10/06/2017 My Conversion: Apathy, Occult, Evangelicalism, & Catholicism (Part 2)
(Pt. 8)
Dave Armstrong
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2017/10/conversion-apathy-occult-evangelicalism-catholicism-pt-8.html? https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/author/davearmstrong “So much must the Protestant grant that, if such a system of doctrine as he would now introduce ever existed in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge . . .
Let him take which of his doctrines he will, his peculiar view of self-righteousness, of formality, . . . his notion of faith, . . . his denial of the virtue of the sacraments, or of the ministerial commission, or of the visible Church
. . . the Scriptures as the one appointed instrument of religious teachings and let him consider how far Antiquity, as it has come down to us, will countenance him in it.”
[Historical Sketches, vol.1: The Church of the Fathers, London: 1872, p. 418] . . .
That Protestantism, then, is not the Christianity of history, it is easy to determine.
(ibid., pp. 7-9)
This was clearly a frontal attack on the entire edifice of my Protestant ecclesiology:
A turning of my argument on its head, with the forceful assertion that it was Catholicism, not Protestantism, that had the historical record on its side.
I respected history enough to shudder at this prospect.
I also knew full well that Newman would bring to bear an enormous weight of historical evidence to support his case, as the book before me was 445 pages long.
After summary statements such as the above.
Newman proceeded to make brilliant specific analogies in order to bring home his point.
The first had to do with the doctrine of purgatory, vis–à–vis the doctrine of original sin (the latter, of course, accepted by Protestants as well):
Some notion of suffering, or disadvantage, or punishment after this life, in the case of the faithful departed, or other vague forms of the doctrine of Purgatory, has in its favor almost a consensus of the first four ages of the Church.
(p. 21)
Newman then recounts no less than sixteen Church fathers who hold the view in some form.
But in comparing this consensus to the doctrine of original sin, we find a disjunction:
No one will say that there is a testimony of the Fathers, equally strong, for the doctrine of Original Sin.
(p. 21)
In spite of the forcible teaching of St. Paul on the subject, the doctrine of Original Sin appears neither in the Apostles’ nor the Nicene Creed.
(p. 23)
This is a crucial distinction. It is a serious problem for Protestantism that it – by and large – inconsistently rejects doctrines which have a consensus in the early Church.
Such as purgatory, the (still developing) papacy, bishops, the Real Presence, regenerative infant baptism, apostolic succession, and intercession of the saints, while accepting others with far less explicit early sanction, such as original sin.
Even many of their own foundational and distinctive doctrines, such as the notion of faith alone (sola fide)
Or imputed, extrinsic, forensic justification, are well-nigh nonexistent all through Church history until Luther’s arrival on the scene, as, for example, prominent Protestant apologist Norman Geisler recently freely admitted:
. . . These valuable insights into the doctrine of justification had been largely lost throughout much of Christian history, and it was the Reformers who recovered this biblical t***h . . .
During the patristic, and especially the later medieval periods, forensic justification was largely lost . . .
Still, the theological formulations of such figures as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas did not preclude a rediscovery of this judicial element in the Pauline doctrine of justification . . .
. . . One can be saved without believing that imputed righteousness (or forensic justification) is an essential part of the true gospel. Otherwise, few people were saved between the time of the apostle Paul and the Reformation, since scarcely anyone taught imputed righteousness
(or forensic justification) during that period!
(Geisler and MacKenzie, ibid., pp. 247-248, 503)
On the other hand, Protestants clearly accept developing doctrine on several fronts:
The canon of the New Testament is a clear example of such a (technically “non-biblical”) doctrine.
It wasn’t finalized until 397 A. D.
The divinity of Christ was dogmatically proclaimed only at the “late” date of 325;
The fully worked-out doctrine of the Holy Trinity in 381, and the hypostatic union, or Two Natures of Christ (God and Man) in 451, all in ecumenical councils that are at least respected by most Protestants.
Development in a broad sense is an unavoidable fact for both Protestants and Catholics.
Granting Church history an important and legitimate role, whether it is considered normative and authoritative or not, the trick for Protestants is to determine a non-arbitrary rationale for accepting some doctrines while rejecting others.
