Interpreting the Interpreter

Bonus CTC snippet:

Catholics and Reformed Protestants believe something very similar regarding original sin. Bryan Cross has an excellent series on Aquinas and Trent that does a good job of explaining the Catholic doctrine on this subject and a few others.

So if Mr. Cross "does a good job of explaining the Catholic doctrine on this subject"  what need is there of the Catechism of the Catholic Church? The APOSTOLIC LETTER LAETAMUR MAGNOPERE states:

Catechesis will find in this genuine, systematic presentation of the faith and of Catholic doctrine a totally reliable way to present, with renewed fervor, each and every part of the Christian message to the people of our time. This text will provide every catechist with sound help for communicating the one, perennial deposit of faith within the local Church, while seeking, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to link the wondrous unity of the Christian mystery with the varied needs and conditions of those to whom this message is addressed. All catechetical activity will be able to experience a new, widespread impetus among the People of God, if it can properly use and appreciate this post-conciliar Catechism.

I guess the CCC left out some things, so Mr. Cross can help out.

The Mustard Tree as an Image of the Church

There’s been a little dustup of comments on the Bryan Cross thread entitled “Ecclesial Consumerism”.

Bryan is one of those individuals that Matthew wrote about in his previous post. “A sensational conversion to Catholicism provides a kind of celebrity, authority and prominence unavailable to those who quietly and obscurely serve the Lord in a Protestant church.” Then of course, there are the gullible ones who will follow him.

Bryan puts up a couple of flamboyant photographs and elaborately explicates a phenomenon of his own creation. “In our contemporary culture, church-shopping has become entirely normal and even expected….[A person] weighs all the various factors and tries to decide which church best matches what he (and his family) are looking for in a church. He might even make lists of all that he is looking for in a church, and see which church comes closest to meeting all the criteria. This phenomenon is called ‘ecclesial consumerism.’”

Nobody else talks about “Ecclesial consumerism.” Only Bryan talks about “ecclesial consumerism.” Bryan is one of those individuals in search of “the correctly marketable term,” a new phrase he can coin and throw out there to “the academy,” which will have his name attached to it, and for which people will fawn over him. He used to throw out the word “monocausalism” and try to sell that concept, as a bad thing, until I pointed out to him that he’s simply trying to re-define the word “sola” as a bad thing. He has ranted and raved about the “invisible church”. Then there was “ecclesial deism”, which he used until someone pointed out that it was not that; then he picked up “ecclesial docetism.” Here’s another one: Branches or Schisms. Maybe, someday, Bryan can be known, like Bultmann, for having discerned “the separation of the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith.”

He misunderstands what the Kingdom of God is. Just as we can know the Character of God, we can know what the one true church is going to be like, because the Scriptures told us a lot about it.

Then Jesus asked, “What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds perched in its branches.” (Luke 13:18-19)

One of the two images here is the Mustard tree, indigenous to Palestine, that Jesus was talking about.

A.A. Hodge wrote about this as well:

AA Hodge on “What is the Church?” (From “Evangelical Theology” pgs 174-177)

What is the Church? There is one thing certain about it: the Church has a great many attributes, but that which is absolutely essential is its absolute unity. There is no doubt if there be but one God, there is but one Church; if there be but one Christ, there is but one Church; if there be but one Holy Ghost, there is but one Church. This is absolutely settled—there is but one Church. We have heard about the visible and invisible Church, as if there were two churches. There cannot be two churches, one that is visible and another that is invisible. There is but one Church, and that Church is visible or invisible just according to the eye that is looking, just according to the point of view taken….

There have been two distinct conceptions of the Church: one is the theory that the Church consists of an organized society which God has constituted, that identity consists in its external form as well as in its spirit, and that its life depends upon the continuity of officers from generation to generation. This is held by a great many able men, men of intellect, and by many respectable, level-headed Christians as well.

