Posted on 01/17/2006 6:56:20 AM PST by HarleyD
Dahleide, I won't deny you your righteous anger at my judgment of Martin Luther's theonomic excesses. I admit your charge that it is comparatively easy for me, at a distance of 500 years, to "sit in my comfy chair sans the trials of that period & judge a brother".
I freely admit that Luther faced far greater trials than I have ever faced, probably ever will, and likewise any of the GRPL.
My view is just an objective observation from history, nothing more. In Retrospect, and in Principle, I simply believe that John Calvin's advocacy of a Republican form of Church Government was ultimately better and more Biblical than Luther's monarchism or Cromwell's independency, and this is proven in its ultimate Fruits (the Romanists can bring their slanders against Luther for the crushing of the Peasant's Revolt and against Cromwell for his crushing of the Irish Revolt, but what charge can they lay against the Theonomy of Calvin -- that he inspired the American Constitution? They won't get very far with that line of attack).
That is my view, and I hold to it... admittedly in my comfy chair, and at a distance of 500 years.
Is this "unfair" to Luther as a mortal human being, who was doing the best he could with the gifts God gave him under unimaginable difficulties? Perhaps so. But if "hindsight is 20/20", then we'd be fools not to use hindsight. And, in hindsight, I think that Calvin's theonomy is better than Luther's. That's my view, and I'm sticking to it.
Now, if you think that I have unfairly maligned Luther as a Person or as a Pastor, then I will apologize for doing so and recant if I have done so. I can only assure you that such was not my intent. However, and specifically, in considering their respective Theonomy, I believe that John Calvin's theonomy was a better Model for the Reformation than was Luther's, was more Biblical, and has borne better Fruit.
That's one OPie's opinion.
Best, OP
But... in order to have a Loyal Servant exhorting the Conqueror to restraint and humility, you first had to have a general who would enter the field of battle and gain a Victory!
...Firmilian's rhetoric is an early example of a sedevacantist argument. The very fact that the argument is made points to the reality of the institution of papacy, today, and in the 3rd century.
It seems to me that this is to assume the very thing in question; namely, was there any such thing as a bishop of bishops in the early church? What else can explain an interpretation of what was (to my knowledge) the very first recorded instance of a heretofore unheard-of demand by a Roman bishop that bishops of other Sees submit to his decrees, a claim that is excoriated to the point of ridicule, repudiated by the Eastern church, 86 bishops of the African churches, and the churches in Asia Minor as sedevacantist evidence of a papacy?
...he does so, interestingly, by disputing the validity of Pope Stephen's succession to the throne of Peter. He is not calling into question the institution of papacy at all.
Again, this is to assume the very thing in question, that is, that one particular bishop holds a position of authority over other bishops as head of the universal Church. Firmillian does not dispute Stephen's "succession to the throne of Peter" at all, because as the bishop of Rome he had that jurisdiction. However, since all Sees were viewed as possessing the throne of Peter, it is clear that he was repudiating Stephen's demand of obedience from his fellow bishops.
Cyprian, in a clear reference to Stephen, says in his opening remarks at The Seventh Council of Carthage,
...It remains, that upon this same matter each of us should bring forward what we think, judging no man, nor rejecting any one from the right of communion, if he should think differently from us. For neither does any of us set himself up as a bishop of bishops, 3 nor by tyrannical terror does any compel his colleague to the necessity of obedience; since every bishop, according to the allowance of his liberty and power, has his own proper right of judgment, and can no more be judged by another than he himself can judge another. 4 But let us all wait for the judgment of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the only one that has the power both of preferring us in the government of His Church, and of judging us in our conduct there.
http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-05/anf05-124.htm
Cordially,
That explains it :^(
Cordially,
Me either .
It is indeed easy to sit back and assess the perceived failures and error of men like Luther and Calvin from a comfortable chair that has the advantage of seeing the broad landscape they could not.
The arrogance of one, that says he follows the magistrates teachings and reads his scripture through the eyes of the likes of Aquinas, to find error in the man that showed the apostasy of that very legion of people simply shows what real ignorance held in pride looks like.Those that will compromise the reformation to achieve peace or to make themselves look like they have spiritual understanding of what they are intellectually studying is sad.
Luther had an imperfect understanding of the perfect as do each of us. I pray that God give us the courage, the intensity and the wisdom to do as he did in the midst of his enemies and say "here I stand".
