The normative value of the truth

David Waltz is here again and is nagging me about Dr. Peter Lampe. He says,

I label Lampe a "liberal" and a "revisionist" because I KNOW (as do you) that he rejects inerrancy (I provided clear examples), and IS revising early Church history. He embraces the methods and presuppositions that pretty much ALL liberals and revisionists accept. I do not see this as a "slur by innuendo", THESE ARE FACTS; but I do wonder why you see it as such.

Just what “methods” and “presuppositions” are these that ALL liberals and revisionists accept? David is painting with a broad brush here, and in fact, as I’ve argued many times in the past, I’ll say that his accusations are simplistic, generalized, and they have no correspondence with what’s really happening either in history or Biblical studies.

I’ve resisted getting into some of the specifics of his accusations, simply because so much background material needs to be presented, that’s not necessarily going to make for interesting reading. And I’ve had more important things that I’ve wanted to say. But I’m going to spend a bit more time here and show where David’s accusations fit (or rather, don’t fit) into the world that we are discussing.

First, listen to his condescending tone.

I have cautioned John about using liberal/revisionist historians like Duffy and Lampe in the AF threads linked to above (and in a number of combox posts)—but alas, my reflections have pretty much fallen on 'deaf ears' (I suspect because I am not Reformed)—perhaps John will give some thought to Garry Williams' reservations...

If he were making good “cautions,” it would be one thing. But his charges have no substance. He thinks, “if I cite a conservative Presbyterian who says that Eamon Duffy is a “revisionist,” then Eamon Duffy is a revisionist.” But that’s just name-calling. Second-hand name calling, in fact. He does nothing to show how Duffy might actually be a “historical revisionist.”

Take a look at the first link he provides. The Exiled Preacher published some notes from a conference talk given by Garry Williams, who appears to be Director of the John Owen Centre in Wales, and someone who would be highly familiar with all of the nuance of the Reformation in England. Here seems to be the core of Williams’s complaint against Duffy and one other writer:

1. They provide a re-examination of the state of church in England at the time of the Reformation. The Anticlericalism in England that seemed to drive the reform was not as popular as once thought [Duffy says]. There was no great cry for reform of the pre-Reformation English Church. The Church was part of everyday life for most people.

2. Slow speed of the English Reformation caused the Reformation to take time to settle in because it was not generally embraced by the masses.

3. Mary Tudor’s reign was more successful [than once] thought; she was a competent monarch. England was more conservative than once believed. People were happy to revert to Rome under Mary's reign.

It is on these views that Williams seems to consider Duffy “a revisionist.” He then moves on from this point. I’m wondering if David Waltz can speak to the issues? What, precisely, is being revised? Does David even know, or care to know? Or is it just an opportunity to smear a person’s work because someone else called him a “revisionist”?

This is a specialized conference (“The Westminster Conference for theological and historical study with special reference to the Puritans”), and it doesn’t surprise me at all that these folks would disagree with some of the opinions put forth by a Roman Catholic historian. Especially not English folks, talking about the English Reformation. On the other hand, Williams says nothing about Duffy’s writings on the papacy. I would tend to think he’d find those writings to be accurate and agree with them.

Williams’s statements about the English Reformation [the nuances of which most of us are unfamiliar with] are no reason to throw out everything else that Duffy has ever said. We’re not even sure what Williams actually said. This report comes to us through the filter of another, who was taking down notes. Davies’s own notes are unclear (and I’ve written to him for clarification, but as yet have not had a response from him). It is not clear in what way Duffy wishes to “overturn the traditional Protestant view of the English Reformation.” Davies does not state what specifically about the “Traditional Protestant View of the English Reformation,” (other than that Mary Tudor was a better Queen in Roman Catholic eyes than Protestant eyes), nor is it clear, what precisely about the “Traditional Protestant View” that he thinks Duffy is hoping to overturn. Nor is mention made of the fact that Duffy, as a Roman Catholic, is going to have historical views about the Reformation that may be at odds with “Traditional Protestant views” at any rate.

Further, David provides no clue as to how, precisely, Duffy’s work on the English Reformation intersects with what he has written about the early papacy. Or how any alleged “revisionism” here, in a discussion of the English Reformation, affects Duffy’s work with regard to the papacy. For all we know, Duffy may in fact provide a more sophisticated view of the English Reformation than the one that has come down to us through “traditional Protestant sources”.

