The End of Catholicity II

{You can read the first part of this here, along with the links to the other posts this alludes to}

Martin Luther was a bit underwhelmed by St. James’ epistle, calling it an epistle of straw, and that because he could not fit it, quite obviously, into a canon of theology that gave pride of place to his own reading of Romans. That Luther’s doctrine of sola fide became his hypothesis (in the original sense of the word), can be seen in his disputation with Johann Eck at Leipzig in 1519. Luther was not supposed to even speak that day, as he had already been put under the ban, though not yet excommunicate. This didn’t stop the Catholic clergy of the Dominican convent in Leipzig, when Luther entered their abbey, from removing the reserved sacrament from off their altars so that it would not be exposed to so notorious a heretic. Ironically, in that convent Johan Tetzel (the monk against whom Luther had posted his 95 theses) lay dying. Luther communicated to him, asking his forgiveness, and informing the late indulgence hawker that he was not to blame for the whole controversy. No, Luther was not to speak at Leipzig. The real debate, as it had been planned all along since Luther first met Eck the previous year in Augsburg, was to be between Eck and Luther’s colleague, Andreas Karlstadt. Karlstadt had cast some rather noxious aspersions at Eck, and Luther had assured the Ingolstadt theologian that Karlstadt would happily debate him, and that Karlstadt was not really that bad a fellow (Luther would change his tune by 1522). But Karlstadt’s cart had lost its wheel on the road into Leipzig, sending Karlstadt to the ground to be buried by all the books that he, Luther, and Melanchthon were bringing to Leipzig for the purpose of the disputation. Some of those books, most of them actually, weighed about fifteen pounds. Clearly Karlstadt was not himself when he took the dais against Eck, and as anyone from the universities of Europe would tell you, even the best at their best were challenged by Eck.

Eventually Eck got his desire when he was able to bait Luther into the ring. There Eck scored two points against Luther, and both important. The first was when Luther admitted that the Church as the Church when sitting in council could err. Luther faulted the Council of Constance for condemning Hus’s notion, taken from Wyclif, that the church is made up of the elect only, and that they are known but to God (this was something Luther ambiguously held later, as is evident in his treatment of baptism in his The Babylonian Captivity of the Church). When Luther made this assertion, the Catholic duke of Albertine Saxony, George, is reported to have said loud enough for all to hear “A plague on this.” The second admission wrung from Luther, and the one pertinent here, was when Eck pressed Luther on the question of prayers for the dead. For if Luther’s doctrine of justification and alien righteousness were true, then what need was there for prayers for the departed? If Luther had ever thought about this question before this moment, I have not found, and I have found no one who has found, any evidence for it. Eck had caught him, it seemed. Luther responded that there were no need for prayers for the departed. Eck then retorted “What then do you do with Maccabees?” Luther: “I reject Maccabees as scripture.” The rejection of Maccabees as scripture is but accidental to the point I am making. It is instead that Luther’s hypothesis, sola fide, had become his new canon. It should not surprise us then that he rid his New Testament of James, nor that he inserted the word “allein” into Romans 3:28: since he had expelled James’ epistle, he had no place left in the New Testament (to be a bit provocative here) where the words “justification” and “by faith alone” appeared, St. James epistle being the only place in the whole Bible where those words are used together. Instead it is that Luther now had a new canon by which the Faith is defined, a new hypothesis which determines the rest of the faith.

Luther’s stratagem would not have surprised the Church Fathers, even though they would have found his hypothesis askew, for they as well had an hypothesis. Now first, it needs noting that by the word hypothesis is not meant a supposition, or as in modern science, a plausible concept in need of verification. Instead to the classical thinkers an hypothesis was the first principle, that axiom on which all subsequent thought stood. It goes without proof, for if there are proofs for it, then those proofs are the hypothesis. We here much, especially since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, about paradigms, those axioms on which the whole edifice of one’s world (and here let us say, on which the universe’s physics) is constructed, that is, until such time when there are so many contradictions from the facts that the edifice collapses and a new paradigm emerges. The paradigm allows for the interpretation and the integration of what is and is not accepted as data. Kuhn was looking largely at the scientistic world essentially beginning from Copernicus (though he does talk as well about atomic physics), but Kuhn’s basic thesis has existed throughout the whole house of intellect. For the Fathers the hypothesis was simple: ultimate reality had intelligibly linked our world to His, or to be more theologically precise: God Himself, who informs our very existence, had fully and ultimately revealed Himself to us in the express icon of Himself, namely His Word, His Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. Further, this is revealed to us by the Spirit (“no one can call Jesus Lord”; “God sends forth his Spirit in our hearts crying Abba, Father”). That Christ fully reveals God is the center of salvation (“That they may know Thee, the only true God”) and thus the center of History. All knowledge of God prior to Christ is partial and incomplete; true as far as it goes, but deficient of what we have in Christ.

Christ is given to us by the Father, indeed handed over immediately to the disciples: “That which we have seen with our eyes, which our hands have handled . . .” and they in turn give Christ to us, they grant unto us what was deposited to them, as St. Paul said to Timothy, “O my son Timothy, guard the deposit of Faith (I Tim. 6:20)” What Paul handed over to Timothy, Timothy is then instructed to pass on to faithful men suitable for the ministry. They likewise will pass it on to others. What has happened here? It is this. For the Orthodox and the Catholics, there is but one sacrament, the Sacrament of the Father, namely our Lord Jesus Christ. This is why, since through Him all things exist, the world is as well sacramental, a gift from God, and a gift for our life. Thus the Sacrament of the Father is given to us for the life of the world. The verbs for giving over in Greek is paradidomi, in Latin, transdo or trado. It is from the Latin that we get the noun traditio, that which was handed over to us. In the early Church, however, the word was not used as often as the words canon (kanon), or regula, by which were meant standards, or we may even think of as Creeds (such as Jesus is Lord, or, Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, or, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God). These were the summations of the hypothesis that formed the basis for theological dialogue, and even for measuring what was and was not scripture (Why isn’t the Gospel of Thomas in our Bible? Have you read it? What in it is explicitly “unscriptural” about it?).

Now, I have never met an Evangelical worth his salt that will not say that Jesus is Lord (maybe I have met some that aren’t worth their salt, but that is another matter). But this is not the first axiom for an Evangelical, but instead that the Bible is the Word of God, and that it is the Bible that gives us Christ and the Church, and not the other way round. This shift in hypotheses carries with it a whole new vision of what the Church is, and is one of the reasons why Evangelicals see the Orthodox and Catholics as so foreign and remote, why they recoil when they hear the words “Most Holy Theotokos, save us!” I will not say that Evangelicals are not Christians, indeed as an Orthodox I am forbidden to do so. But it is clear that Evangelicals begin their theology from a wholly different vantage point, one separated from Patristic theology which began with the Trinitarian revelation in the revelation of the first Man, namely our God, the one Lord Jesus Christ. In this case, we should not be so surprised that things on the Tiber or in the Greek, Syrian and Slavic East look so markedly different.

And now to the denouement: since the fullest revelation of God came in the ultimate revelation of what it is to be human, i.e., in the first real man, we cannot not think of our Lord Jesus Christ as human, we cannot not think of him as a man. We must think of Him not only as the true icon of the Father, but the true icon of humanity, and this in the One Person of the Mediator (and, it should be noted that icon is not mere symbol or sign, like the icons on the desktop of our PCs). And so, we cannot not make images of Him. And the third post will begin somewhere around there.