I hold this to be simply impossible. The marks of the Church are catholicity, apostolicity, infallibility, and purity. Now, apply that to any corporation—to the Church in Jerusalem or to the Church in Antioch; to the Congregational Church, to the Presbyterian, or to the Prelatical Churches. I do not care as to the form; but there never did exist, and there does not now exist, any organized society upon the face of the earth of which these qualities could be predicated. Not one of these societies has apostolicity—that is, precisely the apostolic form as well as the apostolic spirit; not one of these societies has had an absolute organic continuity, or has, without modification, preserved it. Societies, like the Church of Rome, which are most conspicuous in claiming these marks for themselves, are most conspicuously unworthy of them, because there is no comparison between their ritual of service, their organization, and the apostolic Church with which they claim to be identified.

The only possible definition of a Church is that it consists of what is termed “the body of Christ”—that is, human souls regenerated by the presence and power of the Holy Ghost, kept in immediate union with Christ. Of this you can predicate apostostolicity, catholicity, and the sanctifying power and perpetual presence of the Holy Ghost, which belongs to the Church of Christ. This is the true Church, which exists through all the successive generations of men, which is united to Christ, and which shares in the benefits of his redemption through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. This great body is one because the Holy Ghost dwells in it and makes it one. This Church is apostolical, because it is unchanging as to apostolic doctrine; it is catholic, because it contains in one body all of God’s people in all worlds and in all time; it unites all from the creation of the world to the coming of Christ, and all from the coming of Christ to the end of the world in one body—absolutely one, both visible and invisible.…

Now, as to the unity of this Church I have something to say. A great many are agitated at present with regard to Church unity and its manifestations, and I think there is a great deal of confusion of thought as to the original conception of the Church itself. If the Church be an external society, then all deviation from that society is of the nature of schism; but if the Church be in its essence a great spiritual body, constituted by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost through all the ages and nations, uniting all to Christ, and if its external organization is only accidental and temporary, and subject to change and variation, then deviation of organization, unless touched by the spirit of schism, is not detrimental to the Church. I do believe that God’s purpose, on the contrary, has been to differentiate his Church without end. You know that the very highest form of beauty of which you can conceive, the very highest form of order, is multiplicity in unity, and unity in multiplicity; the higher the order of unity, the greater must be the multiplicity.

This is so everywhere. Go to the ocean: every drop of water is the repetition of every other drop, and there is union simply without diversity. Go to the desert of Sahara, and every grain of sand is the duplicate of every other grain of sand; but there is no unity, no life. You could not make a great cathedral by piling up simple identical rhomboids or cubes of stone. It is because you differentiate, and make every stone of a different form in order to perform a different function, and then build them up out of this multitudinous origination into the continuity and unity of the one plan or architectural idea, that you have your cathedral. You could not make a great piece of music simply by multiplying the same tone or sound. In order to obtain the harmony of a great orchestra, you get together a large number of musical instruments, or you have a great number of human voices in a choir, and you combine them; then you have an infinite variety of quality and infinite variety of tone. You combine them in the absolute unit of the one great musical idea which you seek to express.

But if this is true of such things, it is more true of Christ’s Church. If God had followed our idea, how simple a thing it would have been to make a united Church descending from Adam and Eve! We might think that was all that could be done, and there would be then no stones of stumbling. You could then watch this Church, and it would go on indefinitely and without limit.

Now, what has God been doing? He has broken humanity up into infinite varieties. This has been his method. He has been driving it into every clime. He has been driving it into every age through the succession of centuries. He has been moulding human nature under every variety of influences through all time, until he has got men in every age, every tribe, every tongue, every nation, every colour, every fashion—in order to do what? Simply to build up a variety, to build up the rich, inexhaustible variety which constitutes the beauty in unity of this great infinite Church of the first-born, whose final dwelling-place is to be in heaven.

What is "the Church"? Who really understands what "the Church" is?

Elders, Teachers, Chairs, and Thrones: “what they knew, and when they knew it” (Part 1)

George Santayana famously defined a fanatic as “someone who redoubles his zeal whenever he has lost sight of his goal.”

Bryan Cross has published a long article on “The Chair of St. Peter”. In the fashion of a Medieval florilegium [book of sentences], it is thick with early church references to “the Throne of Peter” and “the thrones of the apostles,” etc., as if somehow this amounts to scads and scads of evidence that the papacy is what it says it is. Bryan concludes his article this way:

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. [JB note: but not in the New Testament, not among the Apostles, and no significant mentions of this concept are even evident, much less explicit, until the third 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. Either the Church at Rome almost immediately fell into serious error regarding her own eccesial [sic] 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.

