Posted on 10/21/2006 4:52:03 AM PDT by NYer
From Called To Communion: Understanding the Church Today
Editor's note: This is the second half of a chapter titled "The Primacy of Peter and Unity of the Church." The first half examines the status of Peter in the New Testament and the commission logion contained in Matthew 16:17-19.
The principle of succession in general
That the primacy of Peter is recognizable in all the major strands of the New Testament is incontestable.
The real difficulty arises when we come to the second question: Can the idea of a Petrine succession be justified? Even more difficult is the third question that is bound up with it: Can the Petrine succession of Rome be credibly substantiated?
Concerning the first question, we must first of all note that there is no explicit statement regarding the Petrine succession in the New Testament. This is not surprising, since neither the Gospels nor the chief Pauline epistles address the problem of a postapostolic Church—which, by the way, must be mentioned as a sign of the Gospels' fidelity to tradition. Indirectly, however, this problem can be detected in the Gospels once we admit the principle of form critical method according to which only what was considered in the respective spheres of tradition as somehow meaningful for the present was preserved in writing as such. This would mean, for example, that toward the end of the first century, when Peter was long dead, John regarded the former's primacy, not as a thing of the past, but as a present reality for the Church.
For many even believe—though perhaps with a little too much imagination—that they have good grounds for interpreting the "competition" between Peter and the beloved disciple as an echo of the tensions between Rome's claim to primacy and the sense of dignity possessed by the Churches of Asia Minor. This would certainly be a very early and, in addition, inner-biblical proof that Rome was seen as continuing the Petrine line; but we should in no case rely on such uncertain hypotheses. The fundamental idea, however, does seem to me correct, namely, that the traditions of the New Testament never reflect an interest of purely historical curiosity but are bearers of present reality and in that sense constantly rescue things from the mere past, without blurring the special status of the origin.
Moreover, even scholars who deny the principle itself have propounded hypotheses of succession. 0. Cullmann, for example, objects in a very clear-cut fashion to the idea of succession, yet he believes that he can Show that Peter was replaced by James and that this latter assumed the primacy of the erstwhile first apostle. Bultmann believes that he is correct in concluding from the mention of the three pillars in Galatians 2:9 that the course of development led away from a personal to a collegial leadership and that a college entered upon the succession of Peter. [1]
We have no need to discuss these hypotheses and others like them; their foundation is weak enough. Nevertheless, they do show that it is impossible to avoid the idea of succession once the word transmitted in Scripture is considered to be a sphere open to the future. In those writings of the New Testament that stand on the cusp of the second generation or else already belong to it-especially in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Pastoral Letters—the principle of succession does in fact take on concrete shape.
The Protestant notion that the "succession" consists solely in the word as such, but not in any "structures", is proved to be anachronistic in light of what in actual fact is the form of tradition in the New Testament. The word is tied to the witness, who guarantees it an unambiguous sense, which it does not possess as a mere word floating in isolation. But the witness is not an individual who stands independently on his own. He is no more a wit ness by virtue of himself and of his own powers of memory than Peter can be the rock by his own strength. He is not a witness as "flesh and blood" but as one who is linked to the Pneuma, the Paraclete who authenticates the truth and opens up the memory and, in his turn, binds the witness to Christ. For the Paraclete does not speak of himself, but he takes from "what is his" (that is, from what is Christ's: Jn 16: 13).
This binding of the witness to the Pneuma and to his mode of being-"not of himself, but what he hears" -is called "sacrament" in the language of the Church. Sacrament designates a threefold knot-word, witness, Holy Spirit and Christ-which describes the essential structure of succession in the New Testament. We can infer with certainty from the testimony of the Pastoral Letters and of the Acts of the Apostles that the apostolic generation already gave to this interconnection of person and word in the believed presence of the Spirit and of Christ the form of the laying on of hands.
