THE ROOTS OF THE REFORMATION (Part 5/5)

This book is a large part of "One and Holy," a translation of "Una Sancta in katholischer Sicht," published by Patmos-Verlag, Dusseldorf.

WE CAN only speak in the full sense of unity in the Church if she stands upon one rock in submission to one shepherd. In the light of the development of the Western Church, this rock and this shepherd can only be the Bishop of Rome, whose See was hailed in the earliest Christian times as the cathedra Petri. Even distinguished Protestant historians like Salin and Kaspar do not attempt to deny that belief in the primacy, if not the doctrine of the primacy, goes back to the earliest Christian ages for which we have any evidence. The root of this belief is ultimately to be found in the early Christian view of the Church, in the conviction of the faithful that it was not they themselves, not their own Christian conscience nor their own interpretation of the Bible, but the authority of the Church alone that decided the question of salvation.

We have already pointed out that the first Christian communities were not founded by the written word but by the living teaching of the Apostles and their disciples, and that Christianity was already alive and flourishing before any Epistle or Gospel was written. From the beginning it was the oral teaching of the Apostles, not its crystallization in the Bible, which guaranteed the truth and clarity of the revelation.

From the literary point or view the Bible is a chance collection of missionary writings, inspired indeed by the Holy Ghost, but a chance collection nevertheless. It does not give a general view of revealed truths, a Summa sacrae doctrinae in the scholastic sense. Only in the Epistles to the Romans, the Ephesians and the Hebrews do we find a comprehensive development of ideas. But not even these Epistles give the whole of the Christian Gospel. Several of the apostolic letters have been lost, so that we have, for example, almost no information about the first eleven years of Paul's missionary activity.

The whole of revelation, the legacy of faith (depositum fidei), was entrusted from the beginning not to literary chance but to the personal responsibility of the Apostles and their successors. "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust," Paul exhorts his pupil (I Tim. vi. 20). When the Gnostics appealed to mutilated or invented written texts, the decision against them did not come from Holy Writ but from the "rule of faith" (regula fidei), that is from the living, believing consciousness of the Church as preserved and transmitted by the bishops. Luther's exclusive esteem and reverence for Holy Writ is in contradiction with the facts of history. From the beginning we find, welling up between Christ and the Scriptures, the living teaching of the Church, guarding and explaining the truth. Through every gap and rift in the Biblical message gleam the clear waters of the stream of tradition, coursing through the Christian communities, guided and preserved by the bishops.

It is indeed Christ-alone from whom all the Church's teaching proceeds and to whom it all points. Christianity is Christ. The teaching authority of the Church can do no more than draw on the riches of Christ. The Church has only to testify to the Lord's truth, not to create it. She is not herself the Light but is to give testimony of the Light. The Church's teaching activity is thus not creative. She generates no new truths of herself. She only takes the old truths, objectively given in Christ's revelation (explicitly or at the least in germ), and brings them into the subjective consciousness of the faithful.

We have arrived here at something essential which differentiates the Catholic from the Lutheran concept of the Church, and which provides the ultimate basis for the exclusiveness of the Catholic Church, her claim to be the one means of salvation. The believing Lutheran also recognizes that he is bound to his Church's confession of faith, to the ancient Christian creeds, to the Confession of Augsburg, perhaps to Luther's "Schmalkald Articles" and to the formula of 1580. But there is nothing absolute about this tie: the believing Lutheran does not simply and directly hear the word of Christ in the teaching of his Church.

It is truer to say that he does without the formularies of his Church in his own experience of Christ, when he encounters Him in his own conscience. And in so far as this experience of Christ in each separate believer necessarily remains dominated by subjective impressions, it is in the last analysis the individual conscience that determines the form and colour of each man's Christianity. His religious life does indeed gain something from this subjectivity--an interior dynamism, pressure and intensity, on the other hand, it lacks any ultimate assurance, any unconditional guarantee that it is really Christ and His Truth to whom the believer has given himself.

