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Summeries of Presentations from the 2005 Aquinas-Luther Conference
In this paper I want to do one
thing only: examine the Gospel of Matthew to see if what it has to say about
church authority and the teaching office offers support for the notion of a
formal teaching magisterium. Why Matthew? Ultimately the full canon must be
consulted, but that is too much for one paper and Matthew’s Gospel seems to be
especially attuned to the sort of concerns that the question of a teaching
magisterium raises. The Significance of Teaching in Matthew… the
teaching office of the church appears to be of extraordinary significance to
Matthew. The clearest evidence for this may be the prominence given to teaching
in the Great Commission: the task of the church is to make disciples of all
nations and it fulfills this task by teaching baptized people to obey the
commands of Jesus (28:20). Such a commission seems to presume consensus as to
what obedience to the commands of Jesus entails… Who Has Authority To Teach? Scholars have long noted a connection in this Gospel
between teaching and authority. When Jesus concludes the Sermon on
the Mount, the crowds are astonished because "he taught them as one having
authority, and not as their scribes" (7:29). …
Indeed, he is the Son of God: all things have been delivered to him by
the Father, such that the only ones who truly know the things of God are those
to whom Jesus discloses what God has authorized him to reveal (11:27). … Only Jesus? What about his disciples? Well, here we come up
against a curious tension that runs throughout this Gospel. At one level, the
authority to teach does appear to be restricted to Jesus alone--disciples are
denied participation in this aspect of Jesus' ministry until the Gospel's final
verse (28:20)… the (Great)Commission directs them to teach obedience to the
commands of Jesus not to their own commands. So, there may be a certain ironic
logic that we can grasp: people who are not to be regarded as teachers
themselves will teach people to obey the commands of the only one who is to be
regarded as Teacher. … The key to resolving this tension lies in a deeper
appreciation of Matthean christology and ecclesiology. In some sense … Matthew
believes the church embodies the continuing presence of the living Christ on
earth. This abiding presence of Christ is a prominent theme in our First
Gospel…. Matthew locates the presence of the abiding Christ in the messianic
community referred to as "the church.” If this be true, then there is no
contradiction in Matthew envisioning the church as exercising authority
attributed to Christ alone. It is not that the authority to interpret the law
has passed from the Messiah to the community; rather, the Messiah continues to
exercise this authority through the community, … Practical Grounding for a Teaching Magisterium…
look at the text of Matthew 18:15-17 to get some idea of how the process of
ethical discernment may have played out in practice. One member of the community
believes another member has sinned 6 He or she is to go to that
person in private and "point out the fault." If the brother will not
listen, one or two others are to be brought in to insure that there will be
witnesses. Finally, the Matthean Jesus says, if the offender still will not
listen, the matter is be brought to the church and then if he refuses to listen
even to the church, he is to be regarded as a Gentile or tax collector. Why?
Because whatever the church binds on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever
the church looses on earth will be loosed in heaven (18:18). The latter citation
suggests that what is really envisioned here is a process for resolving disputes
regarding what is or is not morally acceptable. The offender is not best
regarded as a stubborn impenitent who persists in behavior that he himself
acknowledges to be wrong. Rather, he does not accept the judgment of his
accusers that his action constitutes sin. This is why the church must render a
verdict: it must consider the scripture that the questionable activity
supposedly violates and either bind that scripture (decide that it does apply to
his situation) or loose the scripture (decide that it does not apply). … A Magisterium Faithful to Matthew’s Vision
If a teaching magisterium were to be established within our church, it
would remain faithful to the Matthean paradigm only to the extent that it
remained representative of the church as a whole, which embodies the presence of
the Messiah Jesus, rather than becoming authoritative in its own right. … If
our church remains faithful to the Matthean paradigm, then, any teaching
magisterium that arises will have only limited and decidedly deferred authority.