I’ve already written extensively to the effect that the Apostolic Fathers, those writers from, say, 100-150 AD, because of their reliance on “oral tradition,” did in fact begin to lose their understanding of the Gospel of Grace. For example, T. F. Torrance, “The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers” is a major exegetical study of these works, tracing, point-by-point, just how these writers differ from the gospel of Grace as preached by Jesus and Paul:

T.F. Torrance aims in this book to discover how and why there came about in the early history of the Christian Church the enormous difference that exists between the faith of the New Testament and that of the second and third centuries. He explores how the concept of grace is distinctively characteristic of every doctrine of the New Testament, and yet at the same time is the most sensitive to change.

I’d commend this work to you in every way. Keep in mind that this is a major doctrine. Oscar Cullmann describes precisely how this happened:

About the year 150 there is still an oral tradition. We know this from Papias, who wrote an exposition of the words of Jesus. He tells us himself that he used as a basis the viva vox and that he attached more importance to it than to the writings. But in him we have not only this declaration of principle; for he has left us some examples of the oral tradition as he found it, and these examples show us well that we ought to think of an oral tradition about the year 150! It is entirely legendary in character. This is clear from the story that Papias reports about Joseph Barsabbas, the unsuccessful candidate, according to Acts 1:23 f., for the post of twelfth disciple rendered vacant by Judas’s treason. Above all there is the obscene and completely legendary account [in Papias] of death of Judas Iscariot himself.

The period about 150 is, on the one hand, relatively near to the apostolic age, but on the other hand, it is already too far away for the living tradition still to offer in itself the least guarantee of authenticity. The oral traditions which Papias echoes arose in the Church and were transmitted by it. For outside the Church no one had any interest in describing in such crude colours the death of the traitor. Papias was therefore deluding himself when he considered viva vox as more valuable than the written books. The oral tradition had a normative value in the period of the apostles, who were eye-witnesses, but it had it no longer in 150 after passing mouth to mouth (Oscar Cullmann, “The Tradition,” in “The Early Church,” London: SCM Press, Ltd., ©1956, pgs. 88-89).

I’ve written extensively about this process. While the fixing of the canon of the New Testament enabled a writer like Irenaeus (c. 180 ad) to recapture and understand a concept of Grace that earlier writers had lost through a reliance on “oral tradition,” it is vitally important that we understand that some of this “entirely legendary” “oral tradition” did make its way into church organization and church teachings. This is not to say that the entire church became corrupted at that moment. Rather, this process was like yeast getting into the dough (Matt 16:11-12) – it doesn’t corrupt all at once, but the festering situation led to some of the fourth and fifth and sixth century abuses that I’ve written about. And it’s vitally important that Christians understand this progression, because the enemies of Christianity today (scroll down to the “Bart Ehrman” section of this blogpost) certainly have no respect for the truth of Christianity, much less the legends.

In the spirit of “chairs” and “teaching,” and to begin to discuss just how much the meaning of this idea evolved during the early centuries of church history, I’d like to step back for a minute, to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee, to talk about where the notion of “teaching” and “chairs” actually came from:

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down.

The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips.

Understanding the Jewish synagogue system is important, not only for understanding Jesus and his ministry, but also for understanding where Christian worship came from, how it came about, and importantly, where I’d like to focus, on how the leadership structures of early Christianity developed.

People on both sides of the Roman Catholic/Protestant divide will often use the words episkopoi (“overseers”) and presbuteroi (“presbyters”) without understanding that these words had definite meanings when they are used in the New Testament. In fact, it’s remarkable how much Christianity owes, in form and function, to the Jewish synagogue.

Jesus is a pious Jew, who attends synagogue regularly. On this occasion, Jesus goes to the synagogue as was his habit on the Sabbath. This point is especially important, because Jesus’ controversy with the Jewish religious leadership may have left him with a reputation of being a religiously insensitive rebel. In fact, many of the six Sabbath passages in Luke end up in some controversy. Jesus may be pious, but the character of his piety is different from that of the Jewish leadership. On the Sabbath, Jesus will heal, meet people’s needs, and instruct them. The synagogue as a center of Jesus’ activity parallels the church’s activity around the synagogue or temple (Acts 3-4; 13). Christianity did not attempt immediately to isolate itself from Judaism. Rather, it saw itself as the natural fulfillment of Judaism’s hope. So a part of its mission was to call Jews to enter the time of fulfillment. (Darrell L. Bock, “Luke, 1:1-9:50”, “Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament”, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, © 1994, pgs. 402-403.)

