Irenaeus and Tertullian on apostolic succession

It recently came up in discussion with a friend “whether church leaders can be valid if they are not in apostolic succession.” I offer these two Church Fathers in support of the idea that both doctrinal unity and apostolic succession are necessary for the validity and trustworthiness of a church leader. (But I observe that, if the Church teaches the importance of apostolic succession, then it is impossible to be in doctrinal unity with the Church and deny it.)

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Irenaeus
Against Heresies [A.D. 189]

“[I]t is incumbent to obey the presbyters who are in the Church—those who, as I have shown, possess the succession from the apostles; those who, together with the succession of the episcopate, have received the certain gift of truth according to the good pleasure of the Father. But [it is also incumbent] to hold in suspicion others who depart from the primitive succession, and assemble themselves together in any place whatsoever, either as heretics of perverse minds, or as schismatics puffed up and self-pleasing, or again as hypocrites, acting thus for the sake of lucre and vainglory. For all these have fallen from the truth” (4:26:2).

“The true knowledge is the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient organization of the Church throughout the whole world, and the manifestation of the body of Christ according to the succession of bishops, by which succession the bishops have handed down the Church which is found everywhere” (4:33:8).

Also, a bonus identifying the Church in Rome as primary:

“we shall confound all those who, in whatever manner, whether through self-satisfaction or vainglory, or through blindness and wicked opinion, assemble other than where it is proper, by pointing out here the successions of the bishops of the greatest and most ancient church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul—that church which has the tradition and the faith with which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the apostles. For with this Church, because of its superior origin, all churches must agree, that is, all the faithful in the whole world. And it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the apostolic tradition” (3:3:2).

Tertullian
Demurrer Against the Heretics [A.D. 200]

“[W]hat it was which Christ revealed to them [the apostles] can, as I must here likewise prescribe, properly be proved in no other way than by those very churches which the apostles founded in person, by declaring the gospel to them directly themselves . . . If then these things are so, it is in the same degree manifest that all doctrine which agrees with the apostolic churches—those molds and original sources of the faith must be reckoned for truth, as undoubtedly containing that which the churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, [and] Christ from God. Whereas all doctrine must be prejudged as false which savors of contrariety to the truth of the churches and apostles of Christ and God. It remains, then, that we demonstrate whether this doctrine of ours, of which we have now given the rule, has its origin in the tradition of the apostles, and whether all other doctrines do not ipso facto proceed from falsehood” (21).

“But if there be any [heresies] which are bold enough to plant [their origin] in the midst of the apostolic age, that they may thereby seem to have been handed down by the apostles, because they existed in the time of the apostles, we can say: Let them produce the original records of their churches; let them unfold the roll of their bishops, running down in due succession from the beginning in such a manner that [their first] bishop shall be able to show for his ordainer and predecessor some one of the apostles or of apostolic men—a man, moreover, who continued steadfast with the apostles. For this is the manner in which the apostolic churches transmit their registers: as the church of Smyrna, which records that Polycarp was placed therein by John; as also the church of Rome, which makes Clement to have been ordained in like manner by Peter” (32).

Marc Barnes on one-year-olds’ birthday parties

I’ve often thought, and been asked, whether throwing a birthday party for a one-year-old is a little excessive. And while there can be excesses in the way it’s done, I think Marc Barnes has a point that it’s only pointless to throw a one-year-old a birthday party if it’s pointless to throw a birthday party for anyone of any age. Here’s an excerpt from his essay.

The child rips us out of the world—where good deeds are done in exchange for glory—and naturally inaugurates the kind of action adults perform, by grace, within the kingdom of God—where good deeds are done for the sake of reality. I was once asked, “Why celebrate a birthday party for a child too young to remember it?” I answered spontaneously, “Because the world is real!” Not entirely lucid, I’ll admit, but it seems to me now that these early celebrations are holy celebrations for precisely this reason—that they are done “in secret.” The child will not comprehend the party, much less remember it, and so the party cannot be confused for an exchange of cake, ice-cream, and effort for goodwill, good memories and impressed friends. One must face the fact (as your one-year-old spreads frosting on his scalp) that the reality of his birth is worth celebrating for its own sake; that the goodness of existence is real, quite apart from what its celebration can do or what glory it can accrue.