Firmilian, and other bishops may be disputing the institution of the papacy, but the very fact that they were doing it means that there was someone else who asserted it.
Cyprian's comment about the equality of bishops needs to be seen in the context of this quote:
4. If any one consider and examine these things, there is no need for lengthened discussion and arguments. There is easy proof for faith in a short summary of the truth. The Lord speaks to Peter,10 saying, "I say unto thee, that thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."11 And again to the same He says, after His resurrection, "Feed nay sheep."12 And although to all the apostles, after His resurrection, He gives an equal power, and says, "As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you: Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they shall be remitted unto him; and whose soever sins ye retain, they shall be retained; "13 yet, that He might set forth unity, He arranged by His authority the origin of that unity, as beginning from one. Assuredly the rest of the apostles were also the same as was Peter, endowed with a like partnership both of honour and power; but the beginning proceeds from unity.14 Which one Church, also, the Holy Spirit in the Song of Songs designated in the person of our Lord, and says, "My dove, my spotless one, is but one. She is the only one of her mother, elect of her that bare her."15 Does he who does not hold this unity of the Church think that he holds the faith? Does he who strives against and resists the Church16 trust that he is in the Church, when moreover the blessed Apostle Paul teaches the same thing, and sets forth the sacrament of unity, saying, "There is one body and one spirit, one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God? "17Treatise I. On the Unity of the Church
More quotes from Cyprian are at St. Cyprian on the Church and the Papacy, for example,
With a false bishop appointed for themselves by heretics, they dare even to set sail and carry letters from schismatics and blasphemers to the chair of Peter and to the principal Church [at Rome], in which sacerdotal unity has its source; nor did they take thought that these are Romans, whose faith was praised by the preaching Apostle, and among whom it is not possible for perfidy to have entrance.(Letter 55)
Your reply was gracious; more civil than some words & phrases used in my post.
My anger was based on specific words used in posts leading to my #277. I join you & plead for unity when essential doctrine permits, as I believe it does here; but those words which were objectionable to me fell short of our desired goal. Plus, & more importantly, they give, if I may use a military term, aid & comfort to the enemy; that, even to the enemy within, my old Adamic nature
Peace & to God be the glory as we look upon the face of Jesus.
That some sort of papal organizational, administrative, or legal bond among the churches could be derived, extrapolted from, or read into the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians is astounding to me. Unlike Stephen, Clement made no demand in his own name as the personal, exclusive successor of Peter based on his interpretation of Mathew 16:18,19 in the way that Stephen did. Stephen was the first to do so, not Clement.
When because of its prestige the church at Rome was asked for its view or advice in the solution of the Corinthian problem Clement replied not in his own name as a Pope of today would do, but in the name of his church. It begins, "The Church of God which is in Rome, to the Church of God which is in Corinth", and remains collective throughout. By my count, in the letter there are twenty nine citatations to the authority of Scripture and exactly zero to Clement's personal authority. What other ecclesiology can be derived from the letter expressly mitigates against a papal ecclesiology because in 44:3, the congregations had to give their approval in the appointment of prebyters:
1Clem 44:1 And our Apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife over the name of the bishop's office.
1Clem 44:2 For this cause therefore, having received complete foreknowledge, they appointed the aforesaid persons, and afterwards they provided a continuance, that if these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed to their ministration. Those therefore who were appointed by them, or afterward by other men of repute with the consent of the whole Church, and have ministered unblamably to the flock of Christ in lowliness of mind, peacefully and with all modesty, and for long time have borne a good report with all these men we consider to be unjustly thrust out from their ministration.
1Clem 44:3 For it will be no light sin for us, if we thrust out those who have offered the gifts of the bishop's office unblamably and holily.
1Clem 44:4 Blessed are those presbyters who have gone before, seeing that their departure was fruitful and ripe: for they have no fear lest any one should remove them from their appointed place.
1Clem 44:5 For we see that ye have displaced certain persons, though they were living honorably, from the ministration which had been respected by them blamelessly.
1Clem 45:1 Be ye contentious, brethren, and jealous about the things that pertain unto salvation.
1Clem 45:2 Ye have searched the scriptures, which are true, which were given through the Holy Ghost;
1Clem 45:3 and ye know that nothing unrighteous or counterfeit is written in them. Ye will not find that righteous persons have been thrust out by holy men.