Duffy’s alleged “revisionism” did not prevent WSC Professor Scott Clark from passing on two selections that quote from Eamon Duffy’s work, including my own article and a selection from Reformation Italy, a URCNA missionary church plant sponsored by a Southern California church that maintains close ties with Westminster Seminary California.

If David wants his charges to have any credibility at all on this, he will be able to tell us something specific about what Duffy’s view is on the English Reformation and how, precisely his work either distorts or in any way “revises” that history. And further, he will need to say how this affects what Duffy, a Roman Catholic, reports about the papacy. Merely citing someone (however well-meaning) who calls him a “revisionist,” while providing no documentation for that charge, is simply name-calling.

Steve Hays has said on a number of occasions, “truth is normative”. The Scriptures are what they are, because, being “God-breathed,” they are the ultimate truth. How do we respond, then, when we are presented with new information? If a thing is true, if Galileo, for example, through his observations, determines that the earth revolves around the sun, and those observations are determined to be true, then our understanding of Scriptures such as such as 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, Psalm 104:5, Ecclesiastes 1:5 need to be revisited. The Scriptures themselves are true and normative. Galileo presents additional (and true) knowledge. The Scriptures stand; we are the malleable ones. We acknowledge that it is our understanding that is lacking.

When you are presented with new and verified information, and you change your views because you have new information, that’s not being “revisionist”. That is a matter of accepting reality as it is. Of accepting the truth.

Such a thing is difficult, and it takes hard work. But this is precisely the type of thing that conservative Biblical scholarship has done over the centuries. In recent years, when someone like Peter Enns puts forth the theory that the Old Testament relies on myths of the Ancient Near East (ANE) culture. There is no substitute, however, for doing the hard work of truly understanding the ANE [more specifically, Egyptian culture and education], and determining what the true relationship between those two is. And at this point I’ll say that I’m no expert on this topic, but I’ll heartily recommend this brief lecture series from Dr. John Currid, “Crass Plagiarism? The Problem of the Relationship of the Old Testament to Ancient Near Eastern Literature”.

If you download and listen to this series, you’ll understand a great deal about why I don’t concern myself with David Waltz and his criticisms. Enns is a scholar who panics, and says, “gee, there are lots of parallels between ANE culture and literature and the OT. It must be that the OT borrows from that information.” The implication, of course, is that the Old Testament is not truly inerrant. On the contrary, Currid (and scholars like Gregory Beale and the administration at WTS that forced Enns to resign) is not afraid to take on that thesis on its own terms.

In fact, Currid dismantles Enns’s theory and presents a compelling account that it is Moses, educated in Egyptian myth and culture, and Yahweh himself, who is demonstrating who is the true power in history, in the face of Egyptian myths and legends. In reality, it is Yahweh who is laughing in the face of Egyptian myth, not by “copying” those myths, but by demonstrating where the true power in the universe is seated. At the end of Currid’s lectures, there is no question but that it is Yahweh who is absolutely humiliating the greatest world power of that era.

We see this type of thing in our own day. Superman dies in the movie (or at least, is incapacitated by Kryptonite), but then he comes to life again to save the world. Is Superman the reality? Or rather, is the Superman story based on an ultimate reality (in this case, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ) that rather resonates in our hearts (Romans 1:18-19)? The New Testament provides the compelling narrative that Jesus Christ came in the flesh, making claims to be the Son of God; His resurrection and ascension (and the attendant miracles of his life) are an exceedingly powerful testimony that He Is Who He Says He Is, and that other “messiah” types of stories in our world are copies of the true reality.

Fast forward to today (and in fact, to the last 1500 years of history – the true “Catholic Moment”). The Roman Church claims that it is the chief and sole representative of the authority of Jesus Christ on earth. Are Roman claims true? If they are true, then golly, we’d better snap-to. But if Roman claims to authority are not true, then what are we left with?

Rome has always set itself and its own aggrandization above the cause of Christ

I’m following on from my last installment on the history of the early [i.e., late fourth century] papacy.

Remember this citation as evidence that the early papacy [and for the papacy, note that “early” here is in the sixth century] had some sort of “divine institution.”

Testimony from the Early Fathers:
In 517 the Eastern bishops assented to and signed the formula of Pope Hormisdas, which states in part: ‘The first condition of salvation is to keep the norm of the true faith and in no way deviate from the established doctrine of the Fathers. For it is impossible that the words of our Lord Jesus Christ who said, “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build My Church” [Matt. 16:18], should not be verified. And their truth has been proved by the course of history, for in the Apostolic See [i.e. Rome] the Catholic religion has always been kept unsullied.’ (qtd in This Rock, October 1998).