It is a quite different matter with the certainty of the believing Catholic. He is unconditionally bound to the teaching of the Church, because he is penetrated with the certainty that in the teaching of the Church he hears the word of Christ. He thus identifies the Church's message with the Gospel of our Lord. However humanly inadequate, however conditioned by the times the formularies of the Church's teaching may be, they are yet for the Catholic conscience, in their deepest content, in their substance, brought out from the treasure of Christ.

In the strict sense this applies only to those truths which the Church expressly proclaims as truths of revelation. In the strict sense, then, it applies only to the realm of the Church's dogmas. But in so far as these dogmas do not exist in intellectual isolation but are connected both with each other and with truths in the natural order, the light of faith shines also upon their whole logical and historical context, and guarantees its certainty with varying degrees of intensity and logical strength according to the degree with which it is bound up with the dogmas themselves.

The other truths of faith which have been formulated in the course of centuries by the Church, though not clearly expressed in the Bible, are all contained at least in germ (implicite) in a revealed truth already clearly held and proclaimed by the teaching Church. They can all be shown to stand in an essential relationship to the Church's original, central dogma concerning Jesus the Christ. They have all, therefore, their assured place in the Christian message. They all had and have a salutary and creative effect upon the whole Christian body. They are all charged to-day with the devotion, the reverence and the atmosphere of living Christian faith. And we know that what lies behind all these dogmas is not the caprice of emotional piety nor mere historical chance but the clear teaching intention of the Church and behind her the message of Christ bearing testimony of Himself in her teaching.

We have come back to our starting point. We pointed out that the special character of the Catholic concept of the Church and the content of the Catholic faith lay in the identification of the Church's authority with the authority of Christ. The Church does not receive this authority indirectly, as though from the faith of the Christian communities honouring their Church as the teacher and witness of that faith. Before there were any communities with personal faith, and independently of them, when Christ founded His Church upon Peter, He constituted in Peter and with Peter the fullness of His own Messianic power. The Catholic sees in the office of teacher, priest and shepherd built upon Peter the continuation through the centuries of the Messianic authority of Christ Himself.

We must realize that, according to the testimony of the earliest sources, Christ did not attach this Messianic authority simply to the personal "pneuma" of His disciples, to their abundance of the Spirit. They were not His Apostles simply by virtue of being His disciples. For this they needed a special commission from our Lord. "As the Father hath sent me, I also send you" (John xx. 21). This commission was given in the solemn act by which our Lord chose twelve from the multitude of His disciples to be His Apostles, exactly twelve, no more and no less, who were to transmit His Gospel to the twelve tribes of Israel.

Thus our Lord organized the first Christian mission by the special call of the Twelve, the establishment of the college of Apostles. This college of Apostles is so much the one and only organ of the full powers of Christ that after Judas' suicide the election of Matthias had to take place to fill up the number of the Twelve. The fact that within this college, as we are shown in the Acts of the Apostles, Simon the son of John occupied a supereminent position, and that even in the Pauline communities he was referred to simply as "Rock", is not due to his personal qualities, to the strength of his faith, for instance, but again to a particular, explicit call by our Lord, which took place, as a consequence of the strength of his faith, in that solemn act at Caesarea Philippi (Matt. xvi. 18).

The very first Christian mission, the first preaching to the Jews, was not only a matter of the outpouring of the Spirit but of institutional means established by our Lord Himself--the college of the Twelve and the office of Rock. And, in the same way, later on it was not simply to all Christians filled with the Spirit of the Lord, to all the men of the new faith and love, that the office of preaching the Gospel fell. On the contrary, unless an extraordinary charismatic gift gave evidence of their prophetic vocation, they must first receive the laying on of hands from the Apostles. It was only by this laying on of hands that they were numbered among the appointed witnesses of Christ (cf. Acts vi. 6; xiii. 3, etc.).

