An Authority for the Ages

Being Catholic necessitates from the adult member of the Church a formal assent to a number of characteristically ‘Catholic’ doctrines, but one claim alone stands out to the believing intellect as demanding principle acknowledgment in the order of faith: that the authority of the Twelve Apostles is inherited by the bishops of the Catholic Church. The Catholic individual could call this belief his articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae- his one article of faith upon which the Church will either stand or fall.[1] But, before this claim that a discernable line of apostolic succession has been maintained within the episcopate of the Catholic Church is to be believed or rejected- even before the force of such a claim can be judged as holding prime importance for the Catholic believer- it will first be necessary to examine two other things that point to apostolic succession as being the pivotal belief for any Christian’s successful discovery of Jesus Christ: what was the message the Apostles preached, and by whose authority did they go about spreading this message.

The Twelve Apostles report that they encountered a man in Roman-occupied Judaea from the town of Nazareth named Jesus. This man had a mysterious charisma about him- though a son to a simple carpenter, his personality attracted all sorts of people spanning the likes of fishermen, government officials, public sinners, rabbinic teachers, lepers, soldiers, and even astrologers from Persia in search of a king. Something about him drew all these people away from their normal lives and demanded from them an uncompromised obedience to his will. By no means did they all give this fidelity to him, but many did. And the more the Apostles themselves got to know this unique individual, the more they began to sense something more than human in him. They began to appreciate some quality in this grace-filled man that, while being perfectly human like them, was also in some way divine.

The Twelve then make further claims stating that this same Jesus, whom they now called Lord and Master and Teacher, had fulfilled numerous prophecies found in their sacred writings. These scriptures, which spanned the centuries leading up to their own time, looked forward to this unique individual as the long-awaited Messiah, the promised King of David’s lineage, the Prophet who would surpass even Moses himself in speaking to God face-to-face, the true High Priest who would atone for sin. Zechariah, Isaiah, Daniel, Micah, Jeremiah, all the prophets directly or indirectly spoke of him whom the Apostles were currently walking, talking, and eating with. The daily companion of the Apostles seemed to them to be the Priest, Prophet, and King foretold of old.

They also report that during his life Jesus the Galilean gained more followers by performing miracles and wonders the number of which, if written down, all the books in the world would not be able to contain (c.f. Jn 21:25)- multiplying loaves, walking on the sea, calming storms, turning water into wine, healing the sick, raising the dead. Yet, all these miracles only seemed to confirm, in the Apostles’ own minds, the authority with which this same Lord Jesus had always taught, commanded, and acted; a sometimes gentle, but always powerful authority that compelled some to embrace him, others to reject him, and still others to fall down and worship him. The sharply varied responses Christ provoked in others is what caused friction between this extraordinary rabbi and the rulers of the state who, supported by the will of the religious authorities and egged on by the acclamations of the crowds, put him to death by crucifixion. But it is this very death, the Apostles teach, which was an act of unsurpassing love on the part of God that brought about the forgiveness of man’s sins- it was Christ’s subsequent rising from the tomb in which his corpse had been laid three days previous that foreshadows man’s own bodily resurrection at the end of the world. All these things, the Apostles tell us, must be believed in order to grasp the truth of who this Jesus is and what he came on earth to do as the Anointed One of God.

But, to get to the crux of the matter, lest the prospective Catholic think that the case for Christ has been sufficiently established with what has been said - that there can be such a thing as "mere Christianity" as C.S. Lewis put it and that the aforementioned is just that - he must still look further into the Apostles' message. For as many Christians believe that the mere testimony of Jesus Christ as Savior equates to ‘The Faith’, we have not yet answered the question as to why a Catholic says he ought to follow that concrete line of apostolic succession in the Church and not directly follow Christ on his own; after all, it is reasoned the Apostles witness to Christ as Lord, not to themselves, so whence does their authority arise in all this and why ought one feel compelled to submit to it?

With a deeper dive into the witness of the Twelve, one will see that the Apostles seem to emphasize that this same Jesus, whom they both worshiped as the Son of God and loved as their beloved Brother and Friend, chose to establish a visible Church on earth that would reunite the twelve tribes of Israel into a new body. The Apostles would go out, baptize, and teach Jew and Gentile alike the new universal revelation of the Father found in Christ Jesus His Son. This new Body, the Church, would be built on the foundation of the twelve Apostles Christ had chosen, with Peter set as their head. Indeed, the prayer of Ben Sira centuries before: “May the bones of the twelve prophets revive from where they lie,” (Sir 49:10) is fulfilled in the commissioning of these twelve men, for they would be given the gift and responsibility of transmitting the Christian faith with prophetic authority to the next generation. The Church would share the same mission as her divine Founder: to call men out from the crowds into her protective ark,[2] to heal them of their wounds (c.f. Lk 9:1-6), to strengthen them with His grace (c.f. Eph 4:11-16), and to prepare them to partake of the divine nature as adopted sons of God (c.f. 2 Pt 1:4).