In the comments from that last thread, the discussion turned to Pope Damasus (366-384 AD). At question was my appellation “the murderer Pope Damasus,” but as I said there, I’ll stand by that appellation. J.N.D. Kelly (“Oxford Dictionary of the Popes”) notes that Damasus hired the mob [and note both the nomenclature and the location], which “savagely attacked the Ursinians”, [followers of Ursinus, a rival of Damasus’s] and killing 137 people in the process.

“Pope St. Damasus,” of course, is officially a Saint of the Roman Catholic Church. He personifies the legacy, which we see today, that any amount of lying or criminal activity can be excused if it is done in the name of Mother Rome.

Since the mid third century there had been a growing assimilation of Christian and secular culture. It is already in evidence long before Constantine with the art of the Christian burial sites round the city, the catacombs. With the imperial adoption of Christianity, this process accelerated. In Damasus’ Rome, wealthy Christians gave each other gifts in which Christian symbols went alongside images of Venus, nereids and sea-monsters, and representations of pagan-style wedding-processions.

This Romanisation of the Church was not all a matter of worldiness, however. The bishops of the imperial capital had to confront the Roman character of their city and their see. They set about finding a religious dimension to that Romanitias which would have profound implications for the nature of the papacy. Pope Damasus in particular took this task to heart. He set himself to interpret Rome’s past in the light not of paganism, but of Christianity. He would Latinise the Church, and Christianise Latin. He appointed as his secretary the greatest Latin scholar of the day, the Dalmatian presbyter Jerome, and commissioned him to turn the crude dog-Latin of the Bible versions [currently] used in the church into something more urbane and polished. Jerome’s work was never completed, but the Vulgate Bible, as it came to be called, rendered the scriptures of ancient Israel and the early Church into an idiom which Romans could recognize as their own. The covenant legislation of the ancient tribes was now cast in the language of the Roman law-courts [emphasis added], and Jerome’s version of the promises to Peter used familiar Roman legal words for binding and loosing -- ligare and solver -- which underlined the legal character of the Pope’s unique claims. (Eamon Duffy, “Saints and Sinners, A History of the Popes, New Haven and London, Yale Nota Bene, Yale University Press ©1997 and 2001, pgs 38-39)

It should be noted that this “Latinization” was one of the things that the Reformation worked to undo. It was the focus of the motto, ”ad fontes” [“To the sources.”] As Alister McGrath has noted in his “Introduction to Christian Theology,” “the Vulgate translation of several major New Testament texts could not be justified.” Nevertheless, he said, “a number of medieval church practices and beliefs were based upon these texts.” So in addition to some of the forgeries and works of fiction upon which the papacy aggrandized itself, Roman doctrines themselves were founded upon or expanded with translation errors. These included:

Ephesians 5:31-32: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. The Vulgate translation inserted the word “sacramentum” here, where the Greek word is mysterion. Erasmus pointed out that this Greek word simply meant “mystery.” The Ephesians passage had no reference whatsoever to marriage being a “sacrament.” Nevertheless, medieval theologians justified the inclusion of marriage on the list of sacraments, in good part, because of this mistranslation.

Matthew 4:17: From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” The Vulgate mistranslated the word “repent” as “do penance.” As McGrath noted, “this translation suggested that the coming of the kingdom of heaven had a direct connection with the sacrament of penance. Erasmus, following Valla, pointed out” the correct translation. “In other words, where the Vulgate seemed to refer to an outward practice (the sacrament of penance), Erasmus insisted that the reference was to an inward attitude, that of “being repentant.”

Luke 1:28: The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” The Vulgate translated the Greek for “highly favored” as “full of grace,” implying that Mary was somehow a reservoir of grace to be dispensed. Erasmus pointed this out as well. “Mary was one who had found God’s favor,” as McGrath notes. Not that she was one who could bestow grace upon others.

Six centuries later, after the east/west split, at which time anyone who was likely to protest was out of the picture, Pope Gregory VII asserted, “That the Roman church has never erred; nor will it err to all eternity, the Scripture bearing witness.” But it erred in the mistranslation of those very Scriptures. It sullied “the catholic religion” with its own efforts to glorify Rome.

