Will the Pope's Pronouncement Set Ecumenism Back a Hundred Years? (Challenge to Apostolicity)

Yesterday's Reuters headline: "The Vatican on Tuesday said Christian denominations outside the Roman Catholic Church were not full churches of Jesus Christ." The actual proclamation, posted on the official Vatican Web site, says that Protestant Churches are really "ecclesial communities" rather than Churches, because they lack apostolic succession, and therefore they "have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery." Furthermore, not even the Eastern Orthodox Churches are real Churches, even though they were explicitly referred to as such in the Vatican document Unitatis Redintegratio (Decree on Ecumenism). The new document explains that they were only called Churches because "the Council wanted to adopt the traditional use of the term." This new clarification, issued officially by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but in fact strongly supported by Pope Benedict XVI, manages to insult both Protestants and the Orthodox, and it may set ecumenism back a hundred years.

The new document, officially entitled "Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church," claims that the positions it takes do not reverse the intent of various Vatican II documents, especially Unitatis Redintegratio, but merely clarify them. In support of this contention, it cites other documents, all issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: Mysterium Ecclesiae (1973), Communionis notio (1992), and Dominus Iesus (2000). The last two of these documents were issued while the current pope, as Cardinal Ratzinger, was prefect of the Congregation. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was born in 1542 with the name Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition, and for centuries it has operated as an extremely conservative force with the Roman Catholic Church, opposing innovation and modernizing tendencies, suppressing dissent, and sometimes, in its first few centuries, persecuting those who believed differently. More recently, the congregation has engaged in the suppression of some of Catholicism's most innovative and committed thinkers, such as Yves Congar, Hans Küng, Charles Curran, Matthew Fox, and Jon Sobrino and other liberation theologians. In light of the history of the Congregation of the Faith, such conservative statements as those released this week are hardly surprising, though they are quite unwelcome.

It is natural for members of various Christian Churches to believe that the institutions to which they belong are the best representatives of Christ's body on earth--otherwise, why wouldn't they join a different Church? It is disingenuous, however, for the leader of a Church that has committed itself "irrevocably" (to use Pope John Paul II's word in Ut Unum Sint [That They May Be One] 3, emphasis original) to ecumenism to claim to be interested in unity while at the same time declaring that all other Christians belong to Churches that are in some way deficient. How different was the attitude of Benedict's predecessors, who wrote, "In subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions appeared and large communities became separated from full communion with the [Roman] Catholic Church--for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame" (Unitatis Redintegratio 3). In Benedict's view, at various times in history groups of Christians wandered from the original, pure Roman Catholic Church, and any notion of Christian unity today is predicated on the idea of those groups abandoning their errors and returning to the Roman Catholic fold. The pope's problem seems to be that he is a theologian rather than a historian. Otherwise he could not possibly make such outrageous statements and think that they were compatible with the spirit of ecumenism that his immediate predecessors promoted.

One of the pope's most strident arguments against the validity of other Churches is that they can't trace their bishops' lineages back to the original apostles, as the bishops in the Roman Catholic Church can. There are three problems with this idea.

First, many Protestants deny the importance of apostolic succession as a guarantor of legitimacy. They would argue that faithfulness to the Bible and/or the teachings of Christ is a better measure of authentic Christian faith than the ability to trace one's spiritual ancestry through an ecclesiastical bureaucracy. A peripheral knowledge of the lives of some of the medieval and early modern popes (e.g., Stephen VI, Sergius III, Innocent VIII, Alexander VI) is enough to call the insistence on apostolic succession into serious question. Moreover, the Avignon Papacy and the divided lines of papal claimants in subsequent decades calls into serious question the legitimacy of the whole approach. Perhaps the strongest argument against the necessity of apostolic succession comes from the Apostle Paul, who was an acknowledged apostle despite not having been ordained by one of Jesus' original twelve disciples. In fact, Paul makes much of the fact that his authority came directly from Jesus Christ rather than from one of the apostles (Gal 1:11-12). Apostolic succession was a useful tool for combating incipient heresy and establishing the antiquity of the churches in particular locales, but merely stating that apostolic succession is a necessary prerequisite for being a true church does not make it so.