So that this message and work of Christ would not die with the death of the last of the Apostles, the Twelve planned ahead and appointed other men too- in the same manner in which the Lord had appointed them- to succeed them in the apostolic office as authoritative witnesses to the Gospel (c.f Acts 1:20-26). These successors, whom we now call bishops, would also share in the Lord's promise given to the Apostles that the Spirit of Truth would lead them into all truth (c.f. Jn 16:13), that whatsoever they bind on earth would be bound in heaven and whatsoever they loose on earth would be loosened in heaven (c.f. Mt 16:19, Mt 18:18), and that whosoever sins they forgive will be forgiven them and whosoever sins they retain will be retained (c.f. Jn 20:23). To them also would be given the privilege of making new disciples by baptizing and teaching the nations (c.f. Mt 28:18) and feeding the people of God with the Lord's own flesh and blood (c.f Jn 6:48-58, Lk 22:14-20).

Now, having evaluated these grave duties and responsibilities the Lord gave to the Apostles, and in effect the Apostles gave to their successors, it is now clear that there can be no good news of salvation through Christ except by way of this apostolic Body He designed to mediate it. As Hilaire Belloc once wrote: "There is no such thing as a religion called 'Christianity'- there never has been such a religion. There is and always has been the Church."[3] For Christ has freely bound His revelation to the Church as a husband freely binds himself to his wife. Indeed, as St. Cyprian said only a couple centuries after the Apostles: "[One] cannot have God as a father who does not have the Church as a mother."[4] The whole Christian message then is handed down[5] to us not as a philosophy we can grasp on our own nor as a compilation of a wise man's teachings we individually subscribe to; it is handed onto us through a living witness of men who were tasked with protecting the integrity of the entirety of the gospel. Hence, we receive this gospel through imperfect, weak men whose authority is made perfect by the One who sent them. There can be no other way in which the divine teaching of Christ is to remain anchored in a message that is consistent through the centuries than by the assurance that these teachers- human as they are- were given a special grace to do so in an ecclesial body that St. Paul tells us "is the Church of the Living God, the pillar and bulwark of truth" (1 Tm 3:15).

Perhaps St. Peter Fabre put it most eloquently at a time when the Church's unity was being shaken to its core during the Protestant Reformation of the 16^th century:

"Few there are who have an appreciation of the Church, which is the candlestick, in the belief that it is possible to retain the candle and disregard the candlestick; but then the candle would have no place in which to be firmly fixed once the golden candlestick is missing."[6] 

Indeed, it is this candlestick that holds up a burning light to us that we can either turn to and enjoy all things in which it casts illumination on or turn away from, trying to make the best of things in the dark.

Therefore, in demanding an acceptance or rejection of what this Body proposes for belief (e.g. the creed), the Church is really posing a deeper question to the prospective Catholic: Do you accept the Church’s authority to hand the faith onto you in all its fullness? An affirmative answer to this is, for the consistently thinking person, the end of the search for the true Church, the orthodox Faith, the real Jesus. For if a man accepts the Magisterium and its authority, he no longer needs to go through each article of faith and hold it up to his own scrutiny. He has already done that with the Church's claim to authentically teach the entirety of the faith, consequently, he can rest assured that if the gates of hell cannot prevail over this Body (c.f. Mt 16:18), much less of a chance does his own fallible reasoning have in doing so.

The 20^th century Anglican-convert who became a Catholic priest, Ronald Knox, articulately describes two different ways one can search for the true Church.[7] In one way, a man seeking out a church to suit his fancy has within his intellect a set of proposed doctrines he is willing to accept- a "fides" as Knox calls it. His job then is to find a body- a "fideles"- that teaches those same beliefs he already holds in his intellect. His whole search then from beginning to end remains comfortably fixed within the limits of his own reasoning.