The Petrine succession in Rome
In opposition to the New Testament pattern of succession described above, which withdraws the word from human manipulation precisely by binding witnesses into its service, there arose very early on an intellectual and anti-institutional model known historically by the name of Gnosis, which made the free interpretation and speculative development of the word its principle. Before long the appeal to individual witnesses no longer sufficed to counter the intellectual claim advanced by this tendency. It became necessary to have fixed points by which to orient the testimony itself, and these were found in the so-called apostolic sees, that is, in those where the apostles had been active. The apostolic sees became the reference point of true communio. But among these sees there was in turn–quite clearly in Irenaeus of Lyons–a decisive criterion that recapitulated all others: the Church of Rome, where Peter and Paul suffered martyrdom. It was with this Church that every community had to agree; Rome was the standard of the authentic apostolic tradition as a whole.
Moreover, Eusebius of Caesarea organized the first version of his ecclesiastical history in accord with the same principle. It was to be a written record of the continuity of apostolic succession, which was concentrated in the three Petrine sees Rome, Antioch and Alexandria-among which Rome, as the site of Peter's martyrdom, was in turn preeminent and truly normative. [2]
This leads us to a very fundamental observation. [3] The Roman primacy, or, rather, the acknowledgement of Rome as the criterion of the right apostolic faith, is older than the canon of the New Testament, than "Scripture".
We must be on our guard here against an almost inevitable illusion. "Scripture" is more recent than "the scriptures" of which it is composed. It was still a long time before the existence of the individual writings resulted in the "New Testament" as Scripture, as the Bible. The assembling of the writings into a single Scripture is more properly speaking the work of tradition, a work that began in the second century but came to a kind of conclusion only in the fourth or fifth century. Harnack, a witness who cannot be suspected of pro-Roman bias, has remarked in this regard that it was only at the end of the second century, in Rome, that a canon of the "books of the New Testament" won recognition by the criterion of apostolicity-catholicity, a criterion to which the other Churches also gradually subscribed "for the sake of its intrinsic value and on the strength of the authority of the Roman Church".
We can therefore say that Scripture became Scripture through the tradition, which precisely in this process included the potentior principalitas–the preeminent original authority–of the Roman see as a constitutive element.
Two points emerge clearly from what has just been First, the principle of tradition in its sacramental form-apostolic succession—played a constitutive role in the existence and continuance of the Church. Without this principle, it is impossible to conceive of a New Testament at all, so that we are caught in a contradiction when we affirm the one while wanting to deny the other. Furthermore, we have seen that in Rome the traditional series of bishops was from the very beginning recorded as a line of successors.
We can add that Rome and Antioch were conscious of succeeding to the mission of Peter and that early on Alexandria was admitted into the circle of Petrine sees as the city where Peter's disciple Mark had been active. Having said all that, the site of Peter's martyrdom nonetheless appears clearly as the chief bearer of his supreme authority and plays a preeminent role in the formation of tradition which is constitutive of the Church-and thus in the genesis of the New Testament as Bible; Rome is one of the indispensable internal and external- conditions of its possibility. It would be exciting to trace the influence on this process of the idea that the mission of Jerusalem had passed over to Rome, which explains why at first Jerusalem was not only not a "patriarchal see" but not even a metropolis: Jerusalem was now located in Rome, and since Peter's departure from that city, its primacy had been transferred to the capital of the pagan world. [4]
But to consider this in detail would lead us too far afield for the moment. The essential point, in my opinion, has already become plain: the martyrdom of Peter in Rome fixes the place where his function continues. The awareness of this fact can be detected as early as the first century in the Letter of Clement, even though it developed but slowly in all its particulars.
Concluding reflections
We shall break off at this point, for the chief goal of our considerations has been attained. We have seen that the New Testament as a whole strikingly demonstrates the primacy of Peter; we have seen that the formative development of tradition and of the Church supposed the continuation of Peter's authority in Rome as an intrinsic condition. The Roman primacy is not an invention of the popes, but an essential element of ecclesial unity that goes back to the Lord and was developed faithfully in the nascent Church.
But the New Testament shows us more than the formal aspect of a structure; it also reveals to us the inward nature of this structure. It does not merely furnish proof texts, it is a permanent criterion and task. It depicts the tension between skandalon and rock; in the very disproportion between man's capacity and God's sovereign disposition, it reveals God to be the one who truly acts and is present.
If in the course of history the attribution of such authority to men could repeatedly engender the not entirely unfounded suspicion of human arrogation of power, not only the promise of the New Testament but also the trajectory of that history itself prove the opposite. The men in question are so glaringly, so blatantly unequal to this function that the very empowerment of man to be the rock makes evident how little it is they who sustain the Church but God alone who does so, who does so more in spite of men than through them.