The second problem with the new document's insistence upon apostolic succession is the fact that at least three other Christian communions have apostolic succession claims that are as valid as that of the Roman Catholic Church. The Eastern Orthodox Churches, which split from the Roman Catholic Church in 1054, can trace their lineages back to the same apostles that the Roman Catholic Church can, a fact acknowledged by Unitatis Redintegratio 14. The Oriental Orthodox Churches, such as the Coptic and Ethiopic Orthodox Churches, split from the Roman Catholic Church several centuries earlier, but they too can trace their episcopal lineages back to the same apostles claimed by the Roman Catholic Church as its founders. Finally, the Anglican Church, which broke away from the Roman Catholic Church during the reign of King Henry VIII, can likewise trace the lineage of every bishop back through the first archbishop of Canterbury, Augustine. In addition to these three collections of Christian Churches, the Old Catholics and some Methodists also see value in the idea of apostolic succession, and they can trace their episcopal lineages just as far back as Catholic bishops can.

The third problem with the idea of apostolic succession is that the earliest bishops in certain places are simply unknown, and the lists produced in the third and fourth centuries that purported to identify every bishop back to the founding of the church in a particular area were often historically unreliable. Who was the founding bishop of Byzantium? Who brought the gospel to Alexandria? To Edessa? To Antioch? There are lists that give names (e.g., http://www.friesian.com/popes.htm), such as the Apostles Mark (Alexandria), Andrew (Byzantium), and Thaddeus (Armenia), but the association of the apostles with the founding of these churches is legendary, not historical. The most obvious breakdown of historicity in the realm of apostolic succession involves none other than the see occupied by the pope, the bishop of Rome. It is certain that Peter did make his way to Rome before the time of Nero, where he perished, apparently in the Neronian persecution following the Great Fire of Rome, but it is equally certain that the church in Rome predates Peter, as it also predates Paul's arrival there (Paul also apparently died during the Neronian persecution). The Roman Catholic Church may legitimately claim a close association with both Peter and Paul, but it may not legitimately claim that either was the founder of the church there. The fact of the matter is that the gospel reached Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, and other early centers of Christianity in the hands of unknown, faithful Christians, not apostles, and the legitimacy of the churches established there did not suffer in the least because of it.

All the talk in the new document about apostolic succession is merely a smokescreen, however, for the main point that the Congregation of the Faith and the pope wanted to drive home: recognition of the absolute primacy of the pope. After playing with the words "subsists in" (Lumen Gentium [Dogmatic Constitution on the Church] 8) and "church" (Unitatis Redintegratio 14) in an effort to make them mean something other than what they originally meant, the document gets down to the nitty-gritty. "Since communion with the Catholic Church, the visible head of which is the Bishop of Rome and the Successor of Peter, is not some external complement to a particular Church but rather one of its internal constitutive principles, these venerable Christian communities lack something in their condition as particular churches." From an ecumenical standpoint, this position is a non-starter. Communion with Rome and acknowledging the authority of the pope as bishop of Rome is a far different matter from recognizing the pope as the "visible head" of the entire church, without peer. The pope is an intelligent man, and he knows that discussions with other Churches will make no progress on the basis of this prerequisite, so the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the pope, despite his protestations, has no interest in pursuing ecumenism. Trying to persuade other Christians to become Roman Catholics, which is evidently the pope's approach to other Churches, is not ecumenism, it's proselytism.

Fortunately, this document does not represent the viewpoint of all Catholics, either laypeople or scholars. Many ordinary Catholics would scoff at the idea that other denominations were not legitimate Churches, which just happen to have different ideas about certain topics and different ways of expressing a common Christianity. Similarly, many Catholic scholars are doing impressive work in areas such as theology, history, biblical study, and ethics, work that interacts with ideas produced by non-Catholic scholars. In the classroom and in publications, Catholics and non-Catholics learn from each other, challenge one another, and, perhaps most importantly, respect one another.

