In a recent article in the National Catholic Register, Fr. Dwight Longenecker explains why America neeeds the Pope. Using the Anglican “three-fold stool” of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason as his foil for an alternative theory of authority in the church, Longenecker points to the contemporary disarray of Anglicanism as evidence for the necessity of the papal authority. Certainly he makes some good points about some of the failures of Anglicanism, and I don’t mean to deride or dismiss everything he says in his article. However, his claims about what kind of accuracy and certitude the papacy can guarantee strain the bonds of credulity, at least for anyone who studies the long and variegated history of the papacy. One of his most inflated claims goes as follows:
“The pope’s authority transcends vagaries of individual fashion, time and political expediency. The pope’s authority transcends local pressures, intellectual trends, moral dilemmas and subjective social opinions. There is simply no other authority system in the world that is universal in such an expansive and objective way.”
My question for this would have to be something like Whose papacy? Which pope? The history of the papacy is manifestly not a history of transcending “individual fashion, time, and political expediencey.” It is rather a history of degrees of faithfulness and unfaithfulness. Anyone who has taken the time to explore the papacy throughout the middle ages can see with utter clarity that it is a messy, untidy and highly problematic history. I am convinced that trying to unproblematize it will not lead to faithfulness either for Catholics or Protestants. While contemporary Catholicism is very much willing to defy modernity on many points — something I greatly respect about it — I wonder if this evidences more the fact that Roman Catholicism enshrines a certain late medieval sensibility and ethos than establishing an alleged divine endowment of eternal stability and infallibility.
Too often, I think that claims are made by contemporary Catholics about the ability of the papacy to stand aloof from vicissitudes of history and ensure doctrinal accuracy and certitutde that are in fact little more than fantasies. Does the pope really stand in this universal position, being uninfluenced by the social and political realities of their time? For Longenecker, the pope virtually occupies the place of the autonomous Enlightenment self, who is able to view all things from a God’s-eye position: ”He gives us a universal perspective — universal in time and universal in place.”
What I find so uniquely problematic about the sort of Catholicism that Longenecker portrays (and I don’t by any means intend to impute such views to all Catholics) is its radical eschewal of vulnerability. We are invited to view the pope as the “one person who, through depth of knowledge, breadth of vision, wealth of advice and expertise, can see the big picture.” We are given the wonderfully immediate consolation of having absolute certainty that this universal father will never go wrong and that he (through his office) guarantees that we will always have the true and full faith. In short, it promises us Gandalf (I owe this image to my friend Christian). Longenecker’s pope is mystical father figure who hoovers above the world of chance and change, dispensing infallible wisdom that always ensure we need not worry about anything. We are free from the danger of failure, we never need fear that we might slip into heresy.
In so doing he seeks to dissolve the very tension in which we are supposed to live as Christians. The apocalyptic passages in the gospels are very instructive on this point. Almost without exception those who thought they were in, that they were faithful followers of God, are in fact, out and those who had no idea when or if they had truly served Christ are ushered into the kingdom. This is not to say that Protestants and Catholics as such define these two polarities or some such nonsense. It is only to say that the kind of certitude, confidence, and security that Longenecker seems to look to the pope to provide is the very sort of certainty that the gospel calls us to lay at the foot of the cross, following the one who leads us where we do not wish to go. It thrusts us into a mode of Christian faith in which we are assured and validated in our beliefs and practices rather than put into question. He calls us, not to desperate faith and humble hope, but to intractable certainty and serene self-confidence. I find such an approach unconvincing to say the least.
“Our initial point is that God himself wills to reveal himself. He himself wills to attest his revelation. He himself — not we — has done this and wills to do it. Preaching, then, takes place in listening to the self-revealing will of God. Preachers are drawn into this even. It is of concern to them. They are called by this event. The event becomes a constituent part of their own existence. Because God has revealed himself wills to reveal himself,and because preachers are confronted by this event, their preaching — if they are commissioned to preach — is necessarily governed by it in both content and form, in the logical content of what is said and in their relation to the fact that God has revealed himself and will reveal himself. Preaching is not a neutral activity. It is not an action involving two equal partners. It can mean only Lordship on God’s side and obedience on ours.”
I was saddened to hear today that New Testament scholar and Bishop of Stockholm emeritus, Krister Stendahl passed away earlier this morning. I had the privilege of meeting Professor Stendahl and his lovely wife a couple years ago when purchasing his library and his warmth and hospitality were quite evident. Stendahl is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking essay “Paul and the Introspective Consciouness of the West” which later appeared in his most celebrated book, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. His contributions to Pauline studies and the study of the New Testament would be hard to overestimate. In addition to his scholarship, Stendahl devoted his life to his Swedish Lutheran church, being active in ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue throughout his life. The Christian community will suffer for having lost him. Requiesat in pace.
“So if we consider that the office of bishop, as understood in modern times, is a good institution which has stood the test of centuries, then it is at least worth discussing. Only then we must be quite clear that it belongs, at most, to the Church’s bene esse, not to its esse. Where institution is regarded as an unconditional necessity, the same situation exists as in Gal. 2.3ff. For the Church that does not possess the apostolic succession it would mean, not the renunciation of cherished ideals for other people’s sake, but a declaration that something for which it can see no basis in the New Testament is necessary for salvation. Here the concern of the Church to which the apostolic succession is important must certainly be heard, for continuity is essential to the Church of Jesus. But it is the succession of believers, in which the message is handed on from generation to generation. A person will hardly attain to faith unless a living witness of the message mediates it to him by his words or by his whole existence. The only way to guarantee that this handing on does not wander away from the original gospel is, indeed, to go back constantly under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and ask what is the witness of the apostles themselves in the New Testament.”
In his work The Death of Death John Owen lays out a classically Reformed and Puritan approach to soteriology, arguing for the hardcore Calvinist notion of limited atonement. While there are a whole mess of errors in Owen’s theological reasoning I actually affirm his logical syllogism that gets him to his conclusion. The problem is simply that he draws the wrong conclusion, not that he sees the alternatives wrongly. He argues that there are three options in how we view the work of Christ. Either Christ assumed all the sins of all people (thus universalism), all the sins of some people (thus limited atonement) or some of the sins of all people (thus either some sort of Pelagianism or despair).
It is reported that the great church historian Jaroslav Pelikan was once asked who he thought the greatest modern theologian was. Rather than Barth, Schleiermacher, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Niebuhr or any of the other more obvious choices, he replied without hesitation that his vote went to John Henry Cardinal Newman. Why do you think Pelikan would say this? Obviously it has someting to do with the fact that he, like Newman ended up migrating from a Protestant tradition to the historical apostolic churches, a decision which Pelikan must have thought had great theological importance. But, what really was it that Pelikan identified as unique to Newman that made him so important among modern theologians?
“Preachers must not be boring. To a large extent the pastor and boredom are synonymous concepts. Listeners often think that they have heard already what is being said in the pulpit. They have long since known it themselves. The fault certainly does not lie with them alone. Against boredom the only defense is being biblical. If a sermon is biblical, it will not be boring. Holy Scripture is in fact so interesting and has so much that is new and exciting to tell us that listeners cannot even think about dropping off to sleep.”
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