It will not do to say that certain doctrines are “unbiblical” and thus unworthy of Protestant allegiance, since it must immediately be explained why the majority of early Christians believed in them, and why beliefs such as the canon of the New Testament and Scripture Alone are adopted by Protestants despite the utter absence of biblical rationale.
Why (chances are) many other strands of Protestantism disagree with the one making the claim, when Scripture is allegedly so “clear” and able to be interpreted in the main without difficulty by the layman.
Newman writes, regarding the New Testament canon:
As regards the New Testament, Catholics and Protestants receive the same books as canonical and inspired; yet . . . the degrees of evidence are very various for one book and another . . .
For instance, as to the Epistle of St. James . . . Origen, in the third century, is the first writer who distinctly mentions it among the Greeks and it is not quoted by name by any Latin till the fourth . . .
Again: The Epistle to the Hebrews, though received in the East, was not received in the Latin Churches till St. Jerome’s time . . .
Again, St. Jerome tells us, that in his day, towards A.D. 400, the Greek Church rejected the Apocalypse, but the Latin received it. Again:
The New Testament consists of twenty-seven books . . .
Of these, fourteen are not mentioned at all till from eighty to one hundred years after St. John’s death, in which number are the Acts, 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Colossians, 1st and 2nd Thessalonians, and James.
Of the other thirteen, five, viz. St. John’s Gospel, Philippians, 1st Timothy, Hebrews, and 1st John, are quoted but by one writer during the same period.
On what ground, then, do we receive the Canon as it comes to us, but on the authority of the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries? . . .
The fifth century acts as a comment on the obscure text of the centuries before it.
(pp. 123-126)
He makes another brilliant analogy between the “lateness” of the development of the papacy and the Marian doctrines, and the Creed and the Canon:
Ecclesiastical recognition of the place which St. Mary holds in the Economy of grace . . . was reserved for the fifth century, as the definition of our Lord’s proper Divinity had been the work of the fourth . . .
In order to do honor to Christ, . . . to defend the true doctrine of the Incarnation . . . to secure a right faith in the manhood of the Eternal Son, the Council of Ephesus determined the Blessed Virgin to be the Mother of God . . .
The title ‘Theotokos,’ or Mother of God, was familiar to Christians from primitive times, and had been used, among other writers, by Origen, Eusebius, . . . St. Athanasius, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory N**ianzen, St. Gregory Nyssen.
(p. 145)
If the Imperial power checked the development of Councils, it availed also for keeping back the power of the Papacy.
The Creed, the Canon, in like manner, both remained undefined . . .
All began to form, as soon as the Empire relaxed its tyrannous oppression of the Church.
(p. 151)
The Cardinal then defines seven characteristics of all true developments:
It becomes necessary . . . to assign certain characteristics of faithful developments . . . the presence of which serves as a test to discriminate between them and corruptions . . .
I venture to set down Seven Notes . . . as follows: –
There is no corruption if it retains one and the same type, the same principles, the same organization;
If its beginnings anticipate its subsequent phases, and its later phenomena protect and subserve its earlier;
If it has a power of assimilation and revival, and a vigorous action from first to last. (pp. 170-171)
A corruption is a development in that very stage in which it ceases to illustrate, and begins to disturb, the acquisitions gained in its previous history . . .
A true development . . . is an addition which illustrates . . . the body of thought from which it proceeds . . . it is of a tendency conservative of what has gone before it.
(pp. 199-200, 203)
After consideration, especially, of Newman’s analogies between Protestant developments and distinctively Catholic ones, and his “Seven Notes.”
It became clear to me that Protestantism represented a massive corruption of historical Christianity, rather than a consistent development, as I formerly believed, and my thinking underwent a paradigm shift of massive proportions.
For Protestantism undeniably introduced radically new doctrines such as sola fide, sola Scriptura, sectarianism, private judgment, the notion of an invisible, non-hierarchical church, and symbolic baptism and Eucharist, which were sheer novelties, rather than reforms.
(End Part 2)