I was thinking about Jonathan’s comment on the recent post concerning Apostolic Succession and Christian history and had a few more ideas to share.
Jonathan was asking for the evidence that authority was transmitted through the laying on of hands via Apostolic Succession, beginning with Christ commissioning the 12 Apostles then they commissioning (ordaining) others to succeed them (like Paul -> Timothy). I told him that there is no verse in the Bible that explicitly lays out who has authority in Christ’s Church (after the Apostles died) nor how or whether it is transferred to others. There are verses that indirectly support Apostolic Succession, to be sure, but nothing so direct and unequivocal that one couldn’t interpret those verses to mean something else.
Holy Orders
How weird: God didn’t make clear in the Bible how authority would work! What is the Protestant answer to this conundrum? Well, as further evidence that the Bible isn’t clear on this issue, Protestants (all believing in sola Scriptura) offer many different answers to how authority should work. The Baptists and other congregationalists assert the autonomy of the local church and its local board of elders. The Presbyterians have a more regional or denominational authoritative model fashioned after John Calvin’s interpretation of the biblical passages on elders, presbyters, and deacons. The Anglicans have an episcopal model inherited from the Catholic Church.
All Protestant Communities, however, admit that they do not have any protection from error of their teachings, nor do they usually claim that they have “divine authority” which would bind their members to obedience. Because of these facts, Protestants can and do leave their current churches for doctrinal disagreements and other reasons and join other churches or create their own new ones which will ostensibly be better than their old ones. The more orthodox Anglicans cannot stand the heterodoxy of the Episcopal church and so have split to found the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) and the American Mission in America (AMiA), coming under the wing of Anglican prelates in, of all places, Africa or South America to find shelter from the storm of heterodoxy.
Under sola Scriptura, the Bible should be clear on all important matters of the Faith, yet it isn’t. On one of the most crucial matters, that of authority, the Bible is subject to many different contradictory interpretations. Who has the rightful authority today? How do we know?
If God wants us to know him and his truth and to follow his authorized pastors so we would be protected from being led astray, he must have provided a way for that authority to be passed from the Apostles to *someone* and for the faithful to know it. The Bible is unclear on it, so what other sources of knowledge do we have available to us?
One is the writings of the early Christians describing the Church, its governance, worship, and beliefs. Another is the witness of the Church herself through the centuries–is it an accident that the Orthodox Church also teaches that Apostolic Succession is the way that God transmits rightful authority in the Church? Not until the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s do we see an entirely novel theory for how God gives authority–the “direct to me” model because “I teach the truth”–which coincidentally is a necessary justification for the schism caused by the Protestant Reformers.
The early Christians placed great emphasis on the unity of the Church and her safeguarding of Christ’s truth against heretics who caused schism. This unity was defined by full communion with the bishop of Rome, the successor of St. Peter, called the Prince of the Apostles in many writings during these centuries. The Bible makes pretty clear that Peter was special amongst the Apostles–even as a Protestant I could see that, in spite of how Protestant apologists sought to minimize Peter’s significance at every turn–and the early Christian writers and Fathers speak even more directly to his successors’ pre-eminent role in leading the Church.
So from the Bible it is unclear how authority was to be transmitted, but there is indirect evidence that it is Apostolic Succession, evidence which is corroborated in every century after the 1st by these historical Christian witnesses. I would assert that Apostolic Succession should get the nod over any other person’s idea of authority given this evidence, and that means finding the Churches that have it. Unfortunately there are more than one, for schism occurred before the Reformation, but compared to the overwhelmingly numerous Protestant denominations to choose from, this decision really boils down to just two: the Catholic or Orthodox Church.
The Bible isn’t clear on authority because God never intended Christians to try to figure out what is true using the Bible alone. This is why Christ established a Church made up of living witnesseses who could testify to what he said and did and thereby defend the truth against the heresies which would seek to corrupt it in every century. You cannot put a book on the witness stand to explain something; you put a person, and those persons can answer questions, rebut arguments, and interpret their Master’s statements. And because our Lord gave the Holy Spirit to the Church, she will always testify truly. The combination gives us Christians today, in the 21st century after Christ, true knowledge of God which we can be confident is without error as well as Christ’s living presence in the sacramental life of his Bride, the Church.