“That your faith may not fail”: The verse that shows Peter being given the Papacy

Joe Heshmeyer, in his book Pope Peter, makes several interesting arguments from scripture that point to the fact that Jesus gave Peter a unique role among his followers, one that equates to the role of the pope. Of course, the most common passages of scripture are the “keys to the church” passage and the “feed my lambs” passage; however, there is one that is rarely discussed, and I think, due to the deep themes of Christianity and the Bible, it may be the strongest one. It is from Luke 22:24-34, especially verses 31-32:

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat,but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.”

In this passage, the first two occurrences of the word “you” are plural. “Satan demanded to have [you all, the disciples] that he might sift [you all] like wheat.” However, then the word “you” becomes singular. “But I have prayed for you [Peter] that your faith may not fail. And when you [Peter] have turned again, strengthen your brothers.”

The implication of this is that Jesus gave Peter alone the promise that his faith would not fail, and the charge to strengthen his brothers so that theirs wouldn’t either; in other words, he was the tether, the lifeline to keep them all from falling into disbelief or error. Imagine the apostles holding onto a rope dangling over the edge of a cliff, and we all holding onto them, grasping ankles in a long line descending through the ages. The rope is tied to the cross above. But Satan and his demons are flying about, attacking us, trying to pick us off of the rope and make us fall to our death, apart from faith. But by the power of the prayer of Christ, Peter is the only one whom Satan cannot pick off of that rope. He keeps holding on, with a divine tenacity (for it is God holding onto him, not the other way around), and what’s more, because he cannot be plucked off, he is able to catch those others who are falling, and help them to hold on.

I have come around to belief in the Catholic Church because of my great desire to be sure of my Christian faith. One one hand it was because of the accusations of modern critics of the Bible, the canon, etc. There is no reasonable basis on which to assert that we have the Bible and the Creeds intact, whole, reliable, and preserved from error, except that it was the beliefs of the church leaders, not the rampant schismatics and heretics of the early centuries, who were right about the teachings of Jesus; and likewise, there is no reason to believe that they were right, and not their rivals, except that God has promised that he would not let his church, as expressed by its visible organizational structure, go astray, as a whole. And if you believe that the church as a human institution was protected by God for the first three hundred or four hundred years, then the unanswerable question is, when did he stop protecting it so?

On the other hand, it is because I have become weary of poor interpretations of the Bible, which proliferate among Protestants of religious fervor like weeds among wheat. How can we be sure which of the disagreeing teachers is correct? How can we be sure that our own best interpretations are correct? The Protestant cannot answer that question either, unless he makes recourse to individualism, and reclines against the bosom of the spirit of the age, which whispers in his year, cogito ergo sum.

So this tether to Christ is precisely why I cling to the See of Peter. It is because I cannot believe that God would leave his people as sheep without a shepherd; a shepherd not simply of spirit, but of flesh, for we are people of flesh and we must have shepherds of flesh.

But why do I think this passage is stronger than the others that put Peter as the feeder of the flock and the rock of the church? It is because here we see the irony, the humility, the inversion of power which is the unmistakable hallmark of the kingdom of God. Protestants are afraid that the assertion of Peter as this tether is a power-move, a claim to exclusive authority rooted in conceit and pride. (Sometimes I feel that the Reformation taught Modernity how to talk that way.) But how can this be the case when Peter’s charge is unified with his humiliation, his very denial of our Lord? He is first among the apostles because he is also, in this sense, least among them. He is the reliable tether because nothing but the grace of God kept him from denouncement and denial. But Christ restored him. Who can challenge Peter when we see his calling and authority as wrapped up in his story the very grace-through-humiliation that is at the heart of Christianity? On a deep level, a Gospel-level one might say, this resonates with me and reassures me of God’s plan, and I can approach the authority of this man confident that it is God whom I am really approaching.

Aquinas on Forms, Part 2

This is an extension of the conversation mentioned first in my post “Aquinas on Forms.“

How did Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelean view of Forms differ from that of Plato? Can he be said to have denied their reality, or made it possible, by the reasonable extension of his ideas, to have facilitated Nominalism, which did so?