Thus from the beginning the spiritual basis of Christianity, its striving for the fullness of the spirit and interior perfection, was bound up with an institutional element, the connection of the plenitude of apostolic power with an impersonal super-personal act, the laying on of hands. This turns our attention away from the Self, from the personal qualities of the believer, and directs them to the authority of Christ, who alone sends labourers into the vineyard and from whom alone comes all redemption. What was later called the mission of the Church (missio canonica) was from the very beginning an essential element in the Christian message. "How shall they preach unless they be sent?" (Rom. x. 15). Only by the form of the laying on of hands did the believing Christian become a missionary, a witness of the word, a steward of the mysteries. He bears the full powers of Christ, but not so as to be in any sense autonomous and dependent on himself. He is in no sense the creative cause of our salvation, but only, as theology expresses it, the "instrumental cause" (causa instrumentalis) and visible tool chosen by the Lord of the Church, with which He, our divine human Redeemer, invisibly communicates to the faithful the salvation which proceeds from the Trinity. The laying on of hands simply but effectively expressed the fact that the missionary had his place within the whole mission of Christ and partook of His powers. By this means he entered the "apostolic succession", entered into physical and historical contact with the first disciples and with Christ Himself, from whom every mission proceeds and who alone is its meaning and its object.

It is thus with reverent pride that the Catholic looks back on the long line of his bishops, for he knows that there is not one among them who could not historically show that he had been received into that apostolic lineage and so had entered into direct contact with Christ Himself. It is this apostolic succession of his bishops which guarantees to him that the stream of Christian tradition which brought forth and sustains the Bible is no wild torrent to break its banks and mingle with alien currents but that it was received at the beginning and conducted on its way by a strictly constituted channel, the unbroken unity of this same apostolic succession, leading straight back to Christ and guaranteeing the purity of the tradition received from Him.

Seen thus from within, the Church is primarily an institution for salvation. She is not simply a community of salvation, a community, that is, which receives in faith the salvation of Christ and carries it out in herself. It is she who gives this salvation and makes the faithful members of Christ. Thus she stands not only in a passive but also in an active relationship to Christ and the salvation He gives--always of course only as instrumental cause, as the visible earthly tool with which the Lord of the Church, who won her by His Blood, pours the treasures of grace and love proceeding from the Trinity into the body of the Church.

It is only because the Church is in this sense an institution for salvation that she can at the same time be a community of salvation. Her institutional, impersonal office constantly merges into the personal, the establishment of the Kingdom of God in the hearts of the faithful. The official side of the Church is never an end in itself, never self-idolatry, but always only a means and a ministry, a ministry to immortal souls. Simply because the Catholic sees in the Church's activity not the Church alone but ultimately Christ Himself at work, still teaching, still giving grace, still governing, his relationship to the official Church is a living religious thing, saturated with the same faith and the same love which he gives to Christ. What Eucken said of St. Augustine's concept of the Church is still true to-day of the life and experience of the Catholic: "All authority and every development of ecclesiastical power is sustained and embraced in intense personal living. The person in his direct relationship with God remains the animating spirit of the whole. Out from this life with God and into the order of the Church flows a constant stream of power, warmth and fervour which keeps it from sinking into a soulless automatism of ceremonial practice and activism. It is not the brute force of authority working by the sheer weight of its mere existence; there is an inner necessity insisting upon authority and sustaining it. It is chiefly out of these deep wells of life that the Church draws the immense power over consciences which she exercises down to this present day." ("Die Lebensansehauungen der grossen Denker," 9th ed., p. 241.)

Catholicism means the closest possible fusion of the institutional and the personal, objective and subjective, office and spirit. And it is contrary to the essence of Catholicism when either of the two elements, whether the institutional or the personal, becomes exaggerated. In the balance of the two, in their organic relationship and interpenetration, lie the strength and life of the Catholic Church.