Matthew’s Gospel tells us that teaching authority rests exclusively with the
Messiah and with the church, such that any human agency that seeks to bind and
loose scripture for our present day will have to do so in a way that is
expressive of Christ and representative of the church. The Gospel of Matthew would be opposed to the establishment
of any sort of teaching magisterium if that meant the lives of everyday
Christians would be controlled by the decisions of a privileged elite. And it
would be especially opposed to that type of establishment if the
qualifications for becoming part of the privileged elite had anything to do with
attaining wealth or education. … The trick, then, would be to sap the group of
power such that it would be forced to maintain a servant mindset, unwilling and
unable to dominate others through its decisions. In my mind, some such role was
displayed recently in our ELCA by the Sexuality Task Force. Whatever one thought
of its recommendations–or even of the process by which it arrived at
these–this Task Force functioned in a servant capacity. It may have been
composed of powerful (educated) people, but the Task Force itself had no
authority to do anything that would affect, much less dominate, the lives of
everyday church members. A teaching magisterium that seeks to interpret
scripture in ways that are expressive of Christ and representative of the church
might be set up along similar lines–albeit with a more permanent standing and
a more generic commission that was not limited to consideration of any one
specific topic. Conclusion
I have suggested that the Gospel of Matthew does not dictate a need for
our church to establish or develop a teaching magisterium, but it does perhaps
allow for such an institution, if that should turn out to be a useful mechanism
for addressing concerns this Gospel raises. Prominent among those concerns is
for individual members of a church to be trained in a communal ethic, or, more
precisely, for those members to be taught to obey what the community understands
to be the commands of Jesus. Matthew’s Gospel … calls for the church to
develop a formal procedure that will enable the community to resolve those
disputes with maximum consistency. The ideal that the Matthean Gospel sets
before us is not an open-minded community in which church members all live in
accord with their personal interpretations of the Bible, respecting each
other’s differences. Rather, the ideal that this Gospel sets before us is a
community in which church members subordinate their own perceptions concerning
what is right or proper to the understanding of the church as a whole, in order
that their limited human perspectives may be corrected by Jesus the Messiah
whose will is now authoritatively discerned and expressed through decisions of
the church. … A servant body with
deferred authority and penultimate function, a teaching magisterium faithful to
the Gospel of Matthew would strive to be no more and no less than what Matthew
calls “a scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven” (13: 52):
attentive to what is new and what is old, this teaching magisterium would commit
itself to binding and loosing scripture in ways expressive of Christ and
representative of the church as a whole. … II. Hermeneutics, Authority of Scripture, and Magisterium, by
Dr. Mary Jane Haemig, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN
I. Martin Luther
on who may interpret scripture and judge doctrine
– Luther rejects the
argument that the power of interpreting scripture was given to the pope when the
keys were given to Peter. To him it
is clear that “the keys were not given to Peter alone but to the whole
community.” (LW 44, 134) Further,
he notes that the keys are only for the binding or losing of sin and are “not
ordained for doctrine or government.” (LW 44, 134)
Luther then argues on the basis of the Apostles Creed “I believe in one
holy Christian church.” If this
statement is true, “then the pope cannot be the only one who is right. Otherwise, we would have to confess, “I believe in the pope
at Rome. …Luther also argues on
the basis of the common priesthood of all Christians. …(LW 44, 135)…. Luther concludes “Therefore, it is the duty of every Christian to espouse the cause of the faith, to understand and defend it, and to denounce every error.” (LW 44, 136) Pause for a moment and consider that statement: Luther’s emphasis is not so much on interpreting, for in some sense the interpreter stands above, rather it is on properly understanding scripture and the Christian faith. …For Martin Luther the right of all Christians to
understand scripture and to judge preaching and teaching was not rooted in a
modern concept of “rights” but in scripture itself and his conviction of the
activity of the Word among all Christians.
To deny the right and duty of all Christians to judge doctrine is to deny
that Christ is active among all. II. The
Lutheran Confessions – Lurking behind the Lutheran confessions and
indeed behind the reformation itself is Luther’s conviction that God is
present and active in Word and sacrament. Christ
needs no representative on earth because Christ himself is present and comes to
us through the means of the preached word and the sacrament.
So the question is not who will represent Christ and give an
authoritative interpretation, rather the question is how the doing of word and
sacrament will be accomplished, that is, how the benefits of Christ will be
distributed. So the Lutheran Confessions talk about ministry. … A constant theme through the Lutheran Confessions is
the warning against locating ultimate authority in any human or any human office
or any human organization. Not even
the church fathers, for whom the Lutheran confessions evince a great deal of
respect, are an authority that is placed either over scripture or over other
Christians. In many places the
Confessions cite the church fathers in support of their positions and to show
that the Lutheran reform movement is in fact nothing new but rather a teaching
that stands in continuity with what the church has taught.