Roman Catholics ask us all the time, “when did the Roman church fall?” It was not necessarily a “fall,” but more like an erosion. Constant erosion, at greater and lesser rates of erosion. But it was an erosion of the Gospel message, at the expense of the constant aggrandization of the bishops of Rome, and the constant aggrandization of Rome itself.

“Development is just a self-fulfilling prophecy”

Here's an exchange I found interesting:

Arturo Vasquez Cites Eamon Duffy citing Newman:

“We have come to a climax of tyranny,” he wrote. “It is not good for a Pope to live 20 years…. He becomes a god, [and] has no one to contradict him”…

http://arturovasquez.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/for-a-truly-subversive-newman/

Arturo Vasquez:
I think [Catholicism] is the only religion in the modern Western world that merits the name, in that it tries to mix universality and systematic rigor with plurality and local manifestations of the supernatural. Do I think it works? No. But it is still a noble try. As I have written above, I am pessimistic to the point that I think the whole thing is on the verge of collapse, at least a major section of it.

Michael Liccione:
I’ve long thought that the attitude you share is an all-but-inevitable reaction to the scandal of particularity, which is really the difficulty, for many, of seeing the mutual inherence of the universal and the particular. There’s no way to “get it” from the outside; one has to live it from within the tradition, as you clearly recognize. Your own contribution is to point out that “the outside” is now “inside” the Church. I agree that such is the case for many individuals; but to conclude that’s it the case for the Catholic thing as such, one must assume that its intensional reality is reducible to its extensional reality. Only, it isn’t. And that fact lies at the core of the Catholic thing.

Arturo Vasquez:
Well, you can win an argument by addressing reality or you can do it by moving goal posts and saying you kicked the winning field goal that way. If there is something that I have concluded about Mike & friends’ argumentative style is that they tend to argue using the latter method. “Catholicism” will win as an institution because “Catholicism” is invincible. The antagonism is always outside of the Platonic definition of “Catholicism” floating in the ether. How things look in reality, well, your mind is playing tricks on you. Don’t pay any attention to that. God forbid we should argue that change exists in the very idea itself. Otherwise, the sky would fall, we would have to curl up in a fetal position in the corner, dogs will marry cats, etc.

“No coincidence that the first works of papal history are fictitious accounts written by the popes”

It seems as if it’s “let’s persuade Scott Windsor that he needs to re-think his avocation” week here at Beggars All. I’m continuing to respond to his brief defense of the papacy. (Earlier posts discussing his “Scriptural Defense” are here, here and here.) My hope is to return to these “scriptural defenses,” but he also threw out a historical citation that needs to be addressed as well.

In some recent posts, our motivations have been questioned. I’m sure we’ve responded to them adequately; but I want to go a bit further and state, as I’ve done before, that I’m interested in knowing “the truth.” You can think of me as an investigative reporter, and when I study the early papacy, [or the Reformation, or any other topic], I’m interested in knowing, with the greatest degree of certainty that our sources can provide, “what they knew, and when they knew it.” What actually happened.

This is vitally important with respect to the early papacy, because, in polemic discussions on this topic, someone like Scott, taking a literalist interpretation of Vatican 1, will say something like “Christ founded a visible church, Peter was the Rock of Matthew 16, Clement mentioned “worthy men,” and therefore, there was an unbroken chain of “popes” down through the centuries.”

In fact, this is a very dishonest summary of the history of those centuries. The Roman Catholic writer Francis Sullivan, in his work From Apostles to Bishops (New York: The Newman Press), painstakingly works through all possible mentions of “succession” from the first three centuries, and concludes from that study not only that “the episcopate [development of bishops] is a the fruit of a post New Testament development], but he interacts with the notion that there is a single bishop in Rome through the middle of the second century, and he flatly dismisses it. [Sullivan, 221-222].

Klaus Schatz, in his Papal Primacy: From its Origins to the Present, not only acknowledges that in the case of the process of the development of “the historically developed papacy” the initial phases of this long process “extended well into the fifth century” (Schatz pg 36)
.
I concluded my last post with a discussion of the conditions in which bishops of Rome found themselves, and also a fairly lengthy selection about pope Damasus (366-382).