On the contrary, Knox nuances another type of search that entails not matching one's fides with a fideles, but rather learning one's fides from the fideles. When it comes to divine revelation, Knox argues this is really the only way to rationally search for and discover true doctrine- one must first search for and discover the true Church. The starting point must always begin with the credentials of the witnessing Body that is teaching rather than the palatability of individual doctrines that are being taught.

This is evident when we look towards the beginning of John’s Gospel. Did the Apostles ever say to those they brought to Christ: "Does he fit your image of what the truth is?" or, rather did they not simply say, "Come and see"(Jn 1:46). It is a sort of creedal Copernican Revolution as I like to think of it; for it is not that the light of faith conforms to the way we envision it, rather, it is by entrusting ourselves to a faith we receive outside of our intellect that we are then enveloped in its light.

But, why again must faith's abode rest within the authority of the Church? Why could it not be merely found within a prayerful interpretation of the Scriptures by an individual Christian? Could not one simply look to the Bible to be enlightened by the light of Christ?

The need of a Church that has retained apostolical succession within its episcopate has already been emphasized in this essay because it is only through the witness of the Apostles and their designated successors that legitimate teaching authority can be handed on. But, in addition to this, the answer as to why a theology based on sola scriptura[8] cannot be cogently argued is that the Scriptures are not an all-sufficient authority on revelation because they are not self-authenticating themselves. They did not come down from heaven and tell us that their words are to be believed; they did not even come down from heaven as a singly-bond collection of books. It required Tradition to tell us this. It took an authority outside the Bible itself to first compile these writings together and sanction their use as inspired texts in a formal canon. This was of course done in an informal way by the first Christians who more or less followed the collection of Jewish writings found in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament (with the additional twenty-seven books written by the Apostles or their confereres to make up the New Testament), but it was not done formally until the Decretum Damasi of the late 4^th century at a local council in Rome. It would reasonably follow then that the authority that sanctioned the use of this approved list of Scriptures must also be that same authority recognized to be the interpreter of their content. As one of the greatest intellectuals the Church has ever known once said: "I would not believe the Gospels if it were not for the Catholic Church."[9] It was the authority of the Church then that compelled St. Augustine to give credence to the Christ of the Gospels- not the other way around. It was the authority of the Church- even above that of the Bible itself- which remained preeminent in the thought of this preeminent Church father. The fact that Augustine’s lifetime coincided with this historic period in which the collated canon was being formalized by Pope St. Damasus in Rome probably explains why this bishop of North Africa ordered his belief this way.

For the Catholic then, once the authority of the Church's Magisterium is established as credible, the truths of its various doctrines can be inferred as credible by the reality of the Church’s own trustworthiness. There can be no other way in which divine truth can be safeguarded from one generation to the next except by a divinely appointed authority that passes it on. Additionally, it is self-evident that it must be this same divinely appointed authority that interprets the revelation for each generation to learn it anew, for in the end no prophecy, no scripture, no tradition is a matter of private interpretation (c.f. 2 Pt 1:20); this interpretation then must be the prerogative of those who have first received what they then hand on (c.f. 1 Cor 11:23, 1 Cor 15:3).

It is noteworthy that St. Peter says in his second epistle that St. Paul himself can be easily misunderstood in his letters (i.e. in the majority of the books of the New Testament), for there are in them "some things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures" (2 Pt 3:16). In other words, the Sacred Scriptures are not to be read isolated from the spirit of the Church that holds that Christ-given authority to preach them. As St. John Henry Cardinal Newman put it: "Every creed has [scriptural] texts in its favour, and again [scriptural] texts which run counter to it"; [10] for this reason then the leading Oxford controversialist concluded "the sacred text was never intended to teach doctrine, we must have recourse to the formularies of the Church."[11] It was this line of thought that would help lead Newman himself from being one of the most influential Anglican prelates in the 19^th century to a priest of the Roman Catholic Church.

Ultimately then, all the prospective Catholic needs to determine before “crossing the Tiber” is this: Does the Catholic Church exist in his day along that same line of authority first given to the Apostles. Or, put differently, does the Catholic Church have a legitimate claim and God-given ability to prevent the flame of the candle from falling to the ground, thereby risking it to become smothered?