Does this same argument hold for The Old Covenant? If not, why not? Christ held his audience responsible for knowing the Scriptures and knowing them AS Scriptures: does this mean the Sanhedrin was the original infallible authority?
Hi Kevin,
Great questions. I am not anywhere near an expert on this area (the relationship of the leaders of the Israelites in the Old Covenant and the Church (the new People of God) in the New), but I would take a stab.
I think a key passage for understanding the authority of the Old Covenant leaders is the beginning of Matthew 23:
“Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying, “The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens 3 (hard to carry) and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them.”
There are at least two interesting things about this passage:
1. The chair of Moses is never mentioned in the Old Testament–it seems to have been an oral tradition, yet one that was authoritative as Jesus references it in this way.
2. The Sanhedrin, scribes, and Pharisees are being excoriated by Jesus here, yet, he tells his disciples to obey everything that they tell them! Whoa. Then he proceeds to say how they do not practice what they preach, indicating that what they are teaching is true but that which they are doing is not.
What I glean from this passage is that, these were the rightful authorities of the Jews and thus, they were to be obeyed in what they taught, as it was what God had inspired in the OT Scriptures, traditions, etc. However, their actions were hypocritical and represented a perversion of those truths, as Jesus mentions.
Similarly, in the New Covenant, I would argue that there are rightful authorities, that is, authorized by God to lead his Church. That’s a big realization to make, for it means that they exist and we simply have to find these rightful authorities. I would say we can know this answer via Apostolic Succession, the pattern for transmitting authority in the Church from the Apostolic age onward.
A second question is whether these New Covenant rightful authorities within the Church are also infallible in their teachings on faith and morals. There are passages which could be understood to indicate this (John 16:13 I recall from memory), but this question is a bit broader than the one you are asking.
Gotta run! Let me know what you think. Thanks.
It seems to me it’s probably eisegesis to read Catholic structure into the Jewish model. There were, for example, fierce disagreements among and within the Sanhedrin, scribes, and Pharisees, and as far as I’m aware, no one claimed infallible authority from God to decide the questions. More important, I think, is that there was no institution claiming infallibility for itself in authenticating Scriptures, and yet Jesus holds his audience accountable for knowing scriptures as such.
So it appears there must be a mechanism outside of an infallible Magisterium for identifying and authenticating scriptures.
Hey Kevin,
I didn’t intend to imply that there was some Catholic structure latent or similar to the Jewish model, but only that God had established for Israel rightful authorities, and that in the New Covenant he had done the same thing.
I also do not know whether any of the leaders of the Old Covenant claimed infallibility in any sense; I would kind of doubt it, though if that is true, how then do you explain Jesus commanding his disciples to obey everything these leaders told them?
I don’t really understand what you are getting at with the statement that “Jesus holds his audience accountable for knowing the Scriptures as such.” Certainly I agree Jesus thought that his fellow Jews should know the Scriptures as proclaimed in the synagogues, and I agree that the Scriptures are inerrant, including the Old Testament, but the Jews certainly weren’t sola Scriptura in any sense at all.
“So it appears there must be a mechanism outside of an infallible Magisterium for identifying and authenticating scriptures.”
Well, if this is your conclusion, I would have a problem with it. The Jews at Jesus’ time did not have a fixed canon of Scripture. It was not closed nor determined to have ended nor were all the books agreed upon except for the older ones. My Protestant friend and I recently examined the list of books used in the Septuagint, and it includes the books Catholics and Protestants both agree on, as well as the seven deuterocanonicals, as well as books that both Catholics and Protestants view as non-inspired.
It was the Church, the new People of God, in the New Covenant, who was guided by the Holy Spirit in discerning which books God had inspired in both the Old and New Testaments.
If you disagree that the Church was the agent who “identified and authenticated” the Scriptures, what agent do you claim did so?
