[Also on Substack]
And Otis Q. Sellers was no Neo-Orthodox. Yet, as I noted in a previous article, he found 1953 The Misunderstanding of the Church by Emil Brunner (1889-1966) valuable for contextualizing his own ecclesiology. So do I.
Brunner was clear about Rome’s conceit concerning its authority: she must ever try to discredit Sola Scriptura, the Reformation principle that affirms the Bible’s final authority, an effort that has effectively meant replacing it with Sola Ecclesia, Rome’s putative “magisterium.”
The following are salient paragraphs from Chapter 4 of Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (trans. Harold Knight, The Westminster Press, 1953, 41-45). I’ve broken up paragraphs for ease of reading and copy-edited them lightly. Annotations are in square brackets.
“Oh,” today’s Catholic might protest, “we don’t believe that anymore!” Really? Then what would be left of Rome’s much vaunted theological unity, her alternative to Protestant “anarchy”?
Who believes that the Jesuits of the 16th century would not have every LGBTQ-friendly Jesuit of the 21st, along with their Vatican allies, burnt at the stake?
Who believes that Leo XIII (r. 1878 to 1903) would not have excommunicated Leo XIV?
I expound the scriptural basis of Sellers’s dispensationalist ecclesiology—non-Darby/Scofield, I hasten to add!—in Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, which I expect to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press. It’s in the interior design phase.
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What happened [Emil Brunner writes] in the middle of the twelfth century in the western Roman church is astonishingly little known, although it is of enormous significance. This state of affairs arises from the fact that in non-Roman Christianity the theologians for the most part do not know enough about jurisprudence, while the lawyers do not understand enough theology in order to grasp and measure the full import of what then took place in the Roman Curia.
Until then, matters stood thus—that “canon law was in the hands of the theologians” [4]; the essence of early Catholic canon law is expressed in the maxim that “its knowledge is not juridical but theological knowledge.”[5]
For canon law up to that point is defined as “the law appertaining to the sacraments of the church.”[6] Church government and administrative power flow from the privileges conferred by the sacrament of ordination.[7] What takes place now in that period? Two things.
First, lawyers schooled in the science of Roman law enter the Curia. They think in the categories of Roman law, of the corpus juris civilis.
And this shows itself secondly in that they introduce for the self-determination of the Church a notion which had been unknown to the early Church, but which from henceforth is to shape the whole life and thought of the Church: the notion of the Church as a corporation.
The Church ceases to be Christianity represented in the persons of the bishops, and becomes a corporate body ruled by the Pope. From now on, “canon law is made by the bearers of ecclesiastical authority,”[8] just as secular law is made by those who wield the power of the state.
The Pope becomes a lawgiver in that he receives the potestas jurisdictionis [the power of jurisdiction and governance].
“The Church of God is administered after the manner of the state.”
“It engenders its law in virtue of its corporate organs.”[9]
“In neo-catholicism a new (legal) person has stepped in between Christ and Christianity—the Church as a corporation. . . . The Church of Christ ruled by Christ is no longer Christianity, but the Church only as a corporate institution. . . . Christ bears sway in His Christendom only through the means of the Church, that is, the churchly organization.”[10]
New Catholic canon law is fundamentally a body of laws, valid through the power and authority of the corporation from which they emanate, without regard to the consensus ecclesiae [consent of the Church]. “The infallibility of the Church as Christianity is changed into the infallibility of the Church as a corporation.[11] Authoritarian definition of dogma results from ecclesiastical lawgiving.
It took six centuries for this new self-interpretation on the part of the Church to become fully expressed in all its logical consequences and to succeed in establishing itself.
The most important stages in the process are: the Tridentine Council [that is, the Council of Trent (1545–1563), Rome’s 19th ecumenical council, held in Trento, Italy, to address the Protestant Reformation and implement internal reforms] when the sine scripto traditiones [putative “unwritten traditions”] were placed on the same level of importance as Holy Scripture itself and therewith Scripture—the testimony of the apostles—not only completed by a new source of knowledge, but effectively eliminated as a final court of appeal; the Vatican Council in which tradition exactly like Scripture was eliminated in favour of the final authority of the Pope to decide matters of dogma.
“What Scripture teaches, is shown by tradition—so runs the Tridentine decree: what tradition is, the church teaches—so wills the Vatican. (Loofs)[12]
The last step in this direction is taken by the completed Codex juris canonici [Code of Canon Law] of 1918 [promulgated 1917, effective May 19, 1918] in which all matters connected with the Church, both faith and morals, are subordinated to the authority of the Pope, and dogma as a whole becomes part of the papal potestas jurisdictionis.