Another Catholic writer, Robert Eno, S.S. (“Order of the Sulpicians,” whose mission it is to teach Roman Catholic seminarians), notes, “From the time of Pope Damasus (366-384), the evidence for the Roman view of itself became abundant. … I might point out that this distinction between what Rome says about itself and what other, non-Roman sources say about Roman authority, is one that must be observed throughout this enquiry.” (“The Rise of the Papacy,” Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier Press, 1990, p 30).

As I’ve pointed out in the past, Roger Collins notes (in the spirit of Eno) that It is no coincidence that the first systematic works of papal history appear at the very time the Roman church’s past was being reinvented for polemical purposes.

Just sayin’. And I’m just sayin’ that, just as the non-existent early papacy was based on pious and not-so-pious fictions, the medieval papacy, too, rests on not-so-pious fictions.

Now is a good time to remind everyone of what Scott provides, in addition to his exegesis of Matt 16:18, as another “early evidence” for the papacy”:

Testimony from the Early Fathers:
In 517 the Eastern bishops assented to and signed the formula of Pope Hormisdas, which states in part: ‘The first condition of salvation is to keep the norm of the true faith and in no way deviate from the established doctrine of the Fathers. For it is impossible that the words of our Lord Jesus Christ who said, “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build My Church” [Matt. 16:18], should not be verified. And their truth has been proved by the course of history, for in the Apostolic See the Catholic religion has always been kept unsullied.’ (qtd in This Rock, October 1998).

Klaus Schatz explains a bit of this process, from an actual historical perspective:

In the five hundred years from the fifth to the tenth centuries the role of Rome was very different in the Byzantine “imperial Church” and in the West, which after the tribal migrations of the fifth century consisted of a group of independent Germanic kingdoms. Until the eight century, except for the period between 476 and 536 when it was ruled by Odoacer and the Ostrogoths, Rome belonged to the empire governed from Constantinople. The pope was a subject of the emperor, and from the sixth to the eight century the Roman bishop elected by the clergy and people of Rome had to be confirmed by the emperor in Constantinople before he could be consecrated. [And yes, it was the forged “Donation of Constantine” that enabled Rome to break free of this domination].

For five hundred years [400-900] the role of Rome in the imperial Church was determined essentially by the relationships among three entities: the ecumenical councils, the patriarchates, and the imperial establishment. The essential features of this set of relationships developed in the middle of the fifth century, with the events of the years 449-451 the crucial turning point. …

For the ecumenical councils, as for all matters that had to be settled at the highest levels, the “patriarchates” came increasingly to be the most important entities. The terms “patriarch” and “patriarchate” emerged in the fifth century and became fixed usage in the sixth. They originated in the triad of principal churches at Rome, Alexandria and Antioch. The sixth canon of the Council of Nicea (325) explicitly confirmed the “ancient custom” that these three bishops were to have ecclesial jurisdiction (not specifically defined) over their own regions. (Schatz 41-42)

What follows are the years between 325 and 381, when Arianism is defeated and the doctrine of the Trinity defined; following the Council of Constantinople (381), which in which the Nicene Creed was finalized, and the murderer pope Damasus didn’t want to be bothered (except to assert that he was boss). From 381 then, until 451, came the Christological struggles and the council of Chalcedon.

Eamon Duffy notes:

In addition to its doctrinal work, the Council of Constantinople issued a series of disciplinary canons, which went straight to the heart of Roman claims to primacy over the whole Church. The Council decreed that appeals in the cases of bishops should be heard within the bishop’s own province – a direct rebuttal of Rome’s claim to be the final court of appeal in all such cases. It went on to stipulate that ‘the Bishop of Constantinople shall have the pre-eminence in honour after the Bishop of Rome, for Constantinople is new Rome’.

This last canon was totally unacceptable to Rome for two reasons. In the first place it capitulated to the imperial claim to control of the Church, since Constantinople had nothing but the secular status of the city to justify giving it this religious precedence. Worse, however, the wording implied that the primacy of Rome itself was derived not from its apostolic pedigree as the Church of Peter and Paul, but from the fact that it had once been the capital of the empire. Damasus and his successors refused to accept the canons… (Duffy 34-35).

So during the first two councils, Nicea (325) and Constantinople (381), while the eastern bishops were doing the heavy lifting, bishops of Rome were not present, they were an afterthought, and the pope's alleged "divine institution" was not recognized at all. By councils of bishops.

This is a bit lengthy, and there’s more of it, so I’ll finish it in another installment, Lord willing. But note here that the image of a “unified church under the pope” is far, far from reality.