I’m amazed at just how much time, in some of the newer histories of the New Testament, is spent on “the Jewish background.” F.F. Bruce’s “New Testament History (New York: Doubleday, © 1969) for example, devotes 150 pages of a 400 page book to such topics encompassing “Judeaea under Roman Governors”, “Philosophical Schools”, “Hasidism, Pharisees and Sadducees”, “Essenes”, “Zealots”, “The Qumran Community”, and “Judaism at the Beginning of the Christian Era,” before beginning with John the Baptist.
Bock Continues:

A synagogue service had various elements: recitation of the Shema (Deut 6:4-9), prayers, a reading from the Law, a reading from the Prophets, instruction on the passages, and a benediction.

The exact nature of the synagogue service—including how fixed it was in this period—has been the subject of discussion. Though some speak of a fixed cycle of readings every three years, such a schedule in this period seems unlikely. The Hebrew Scripture would be read in a standing position in one- to three-verse units. The text was translated into Aramaic, the local language, an oral procedure that often involved targumic renderings of the text (i.e., Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew OT), though the translator did not read from a text in the assembly. The Torah was always read, and often a reading from the Prophets followed. After the reading came an invitation for someone to instruct the audience. Based on texts already read or on new texts, this instruction could be done by any qualified male in the audience, provided ten males were present. Jesus stood up apparently to indicate that he could speak about a passage. Jesus gave such a lesson from the prophets, what was called the Haftarah (a reading from the Prophets).

Jesus takes the scroll and unrolls it to the place from which he will give instruction. It seems that Jesus chose the reading from the Prophets and “found” the place in Isaiah from which he wanted to teach. If the text was part of a fixed reading schedule, then the scroll would have been opened at the appropriate place. This detail suggests that a reading schedule was not used, but that Jesus chose his text (Bock, 403-404).

* * *

The drama intensifies now that the eschatological passage has been read, but its exposition remains. The scroll is rolled up and returned to the attendant, who is responsible for getting and returning the scroll to the ark where it is kept. In all probability he is the hazzan of the synagogue. Jesus then sits down to teach. Teaching in a sitting position was customary (Luke 5:3; Matt 5:1; 23:2; 26:55; Mark 4:1 …). As he prepared to speak, Jesus had the crowd’s attention. The common Lucan term (atenizontes) depicts intense, focused emotion by describing the crowd’s gaze of attention. (Bock, 411).

For more on the evolution of the early papacy and the introduction of forgery by popes to enhance their own stature, see my earlier series of posts on “The See of Peter”.

“The only relevant question … is whether certain claims are true …”

Keith Mathison responds to Bryan Cross at Turretinfan’s blog.

Turretinfan Puts Holes in the Argumentation of Roman Catholics and Bryan Cross’ article at “Called to Communion”. (Part 2)

In the combox, # 441 – at “Called to Communion” -

http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/11/solo-scriptura-sola-scriptura-and-the-question-of-interpretive-authority/comment-page-9/#comment-5307

Bryan Cross responded to Turretinfan's excellent questioning and it is here where Bryan became more explicit in his "organic natural necessity" of ideas argument.

Bryan wrote:

. . .
One of those other kinds of necessity is called ‘natural necessity’ (necessitas naturalis). For example, that an acorn becomes an oak tree is not a logical necessity, but it is a natural necessity, even though many contingencies could prevent this particular acorn from becoming an oak tree. Given the ordinary conditions, the acorn would naturally become an oak tree. That is the natural end of an acorn, given its nature, and it will necessarily move toward that end, unless other factors interfere. (In that respect, the result does not follow in just the same way a conclusion follows by necessity from premises in a deductive argument.) So likewise, the results of sola/solo (described by Mathison) follow from it over time by natural necessity, because of what it is by nature (i.e. each individual retaining ultimate interpretive authority).

Turretinfan's excellent questioning exposed this hole in Bryan Cross’ argument.