Addendum: Hey Kevin, I just read a relevant comment on another blog about the Old and New Covenants:
http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/11/solo-scriptura-sola-scriptura-and-the-question-of-interpretive-authority/#comment-4856
“That would make every significant difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant into an “inconsistency.” There was no “visible Church” in the Old Testament; the Church was born on Pentecost. That’s why Jesus preached that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. He was inaugurating the Kingdom, something not present in the Old Covenant. The New Covenant is far better than the Old Covenant. Baptism now saves, as Peter tells us, but circumcision did not. The passover lamb of the Old Covenant did not give eternal life. But the Eucharist under the New Covenant gives eternal life (John 6:54-58) In every way the promises of the New Covenant are better. So you shouldn’t be surprised that what Christ inaugurated, and to which He gave the keys to Peter, would be far greater and indefectible compared to what we find in the Old Covenant. With a mere sola scriptura approach that’s much more difficult to know, because you don’t have the benefit of what the Church herself has definitively taught about herself through the ages.”
Ego distinguo, as St. Thomas would say. There’s a difference between canon and scripture, a claim I think you agree with (since scripture is much older than the Tridentine canon). I want to zero in on the point I’m making, which is about scripture and not yet about canon. In Mark 12 and elsewhere in the Gospels, we see Jesus holding his audience accountable to scripture as such (i.e. as revelatory of God’s purposes and commandments). That’s just got to mean that there are sufficient means for identifying and authenticating scripture as such outside an institution claiming for itself infallible authority. That’s all I’m saying.
Hi Kevin,
Ah, I think I understand what you are saying now. Yes, I think I could agree that in the times of the Old Covenant (e.g. before Christ ushered in the New), the Jews used the Scriptures, such as they had been orally passed down and then recorded, lost and re-discovered, etc. and they read them with reverence as the chronicle of God’s loving actions toward them over the centuries. But their leaders and priests did not have infallibility. (This is leaving aside the big question of which books actually made up the Scriptures they used.)
So what conclusion do your then wish to make?
Only this: scripture as scripture (God’s words to man) can be identified and authenticated while prescinding from the question of whether an infallible authority exists (as shown above).
Thus, the Catholic apologetical argument that Protestants are incoherent because they can’t account for scripture without an infallible magisterium is false.
Oooh, I like that argument.
However, I think there are some ways to rebut it, which I will take a stab at.
Firstly, I would again argue what I did in comment #5 about the New Covenant far surpassing the Old, so “symmetry” should not be expected (e.g. “if the old was fallible, the new must be, too”). That doesn’t exactly rebut your argument, but I think it needs to be mentioned for the principle’s sake.
Secondly, another difference between the two is that, public revelation did not ever end in the Old Covenant; instead, it continued throughout the centuries from ca. 1800 BC with Abraham through the centuries just before Christ, at which time a startling new revelation was given in God becoming man. This is in contrast to Christ’s self-revelation of God to us and then the Apostles’ writing of what became the New Testament books, at which time public revelation definitively ended.
Why is that important? Well, from my understanding, the Jews did not have a “closed canon” nor necessarily the same belief that we now do that their Scriptures, such as they had been written and collected at any given point in their history, was the infallible, inspired Word of God. Rather, these books were the chronicle of God’s actions toward them throughout their history, actions which continued to occur and be chronicled (including the historical books of the deuterocanon like 1 & 2 Maccabees).
Their “Scriptures” also seemed to have included books which no one now considers God-breathed, inspired, inerrant Scripture. How much were those non-inspired books used in the Jewish life and liturgy? I don’t know.
But I do know that their worship and life was not based on the Scriptures as “the sole infallible rule of faith” as sola Scriptura Protestants believe now, so they were in a very different “economy” than we now consider ourselves in. Instead, God continued speaking to them through living prophets, through their rightful authorities in the priests and other leaders, and through their liturgical life in the temple.
Now, contrast that with the New Covenant at the end of the 1st century when public revelation has now ended. It becomes important over the first centuries to identify which new writings should be read in the Church during Mass and be meditated on, so the New Testament is discerned and collected over the next 300 years. During this time, the Old Testament books are also discerned by the Church. The agent which discerned the canon is the Church, the new rightful authorities of the people of God.