How does one define the Church? Christians have many different understandings of the term, and Catholics are divided among themselves, as are non-Catholics. The ecumenical movement is engaged in addressing this issue in thoughtful, meaningful, and respectful ways. Will the narrow-minded view expressed in "Responses" be the death-knell of the ecumenical movement? Hardly. Unity among Christians is too important an idea to be set aside. Will the document set back ecumenical efforts? Perhaps, but Christians committed to Christian unity--Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant alike--will get beyond it. The ecumenical movement is alive and well, and no intemperate pronouncement from the Congregation of the Faith, or the current pope, can restrain it for long. Even if ecumenism, at least as it involves the Roman Catholic Church's connection with other Churches, is temporarily set back a hundred years, that distance can be closed either by changes of heart or changes of leadership.

Because it is not the original, because it has been tamnpered with, changed, added, deleated, redacted, stitched together, etc. by various individuals and is a human product.

Boy you sound like a Mormon.

1 Nephi 13:28
28 Wherefore, thou seest that after the book hath gone forth through the hands of the great and abominable church, that there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book, which is the book of the Lamb of God.

1 Nephi 13:29
29 And after these plain and precious things were taken away it goeth forth unto all the nations of the Gentiles; and after it goeth forth unto all the nations of the Gentiles, yea, even across the many waters which thou hast seen with the Gentiles which have gone forth out of captivity, thou seest--because of the many plain and precious things which have been taken out of the book, which were plain unto the understanding of the children of men, according to the plainness which is in the Lamb of God--because of these things which are taken away out of the gospel of the Lamb, an exceedingly great many do stumble, yea, insomuch that Satan hath great power over them.

I think that the whole Adam and Eve story was the introduction to the human race of free will. It is the mechanism by which we are given free will and the reason that we have it. We are different from the angels; we have been tasked with accepting Him.

To me, it is incredibly simple. God wants us to accept Him. That is an overriding message that I get from the Bible. I cannot accept that God wants robot slaves or that He has created large numbers of people that He wants to ship to everlasting Hell. It is not supported by my reading of Scripture. But in the final analysis, it is up to each individual human being.

If 5 people are racing and 1 is predestined to win it, what’s the point of actually racing? If God’s purpose in creating us is for us to love Him, then if we don’t do it ourselves, what is the purpose? It would be the equivalent of blow up dolls. Or robots programmed to do what their Creator wants them to do. Pointless.

If God wanted all men to be saved, all men would be saved.

Start with the presupposition that God is in control of His creation, every last speck of it, and life makes a lot more sense.

SOME THOUGHTS ON PREDESTINATION
by Benjamin Warfield

"...Our difficulties with Predestination arise from a, no doubt not unnatural, unwillingness to acknowledge ourselves to be wholly at the disposal of another. We wish to be at our own disposal. We wish "to belong to ourselves," and we resent belonging, especially belonging absolutely, to anybody else, even if that anybody else be God. We are in the mood of the singer of the hymn beginning, "I was a wandering sheep," when he declares of himself, "I would not be controlled." We will not be controlled. Or, rather, to speak more accurately, we will not admit that we are controlled.
I say that it is more accurate to say that we will not admit that we are controlled. For we are controlled, whether we admit it or not. To imagine that we are not controlled is to imagine that there is no God. For when we say God, we say control. If a single creature which God has made has escaped beyond his control, at the moment that he has done so he has abolished God. A God who could or would make a creature whom he could not or would not control, is no God. The moment he should make such a creature he would, of course, abdicate his throne. The universe he had created would have ceased to be his universe; or rather it would cease to exist-for the universe is held together only by the control of God.
Even worse would have happened, indeed, than the destruction of the universe. God would have ceased to be God in a deeper sense than that he would have ceased to be the Lord and Ruler of the world. He would have ceased to be a moral being. It is an immoral act to make a thing that we cannot or will not control. The only justification for making anything is that we both can and will control it. If a man should manufacture a quantity of an unstable high-explosive in the corridors of an orphan asylum, and when the stuff went off should seek to excuse himself by saying that he could not control it, no one would count his excuse valid. What right had he to manufacture it, we should say, unless he could control it? He relieves himself of none of the responsibility for the havoc wrought, by pleading inability to control his creation.
To suppose that God has made a universe-or even a single being-the control of which he renounces, is to accuse him of similar immorality. What right has he to make it, if he cannot or will not control it? It is not a moral act to perpetrate chaos. We have not only dethroned God; we have demoralized him..."