Anyone who has surrendered to the Church of Rome's claims recognizes that she is the only Church which alleges responsibility for the welfare of all Christians in the world because with her the authority to teach, sanctify, and govern Christ’s flock has been preserved in a concrete line of apostolic succession reaching all the way back to Christ Himself. With her is the petra, the petros, the successor to St. Peter in the person of the pope, the rock upon which Christ built His Church (c.f. Mt 16:18). The keys have been taken from the former steward Shebna, they have now been laid upon his petrine shoulders to open what shall not be shut and shut what shall not be open (c.f. Is 20:15-25, Mt 16:19). He alone, even in his weakness, is commissioned by the Lord Himself to strengthen the other foundation stones of the Church (c.f. Lk 22:32), wherever they may be faltering in the world. No other church preaches such a sweeping, universal claim as being the "Mother of all Churches" and that outside of her salvation cannot be found. It is through her we encounter the fullness of Christ's message and not one bit of that message is something that can be disregarded without a commensurate misunderstanding of the person and message of Christ.

Jesus Christ, as the Gospels show (i.e. the Apostles show), did not enter a nebulous cosmos devoid of space and time. He entered our world at a specific time, at a specific place, to a specific group of men. Imperfect though they be in wisdom or moral conduct, He chose to impart His Spirit on them to make them reliable transmitters of His message and grace through word and sacrament. If one doubts that the Lord could do that, he ought to doubt more spectacular things professed in the various creeds of the churches; moreover, if one doubts that He did do this, he ought to doubt God actually wants to be manifest- for to think that He would make Himself known for a span of three years (the length of His public ministry) and expect the rest of human history to still know Him centuries after this brief manifestation so long ago, one ought to question the wisdom of the divine Mind. Frank Sheed made this point quite sharply when he wrote: " For God to have given His revelation and made no provision for its preservation would have been sheerly insane."[12] It is obvious, even in the immediately following generation after the Lord's earthly life, knowledge of Him would be quickly distorted - as is evidenced with the historic growth of heresy in the first few centuries by those who ventured away from the authority of the Catholic Church. It is only fitting then that Christ would establish a credible, reliable authority empowered by His Spirit to authentically lead men back to God on a path so certain, one could stake his life on it.

Indeed, Christ came to us as a man so that through men, we might come to Him. It really is as simple as it was in the early days of the Church when the preaching of St. John the Apostle was stilling ringing in the ears of St. Ignatius of Antioch at the beginning of the 2^nd century: "Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church."[13]

[1] I have adopted this phrase used by Martin Luther (in reference to his doctrine on justification by faith alone) to the doctrine of apostolic succession because I think that the apostolicity of one’s faith remains the most fundamental tenet of belief for any Christian. The only way one knows anything about Christ is because he receives his doctrine from those who knew Him personally and were commissioned to be His messengers. Consequently, if any atheist seeks to undermine the Christian faith in general, I think his best bet would be to attempt to undermine the legitimacy, consistency, and inner-coherence of the Church itself- in other words, to attack the one concrete link Christians have to Christ.

[2] Ekklesia (Greek)- ‘a gathering or assembly that has been called out,’ whence comes the English words, ‘ecclesial, ecclesiastical’ referring to the ‘church’. St. Peter compares the rescue from death given by the Ark for Noah and his family to the rescue from sin given by baptism in the Church (c.f. 1 Pt 3:21).

[3] Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1991), 144.

[4] Cyprian of Carthage, “On the Unity of the Catholic Church,” in The Teachings of the Church Fathers, ed.John R. Willis (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2002), 59.

[5] Tradere (Latin)- ‘to hand over,’ whence comes the English word ‘tradition’; a word that often carries with it, in some non-Catholic communities, a perjorative connotation when used in speaking of theological teachings as man-made customs (c.f. Mk 7:8). However, the authentic meaning of the word is merely found in this sense of preaching that is ‘handed on/down’ whether by written or oral word (c.f. 2 Thess 2:15).    

[6] Letter by Peter Fabre to Gerard Kalckbrenner, quoted by William V. Bangert in To the Other Towns: A Life of Blessed Peter Favre, First Companion of Saint Ignatius (San Francisco, CA; Ignatius Press, 2002), 182.

[7] c.f. Milton Walsh, Ronald Knox as Apologist: Wit, Laughter and the Popish Creed (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2007), 222-223.

[8] ‘by scripture alone’

[9] Augustine of Hippo, “Against the Epistle of Manichaeus Called Fundamental,” in The Teachings of the Church Fathers, 77.

[10] John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (New York, NY: The Classics of Liberty Library, 1997), 171.

[11] ibid., 66.

[12] Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1993), 17.

[13] Ignatius of Antioch, “Letter to the Smyrnaeans,” in The Teachings of the Church Fathers, 53-54.