The mystery of the Cross is perhaps nowhere so palpably present as in the primacy as a reality of Church history. That its center is forgiveness is both its intrinsic condition and the sign of the distinctive character of God's power. Every single biblical logion about the primacy thus remains from generation to generation a signpost and a norm, to which we must ceaselessly resubmit ourselves. When the Church adheres to these words in faith, she is not being triumphalistic but humbly recognizing in wonder and thanksgiving the victory of God over and through human weakness. Whoever deprives these words of their force for fear of triumphalism or of human usurpation of authority does not proclaim that God is greater but diminishes him, since God demonstrates the power of his love, and thus remains faithful to the law of the history of salvation, precisely in the paradox of human impotence.
For with the same realism with which we declare today the sins of the popes and their disproportion to the magnitude of their commission, we must also acknowledge that Peter has repeatedly stood as the rock against ideologies, against the dissolution of the word into the plausibilities of a given time, against subjection to the powers of this world.
When we see this in the facts of history, we are not celebrating men but praising the Lord, who does not abandon the Church and who desired to manifest that he is the rock through Peter, the little stumbling stone: "flesh and blood" do not save, but the Lord saves through those who are of flesh and blood. To deny this truth is not a plus of faith, not a plus of humility, but is to shrink from the humility that recognizes God as he is. Therefore the Petrine promise and its historical embodiment in Rome remain at the deepest level an ever-renewed motive for joy: the powers of hell will not prevail against it . . .
Endnotes:
[1] Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, 2d ed. (198 1), 147- 51; cf. Gnilka, 56.
[2] For an exhaustive account of this point, see V. Twomey, Apostolikos Thronos (Münster, 1982).
[3] It is my hope that in the not-too-distant future I will have the opportunity to develop and substantiate in greater detail the view of the succession that I attempt to indicate in an extremely condensed form in what follows. I owe important suggestions to several works by 0. Karrer, especially: Um die Einheit der Christen. Die Petrusfrage (Frankfurt am Mainz, 1953); "Apostolische Nachfolge und Primat", in: Feiner, Trütsch and Böckle, Fragen in der Theologie heute (Freiburg im.Breisgau, 1957), 175-206; "Das Petrusamt in der Frühkirche", in Festgabe J. Lortz (Baden-Baden, 1958), 507-25; "Die biblische und altkirchliche Grundlage des Papsttums", in: Lebendiges Zeugnis (1958), 3-24. Also of importance are some of the papers in the festschrift for 0. Karrer: Begegnung der Christen, ed. by Roesle-Cullmann (Frankfurt am Mainz, 1959); in particular, K. Hofstetter, "Das Petrusamt in der Kirche des I. und 2. Jahrhunderts", 361-72.
[4] Cf. Hofstetter.
I have no interest in such tracts.
it is interesting to note that you will never see anything written by a Catholic saying that a prominent Protestant is the antichrist or that all Methodists are burning in Hell.
= = = =
Actually, I have seen such. But it's been decades ago.
21Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. 22Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
23And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
28And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine:
29For he taught them as ONE HAVING AUTHORITY, and NOT AS THE SCRIBES.
I didn't suppose you did, but you did say that you were unaware of any directed at the Catholic church. I was just letting you know that they are out there.
Nope, the Holy Spirit did.
AMEN! Interesting we both felt the same urge to encourage going TO GOD about it at roughly the same point in the thread.
Men are saved by God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ. And faith comes by hearing the world of God.
= = =
Well said. But that Scripture doesn't sound very Calvinistic, to me.
LOL.
"It appears you only want to keep it going in circles, while you don't have any interest in seeking God about it."
This appears to be a judgment call about what is in his mind.
I understand his posts as asking legitimate questions.
The Pope (prior to his election) wrote this, I presume it is his title and I doubt his title had anything to do with how non-Catholics on a political website would perceive it.
for it removes ecclesial hiearchy
= = =
God was in the habit of REMOVING ecclesial hierarchy throughout Scripture.
for it removes ecclesial hiearchy
= = =
God was in the habit of REMOVING ecclesial hierarchy throughout Scripture.