But the Confessors are acutely aware that the church fathers can err and
should not be taken as authorities that stand over and above scripture. … This year I asked the students in my Lutheran Confessions
course what topics or issues they would have the Augsburg Confession address if
they could contribute to it. The
most common answer was “an article on the interpretation of scripture.”
They echo what many Lutherans have thought and still think:
Wouldn’t it be much more helpful if we had a set of principles set out? I am convinced that the reformers knew what they were doing
when they did not include such an article—they were keenly aware that
scripture stands above the Confessions and is not subject to any interpretive
genius. … Lutherans
consider the confessional writings a guide – or as my first Confessions
teacher put it, a roadmap – to the scripture.
Scripture is the norming norm, the norm above which we cannot stand.
The Confessions are the normed norm (norma normanda), that is they are
the norm for what we believe. The
Confessions are helpful because they in fact say what scripture says.
The Word of God establishes articles of faith; the Confessions merely
record those articles. III. Tools
for educating Christians to exercise their vocation to understand
and judge… The reformers assumed that scripture is clear.
If we have trouble understanding, we are the problem, not scripture.
Luther and the reformers worked to give all Christian the tools to
interpret scripture… Luther and the reformers were convinced that the catechism
was the key to scripture. It was
not a set of human standards applied to scripture, rather the heart of scripture
itself, used to interpret the rest of scripture. (Lest you worry too much, remember what was said earlier
about scripture being the norming norm and the confessional writings –
including the catechism – being the normed norm.
The catechism is subject to, not above, scripture.) As the key to scripture it provided the key to judging what
was right and wrong in teaching and preaching.
And who could exercise the function of judging?
Any Christian! Even the most simple layperson (or clergyperson!) had this
right and duty. … It was not the
ignorant layperson who was charged with the task of judging doctrine and
teaching but rather the well-catechized layperson. IV. The catechized layperson as judge of preaching
and teaching – I want to
note that none of the sources cited – nor any of the sixteenth century
Lutheran sources I read saw the authority of the layperson to judge all
preaching and teaching as authorizing any judgment that person wanted to make. To the contrary! This
authority was always bound to the Word of God.
The catechism was a tool for learning and knowing the Word of God.
Also, I never saw a source that claimed that laypersons should judge
preaching and teaching but clergy and university professors should not.
These latter too were expected, as part of their Christian vocation, to
judge preaching and teaching. I
also never saw a claim that one group of people (laypeople, professors, clergy)
were more likely to do this rightly than another group.
Rather what I saw was recognition that it is the task of ALL Christians,
clergy and lay, to discern what is right and wrong in the faith. Closing Remarks – For the Lutheran
reformers the sole authority on earth and in heaven belongs to Christ (the Word)
alone. Christ, present and active
among us, needs no representative, nor even an interpreter. Christ continues to come to us through the means of grace,
the Word and sacraments. …The
authority to read and interpret scripture, authority to judge what is right and
wrong in the faith belongs to all Christians.
A risky statement! Unless,
of course, you believe that it really is true that Christ the Word is present
and active among us, coming to those same Christians who struggle with what is
right and wrong in the faith. This
Christ comes, not to affirm us, but to make his purpose clear in both judgment
and forgiveness and to raise us to new life. What then of difficult and confusing issues in the faith?
What do we do when God seems to have hidden his way from us?
Perhaps we should cry out as Jehoshaphat in II Chronicles 20 “We do not
know what to do but our eyes are on you.”
What do we do when humans seem to hide themselves from the clear judgment
of God? Perhaps we should
remember the story of Adam and Eve hiding from the presence of God.
Sometimes it’s even hard to tell who is hiding – God or ourselves –
but at that very time we cling only to Christ, coming to us in Word and
Sacrament. The Word revealed
enlightens all of the darkness, confusion, and hiddenness that we encounter.