Firmilian, and other bishops may be disputing the institution of the papacy, but the very fact that they were doing it means that there was someone else who asserted it.
Without a doubt, but the breadth and severity of their outrage indicates the novelty of Stephen's interpretation of Matthew 16:18,19. It was an innovation to them, one not based on Apostolic tradition.
Stephen had condemned Cyprian as ‘false Christ, false apostle, and practicer of deceit,’ because he advocated re–baptism; and the Bishop of Carthage reciprocated in kind. Since the headship which Stephen claimed was unwarranted, by the example of St. Peter, he could not force his brethren to accept his views. Even worse, his judgment opposed the authentic tradition of the Church. The bishop of Rome, wrote Cyprian, had confounded human tradition and divine precepts; he insisted on a practice which was mere custom, and ‘custom without truth is the antiquity of error.’ Whence came the ‘tradition’ on which Stephen insisted? Cyprian answered that it came from human presumption. Subverting the Church from within, Stephen wished the Church to follow the practices of heretics by accepting their baptisms, and to hold that those who were not born in the Church could be sons of God. And finally, Cyprian urged that bishops (Stephen was meant) lay aside the love of presumption and obstinacy which had led them to prefer custom to tradition and, abandoning their evil and false arguments, return to the divine precepts, to evangelical and apostolic tradition, whence arose their order and their very origin.
In a letter to Cyprian, Firmilian endorsed everything the bishop of Carthage had said and added a few strokes of his own...Recalling the earlier dispute about the date of Easter, he upheld the practice of Asia Minor by commenting that, in the celebration of Easter and in many other matters, the Romans did not observe the practices established in the age of the Apostles, though they vainly claimed apostolic authority for their aberrant forms. The decree of Stephen was the most recent instance of such audacity, an instance so grave that Firmilian ranked Stephen among heretics and blasphemers and compared his doctrines and discipline with the perfidy of Judas. The Apostles did not command as Stephen commanded, Firmilian wrote, nor did Christ establish the primacy which he claimed...To the Roman custom, Firmilian, like Cyprian, opposed the custom of truth, ‘holding from the beginning that which was delivered by Christ and the Apostles.’ And, Firmilian argued, by his violence and obstinacy, Stephen had apostacized from the communion of ecclesiastical unity; far from cutting heretics off from his communion, he had cut himself off from the orthodox and made himself ‘a stranger in all respects from his brethren, rebelling against the sacrament and the faith with the madness of contumacious discord. With such a man can there be one Spirit and one Body, in whom perhaps there is not even one mind, slippery, shifting, and uncertain as it is?’
(Karl Morrison, Tradition and Authority in the Western Church (Princeton: Princeton University, 1969), pp. 31-32).
Cordially,
Clement I wrote his letter as a bishop of Rome over the head of the local bishop. Functionally, that is papacy. If he did not call his office that, and did not spend much time establishing his authority, then that only shows that his prerogatives were well understood. There is a veiled reference to papacy though in the recount of Aaron's primacy among the twelve tribes.
It is also incorrect to consider the authority of the pope "personal", -- to this day it is not, it is the authority of the office.
The "breadth and severity of [Firmilian's] outrage" reflects nothing but the disagreement over the rebaptism. Naturally, he throws everything and the kitchen sink at pope Stephen. Even so, the passages you cite point to the opinion that repabtism, -- not Stephen's authority -- is what Cyprian and Firmilian consider unapostolic.
Again, there are some today who disagree about Vatican II and they write, very convincingly, that we have no Pope, or that the Pope could not do what he in fact did, or that the Apostolic Church is not what we have. Agree or disagree with them on substance (the rebaptizers were, as a matter of fact, wrong), it has no bearing on the objective fact that the Catohlic Church is headed by the pope.
The Roman Catholic Church is headed by the pope, on that I'll agree.
