasch revealed, there was no central authority within Christianity in the second century. The Church was composed of a constellation of local communities spanning the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East. They had a strong sense of unity among themselves, but they were only loosely organized." (The First Thousand Years [New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2012], 39)
"In the early Church there was no 'private' confession. According to church law the emperor could not present himself quietly before the bishop, confess his sin, and receive absolution. The penitential discipline of the early Church was unremittingly harsh and carried out in front of the Christian people. The penitents were segregated from the rest of the community, assigned a special section in the church, and forbidden to receive the Eucharist." (135)
"By the middle of the third century the bishop of Rome had begun to acquire an unparalleled authority in the West - in Italy, North Africa, Gaul, and Spain. Not, however, in the East. There the churches looked to the bishops in the major cities, Alexandria in Egypt or Antioch in Syria. This geographical fact, that Rome was the principal city in the West, whereas in the East there were several, would lead to a quite different understanding of how the Church was to be governed at the highest level….It is clear from the minutes of the Council of Chalcedon that the bishops, most of whom were from the East, did not view Rome's authority as Leo [the Roman bishop] did." (165-66, 170)
"Apparently [in The Apostolic Tradition, a document of the third century] infant baptism was permissible - though not conventional - and parents or guardians would speak for the children." (176)
The Bible is the light of the moon to us , but when the light sun comes out , the moon has done its wonderful job but fades away .... something like that "George Mac Donald" Unspoken Sermons
ReplyDelete1. George MacDonald was a heretic (e.g. he espoused universalism or universal reconciliation, he denied penal substitutionary atonement). The primary reason he's famous is because men like GK Chesterton and CS Lewis praised him to high heaven. However I think Lewis overlooked MacDonald's theology for MacDonald's literary or mythmaking qualities. And actually I don't find MacDonald's literary works to be all that impressive.
Delete2. In any case, if the Bible or word of God is the moon, then what's the sun? God himself? If so, what does it mean or entail to demarcate God from his word in such a fashion? If we're supposedly in union and communion with God, then we can toss aside the Bible? Like a mystic who relies solely on the inner voice of God to guide him to the truth?
To me those quotes sound like they actually support a more Protestant understanding. E.g. That the primacy of Rome, much less of the Pope, were only later developments.
ReplyDeleteAnd Catholic scholars often make comments like those, even scholars who are treated so favorably in conservative Catholic circles, like on EWTN and Marcus Grodi's program.
DeleteIt's strange, isn't it? Do they just not realize the implications, or do they say other things that contradict these comments elsewhere, or do they try to say that it shows the work of the Holy Spirit in the development of doctrine over time? Or maybe some combination.
DeleteI've seen all of the approaches you refer to. The traditional claim that these Catholic beliefs have always been held and understood in a highly developed form by the church (e.g., what the First Vatican Council claimed about the papacy) is contradicted by the evidence, which leads many Catholics to appeal to a lengthy process of development in the church's understanding. But the developments in question can't be demonstrated to be probable implications of what Jesus, the apostles, or any other relevant figure taught. At best, they're just possible developments rather than probable ones, and some of the developments even contradict what Jesus, the apostles, and other relevant authorities taught if we interpret those authorities as we'd normally interpret other historical sources. And there's no combination of the traditional Catholic approach and the development approach that resolves these problems, even though Catholics have tried a lot of different combinations. They can appeal to people's preferences, along the lines of what I referred to in my recent post on the desire for a king. A lot of people are attracted by a monarchical form of church government, a mother figure like the Catholic view of Mary, belonging to an institution with the sort of cultural prestige the Catholic Church has, or other such factors that don't have much to do with the truthfulness of Catholicism. There's a lot that Catholicism has to offer that's appealing to people, and it will appeal to many people for a long time to come. But from an evidential perspective, it's unsalvageable.
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