Ultimately this is only bearable because we know this same Word as
gracious and merciful to us. Ultimately, it is only bearable because in the midst of
our inability to know, to do, to be right , the one who is right, the
Word, comes to us and gives us his rightness, his righteousness.
Before God we are clothed not in our own rightness but in the
righteousness of Christ….. For pastors, teachers, and indeed all Christians, Christian
perfection does not consist in being right.
It is instead to fear God and have the sincere confidence that we have a
merciful God because of Christ. We
should pray to and confidently expect help from God in all afflictions,
including exegetical confusion and ecclesiastical corruption and ruin.
Meanwhile we should attend to our callings. III. A MAGISTERIUM FOR LUTHERANS, by Frank C. Senn, STS, Ph.D. Lutherans … borrow cathedrals in which to
install our bishops, but we don’t actually install them, because that would
require sitting them in the seat of teaching authority.
It is a ministry our bishops seem reluctant to exercise, although the two
times in which the Conference of Bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America have exercised teaching authority collectively they have performed a
great service to this Church; first, maintaining orthodoxy in the use of the
trinitarian Name of God and, second, preserving orthopraxy by determining that
the blessing of same-sex unions has no basis in Scripture or tradition.
Their pronouncements have withstood the opposing winds of doctrine in our
Church even though, constitutionally, they had no power to back them up.
This may be a clear sign that our pastors and people are looking for the
clear voice of a magisterium that will defend and uphold “the faith once
delivered to the saints.” Let us understand that the teaching office must be
considered an essential part of the constitution of the Church.
Jesus himself was commonly addressed as “teacher.”
…. the bishops and presbyters of the Church exercised a teaching
ministry and the Bishop of Rome in particular came to exercise, by the end of
the first century, a combined teaching/juridical authority as evidenced in
Clement’s First Letter to the Corinthians (A.D. 96).
In this letter the leader of the Roman Church intervened in the internal
dispute of another local Church. Ignatius
of Antioch’s Letter to the Romans (A.D. 110) points to the primacy of
Peter among the Twelve, the prominence of Rome, and articulates a clearly
defined role for the bishop. … Martin Luther’s rejection of the teaching authority of
popes and councils: Luther’s debate with Johannes Eck at Leipzig in 1519
was primarily over the interpretation of Matthew 16:18, especially the
interpretation of “rock” (petra).
….. When pressed, Luther
admitted that both popes and councils had erred. Finally, Eck forced Luther to articulate his growing
conviction: “A simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed above a
pope or a council without it.... For the sake of Scripture we should reject pope
and councils.”5
One can imagine the revolutionary impact of such statements when reported
to general public. … But Eck was right; anyone can appeal to Scripture.
Scripture requires interpretation. Luther
gradually developed new principles of interpretation that had consequences for
the teaching office in the church. He
recognized that Scripture has a waxed nose that can be easily distorted and
manipulated. Therefore he set aside
the allegorical method and opted for the plain grammatical sense and historical
context of the text. He learned the
biblical languages, first Greek and then Hebrew, in order to exegete more
accurately the meaning of the text. … Scripture is
its own interpreter and it should be interpreted in the light of the one story
it tells—the story of Christ. All
Scripture points to Christ, the Old as well as the New Testaments.
Not everything in Scripture is clear, but the clearer passages can be
used to interpret the less clear passages.7
Pastors and teachers can do this by learning the biblical languages and
exegeting the texts carefully in their sermons before going on to apply them.
But lay people can also grasp the plain sense of Scripture and can
ascertain whether preachers are delivering to them the pure gospel of Christ or
some other message. The church
would be a community of interpretation in which pastor and congregation
interpreted the Bible together. … … Luther was not opposed to the roles that might be
played by councils and popes in the reform of church.9
He argued early and often for a free general council that would be called
by the Emperor and that would subject its deliberations to the authority of
Scripture. He even accepted in
principle that a universal episcopate would be useful to preserve peace and
unity in the Church, and said he would submit to the Pope and do his bidding if
the Pope simply allowed the Gospel to be preached.
… … The Augsburg Confession affirmed in Article 14 “that
nobody should publicly teach or preach or administer the sacraments in the
church without a regular call.”11 Article 28 called for the reform of the Office of Bishop.
