Monthly Archives: July 2014

Halbig and Hammurabi and Sola Scriptura

28 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by in Christianity, Founding Fathers, Reformation, Roman Catholicism, Uncategorized

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Last week’s Halbig decision is an interesting application of the Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura for today and is a prime demonstration why that doctrine is central to American life.

The question in Halbig was essentially whether a “magisterial” administration could redefine a written law contrary to its explicit text in favor of what the political hierarchy “meant” when the law was drafted.  Was the text supreme or was it just one leg in a multi-legged stool upon which a prince could sit while pronouncing the law’s meaning?

Providentially, Kevin Williamson at the National Review Online weighed in on Halbig with his article, “Halbig and Hammurabi” (www.nationalreview.com, July 27, 2014).  Hammurabi, it will be remembered is known to history as being (at least one of) the earliest  king to codify laws in written form.

Williamson reminds us of the importance of Hammurabi’s legacy:

The Hammurabic Code…represented something radical and new in human history.  With the law written down – with the law fixed – a man who had committed no transgression no longer had reaason to tremble before princes and potentates.  If the driver of oxen had been paid his statutory wage, if a man’s contractual obligations had been satisfied, and if his life was unsullied by violations of the law, handily carved upon slabs of igneous rock for all to see and ingest, then that man was, within the limits of his law, free.

And the implications are immense:

“The written law was the first real constraint on the power of kings.  An oral tradition is subject to constant on-the-fly revision.”

So the Court’s decision in Halbig was an affirmation on the restraint of kings.

Dr. Mereidth Kline has written a wonderful study entitled, “The Structure of Biblical Authority” (Euguene, OR; Wipf & Stock. Copyright 1989 by Meredith G. Kline) which traces God’s purposes in creating a society built upon written laws.  Kline shows how the ancient near east – including the Babylonia of Hammurabi – was moved to codify their laws in stone.  These ancient “covenants” specified the name of the king, his relation to his subjects and theirs to him, the laws that were to be followed and specific penalties for their violation.  One stone was typically placed in the center of town so that all could see it; another was tucked away for safe keeping in the event the first was damaged or lost.  This supports Williamson’s idea thoroughly.

This concept begins to become more interesting when one realizes that this is expressly the context into which God chose to codify His laws to the ancient Israelites.  Sometime about 200-500 years after Hammurabi (depending on which source you choose) God wrote His law in stone; one copy for the Israelites and one stored in the Ark of the Covenant. (Exodus 34)  That was His way of assuring the Law was being expressed in a fashion that would have been familiar to the Israelites.  And it would have been an entirely familiar thing to those societies among whom the Israelites lived.

But there is yet another fascinating part of God’s creation of laws written in stone that is fundamental.  And that is the extreme sanction against anyone seeking to change it.

Dr. Kline explains:

A feature of the covenant tablets of peculiar significance for their canonical character is the inscriptural curse, or what we may call the canonical sanction.  The tablet was protected against alteration or destruction by making such violations of it the object of specific curses…  Wherever it is found the inscriptional curse is somewhat stereotyped in content.  This is so both in respect to the techniques envisaged by which the text might be defaced or removed and with respect to the divine retribution threatened as a deterrent to any contemplating such transgression.” (Kline, p. 29)

How fascinating that God used that part of His creation as a model for the communication of His Law to the Israelites.

Consider Deuteronomy 4:2 –

You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take anything from it.

…or Proverbs 30:6 –

Do not add to his words, or he will rebuke you and prove you a liar.

So this was an established principle centuries later when the Apostle Paul wrote in the New Testament:

“Do not go beyond what is written.”   (1 Corinthians 4:6)

Or when the Scriptures closes with just such an admonition.

Revelation 22:18-19  –

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll:  If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plauges described in this scroll.  And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God willt ake away from tath person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City….

So we readily see that the roots of Sola Scriptura – contrary to some claims of its modernity – is really an ancient doctrine.

So the Halbig Court affirmed principle that is thousands of years old and one that America’s Founders also affirmed.  Dr. John Eidsmoe’s study of early America produces this interesting fact:

Many, if not the vast majority of colonial Americans came from Calvinistic backgrounds.

The author goes on to show that by 1787 two thirds of Americans were “trained in the school of Calvin” and had come from “Calvinistic backgrounds.”  This resulted in seventy seven percent of the country universities being built on Calvinistic principles.  (Eidsmoe, John.  “Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers”.  Grand Rapids, Baker Books, 1987. Kindle locations 82, 87).  With such a large Calvinistic influence the presence of the doctrine of Sola Scriptura in the establishment of the laws of this country is self-evident.

