This Reformation Day (well, All Saints' by now) might be a good time to respond to David Mills' thoughtful reflection on C.S. Lewis's image of the Church Catholic as a house with many rooms.
The rooms in Lewis's analogy are the various Christian denominations. Mr. Mills is a Roman Catholic, you see. Hence his question: "What is the house?"
Unsurprisingly, his answer is that the house proper is the (Roman) Catholic church. The Protestant denominations, he suggests, are not only not rooms in the house, but properly speaking are not a part of the house at all. To be sure, it is not his intention to deny us non-Roman Western Christians some sort of very real and significant relationship to the house (for the moment, Eastern Orthodoxy lies outside the scope of the metaphor). Mills puts it this way:
Mills quite ably sets forth the problem this way:
That's a fair statement of our differences on the issue of ecclesiology. But I must demur. For one thing, throughout history Catholics have been as divided on a whole lot of things as, say, Lutherans have. Doubtless the rejoinder will be that while this may be true, they have been united in the one, essential thing: allegiance to the Pope.
But wait a minute. If, as Mills suggests, membership in the Catholic church depends upon subscription to its confession (and I agree that it ought to; the unquestioned right to believe as one likes does not imply the right to do so while dishonestly claiming membership in a group or movement which defines itself by belief in something which contradicts that belief), then precisely where is this manifest Body to which he prefers? Dissent from Catholic teaching among Americans who call themselves Catholics and for many purposes are treated as such by the Catholic church on matters ranging from birth control to abortion to the ordination of women is pandemic. And in fact, any but the most superficial study of church history will reveal that there have always been large numbers of Catholics who have quietly dissented from settled matters of Catholic doctrine, and much of the time- as at present- no particular effort has been made by the church to root them out.
There have even been multiple popes on several occasions in church history (yes, I know; institutional Catholicism has in each case subsequently designated one of them as the true pope, and the others as antipopes. But that does not change the face that, while these disagreements existed, there were unexcommunicated Catholics who followed each). This manifest Body, by Mills' own quite reasonable definition of it, seems on second glance not to be so manifest after all.
And there's no getting around the two flaw in Mills' ecclesiology, and that of his church. First, it did something which it cannot have done if the Roman Catholic church's claim to institutional identity with Christianity itself is valid: it developed into the form which supposedly defines it as the Church from something else.
As embarassing as it is to Roman Catholic ecclesiology, this whole business about an unbroken line of popes going back to Peter is dogma, not history. The evidence that St. Peter was ever in Rome, much less that he was its bishop, is very far from utterly compelling. And the fact is that not only the papacy but the monarchial episcopate itself developed over time. Originally the bishop was merely the pastor of a local congregation; the New Testament uses the terms episkopoi (bishops) and presbuteroi (elders; what modern Catholics would call "priests" and what modern Protestants would call "ministers") interchangably. A description of the Catholic view of the process- and a denial of the development of the episcopate (and thus of the papacy) based more upon speculation than historical evidence- can be found here.
The fact is that from its earliest days, when the universal Church was a loose confederation of local congregations acknowledging only some sort of very vague authority held by the Jerusalem church (and not that of Rome), it has been the faith of Christians that has bound them together as a body, and not allegience to a hierarchy of any kind. And there has never been a time when the Church catholic (as opposed to the Catholic church) has agreed upon the role of the Pope as the head of the church on earth. This is not to minimize the degree to which, by the time of the Apostolic Fathers, unity was often sought in the person of the monarchial bishop and sometimes (though not always) in communion with the Holy See. More generally (and certainly ealier), though, the unity of the Church has seen in precisely that which Mills dismisses as a Protestant chimera: the "distilled essence of Christianity" expressed in the Creeds, and the Church precisely as the company of those living "a theology and moral life in company with the like-minded."
It is precisely as St. Paul expresses his own ecclesiology quite clearly in Ephesians 2:19-22:
Many scholars through the ages have seen the foundation for the Church Christ speaks of in Matthew 16 as the confession that He is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Paul speaks of it as existing in the confession of the prophets and apostles, with Christ Himself as the chief Cornerstone. As it happens, the writings of the prophets and the apostles are gathered in a collection many of us have in our homes. It is called the Bible.