In Part 1, we saw that ideas do not spawn other ideas as a natural organic necessity, as in a seed growing into a plant or an acorn growing into a tree, or a fertilized egg growing into a baby in the womb. We are not saying that ideas or philosophies or doctrines do not have consequences in actions and affects; obviously ideas have consequences, and the evil philosophies have produced evil actions. But Bryan Cross was arguing that the idea of Sola Scriptura was a seed that of natural necessity produced increased levels of Solo Scriptura as time goes on; or “that it is more and more manifested as time goes on”. He leaves out the facts of :
1. The analogy is hard to prove that ideas produce something by nature necessarily from their essence as if they were DNA or organic material.
2. Other Sociological/political/cultural factors in history. (see below)
3. The free choices of people – whatever one’s view is – the Augustinian/Luther/Calvin/Edwards view that men are free to act without coercion from the outside according to their desires, but those desires are in bondage to sinful motives, always tainted by sin in some way until God frees the will in regeneration. (John 8:34; John 1:13; 3:1-8; 6:44; Acts 16:14; Ephesians 2:1-4) The other view is the Libertarian free will view; that man has the moral ability to choose good over evil, even without the special grace of regeneration. Whatever one’s view is, the article is still leaving out that factor. The Reformation was a reaction against Sola Ecclesia and the false doctrines of indulgences and the lack of basing teachings and practices on the Scriptures, and the neglect and eclipse of the doctrine of justification by faith alone in Romans and Galatians. By Cross’ reasoning, one could argue that the Reformation and Sola Scriptura came naturally and organically from Sola Ecclesia and Apostolic Succession, but this is not true. A reaction to a philosophy or idea is not the natural consequences in the sense of organic material like a seed or fertilized egg, but it is a consequence in the sense of historical reality and fact. It was a reaction against the Roman Catholic Church; and mere fact and reality of history.
2. Other Sociological/political/cultural factors in history. Solo Scriptura has increased because of the increase of other factors, (not organically or naturally from Sola Scriptura); but mostly from the political freedoms (separation of church and state), increased affluence and literacy, the collapse of the feudal system; the collapse of the states unified with the Pope and the founding of separate political countries in Europe, etc.
Turretinfan writes:

“Calling solo scriptura the "true nature"[Fn9] of sola scriptura in the sense of being the practical outworking of it, runs into the problems above. To the extent that people accept "free will" it is tough to ascribe the outworking to the ideology apart from the people. The revitalization of sola scriptura during the time of the Reformation [Fn10] was also accompanied by a number of other sociological factors and the rise of a number of ideologies (such as views on personal liberty and equality) and influences (increased affluence and literacy) that are hard to link to specific causes.

. . . The combination of a collapse of feudalism in favor of more democratic forms of government, together with a rise in literacy, can at least intuitively explain a general increase both in lack of respect for authority (both civil and ecclesial) and an increase in confidence in one's own abilities (if one is an illiterate serf one may not feel as qualified to interpret Scripture as if one is a merchant who can read and write in three languages).

In fact, while it is difficult to attribute weight to various forces, those forces on their face have more explanatory power with respect to the changes seen in the Reformation and post-Reformation period in terms of attitude toward authority than does sola scriptura, as such - since sola scriptura has to do with infallible authority, not authority in general.

In summary, Turretinfan writes:

The assertion that solo scriptura proceeds by natural necessity from sola scriptura hasn't been established but merely asserted. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate nature necessity with respect to an ideology, particularly because it involves mixing human beings and the ideas.

The alleged consequences don't actually seem to be tied to sola scriptura in any concrete way. In fact, it seems that to tie the consequences to sola scriptura the deck must be stacked against sola scriptura by creating a multi-church abstraction to compare to a single church. Similarly, the arguments presented to deny that the creeds (or whatever) have any real authority are demonstrably wrong in that they would imply that any subordinate authority is not a real authority.

With respect, most of the criticisms of the article seem to be missed, such as the criticism that the article fails to address the trade-offs of the Roman Catholic system. The cost of avoiding anarchy to Hobbes was tyranny. He thought it was worth it, but most folks today disagree. At any rate, one must at least consider the trade-offs before one can conclude in favor of an alternative.”