The confessors stated that the office of the keys is not a power of
jurisdiction but authority to teach and preach the Word of God, administer the
sacraments, and forgive or retain sins. Therefore
the temporal authority of the bishops, which some bishops exercise by human
right, needs to be distinguished from the spiritual authority to preach the
gospel and administer the sacraments, which all bishops exercise by divine
right.12
…The divine right of bishops to exercise spiritual authority was
reaffirmed in the Smalcald Articles (1537), in spite of its denial of papal
primacy. “The church cannot be
better governed and maintained than by having all of us live under one head,
Christ, and by having all bishops equal in office (however they may differ in
gifts) and diligently joined together in unity of doctrine, faith, sacraments,
prayer, works of love, etc.”16
… … It often comes as a surprise, especially to American
Lutherans, to discover these positive statements about ecclesiastical office and
teaching authority in the Lutheran Confessions as well as examples of
evangelical bishops in the Reformation Churches. The surprise is due to the fact that Lutheranism has long
since de facto given up these positions.
To some extent this is because what one finds in Luther’s writings
strikes us as only a grudging concession that the traditional structures of
authority could be retained if they submitted to the authority of
Scripture and allowed the preaching and teaching of the gospel and if they
basically acquiesced on all of the reformers’ proposals.
… A bishop whom I very much respect asked me: what do you do when the theological faculties disagree and the bishops cannot make up their collective minds? I answered her: appeal to Rome. There was nervous laughter in the room, but I was serious. … You may just get up and go to Rome. A number of our prominent pastors and teachers have done that. But while this may be the satisfying conclusion of a personal pilgrimage, it does not do much for Christian unity. … The Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue on Papal Primacy and the Universal Church … held that “This Petrine function of the Ministry serves to promote or preserve the oneness of the church by symbolizing unity, and by facilitating communication, mutual assistance or correction, and collaboration in the church’s mission.”24 Pope John Paul II furthered this understanding of the papal office as a ministry in the service of Christian unity and mission, in his encyclical Ut Unum Sint. Yeago’s proposal is that we move toward consideration of what the role of a universal pastor would entail rather than tackle head-on the issues of primacy and infallibility. In other words, it might be possible to back into agreement. My proposal builds on this strategy.
I suggest that we simply start paying attention to papal teaching.
We need not pay attention to papal pronouncements that concern the
internal life of the Roman Catholic Church.
But where the pope addresses issues of the Christian faith and moral
life, we should study his teachings as diligently as those who are
jurisdictionally under his authority—maybe even more diligently.
Our Lutheran church leaders should invite reflection on and response to
encyclicals. Pastors should help
their congregations work through the pope’s letters.
Now that the papacy has been placed in the service of Christian unity by
John Paul II (an offer which Benedict XVI will undoubtedly honor), we should
turn to the Roman magisterium as conceivably the best safeguard against the
increasing dissolution of our own Lutheran tradition. IV. The
Church’s Book and the Sacred Liturgy, by Father
Jay Scott Newman Ego vero Evangelio non crederem, nisi me Catholicae Ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas.[1] (I would not believe the truth of the Gospel, unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to this.) In phrasing his position thus, St. Augustine placed the question of authority in general and of the Catholic Church’s authority in particular squarely at the center of the credibility of the Gospel and therefore of Holy Scripture. And this should not surprise us. After all, the Lord Jesus neither wrote nor commanded to be written any of the saving doctrine which he preached with his own lips. Rather, invoking his own messianic authority received from his eternal Father, the Lord Jesus launched the Church–through the office of the Apostles–on a comprehensive mission of teaching with authority; and so, Jesus said to the eleven “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”[2] (Matthew 28:18-20) This mission of teaching with authority is clearly meant by the Savior to extend to every nation and to endure until the Day of the Lord, and so the exercise of apostolic teaching authority must be considered an intrinsic part of the Church’s fidelity to her Lord’s command. In other words, the questions of who has authority to teach, of where that authority comes from, and of how that authority is exercised are inextricably bound up with the transmission of the Gospel from generation to generation, and in some sense, it is not possible for the Church to obey Christ’s Great Commission without answering these questions in a satisfactory way. Even more, we may say that knowing with certitude the nature and authority of Holy Scripture depends upon first knowing with certitude that the Church teaches with a divinely given and guaranteed authority, hence St. Augustine: I would not believe the truth of the Gospel, unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to this. In the Catholic Church, this