And He's getting ready to do it wholesale big time before too many more months/years have passed.
I don't doubt that.
Just . . . in this context . . . it's quite understandable for many to take it that way.
I C.
THX.
'Experiential' is entirely subjective. And the interpretation of what is observational is also entirely subjective. (Notice that you are once again unhelpfully vague; you don't show how the test can be simultaneously observational and objective.)
And, as to demons . . . Christ's standard remains . . . Do the individuals, sources involved confess that Jesus came in the flesh etc. and Jesus as Their Lord, and humans as their Savior, or not?
The assumption underlying your 'miracle' test is that anyone through whom the Holy Spirit acts to perform miracles is free from serious theological error. But that is not a safe assumption. (And having grown up Pentecostal, I can assure you that it is a false assumption.)
Counterfeit miracles are genearlly flavored, toned, colored, tainted with their source . . . particularly after closer examination and reflection by discerning folks but usually by most anyone with any horse sense.
So the test to determine whether someone is discerning is to see whether they have the anointing; and one determines whether they have the anointing by using the 'miracle' test; and in order to determine whether they pass the 'miracle' test, one has to have discernment. One big circle again.
Holy Spirit can cause a burning within that I'm sure LDS folks would assert is the same. They are good at including everything including the kitchen sink as covered and included in their scheme of things. It's not the same, in my book.
So, how should we determine whether you or the Mormons are right? The 'burning in the bosom' test? Or something objective?
I think Christ said it best: MY SHEEP KNOW MY VOICE.
So, how do you know that the voice you are hearing is Christ's, and not that of another?
I think it's akin to a mother and child knowing one another's voice. I wonder how many would call that subjective.
I would, because it is subjective. But if the child were kidnapped as a newborn infant, and grew up in the house of its female kidnapper, the voice it recognizes would not be that of its mother. So, recognizing a voice is not enough to guarantee that you are in the truth, especially since 20,000+ sects claim to be following His voice, while all disagreeing with each other. They cannot be hearing His voice if they are contradicting each other.
"Entirely subjective" is simply false.
How so? In other words, how are your tests objective?
Sounds to me like folks not accustomed to hearing His Voice and acting on it might do well to check up on their relationship with Him. He didn't put qualifiers in that sentence.
Ad hominems are fallacies.
I suspect that anyone who seriously wants to find GOD'S ANSWER on this issue . . . and who SEEKS HIM FIRST AND HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS . . . AND who asks HIM to show them His truth . . . will likely find in the next 18 or so months that He has.
Do you think all the millions of Mormons are lying when they say that they are seeking God and concluding that God wants them to be Mormons???
-A8
No, but I think we can all start at the fact that NONE of us has it all right. Jesus was the only man who ever lived on this earth that had it "right". No person, no church, no single interpretation is "right".
Good grief, even before the Apostles were gone, they were already having problems with peoples' interpretation of the gospel and their fleshly human selves. Only Jesus can be our head. Any human person is subjective, fallible, and going to interpret differently from the next.
I think we're all going to find that we put a little too much focus on one thing or another.
I just wish we could play nicely together.. And, in fact, the majority of the churches in my area do, despite our differences. Jesus first ...
It might be better to focus on epignosis rather than gnosis, although the gnosis is inbreathed and after made efficacious to our soul and spirit is made useful by our hearts as an outbreathed epignosis.
Gnostics interestingly touched on many truths which would shake up many modern scientific misunderstandings, but they still became heretical in that they left out faith through the Son. I don;t agree with gnosticism, but like many false beliefs, they hinge off of several real truths then slide in deceptive practice.
It sounds to me like you are not sure, which shows that you haven't studied this issue in relation to Church history. Before you go speculating about whether this is "historical revisionism", dig into early Church history, including the fathers. You won't find sola scriptura anywhere. A good book on this subject is Robert Sungenis's Not By Scripture Alone
-A8
faith comes by hearing the 'Word' of God (not the 'world' of God....(easy typo)
I have no need to return to such studies again. Been there, done that.
Thanks anyway.
This is the same kind of deism that underlies Mormonism: God abandoned His Church for 1800 years, and Joseph Smith restored the Church to the purity that it once had in the Apostolic period.
-A8
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