So what happened in Halbig?  The court merely restated what the Apostle Paul taught us two thousand years ago:  “Do not go beyond what is written.”

Sola Scriptura at work today!

The Babylonian Captivity Of The Papacy – R. Scott Clark

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

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Dr. Clark weighed in a topic about which I posted yesterday.  In this 600th anniversary year of the convening of the Council of Constance, his effort is very timely and can be read here.

The crux of the matter is put succinctly here:

 The Avignon crisis is just one of many examples from the history of the medieval church that illustrate the futility of seeking continuity, unity, and stability where they have never existed. The historical truth is that the Roman communion is not an ancient church. She is a medieval church who consolidated her theology, piety, and practice during a twenty-year-long council in the sixteenth century (Trent). Her rituals, sacraments, canon law, and papacy are medieval. The unity and stability offered by Roman apologists are illusions—unless mutual and universal excommunication and attempted murder count as unity and stability. Crushing opponents and rewriting history to suit present needs is not unity. It is mythology.

I commend his post to your reading.

The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity

14 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by in Charles Chaput, Papacy, Roman Catholicism

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The post-Vatican II era has created a serious problem for Roman Catholics.  And that problem is precisely how to reconcile the claims of the church with the facts of history – and sometimes with the facts of its own history!   It is not that this is a new problem but rather that the world and how the church relates to the world has so changed as to now lay bear the glaring contradicitons that previoiusly had been covered over by structures of authority[i] which Vatican II has made more transparent.   Perhaps the most obvioius examples are the claims made by Vatican I regarding the papacy and its foundation, continuity and extent.  As it turns out none of those claims is supportable in history and modern Roman Catholic scholars are now free to plumb the depths of these errors however much they are enshrined as “de fide” pronouncements.

But what is new in all this is not the errors but the fact that they can be discussed openly.  We know from history that John Calvin himself cajoled the Roman Church for its false claims and showed in his famous letter to King Francis I that all ordinations after the Council of Basel were fraudulent.[ii]   Calvin showed how political machinations and not “apostolic succession” had made necessary the removal of some popes and the appointment of others with little regard for ecclesiastical involvement.   And that those depositions and appointments had broken whatever alleged continuity Rome claimed theretofore from the Apostles.  And yet centuries later Vatican I was able, with full force of papal authority, to claim that all popes are “successors” of Peter that it “has always been necessary for every church…to be in agreement with the Roman church….”[iii]

And so it was with great interest that I found a collection of essays by legitimate church historians dealing with exactly these matters and it is their title that I have borrowed for this post[iv].  The first essay written by the eminent scholar, Francis Oakley[v], focuses on how the Council of Constance is a roadblock to modern Roman Catholic claims to authority.

Oakley begins with a fascinating expose of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s famous, Essay on the Development of Doctrine. In what seems a tangential departure from the period of Constance, Dr. Oakley shows how Newman misunderstood “development” in the context of Catholic history.  According to medieval scholastics (Oakley names Bonaventure, Aquinas and Scotus) Catholic doctrines were “immutable”, never changing.  So when something appeared to be different than what the church had proclaimed to be “de fide”[vi] these scholars insisted that whatever the variation it was either “implicit” in the original teaching or could be explicated therefrom.  The point is that the teaching itself was considered eternal and unalterable – it did not develop as Newman would have it.   This was the view of the Roman church from medieval times through the period Oakley refers to as the “second scholasticism” when” Spanish theologians in the 17th century”…had been at pains to make clear that, in so doing, it (the church) was not attempting to supplement revelation that was, in fact, immutable.”  Oakley uses this to lay the foundation for what will follow:

When he (Newman) wrote that work, he appears to have known nothing about the older scholastic views on doctrinal development.[vii]

 

 

The Politics of Oblivion

 The ignorance of history displayed by Newman and decried by many of his critics unfortunately continues to this day.  I have written how the Archbishop of Philadelphia mischaracterizes his church’s history here and here in our time.   And Oakley cites the work of the distinguished Catholic theologian John Noonan who has documented “the convoluted process whereby a pattern of behavior once denounced (by Rome) as contrary to nature has modulated across time into the routinely acceptable….”[viii]    All of this is to say that there has been an odd combination of historical forgetfulness in the Church of Rome.