apostolic teaching authority is called magisterium, from magister
or teacher, and the Church believes that this teaching office is exercised after
the death of the last Apostle only by the bishops who are in communion with the
Bishop and Church of Rome and that only through this office is the Gospel
transmitted through time without addition or subtraction. The Second Vatican
Council formulated this doctrine in Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church: “Among the principal duties of bishops, the
preaching of the Gospel occupies an eminent place. For bishops are preachers of
the faith, who lead new disciples to Christ, and they are authentic teachers,
that is, teachers endowed with the authority of Christ, who preach to the people
committed to them the faith they must believe and put into practice, and by the
light of the Holy Spirit illustrate that faith. They bring forth from the
treasury of revelation things new and old, making it bear fruit and vigilantly
warding off any errors that threaten their flock. Bishops, teaching in communion
with the Roman Pontiff, are to be respected by all as witnesses to divine and
Catholic truth. In matter of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of
Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a
religious assent.”[3]
That is the settled and irreformable Catholic doctrine on the apostolic
authority of bishops as the only authentic teachers of the Gospel… … [I]t is not possible for an atheist, who may be a
splendid professor of religious studies, to be a theologian. St. Anselm’s
description of sacred theology as fides quaerens intellectum helps us
grasp why only a true disciple of the Lord Jesus, only one–that is–with
saving faith in the words and deeds of Jesus Christ as recorded in the canonical
Scriptures, has the capacity to be a theologian. This means that neither the
unbeliever nor the heretic can be a true theologian, and what is true of the
theologian is true also of the exegete… …
A quick survey of the relevant literature would reveal that various exegetes and
theologians who still identify themselves as Catholic seek to justify by
interpretations of Sacred Scripture the following false propositions which no
Catholic can accept: + that the Blessed Virgin Mary bore children other than the Lord Jesus + that in his human intellect, the Lord Jesus had no knowledge before his Resurrection of his divine nature + that the miracles of the Lord Jesus described in the New Testament were not observed by the Apostles or other disciples but were later creations of the Church designed to teach a lesson + that women can and should stand in persona Christi and preside at the celebration of the Holy Eucharist and that by his own free and sovereign choice the Lord Jesus did not restrict the ministry of Word and Sacrament to men alone + that homosexual acts can be morally good and that the Church should bless or even sacramentalize relationships based upon homosexual acts + that
the hierarchical constitution of the Church is not willed by the Lord Jesus but
is a later corruption of and departure from the egalitarian community
established by Christ These six examples merely serve to illustrate that
novelties based upon errant interpretations of Scripture are offered from time
to time offered by scholars who identify themselves as Catholic, but this does
not mean–as we have seen–that such positions can legitimately be held by
Catholics or that the Church is obliged to give a sympathetic hearing to such
arguments. But so far my analysis has concerned only Catholics. What about
Lutherans? Or Anglicans? Or Presbyterians? In other words, what about Christians
in communions that do not have and that reject as a matter of principle an
authoritative magisterium capable of excluding from inclusion in
Christian doctrine and disciple an interpretation of Holy Scripture which is
demonstrably false? Is there a theological mechanism available to such
Christians which could justify, say, the repudiation as heretical of the
proposition that homosexual acts can be morally good and that the Church should
bless relationships based upon such acts? One possibility would be to
invoke the seven notes of true development of doctrine elaborated by John Henry
Newman in An Essay on the Development of Doctrine. There Newman proposed
seven tests that would distinguish mere novelty from a genuine development of
Christian teaching, and the seven can be summarized this way. A true
doctrinal development must: 1. Exhibit preservation of type. 2. Possess continuity of its principles. 3. Have the power of assimilation. 4. Show its logical sequence. 5. Anticipate its own future. 6. Conserve its own past. 7.