Roman Catholic apologists often argue that Scripture itself nowhere teaches the sola Scriptura. I would direct them to Ephesians 2:19-22. That, and a good textbook on Reformation theology, preferably written by a Lutheran or a Calvinist expressing his own faith rather than by a Roman Catholic critiquing it. There they will discover something which ought to be obvious: that the sola in "sola Scriptura" asserts not, as Catholics often assume, that Scripture is the only authority in the church of any kind (the most superficial observation of the history and life of the Reformation churches would clearly note many sources of authority at work, from historical confessions to the pronouncements of individual theologians, as well as denominational conventions, executives, and organizations). Rather, the sola Scriptura means very simply that nothing else can be an authority in the Church in the same sense and of the same degree of authority as the words of Christ and His prophets and apostles (for all the tendency of Protestants at times to treat the Scriptures as a kind of magical book possessing an authority of its own, in the last analysis that authority remains in practice that of the Holy Spirit speaking through its inspired human authors).
What I, as a Lutheran, find wanting in the Roman Catholic attitude toward tradition is not that it is accorded authority, but that it is accorded authority equal to that of Christ and His prophets and apostles- and, I would argue, in some places is allowed to overrule it. As a Reformation Christian, I take my stand with Paul. The household of God is not built on its character as a "Body manifest in history;" indeed, honesty compels me to agree with Luther and Calvin (and Jesus, in His parable of the wheat and the tares) in asserting that, in its truest sense, the Church in this world is hidden, invisible, and anything but manifest. Rather, it is "the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord."
And I am compelled to confess, with Paul, that all whom the Holy Spirit is building together by faith- however invisibly- into a dwelling place for our God are residents of Lewis's house. I see nothing here about tents in the back yard, nor anything in Paul's ecclesiology which allows for them. The claims of "the old codger in 4B" rest, on the other hand, pretty much on the claims of the old codger in 4B. Except that, Mills to the contrary, this Lutheran, at least, does not dismiss the Roman Catholic church as merely an old codger in an obscure room in our common house. I've given a great deal of thought to this, and after much deliberation I've come to the conclusion that what the Roman Catholic church is, in the last analysis, is the attic of the house. No ordinary room will do.
It's by far the largest room in the house, for one thing. And it's the place which serves the very important function of being the repository of a great deal that is old and valuable. If, as in every house, the attic also has accumulated a lot of trash the house would be better of without, well, that's the way of houses and attics.
But there is a downside to being the attic: of all the rooms in the house, you're the farthest removed from the Foundation. Now, I realize that that's not really fair. As far as- on the prophets' and apostle's own terms- the Roman Catholic church has allowed itself to wander from the foundation of the prophets and apostles, there are those who have wandered much further. The Mormons, for example, live at an entirely different address. And even some churches which allegedly spring from the Reformation- I'm thinking of the some of the Pentecostal churches, which have also removed the sola from the sola Scriptura in favor of subjective emotions and dreams and visions, and the more Finney-esque "Evangelicals," who are far more Pelagian than Rome ever was, are perhaps best thought of as inhabiting little huts somewhere up on the roof. There are those attached to the house, however slightly, who are much further from the foundation than the Roman Catholics.
And then, let's give tradition its due. True, Augustine did say that if he had not believed the Church, he would not have believed the Scriptures, he also wrote
The Eastern Fathers agree:
There is nothing so catholic as the sola Scriptura. Unless, that is, it's the notion that all who belong to Christ also belong to His Church.
All who belong to Him live in the House.
HT: Rev. Walt Snyder, for the quotations from the Fathers supporting the sola Scriptura
The rooms in Lewis's analogy are the various Christian denominations. Mr. Mills is a Roman Catholic, you see. Hence his question: "What is the house?"
Unsurprisingly, his answer is that the house proper is the (Roman) Catholic church. The Protestant denominations, he suggests, are not only not rooms in the house, but properly speaking are not a part of the house at all. To be sure, it is not his intention to deny us non-Roman Western Christians some sort of very real and significant relationship to the house (for the moment, Eastern Orthodoxy lies outside the scope of the metaphor). Mills puts it this way:
For the Catholic, one of the house’s main rules is that you have to be a Catholic to live there. The Immaculate Conception of Mary is not a belief required in the Catholic room, while disbelief in it is required in the Protestant rooms; it is a belief required of all those who live under that roof. If someone doesn’t believe it, he can’t have a room in the house. He can set up a shelter in the yard (his communion is real but imperfect)—inside the pale, certainly, and not beyond it, but not in the house.
Mills quite ably sets forth the problem this way:
From the Protestant point of view, the Catholic who insists that his church is the Church is a lot like the old codger in 4B coming round demanding the rent or imposing a curfew on the other apartments. He may be the oldest and wealthiest and most learned person in the building, but still, he’s just the old codger in 4B.