We must speak in more detail of this fundamental character of Catholicism if what follows is to be intelligible. The Catholic Church lives and breathes in the consciousness that by her apostolic succession founded upon Peter she stands in that stream of tradition which leads straight from Christ through the Apostles down to the present day. With this before her eyes she knows herself as divine tradition incarnate, as the visible embodiment of those powers of our Lord's Resurrection which are forever penetrating the world whether they were set down by the finger of God in Holy Writ or not. The Church has no need of witnesses. She witnesses to herself by the "divine tradition" in which she stands and by which she lives, indeed which she is.

Because of the way in which the message of Christ is thus united with her own tradition, the Catholic Church feels and knows herself as the Church of Christ in the emphatic, exclusive sense: as the visible revelation in space and time of the redemptive powers which proceed from Christ her Head, as the Body of Christ, as the one means of salvation. Because she is aware of this she is bound to condemn all other churches which have arisen or may arise--in so far as they are churches, i.e., sociological phenomena, and not merely a group of believers--as extra-Christian and indeed un-Christian and anti-Christian creations. To admit even the possibility that the final union of Christendom could take place other than in her and through her would be a denial and betrayal of her most precious knowledge that she is Christ's own Church. For her there is only one true union, reunion with herself.

For the Catholic the immediate object of all effort at reunion can only be that each according to his powers should help to remove the obstacles which are keeping those who do not believe in her from the Mother Church.

For these obstacles are his responsibility as well. It is not as though it were only the non-Catholic Christian who was the guilty party while the Catholic could think of himself as completely innocent and magnanimously proffering forgiveness. We made ourselves clear in our first section: both are at fault, and this fault extends to Rome itself.

Pope Adrian VI made public confession of this through his legate Chieregato before the German Princes assembled at the Reichstag at Nuremberg on the 3rd January 1523: "We freely acknowledge that God has allowed this chastisement to come upon His Church because of the sins of men and especially because of the sins of priests and prelates.... We know well that for many years much that must be regarded with horror has come to pass in this Holy See: abuses in spiritual matters, transgressions against the Commandments; indeed, that everything has been gravely perverted." And therefore he authorizes his legate to promise that "we will take all pains to reform, in the first place, the court of Rome, from which perhaps all these evils take their origin". When therefore the Holy See regards as one of its gravest and most urgent tasks the restoration of unity to Christendom--not only with the Orthodox Churches, which already have the essentials of dogma, cult and organization in common with it, but also with the Protestant communions--it is thereby fulfilling not only the duty of the Good Shepherd setting out in pursuit of the lost sheep but also the special duty of common penance and expiation.

I do have to take issue with several points in Adam's account, though in general I think it summarizes well the evidence. Adam was writing before Wicks's research, before a further development of the "Lortz school's" honest recognition of the serious abuses at the time of the Reformation. Lortz was the one who said, "yes, the Church was in terrible need of reform but Luther was tainted, predisposed to go off the rails because of the evil influence of heretical Ockhamism and because of his psychological, temperamental flaws. There is truth to all of this. But Adam, following Lortz, is writing out of the "beautiful medieval Thomist synthesis ruined by Ockham" assumption that dominated Catholics ever since the Thomist approach became enshrined as virtually the only Catholic approach in the neo-Thomist revival. On this point we need to listen to Benedict XVI (who knows Luther's writings in and out and was involved in all the debates surrounding the Lortz school) who says that, as wonderful as Thomas's synthesis is, it needs to be complemented by Augustine, Bonaventure etc. Even Scotus has a lot to offer. John Paul II was very careful not to elevate Thomism as the only Catholic philosophy in Fides et Ratio.

That's the background for my critique: Adam's account is good but reflects a bit too much of that idealized vision of medieval Catholic theology.