In Question 84 of the Summa Theologiae (Part 1), ”How the soul while united to the body understands corporeal things beneath it,” Aquinas says that ideal forms exist, but cannot be known by human intellect without our coming into contact with material species of these forms, through which our intellect can understand them. The essential articles are Article 5, “Whether the intellectual soul knows material things in the eternal types?”, and Article 6, “Whether intellectual knowledge is derived from sensible things?”

In Article 5, Aquinas accepts the existence of ideal forms, affirming Augustine, but qualifies this by saying, “But since besides the intellectual light which is in us, intelligible species, which are derived from things, are required in order for us to have knowledge of material things; therefore this same knowledge is not due merely to a participation of the eternal types, as the Platonists held, maintaining that the mere participation of ideas sufficed for knowledge.”
In Article 6, Aquinas rejects the pre-platonic idea that we know all things by “atoms”/material ways only (~nominalism?); Plato, on the other hand, said that our intellect is “an immaterial power not making use of the senses”; Aquinas owns the “middle course” of Aristotle: “For with Plato he agreed that intellect and sense are different. But he held that the sense has not its proper operation without the cooperation of the body; so that to feel is not an act of the soul alone, but of the “composite.”

So he essentially says, “Yes, forms are real and it is by means of them that we know things, but not ONLY by means of them; we also need intelligible species (particular things/physical realities) to cooperate with them in order to produce understanding.

I see this to be the most “incarnational” view, the one most unitive of the heavenly and the earthly. This is what we Anglicans mean when we say that “We need sacraments because as humans we are both spiritual and physical, and to know God, we must experience him both spiritually and physically.” Indeed it seems to be thick with the very Incarnation of God, who knew that humans could only know him if he came to them in physical form! (In subsequent Question 88, “How the human soul knows what is above itself,” Aquinas says that human intellect cannot perfectly know “immaterial substances,” i.e. angels or God, for the same reason, that they cannot know things without material species.)

Interestingly, Aquinas is favoring Aristotle’s more nuanced position over Plato’s, but he is accepting ideal forms from Plato, and even more so, he is defending and assimilating Augustine’s statements on the issues, presenting them in the “objections” and resolving them in the “replies to the objections.” It seems that it matters to him not to contradict Augustine, much more than to not contradict Plato.

If the nominalists cited Aquinas to deny the real existence of universal ideas, their argument, as far as I can see, must have been “According to Aquinas, we cannot know ideal forms without participation in species; therefore, ideal forms are not real.” This makes no sense(!?) It is like saying, “We cannot know God the Father except through God the Son; therefore, God the Father is not real”! I cannot see any way the nominalists could have validly reached their conclusion from the starting point of Aquinas; it seems, rather, that they are an antagonistic strain of thought.

Mary, our heavenly mother

I just read this reflection in the Exodus 90 devotional:

“In God’s infinite wisdom, He desires that all men have the blessing of a mother (and father!). Unlike all other mothers who sin, fail their children in various ways and eventually die, Jesus has given all men an eternal and perfect Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who never fails to love and help those who come to her. Realize your deep need for her and grow in Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary (CCC 963-975) and be a man who fulfills Mary’s prophecy, “All generations will call me blessed” (Lk 1:48).”

I realize that, in dealing with family-of-origin stuff, it is not only important to deal with the ways that our father has let us down, but also the ways our mother has. It seems that in Christian circles people are quick to say “Your Heavenly Father can be for you what your earthly father failed to be.” And amen. But I wonder whether there isn’t that other aspect of needing a fully healthy mother figure, that is almost never talked about as being something God provides!

So reading the passage above I was like “Maybe he does” 😮.

Just on a purely theological level: Jesus calls us brothers (Heb 2:11-12), because we share a “source” (Greek “all are of one”). It is clear that this means we share the same Father. Would it not also imply that, in some true sense, by virtue of our adoption, we also share the same mother?

Could it be that Mary, in her perfect obedience, and with her status among the saints of heaven as the Mother of God, can intercede between her Son and us with a feminine tenderness that we have heretofore done without, but need not?

Astounded by this, and hopeful.

Wendell Berry on protest

“Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”

—Wendell Berry, from an essay in What are People For?