So how does this happen?

…it may largely be due to the empire that the present continues to exert over the past in so much of Catholic institutional thinking.  And it certainly reflects the measure of genial institutional forgetfulness that seems to attend inevitably upon that state of affairs.  Under certain circumstances, moreover, casual forgetfulness has betrayed a disagreeable tendency to mutate into a proactive politics of oblivion reflective of the Orwellian conclusion that if he who controls the past controls the future, then he who controls the present would be well advised to control the past.[ix]

It is precisely that “politics of oblivion” that makes the study of Constance so fascinating.

 

The Problem of Constance

 The instance of radical doctrinal discontinuity in question is the great gulf that yawns between the position the general councils of Constance (1414–1418) and Basel (1431–1449) affirmed concerning the ultimate locus of authority in the universal church and that staked out in 1870 by Vatican I.[x]

The seeds of Constance were planted more than a hundred years previously in the conflict between Boniface VIII and Philip IV, King of France.  And those seeds were watered and fertilized by the conflict between Boniface and the Colonna family in Italy.  The facts are too numerous to recount here but this conflict ended in favor of Philip and Boniface’s successors were much more amenable to the king’s wishes resulting in Clement V’s acquiescence to the King and the moving of the curia to Avignon (1309).

After a nearly seven decade hiatus at Avignon, the papacy returned to Rome haltingly in 1370 and then totally in 1378 with the election of Urban VI.  Shortly thereafter a group of French cardinals splintered from the Roman group, “disgusted by the pope’s insulting behaviour” and elected Clement VII who is known to history as the first “anti-pope”.  This is the action that set up the “Great Schism” of the church which saw competing claims to the papacy until Constance.

The intransigence of the two popes (Benedict XII and Gregory XII) coupled with a growing tension for the schism to be healed caused several of Benedict’s cardinals to defect to Gregory’s side where they called for a general council at Pisa in March 1409.  Both popes were invited to attend but refused and were summarily deposed by that Council.  The cardinals at Pisa facing a world now with no pope, elected Alexander V as their new pontiff.   And surprise of surprises, neither Benedict nor Gregory acquiesced in the Council’s decision.  Hence, the world now had three claimants to the See of St. Peter.

Alexander’s pontificate lasted less than a year until his death in May 1410.  The Pisan cardinals took less than a week to elect his successor, John XXIII, another “anti-pope”.  It was John who, under secular political pressure called the Council of Constance.

The great legacy of Constance is its decree Haec sancta, which declared that a general council of the church is the highest authority to which everyone, including the pope, is subject.  The Council thereby exercised that authority by deposing Popes John XXIII and Benedict XIII, negotiating and accepting the resignation of Gregory XII and appointing as replacement Martin V.

 

An Analysis

 Constance (along with Pisa and Basel) cause severe problems for Catholic historians.  Chief among these is the question of utlimate authority in the Church of Rome.  Is the council supreme ala Constance or is the pope as per Vatican I?  If the former is true then can it be said that Vatican I erred in its decrees?  And if Constance is not legitimate, then what to do with its annointing of Martin V as pope, a man who is the direct ancestor for every consecrated priest today?

Oakley traces the ultramontane reaction to Constance:

“…the Council of Constance, not having been convoked by a legitimate pope, cannot be regarded as a legitimate general council prior to its convocation by Gregory XII, just before his resignation on July 4, 1415.”[xi]

The difficulty here is that the council fathers did accord John XXIII the status of pope.  They did, after all, assemble in council at his decree.  And they forcibly brought him back to the council after his escape to prevent just that claim of illegitimacy from being made against them.

The discomfort that Rome feels about the history of Constance can also be seen in how they have selectively edited documents since then.

Thus, early in the (twentieth) century, even so learned a work as the Dictionnaire de thee’logie catholique took the extraordinary step of simply excising the Councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basel from tis list of general councils.  That list, therefore, simply jumped from the Council of Vienne in 1311–1312 to the Council of Florence in 1439–1445. A remarkably bold exercise in the politics of oblivion![xii]

Oakley continues,

In a similar but Anglophone exercise conducted around the same time, the editors of the Catholic Encyclopedia, a pretty scholarly piece of work, by simply opting to include no article on the subject, made it clear that conciliar theory was to be viewed as a dead issue, an ecclesiological fossil, something lodged deep, in the lower Carboniferous of the dogmatic theology.[xiii]

The author then goes on to note that the tradition of Rome’s historians was to label the Avignonese popes, “anti-popes” while Alexander V and John XXIII– the “Pisan” popes – were “handled in a more gingerly fashion and left in limbo.”  But Oakley notes how that mysteriously changed in 1947 when the prefect of the Vatican archives published a new list of popes wherein the “Pisan” line were now listed as anti-popes.  The reason for the change was not given but is another clear example of how the “politics of oblivion” works in Catholic history.