A Catholic, however, can’t remove membership in the Catholic Church from the things that are essential to the definition of Christian. Lewis's idea of Mere Christianity is ruined as an ecumenical proposal from the start by his making it a theology and moral life lived in fellowship with the like-minded rather than an incorporation into a Body manifest in history. For the Catholic unity comes from shared membership in the Catholic Church, not from agreement on some distilled essence of Christianity.
That's a fair statement of our differences on the issue of ecclesiology. But I must demur. For one thing, throughout history Catholics have been as divided on a whole lot of things as, say, Lutherans have. Doubtless the rejoinder will be that while this may be true, they have been united in the one, essential thing: allegiance to the Pope.
But wait a minute. If, as Mills suggests, membership in the Catholic church depends upon subscription to its confession (and I agree that it ought to; the unquestioned right to believe as one likes does not imply the right to do so while dishonestly claiming membership in a group or movement which defines itself by belief in something which contradicts that belief), then precisely where is this manifest Body to which he prefers? Dissent from Catholic teaching among Americans who call themselves Catholics and for many purposes are treated as such by the Catholic church on matters ranging from birth control to abortion to the ordination of women is pandemic. And in fact, any but the most superficial study of church history will reveal that there have always been large numbers of Catholics who have quietly dissented from settled matters of Catholic doctrine, and much of the time- as at present- no particular effort has been made by the church to root them out.
There have even been multiple popes on several occasions in church history (yes, I know; institutional Catholicism has in each case subsequently designated one of them as the true pope, and the others as antipopes. But that does not change the face that, while these disagreements existed, there were unexcommunicated Catholics who followed each). This manifest Body, by Mills' own quite reasonable definition of it, seems on second glance not to be so manifest after all.
And there's no getting around the two flaw in Mills' ecclesiology, and that of his church. First, it did something which it cannot have done if the Roman Catholic church's claim to institutional identity with Christianity itself is valid: it developed into the form which supposedly defines it as the Church from something else.
As embarassing as it is to Roman Catholic ecclesiology, this whole business about an unbroken line of popes going back to Peter is dogma, not history. The evidence that St. Peter was ever in Rome, much less that he was its bishop, is very far from utterly compelling. And the fact is that not only the papacy but the monarchial episcopate itself developed over time. Originally the bishop was merely the pastor of a local congregation; the New Testament uses the terms episkopoi (bishops) and presbuteroi (elders; what modern Catholics would call "priests" and what modern Protestants would call "ministers") interchangably. A description of the Catholic view of the process- and a denial of the development of the episcopate (and thus of the papacy) based more upon speculation than historical evidence- can be found here.
The fact is that from its earliest days, when the universal Church was a loose confederation of local congregations acknowledging only some sort of very vague authority held by the Jerusalem church (and not that of Rome), it has been the faith of Christians that has bound them together as a body, and not allegience to a hierarchy of any kind. And there has never been a time when the Church catholic (as opposed to the Catholic church) has agreed upon the role of the Pope as the head of the church on earth. This is not to minimize the degree to which, by the time of the Apostolic Fathers, unity was often sought in the person of the monarchial bishop and sometimes (though not always) in communion with the Holy See. More generally (and certainly ealier), though, the unity of the Church has seen in precisely that which Mills dismisses as a Protestant chimera: the "distilled essence of Christianity" expressed in the Creeds, and the Church precisely as the company of those living "a theology and moral life in company with the like-minded."
It is precisely as St. Paul expresses his own ecclesiology quite clearly in Ephesians 2:19-22:
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
This- and not Matthew 16:13-19 (whose connection to the papacy rests pretty much on the papacy's own assertion of that claim; the same words Jesus addresses to Peter in Matthew 16-or are they exclusively to Peter?- are addressed to the apostles as a group in Matthew 18: 17-19. In the earlier parallel, Mark 8:27-30, the words allegedly making Peter, rather than Christ, the foundation of the Church are missing. And the controversy over the significance of the fact that in Matthew 16 Christ renames Simon "Peter" rather than "Petra" (the word Matthew uses to designate that upon which Christ would build His church, and grammatically indicating a smaller rock than that petra) has been a matter of contention between the confessions ever since the Reformation. Ever since Luther, the case has been made quite plausibly that Peter was given his name in commemoration of his confession of that upon which Christ would build His Church, rather than as an indication that he, himself, would be that foundation. "Peter," properly speaking, does not mean "the Rock," but rather "of the Rock." And again, any association of Peter with the papacy and thus the Roman magisterium rests pretty much on the spin the popes and the magisterium have put upon history rather than on history itself. Allegiance to the pope may well include one in a group made manifest in history by that allegiance, but only that spin identifies it, per se, as the Body of Christ.