It's the temporal world that denounces the truth of God's predestination because then men can control other men. "You have the power, so give that power to me."

In truth, it's God's universe, and for those who have been graced with faith in Jesus Christ, it is a glorious reality. As God wills.

In truth, I did. They provided a strong illustration for the introduction and the mechanism of free will.

I understand the comfort of the idea of predestination, but the Bible overwhelmingly pronounces that each of us must make our own journey to Him and that it is up to each of us to accept His grace and go to everlasting life with Him.

John 3:16.

If God didn’t want people to go to heaven and merely wanted an army of robot slaves, then why go through the Adam and Eve charade? Why bother having people on Earth at all? He could have merely created them, popped a bunch of them into Heaven and bunged the rest into Hell. Hooray. No muss, no fuss, and a whole bunch of people created for the fires of Hell roasting merrily there.

From the Greek Archdiocese of America: "Nothing human is perfect, including the Bible, which is the end product of human cooperation with the divine Spirit."

I cannot argue with the logic of this statement, but I certainly argue with its truth. If the Bible is littered with human error, then you cannot call it God's word. You would have to call it God and man's word. You also could not call it God's revelation. You would have to call it God and man's revelation. Is the Church able to explain why the cooperation of man and God produces error in the Holy Bible, YET, the cooperation of God and man in the Magisterium is infallible? I have never understood the view that a single man is fallible, but when you compound the problem by adding more fallible men to the mix, somehow the result is infallible. Perhaps if all the books of the Bible had been written by committee, then the Church would think it was perfect.

If you mix clean clothes with soiled linen, you don't end up with clean linen, but with soiled clothes.

Sure, that is EXCEPT for the Magisterium. In that SOLE case, when you take one soiled linen, and leave it alone, it remains soiled. However, if you add a bunch of other soiled linen, the result is clean, perfect and infallible. For some reason this applies to the Magisterium, but not to the Bible. Go figure. :)

This places everything before and after the Gospels' time frame (Christ's minister on earth) on a different plane, because prophesies and visions cannot be distinguished from fantasy and hallucinations, FK.

Yes, if God allowed the pollution of men into His Holy gift to us, then we should be very suspicious of the scriptures as fact. I just can't imagine why God would give us such a flawed gift. I mean, He asks the best from us, so why don't we get the best from Him?

Now, we know that not everyone who got hold of the Bible and made little changes was inspired. Like I said, the very fact that we add commas is corrupting, since different locations of commas affect the meaning of the verses, we cannot claim inerrency. Additions of vowels have a potentially even greater effect. Thus, it is naïve to treat the existing copies of the Bible as some pristine work of God.

Commas affect interpretation, not the perfect words themselves. And even with the commas we agree upon, interpretation is still all over the place depending on the faith. I've seen you speak about the vowel issue before, so I suppose that God either completely managed His gift to us, or He helped with some parts and left others to pure chance. If the latter, then it really wasn't much of a gift, it seems. I suppose the only thing of real value that leaves us with then is the Magisterium. It's amazing how it works out like that. :)

Your second sentence is not a logical outgrowth of your first sentence

No, a choice has to be free to be a choice. A "choice" with a predtermined outcome is not a choice.