As you might have anticipated the situation was further aggravated when Angelo Rancalli chose the name “John” for his episcopacy in 1958.  Interestingly Rancalli refused to endorse the 1947 position when he noted that he was claiming his name “extra legitimitatis discussiones”.  Oakley explains that Rancalli thereby signaled that he was setting himself apart from “disputes about legitimacy” regarding the prior use of his chosen name.  And in another exceptional example of the “politics of oblivion” that phrase was removed from any “official version” of the papl record and the pope’s handlers took the matter so far as to say what he really meant was “to deny the legitimacy of the Pisan line.”  Oakley draws a circle around the issue thusly:

Thus, in some cases, the Council of Pisa is either passed over in silence or rejected outright; in others, the question of its ecumenicity is portrayed as having yet to be decided.  In most cases, the Avignonese claimants are treated consistently as antipopes, but in some, the matter of their legitimacy is left in limbo.   Similarly, the Pisan pontiffs are listed as legitimate popes or dismissed as antipopes sometimes even in articles appearing in the same encyclopedia. The most striking instance of disarray is in the New Catholic Encyclopedia (first ed., 1967), where Mollat insists that “the question of the legitimacy of [John XXIII’s]… claim to the Papal See is still unanswered” but does so, ironically, in an article titled (editorially?) “John XXIII, Antipope.”[xiv]

 

Three Issues

 Professor Oakley then gives us a brief overview of the extensive literature that has developed since Vatican I.  And in the interest of brevity focuses our attention on the three issues he deems most serious.

  1. The Great Schism itself.  Current scholarship tends to side with the French cardinals who instigated the schism in 1378 by electing Clement VII.  Ultramontane sentiments had heretofore been likely to favor the prior electon of Urban VI of the Roman line but new evidence shows that Urban was not of stable mind or temperament and was inclined to “torture dissident cardinals, despite their dignity and advanced years.”  Therefore, the cardinals acted justly in preserving the structure of the church as well as themselves.

The historical evidence, certainly, does not permit one simply to insist on the exclusive legitimacy of Urban’s title to the papacy (and, therefore, the legitimacy of his successors in the Roman line). If that claim is now enshrined in the current official listing of popes, it should be recognized that it has been advanced quite explicitly on theological or canonistic rather than historical grounds.[xv]

 

  1. The papalist claim that the Council of Constance “became a legitimately assembled council only after the Roman claimant, Gregory XII, as part of the deal involved in his resignation in July 1415, was permitted by the council to convoke it also falls by the wayside.”   Professor Oakley notes two things here: first, the council’s overriding concern was unity and not succession and secondly, during the previous year the Council had received ambassadors from both Gregory XII and Benedict XIII as “papal delegates” conferring a status on them reflective of the council’s estimation of who they were representing.  The final point in regard to the papalist claim here described is that all of the Fathers at Constance had accepted the decision of the Council of Pisa which deposed both the Roman and French popes.
  2. The third issue is “conciiliar theory itself”.  The papalist claims have been that conciliarism was an accident in history that sprung up quickly and receded in a similar manner.  I find it interesting that no less an historically vibrant character as Torquemada advanced just such a theory!  (Anyone want to side with the Inquisition?)  But Dr. Oakley cites the work of Brian Tierney as having documented the bona fides of conciliarism back to the early church.  It turns out that conciliarism has “deep (and impeccably orthodox) roots in history.”

Professor Oakley’s conclusion is that after centuries of censorship and avoidance the time has come for the Roman Church to own it’s history:

…what is not in doubt is the urgent need for contemporary Catholic theologians to accept the fact that doctrinal rupture or radically discontinuous change has in the past been an unquestionable reality in the life of the church and that condeded, to undertake the bracing challenge of coming to terms with that intractable fact.[xvi]

I will end here with a quote used by Dr. Oakley near the beginning of his wonderful essay.  It succinctly captures the dilemna posed by the councils of Pisa, Constance, Basel and Vatican I.