Many scholars through the ages have seen the foundation for the Church Christ speaks of in Matthew 16 as the confession that He is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Paul speaks of it as existing in the confession of the prophets and apostles, with Christ Himself as the chief Cornerstone. As it happens, the writings of the prophets and the apostles are gathered in a collection many of us have in our homes. It is called the Bible.
Roman Catholic apologists often argue that Scripture itself nowhere teaches the sola Scriptura. I would direct them to Ephesians 2:19-22. That, and a good textbook on Reformation theology, preferably written by a Lutheran or a Calvinist expressing his own faith rather than by a Roman Catholic critiquing it. There they will discover something which ought to be obvious: that the sola in "sola Scriptura" asserts not, as Catholics often assume, that Scripture is the only authority in the church of any kind (the most superficial observation of the history and life of the Reformation churches would clearly note many sources of authority at work, from historical confessions to the pronouncements of individual theologians, as well as denominational conventions, executives, and organizations). Rather, the sola Scriptura means very simply that nothing else can be an authority in the Church in the same sense and of the same degree of authority as the words of Christ and His prophets and apostles (for all the tendency of Protestants at times to treat the Scriptures as a kind of magical book possessing an authority of its own, in the last analysis that authority remains in practice that of the Holy Spirit speaking through its inspired human authors).
What I, as a Lutheran, find wanting in the Roman Catholic attitude toward tradition is not that it is accorded authority, but that it is accorded authority equal to that of Christ and His prophets and apostles- and, I would argue, in some places is allowed to overrule it. As a Reformation Christian, I take my stand with Paul. The household of God is not built on its character as a "Body manifest in history;" indeed, honesty compels me to agree with Luther and Calvin (and Jesus, in His parable of the wheat and the tares) in asserting that, in its truest sense, the Church in this world is hidden, invisible, and anything but manifest. Rather, it is "the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord."
And I am compelled to confess, with Paul, that all whom the Holy Spirit is building together by faith- however invisibly- into a dwelling place for our God are residents of Lewis's house. I see nothing here about tents in the back yard, nor anything in Paul's ecclesiology which allows for them. The claims of "the old codger in 4B" rest, on the other hand, pretty much on the claims of the old codger in 4B. Except that, Mills to the contrary, this Lutheran, at least, does not dismiss the Roman Catholic church as merely an old codger in an obscure room in our common house. I've given a great deal of thought to this, and after much deliberation I've come to the conclusion that what the Roman Catholic church is, in the last analysis, is the attic of the house. No ordinary room will do.
It's by far the largest room in the house, for one thing. And it's the place which serves the very important function of being the repository of a great deal that is old and valuable. If, as in every house, the attic also has accumulated a lot of trash the house would be better of without, well, that's the way of houses and attics.
But there is a downside to being the attic: of all the rooms in the house, you're the farthest removed from the Foundation. Now, I realize that that's not really fair. As far as- on the prophets' and apostle's own terms- the Roman Catholic church has allowed itself to wander from the foundation of the prophets and apostles, there are those who have wandered much further. The Mormons, for example, live at an entirely different address. And even some churches which allegedly spring from the Reformation- I'm thinking of the some of the Pentecostal churches, which have also removed the sola from the sola Scriptura in favor of subjective emotions and dreams and visions, and the more Finney-esque "Evangelicals," who are far more Pelagian than Rome ever was, are perhaps best thought of as inhabiting little huts somewhere up on the roof. There are those attached to the house, however slightly, who are much further from the foundation than the Roman Catholics.
And then, let's give tradition its due. True, Augustine did say that if he had not believed the Church, he would not have believed the Scriptures, he also wrote
Neither dare one agree with catholic bishops if by chance they err in anything, (with) the result that their opinion is against the canonical Scriptures of God. (De unitate ecclesiae, chp. 10).
The Eastern Fathers agree:
Regarding the things I say, I should supply even the proofs, so I will not seem to rely on my own opinions, but rather, prove them with Scripture, so that the matter will remain certain and steadfast. (John Chrysostom)
We are not content simply because this is the tradition of the Fathers. What is important is that the Fathers followed the meaning of the Scripture. (Basil the Great)
The holy and inspired Scriptures are fully sufficient for the proclamation of the truth. (Athanasius)
There is nothing so catholic as the sola Scriptura. Unless, that is, it's the notion that all who belong to Christ also belong to His Church.
All who belong to Him live in the House.
HT: Rev. Walt Snyder, for the quotations from the Fathers supporting the sola Scriptura
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