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.
Benedict XVI bump.
What part of "don't pick at the scab" and "don't make it pesonal" did you miss?
oh dear, this thread is descending into one of those distressing threads that has me shaking my head.
1Ti 5:19 Do not receive an accusation against an elder except on the basis of two or three witnesses.
Catholics agree. But Catholics do not see this truth as incompatible with Heb 13:17. We recognize that our leaders are fallible, but we also recognize that God has appointed them, and that He wants us to obey them. The command to obey our leaders is not a blank check. Perhaps that is your worry (and it is an understandable and justified worry). But we have to fit both truths together, and neither reject Church authority nor turn into Catholic Borg [from Star Trek]. Protestantism has tended to reject Church authority altogether, as you can see clearly stated throughout this thread. On the other side, some Catholics have hushed up crimes and abuses because they failed to understand that our leaders are fallible.
The charism of truth provided in ordination is not an unqualified gift of infallibility; it is a *communal* gift, one that applies to the bishops as a whole (united throughout all time), and especially to the bishop of Rome speaking ex cathedra. Priests and bishops and even popes are, outside of those qualifications, fallible and flawed human persons.
We don't have to choose between deifying clergy and rejecting Church authority. That's a false dichotomy.
-A8
Does that only apply to me? I thought you posted that to Quix, also. You let his post 1275 stand. Is he allowed to post, but I am not allowed to reply? At least be consistent.
It is time to drop it, forgive and forget, get back to the issues.
I will repeat one point here that you made and I removed, you did not ask me to remove the original offensive post. I did that because it was toxic and would surely incite the reaction which, as it turns out, it did.
I was honestly trying to extend grace and calm the waters by noting, confessing that my notions of humor were obviously not everyone's.
And, by submitting to the higher standard of prefering to avoid offense with those who felt differently by acknowledging that others differed and I could accept that and go on.
Am sorry my clumsy efforts at extending grace and calming the waters failed to have such an effect.
Good night.
According to your interpretation they "say otherwise". But according to the Church's interpretation, they do not.
-A8
Your "picking at the scab" is noted.
However,I would be very interested in understanding how you would plausibly explain the fact that the New Testament mentions Peter 198 times as compared to the 90 times all of the other Apostles together were mentioned.
Many of the references to Peter in scripture are in the context of conversations or directions or explanations or responsibilities given by Jesus (the complete Word of God) to Peter. References found in Acts seem to testify to Peter's authority and leadership as well as his supernatural gifts.
Of course everything I say is my opinion, just as everything in your post is your opinion. Pointing out that what I say is my opinion does not show whether what I am saying is true or false. Claiming that it is "just my opinion" implies that what I am saying is not true. But merely asserting that what I am saying is not true does not show that what I am saying is not true. Some evidence or argumentation is needed.
Consider:
Satan is transformed into an angel of light, and his ministers into ministers of righteousness.
Catholics agree.
To achieve that level of deception, is there a line the devil will not cross when wanting to look 'Christian'?
Catholics agree.
Can you imagine Satan saying, "Oh, I would not lay claim to preserving the scriptures." ? Answer: He knows that God will not let his word pass away. So the devil, who can quote it cover to cover, is more than willing to cross that line. He's gotta look like an angel of light.
I don't fully understand what you are saying here.
Can you imagine Satan saying, "No, I would never set up my own lineage of church leaders, or even claim Peter and the other apostles as their predecessors, to further enhance my way as legitimate." ? To appear to be an angel of light, the line is crossed in hastily.
Ok, I think I understand what you are saying here. If I understand you corectly, you are saying that the Catholic Church could be a big deception fobbed on us [Catholics] by Satan, since Satan won't spare any effort to appear like an angel of light.
So, I think we can agree that there are (at least) two possibilities: (1) the Catholic Church is a big deception fobbed on us [Catholics] by Satan, or (2) Protestantism is a big deception fobbed on [Protestants] by Satan. Now comes the hard work of determining whether (1) or (2) (or something else) is the case.
Sure, some of Satan's efforts are easier to spot than others (such as the ones that claim to be the last prophet from God), but how to spot them? By the WORD OF GOD, of course.
According to whose interpretation? Yours? If you have followed this thread, you can see that appealing to Scripture does not resolve the disputes, because everyone has a different interpretation. And who gets to decide what even counts as "the WORD OF GOD"? You? What makes you special?
-A8
Reality has a habit of not fitting any tidy little boxes.
Feel free to provide an example of reality violating a rule of logic.
-A8
I sincerely hope that you will explain why you think that.
-A8
I think the humility Peter learned after his betrayal moved him far toward much more mature spirituality and God blessed him and his ministry accordingly.
The number of times Peter is mentioned is interesting. I've never heard of it as a criteria for Papal authority before.
Satan is mentioned a lot, too. I hope he's not in the running accordingly.
So, I think we can agree that there are (at least) two possibilities: (1) the Catholic Church is a big deception fobbed on us [Catholics] by Satan, or (2) Protestantism is a big deception fobbed on [Protestants] by Satan. Now comes the hard work of determining whether (1) or (2) (or something else) is the case.
= = = =
D) All of the above.
In that . . . satan uses ALL organizations made by man to raise up RELIGION--AGAINST
RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD; FELLOWSHIP; WALKING IN THE GARDEN; INTIMATE DIALOGUE PERSON TO PERSON WITH GOD.
He destroyed it in The Garden. He's been diligent to destroy it ever since.
Do the letters to the 7 churches in Revelation sound like letters to components of a big human oriented, organized, RELIGIOUS system? Hardly.
And, those letters are not very flattering. Yet, those churches started out wonderful with God's anointing to greater or lesser degree. Doesn't hinder God's rejection even slightly--He's concerned with where they are NOW in terms of SEEKING HIM AND HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS FIRST instead of their own agendas first, middle and last.
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