The past isn’t what it used to be.  – Yogi Berra

 

[i] Dr. Garry Wills prefers the term “Stuctures of Deceit” which may be nearer the truth.  See Wills, Garry: Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit.  New York, Doubleday Books, 2000.

[ii] See Calvin’s “Prefatory Address to His Most Christian Majesty, the Most Might and Illustrious Monarch, Francis, King of the French, His Sovereign” which were included as introductory to the Institututes of the Christian Religion. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.ii.viii.html

[iii] First Dogmatic Constitution of the Church(Decrees of Vatican I).  Session IV, Chapter 2.  July 18, 1870.  http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ecum20.htm#Chapter 1 On the institution of the apostolic primacy in blessed Peter

[iv] Lacey, Michael J. and Francis Oakley.  The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity. New York, Oxford University Press; 2011

[v] Oakley Francis. “History and the Return of the Repressed in Catholic Modernity: The Dilemma Posed by Constance” in Lacey and Oakley op. cit., pages 29-58.

[vi] De fide or “of the faith” represents a level of commitment that Roman Catholics must make to teachings so described.  To question or modify a “de fide” doctrine is to place oneself outside of the Catholic faith.

[vii]  Oakley, op. cit., kindle location 621

[viii] Noonan, John T. A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching. (Notre Dame; University of Notre Dame Press, 2005; as quoted in Lacey and Oakley op. cit.  Noonan is undoubtedly referring to the matter of “natural” family planning which is now acceptable but historically had been prohibited in the Roman communion.

[ix] Oakley, op. cit. kindle location 677.

[x] Oakley, op. cit. kindle location 689.

[xi] Oakley, op. cit. kindle location 765.

[xii] Oakley, kindle location 788.

[xiii] Oakley, kindle location 789.

[xiv] Oakley, kindle location 819

[xv] Oakley, kindle location 855

[xvi] Oakley, kindle location 1041

To be deep in history is to not be Charles Chaput

01 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by in America's Christian Heritage, Charles Chaput, Christianity, Founding Fathers, Roman Catholicism, U S Constitution

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Chaput

Roman Catholics have long quoted Cardinal Newman and his view of the errancy of Protestant history.  But Newman lived in a different age, an age where truth was a commodity whose usefulness was not universal.  And the pendulum of history has now swung back to where the certainty of history has been shown to be well, more Protestant.  And so it was with some great interest that I noted the estimable Archbishop of Philadelphia has written a piece in the May issue of First Things making the case for civic involvement.[i]    But he does so on an entirely Protestant foundation!  It’s almost as if Chaput either doesn’t know American history or he hopes his readers don’t. (In fact, I’ve written about Archbishop Chaput’s mistreatment of history in a previous post, The Death of Roman Catholic Tradition.)

Chaput begins, “As a nation, the United States is built on a religious anthropology.  It presumes a moral architecture shaped deeply by biblical thought and belief.”  Well that is certainly true as far as it goes.  But what he leaves unsaid is that that “anthropology” was exclusive of his denomination.  In other words to appeal to the “architecture” of the American founding is necessarily to exclude Roman Catholicism and appeal to a tradition that worked against his denomination.  (It must be admitted that the Catholics from Spain actually arrived on the North American continent before the European Protestants.  But as I show in the previous post – and what the archbishop continues in his recent offering – is his focus only on the Protestant Founders citing many of them by name.  When he refers to “the Founders” he obviously means the Protestants of New England.)

The Archbishop continues:

What we believe – or don’t’ believe – about God profoundly shapes what we believe about the nature of the human person and the purpose of human society.

So what did the Founders believe about God and the nature of the human person?   And does that bear any resemblance to what Chaput’s denomination holds?

If the average American citizen were asked, who was the founder of America, the true author of our great Republic, he might be puzzled to answer. We can imagine his amazement at hearing the answer given to this question by the famous German historian, Ranke, one of the profoundest scholars of modem times.  Says Ranke, `John Calvin was the virtual founder of America’.[ii] (emphasis added)

In fact, so profound was Calvin’s influence on the Founders that fully “80 percent of American Christians in the colonial period… were significantly influenced by John Calvin’s teachings.”[iii]  That number is simply astounding!  But it explains why 77% of the universities in America at the time of the adoption of the Constitution were “based on Calvinistic principles.”  So we may rightly assume that Founders’ idea of God, “the nature of the human person and the purpose of human society” were Calvinistic and antithetical to Roman Catholicism.