Demonstrate chronic vigor. Newman believed that the whole
Bible discloses development of doctrine (Think of St. Augustine: the New
Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old is revealed in the New.[4])
and that Christian doctrine admits of formal, legitimate, and true developments
provided for by God in his eternal Plan of Salvation. But Newman also held that
no Christian doctrine could ever mutate into a contradiction of itself and that
any effort to interpret Scripture or make a theological argument which resulted
in such a contradiction was thereby revealed to be heresy. Using Newman’s
seven notes or tests, therefore, I believe that even Christians who do not have
an authoritative magisterium could provide a conclusive rejection of the
novel and heretical suggestion, to return to the example, that homosexual acts
can be morally good. Such a demonstration, of course, would be persuasive only
to other Christians who accept the validity of Newman’s argument about the
development of doctrine, and it is clear that many Christians in our day do not
consider themselves bound to such an understanding of legitimate development.
So, is there any other recourse for Christians seeking to demonstrate that
theological novelties of the sort mentioned above do not constitute true or even
possibly true developments of Christian doctrine? Yes, there is. And it is the
sacred liturgy of Christian worship. “In principle, the
liturgy...the high point of which is the Eucharistic celebration, brings about
the most perfect actualization of the biblical texts, for the liturgy places the
proclamation in the midst of the community of believers, gathered around Christ
so as to draw near to God. Christ is then ‘present in his word, because it is
he himself who speaks when Sacred Scripture is read in the Church’. Written
text thus becomes living word.”[5]
…So, the proper and privileged place for the Church to hear and understand the
Sacred Scriptures is in the sacred liturgy. But even more than that, the
liturgical texts themselves help us to grasp the full meaning of the biblical
faith we profess. This is what is meant by the ancient adage lex orandi, lex
credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief), which is based upon the
teaching of Prosper of Aquitaine, a monk who served as secretary to Pope St. Leo
the Great and who was a devoted student of St. Augustine. … Now using the six novel
doctrines I mentioned above as tests, try to find any Christian liturgy of
either East or West, from the Ascension of the Lord Jesus to the day before
these novelties were proposed in the late 20th century, which gives a
warrant for these new teachings as true developments of doctrine. It cannot be
done, and one cannot find such liturgies because they simply do not exist. And
the liturgical texts we do have provide strong, clear, and constant warrant for
the Church’s teaching in the areas revisionists seek to change. Take, for
example, the Nuptial Blessing of the Roman Rite, which speaks of God the
Father’s eternal plan that the marriage of one man and one woman be the “one
blessing not forfeited by original sin or washed away in the flood”. By
itself, of course, such a text does not prove that homosexual marriage is an
impossibility, but it does provide another dimension of a question much larger
than the partisans of revision will admit. In his masterful treatise on
moral theology, Les sources de la morale chrétienne, the Belgian
Dominican Servais Pinckaers, O.P. offers a neologism to describe the way in
which some exegetes and theologians choose either categories of interpretation
or principles of exegesis which restrict rather than enlarge the reader’s
approach to a text. He calls this the intellectual error of “schizoscopia”,
meaning a reading of a text that cuts off (schizein) from view (skopein)
essential elements of the text’s content and meaning.[6]
This tendency to “schizoscopia”, it seems to me, is a prerequisite
for anyone attempting to persuade a Christian communion to accept as a
legitimate development of doctrine something that flatly contradicts received
and settled Christian teaching on that question, and any such communion which
falls prey to this tactic has then enshrined “schizoscopia” in both
the doctrine it teaches and the liturgy it celebrates. Such a cutting off from
view for the Christian people of doctrine after doctrine can only serve to
impoverish, and perhaps finally to starve, a Christian communion and lead those
ensnared in that poverty to spiritual death. And surely that cannot be accepted
by those who would follow Christ the Lord. So, what remedy would I propose? Against the skeptics and revisionists, I will stand with St. Augustine: I would not believe the truth of the Gospel, unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to this. It does, and so I do. [1] Against the Letter of Manichaeus entitled ‘Fundamental’ 5, 6 (PL 42, 176). [2] All quotations from the Bible are from the English Standard Version, Crossway Bibles, 2001. [3] Lumen Gentium, 25. [4] cf. St. Augustine, Quest. in Hept., 2, 73: PL 34, 623. [5] The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, pp 119-120. [6] See Cessario, pp. 348-349.
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