Cordially,
Just for the record, it is the Catholic Church. It is headed by the pope, who is in Rome, of which he is a bishop, or it can be also said that he is in the Vatican. The Church recognizes several "rites", that is liturgical and ecclesiological systems. They all share the same Catholic theology, but differ in how the liturgy is conducted, how the sacraments are administered and in the disciplines of their priests. Most people are only familiar with one, Roman or Latin rite that prevails in Western Europe and the Americas. But in Slav lands and in the Middle East there are about twenty small rites that are also Catholic, even though in appearance they resemble the Orthodox, and they admit married men into priesthood. There is also a rite or two that is Latin in appearance but is distinct and is kept by some monastic orders. The pope belongs to the Latin rite and he administers the Latin rite more closely than the Eastern rites. Catholic laity is free to take communion and generally fully participate in any rite and in fact it would be good if more Catholics visited Eastern rite churches that exist in larger cities, just to broaden their liturgical experience and avoid liturgical blandness that plagues many Latin rite parishes after Vatican II.
It is therefore a bit imprecise to call the Church Roman Catholic, unless a specific reference to the Roman rite is implied.
Thank you for the stimulating discussion of the early papacy, I enjoyed it very much.
I have always thought that there was more to “this is my body …” than “this (merely) represents my body …”; on the other hand I could not explain it to myself so “this represents …” was my only verbal explanation.
I was struck by what I read concerning the Marburg Conference. On recent FR threads the comment has been made that Luther kept that conference from being a success because he came to pick a fight with Zwingli over the Lord’s Supper.
Anyhow what I have learned is that they agreed on 14 of 15 points. That even on the 15th they agreed on 5 of 6 sub-points. The killer was the Lord's Supper. Luther refused to budge do to his adamant stance on taking Scripture literally; he of course disagreed with RC doctrine but he took the words seriously. According to Luther there cannot be a question as to the meaning of “is”. He went on to explain all the nonsense that would result from replacing “is” with “represents” or even “signifies” in various other parts of Scripture.
Apparently John Calvin did not agree with either Luther or Zwingli but was closer to Luther than Zwingli; as I understand it Calvin said “spiritual presence” which seems to me to put in words what Luther was, like myself, unable to find words for.
The connection – remember the recent “it depends on the meaning of is”?.
Two words that meant a lot to me - "me either".
Yes, yes... my response was "gracious" and "civil" -- all of which only proves that I am willing to admit when I have been overly-zealous in my argument, and step it back a bit.
Nonetheless, I wonder if I have not -- as our dearly-departed DrSteveJ's alleged "Minister of Diplomacy" -- been myself an hindrance to the GRPL which DrSteve and I orginally Founded.
Would you pardon me, if I commiserate a bit? I always tried to uphold the "Religion Moderator"s decisions, having great respect for him as a conservative Presbyterian Elder since long before the "Religion Forum" was founded -- and yet it seemed that despite all my "Diplomacy", my fellow GRPL Calvinists were reprimanded, suspended, and permanently banned according to a standard which seemed UnFairly Stringent compared to other Denominations.
Part of that can be blamed on a few "Bad Apples" (does anyone else want "Dr.Warmoose" back? Not me); and part of that can be blamed on "Logos", the Religion Moderator, asking a "higher standard" of his fellow Calvinists (a reasonable request, I thought)... but overall, it seems like the GRPL got slammed.
And -- though I still like and respect "Logos" a lot -- that just doesn't seem fair. Some "Minister of Diplomacy" I turned out to be.
My anger was based on specific words used in posts leading to my #277. I join you & plead for unity when essential doctrine permits, as I believe it does here; but those words which were objectionable to me fell short of our desired goal. Plus, & more importantly, they give, if I may use a military term, aid & comfort to the enemy; that, even to the enemy within, my old Adamic nature. Peace & to God be the glory as we look upon the face of Jesus.
I must admit, Dahlseide -- before our conversations, I was not aware that the FreeRepublic Counter-Reformationists were attempting to drive a wedge between Lutherans and Calvinists.
Nonetheless, you did nothing wrong, Dahlseide. I still maintain my objective position as to the rectitude of Calvinist Theonomy versus Lutheran Theonomy; However, given the choice, I would gladly take Lutheranism over and above Papism and Jesuitry any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.... and, whatever my Presbyterian Preferences, I am genuinely sorry if I ever maligned Martin Luther, either as a Person or as a Pastor.
If it's any consolation to you, I can tell you that I married my Wife on "Reformation Day", October 31, the Day of the Ninety-Five Theses. If the Prophet Elisha inherited double the Spirit of Elijah... well, then, John Calvin likewise needed his Martin Luther.
Best, OP
And may your wedding, like Luther's joyous rebellion, be the start of something Godly and splendid. 8~)
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