Specifically, the places I disagree with Adam are:

1. He is wrong to place the beginning of the overweening poltical claims of the papacy with Gregory VII. The Dictatus papae have been the subject of great controversy among historians. Brian Tierney edited a source collection on church and state in this period (published by Heath Publishing, Lexington, Mass., about 1975) that gathers the rival opinions. The most recent exhaustive treatment of Gregory VII, by an Anglican, John E. H. Cowdrey (the initials may not be correct), Gregory VII summarizes recent scholarship. We simply do not know what the dictatus papae were. They are not known ever to have been promulgated. Some think they represent an internal memorandum but we don't know for sure by whom or for whom. Nowhere else does Gregory VII make such sweeping claims for temporal authority on the part of the pope, which is why the DP have always stuck out as rather odd and hard to reconcile with the rest of the Gregorian Reform. Adam takes them as his touchstone, which is not wise. If you set aside the DP, the Gregorian Reform claims spiritual authority and spiritual power over temporal rulers because the temporal rulers are Christians and as chief pastor the pope will some day answer for their souls to God, but the Gregorian reformers did not, except in the DP, claim the power over temporal government and, even the DP do not claim direct papal power over temporal affairs, so Adam's use of the term "directly" is misleading even for the DP. But the DP really can't be used to base any conclusions on.

Certainly the Gregorian reformers, outside the DP, did claim authority to depose rulers, but only under very limited circumstances and in keeping with their role as chief pastors. Perhaps that's all Adam meant by his opening paragraphs and, if so, fine.

Therefore, in my view, not until Boniface VIII did the popes claim more than simply a last resort ability to depose rulers for the sake of their souls and claim the right to interfere more thoroughly in temporal government. Some might say that Innocent III made such claims and I am willing to be convinced that he did, but I as of yet am not so convinced by the arguments for that claim.

Thus, the direct background of abuses that led to the Reformation began ca. 1300, in my view, not in the 1080s or in the 1200s. That's my first point--Adam faults developments in the high medieval Church that I think were, considering the violent efforts by kings of the time to control the Church, not only legitimate but necessary. In contrast, the abuses of the 1300s begin with poorly stated but in some ways legitimate or at least understandable claims and then, what really screwed things up, the success of the French kings at actually controlling the popes during the 1300s, which led to schism etc. Even there, I would caution against exaggerating. Although under French dominance, the Avignon papacy was not all bad, was not merely corrupt, did some really positive things in governing the Church and resisting the kings. Still, it was a bad development.

2. Adam dates Luther's tower experience to 1512. I don't think any respectable Luther scholar, protestant or catholic, would agree with that today. The consensus is strongly in favor of 1518 or thereabouts. I don't think corruption by Ockhamism as early as 1512 explains Luther very well. Again, I base this on Wicks's Luther: Yearning for Grace (that may not be the precise title; I posted it in response to one of Harley's Reformation articles earlier this morning). Luther's theology of grace up to 1518 or 1520 is really quite Catholic. He has not yet fallen into the errors on justification that characterize his later writings. 3. Adam, in my view, relies too heavily on psychologizing Luther. This is always risky with characters from the past--a therapist today at best struggles really to get into the mind and psyche of a client he can talk to and ask questions of. When dealing with dead people, people one cannot question and listen to responses from, one has to be careful about making assessments of their state of mind. I do believe Luther had some "issues"--as I stated in earlier postings. He probably did not properly discern his monastic vocation. That may be his fault--people may have given him good counsel against it and he ignored it, or he may have been given bad counsel, or he may not have sought out much counsel--but exactly how it happened, I think a poorly discerned vocation to monastic (mendicant, friar's) life may be the biggest single biggest problem in his personal life, more so than conflict with his father (Erik Erikson--who makes some good points but overinterprets his evidence and has no knowledge of how monastic vocations are well or badly discerned).

I don't doubt that Luther was prone to rash judgments and lived with neuroses of insecurity and suffered from scruples (there's evidence today that scruples actually has pyschiatric basis). And post-1518 I think these "personal issues" served as catalysts for bad theological judgments Luther made that led him into total opposition to the papacy and into heresy. I just don't think these "issues" wreaked so much havoc so early as 1512 and thus don't carry as much explanatory weight as Adam gives them.

But these are all relatively minor points. Overall, Adam's assessment of the roots of the Reformation is a solid one and deserves a good hearing.

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THE ROOTS OF THE REFORMATION (Part 5)

BY KARL ADAM

CONTENTS