Without an infallible Magisterium guided by God to be protected from error, we would have little confidence that the books in our Bible are all inspired and none other are and none got in that were not. Like the Septuagint which contained non-inspired books. We now have a deeper understanding (than the Jews did in the Old Covenant) that these writings are not just useful books of how God worked in their peoples’ history, but also inerrant, God-breathed writings that are called the Word of God and should be trusted as inerrant. With public revelation closed and the Church using these Scriptures (and Tradition) to protect the deposit of Faith and define true doctrines, it becomes imperative to know the canon with certainty. With the Old Covenant, it was less important.
Gotta run–thanks for the interaction!
I appreciate the thoughtful response, but still see the claims for the absolute necessity of an infallible authority as extravagant. If God’s people could be expected to know which books were inspired and which were not under the Old Covenant, I don’t see how you can rule out that possibility now. Additionally, I don’t think the confidence in the texts would be as low as you say in the absence of an infallible authority (again, Jesus didn’t seem to think the Jews should lack confidence in the authority of the scriptures).
Hi Kevin,
I would not maintain that infallible authority is an absolute necessity, so I agree with you that there is a possibility that God has provided no infallible authority in the New Covenant and that we have to just figure things out as best we can, realizing we cannot look to any church’s teachings as being the fullness of the truth, without error. That does leave us with having to interpret verses like John 16:13, where Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will lead the Apostles “into all truth” as meaning something different than promising his Church and her leaders this charism of infallibility.
I would also say that Jesus’ presence with us in the Eucharist and the Holy Spirit being sent to dwell within us as our intimate companion are not absolutely necessary–the Old Covenant didn’t have them, but they still knew and loved God and “got along fine.” Rather, these things are gifts from God’s stupendous merciful love, things he has chosen to bestow upon us, his children, beyond what we deserve or ever would have expected.
The line of argument you are using seems to be that “if it was good enough in the Old Covenant, it should be good enough for the New Covenant” runs into problems because of this super abundance of God’s grace shown forth in the New Covenant (in the Eucharist and the Hoiy Spirit for example). Take also baptism, the New Covenant equivalent to circumcision. Well, circumcision was good enough in the Old, after all, it is what God instituted such that males became members of the people of God, the Israelites, yet in the New Covenant, it was superseded by baptism, whereby (in the Catholic teaching), one becomes a member of Christ’s own Body, the Church, is cleansed of all sin, and is given the Holy Spirit. Those were not necessities–God could have just kept using circumcision–but he chose to do something new and better in the New Covenant.
As to your last argument that our confidence in the canon of Scripture does not need to be low, I would challenge you with this syllogism:
1. Certainty cannot rest on doubt. A decision cannot be more trustworthy than the deciding principle. You cannot trust the action more than the agent.
2. The Church is the agent who defined the canon.
3. You cannot have more trust in the canon than you have in the Church.
4. Protestants do not trust the Church with even moderate certainty.
5. Therefore Protestants cannot trust the canon with even moderate certainty.
Hey Devin,
A few thoughts. First, I don’t concede that it’s the most obvious prima facie interpretation of John 16:13 to think it would mean that particular officeholders are guaranteed infallibility. There are, it seems to me, several less extravagant interpretations that square easily with the absence of infallible offices, so I don’t see a scriptural problem yet.
I don’t think we need to broaden the scope of my argument to the more general “good enough for the OT, good enough for me” in all things. That’s clearly not the case with most of the new covenant. I’m making a much more confined claim than that, one about the way human beings identify and authenticate scripture as such.
The syllogism is the most interesting response, but I don’t find it persuasive. I think premise 1 misunderstands faith, where the conclusion is always stronger than the premises (i.e. faith is evidence of things not seen). This is why the blessed in heaven don’t have faith — they don’t need it, because they simply see the Truth. Premise 2 doesn’t entail anything unless it was per se rather than per accidens that the Roman Catholic church is the temporal agent defining the canon; and you agreed above that the church isn’t per se necessary. You can probably see how the rest of the argument comes apart without those premises.