All men "have a choice." And all men choose poorly unless and until God regenerates them

Then it's not a choice.

That's what the Bible tells us and I believe the Bible

The Bible also says that God desires all men to be saved. Obviously you don't believe that part.

Before we continue in this vein, please consider this:

We were the ones who wrote Scripture, or in the case of the OT, selected it. We put the Bible together and we said what it is to be.

We are also the only entity authorized to interpret it. We have the Scriptures; you have an abridged copy of them. We have the wherewithal to interpret them; you are grasping at straws.

Kosta is correct. Without the Catholic Church, you have no more proof that the Bible is the Word of God than you do for the Koran.

Christ's own revelation witnessed in the Gospels shows us that God does not order slaughters, that the Hebrew prophets did not receive full revelation, and that God's Justice is not human justice.

If true, then Christ directly contradicts the plain text of the OT, thereby abolishing it. We are given no indicators, such as we are with parables, that we are to take the OT stories as myth. In addition, those stories would directly lead the reader in the opposite direction away from what you say is Christ's revelation. Again, you have Christ abolishing these texts. ...... It is BECAUSE God's justice is not human justice that the stories in the OT, which you deny, can be true and really happened.

If this is what Protestants believe, then we do not believe in the same God, FK. God, revealed fully in Christ, does not order or perform mercy killings of children.

Maybe we don't believe in the same God. :) For us, the God of the OT is the same as the God in the NT. You have Christ either denying the God of the OT, OR, denying God's word in the OT.

Scripture is scripture, I didn't write it, I just believe it. On these matters there is no way to nuance these stories to mean the direct opposite of what they say. These are not matters of interpretation. God either would and did kill children (and others) when it suited His purposes, or He did not. We either believe it or we do not.

There are many more examples of permissive cruelty ascribed to God in the OT than examples that would teach against abortion, FK. Abortion was unknown.

The point was to show that we can know that God disapproves of abortion solely from scripture, especially the OT. We do not need to be told by any person that abortion is bad. God tells us.

Obviously, killing members of non-Hebrew tribes, whether they were born or unborn, was not considered murder but "righteous."

But only under a direct and specific order from God. Are you aware of scripture that had that as a standing order?

FK: "I think all of these go to show how God views an unborn baby. He or she exists as a person at conception, at which time all the OT rules against the murder of innocent life would apply."

Except when God orders genocide against Canaanites and others in the OT, even smashing their babies against rocks, all of which—according to your earlier statements—are acts of "mercy" to "save" their souls.

I said it was an effect, I didn't say I thought God did it for that reason. I don't know what His reasons were. God shows us how WE are to treat fellow created humans. God, as the Creator, is not subject to those rules. You appear to be subjecting God to man's justice.

He has set up the rules and we must play by them for our eternal rewards.

I notice you give little Scriptural support for your positions. We cannot earn our salvation. We cannot merit God's grace. It is freely given according to His good pleasure alone.

"But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us,
Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;)
And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus:
That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
Not of works, lest any man should boast.
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." -- Ephesians 2:4-10

Wait!

I'm confused again! If the RCC church, per MarkBsnr, "We were the ones who wrote Scripture, or in the case of the OT, selected it. We put the Bible together and we said what it is to be." is correct then what about this from an Eastern Orthodox website?

The Holy Scriptures Were Produced by the Orthodox Church. The Church"s holy prophets and Apostles wrote the books contained in the Bible. The Church determined which books were authoritative and belonged in Holy Scripture. The Church preserved and passed on the texts of these Scriptural books.

The seventy-two Jewish rabbis and scholars who gave us the Septuagint Greek Old Testament, produced seventy-two identical Greek translations working independently and in insolation from one another. Writing in Greek, the Holy Apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter, and Jude produced the books of the New Testament.

The Holy Scriptures Were Preserved by the Orthodox Church. These books and letters were studied, copied, collected, recopied, passed from group of early Christians to another, and read in the services of the Church.

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