How so, you might ask?

The chief characteristic of the Calvinistic churches was their belief in the sovereignty of God.  And because God’s will guides and directs all of His creation there was no need of a “Magisterium” to do God’s work.  (This incidentally, is the foundation of Calvin’s doctrine of predestination which the Roman Catholic Church declared anathema at the Council of Trent.)  So the early Christian churches had no hierarchy. (And Christian churches today maintain that tradition!)

The Calvinist churches in early America divided labor between pastors, elders and deacons with presbyteries over geographical areas; but none was superior to the others.  This is precisely the arrangement that was built into the American government – a President, Senate and House of Representatives with a judiciary over geographical areas.  All performed their own function but none was superior to the others.  That structure, by the way, was specifically condemned by Pope Leo XII in 1895, more than one hundred years after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution![iv]    You see to the Pope at Rome, the proper form of government was to give to Rome the “favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”  In other words, the state should bow to the Pope.

(Apparently Archbishop Chaput is not even aware of his own sect’s history when he makes this further faux pas: “For Catholics, the civil order has its own sphere of responsibility and its own autonomy apart from the Church.”)

The lack of ecclesiastical hierarchy was based on the Calvinistic principle of the priesthood of all believers.  That is to say, that all of God’s children take part in the work of His kingdom equally.   The impact that this had on early America was that everyone – from a very early age – had to read and understand the Bible.  After all, how could one exercise his priestly office without knowledge?  And that had the further effect of causing Calvinists to build universities wherever they went.  God required that all of His people be educated in order to better serve him.  The Roman Catholic Church as is shown by Archbishop Chaput’s title is the antithesis of this.   Rome has always selected just a few to be “priests”.  And those priest act as an “alter Christus” which was anathema to America’s Founders.

The fact that Roman Catholicism was so far outside the purview of early American Christianity is made clear by Dr. Mark Noll’s description of the country nearly seventy years after the Founders had completed their work:

They (Protestant Christians of British descent) regarded Roman Catholicism not as an alternative Christian religion but as the world’s most perverse threat to genuine faith.  To most American Protestants, Catholicism seemed as alien to treasured political values as it was antithetical to true Christianity.[v]

How a modern Roman Catholic prelate can opine about a “religious anthropology” that would have excluded his denomination as though it hadn’t is really quite perplexing.

The Archbishop continues:

Our history as a nation is steeped in religious imagery, convictions, and language.  The idea that we can pull those religious roots out of our political life without hurting our identity as a nation is both imprudent and dangerous.

But it is equally dangerous to graft Catholic doctrine onto “those religious roots” where they never existed to begin with especially when the Catholic ideals were nowhere to be found in our “identity”.

Four paragraphs before the end apparently the Archbishop had a twinge of conscience:

It’s worth recalling that the roots of the American experience are deeply Protestant, and that these roots go back a very long way, to well before the nation’s founding.  Catholics have little reason to remember the Puritans fondly.

And apparently Catholics have little reason to remember any other of America’s founding groups either.

In the end, I suppose a couple of questions weigh on me:

  1. Is it legitimate for a Roman Catholic Archbishop to lay claim to ideas and principles that his denomination has rejected?  And then to use same as a basis for a call to action?
  2. Should we allow the Archbishop to so cavalierly dismiss his own church’s history while at the same time appropriating Protestant history as though it were his own?
  3. Can we as American Christians allow such God honoring doctrines as His Sovereignty and man’s depravity to be commingled with an institution that has historically stood against them?
  4. Is it prudent or even “American” to support this man when the goal of his denomination, as stated by the Pope at Rome, is to subject the state to the church?

If we are going to heed the Archbishop’s call to action we must surely get our history right first.  Or insist that he does.

 

[i] Chaput, Charles J. (2014, May 1) “We Can’t Be Silent”.  First Things.

[ii] Eidsmoe, John, “Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers” (Grand Rapids: Baker Books. Kindle book loc. 68-70

[iii] Holmes, David L.  “The Faiths of the Founding Fathers” (New York: Oxford University Press. 2006)  Kindle book loc. 225-227

[iv] http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_06011895_longinqua_en.html   Specifically, Leo said: “it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced… but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”  In other words the state should bow to Rome.

[v] Noll, Mark A.  “The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.”  (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.  2006.  P. 18)