The Pope is no longer bound to what has always been the rule in the life of the Church; he can make new departures. He is no longer bound to the consensus of the Church; rather, it is explicitly stated that ex sese, on his own authority, non autem exconsensu ecclesiae [“but not from the consent of the church.”][13], without needing to have regard to a council, or the assembled body of bishops, he may create dogma, in virtue of his unlimited absolute potestas jurisdictionis, which extends over the whole field of faith and morals.
Naturally, the Church had to present this new state of affairs in such a way as to appear once again to combine the new with the old. For this purpose, she used a means which was a sheer inspiration of genius.
Scripture and tradition had to be preserved as normative factors, and at the same time, room had to be made for the unrestricted potestas jurisdictionis assigned to the Pope.
The two things were made compatible by the explanation that the Pope was the sole authoritative exponent of Scripture and the sole authoritative source and interpreter of tradition.
Henceforth, tradition is no more what hitherto everyone understood it to be: an extant chain of witnesses binding the present uninterruptedly with the remotest past. Now tradition is instead something of which the Pope alone has knowledge and which he handles with sovereign authority.
“The present has power over the past.”[14] It is now de jure [“according to rightful entitlement] exactly as Pope Pius IX declared: “La traditione son io”: I, the Pope, am tradition.
What the Pope declares to be tradition, that is tradition, and every Catholic Christian must profess his belief that it is tradition, even though no trace of such a tradition exists.
The absence of evidence of tradition in the customary sense can offer no difficulty: for the Pope alone has authoritative insight into what constitutes tradition. What he explains to be traditional must be believed as such, on pain of the loss of eternal felicity.
That means then: the process which began with the institution of the episcopate as the guarantee of original apostolic truth has here reached its logical conclusion. The formal institution has triumphed over living tradition. The institution as such guarantees apostolic truth.
The notion of tradition has been completely emptied of its true content.
Tradition has ceased to be the chain of witnesses reaching back to the original revelation; instead, it has become a myth.
It is now a dormant reserve fund of the Church, from which, from time to time, the inadequate Biblical evidence is completed, a reserve fund which the Pope alone has at his sovereign disposal and in the exploitation of which no one may call him to account.
Since the Council of Trent, every appeal to Scripture is rendered null and void by the conception of the tradition which completes—and eventually, in point of fact, eliminates—Scripture.
Since the [First] Vatican Council [1869-70], every appeal to real tradition also is made inefficacious through the theory that the Pope alone has authoritative knowledge of tradition.
The Pope has not only the right but also the sacred canonical duty of repudiating and disallowing every critical further inquiry based upon an appeal to Scripture or tradition and of excommunicating anyone who persists in such an attitude.
Not only Scripture but tradition also is eliminated by the boundless absolute potestas jurisdictionis of the highest ecclesiastical office.[15] The ecclesiastical office alone guarantees the compatibility of what is now accepted as valid with the original apostolic doctrine.
Notes
[4] Rudoph Sohm, Canon Law, Vol. 2, 78. Rudolf Sohm (1841–1917) was a German jurist, legal historian, and theologian who specialized in canon, Roman, and Germanic law. A professor at several universities, he is best known for Kirchenrecht (1892), wherein he argued that spiritual “charisma” is incompatible with formal legal structures in what we call “the early church.”
[5] Sohm, Canon Law, 79.
[6] Sohm, Canon Law, 83.
[7] Sohm, Canon Law, 88.
[8] Sohm, Canon Law, 103.
[9] Sohm, Canon Law, 105.
[10] Sohm, Canon Law, 107.
[11] Sohm, Canon Law, 110.
[12] Friedrich Loofs, Symbolism, 209.
[13] Conc. Vaticanum No. 1839. (A reference to a decree of the Roman Catholic First Vatican Council.)
[14] Sohm, Canon Law, 117: “The principle of tradition has been superseded by the development of an infallible administrative teaching office.”
[15] An illuminating example of this tradition, which is no tradition, but is theologically construed as such and dogmatically credendum proponitur [“it is proposed to be believed” or “it is set forth as a matter of faith”], is all the dogmas concerning the Virgin Mary, especially the most recent regarding her bodily assumption [in 1950, a year before Brunner’s Das Missverständnis der Kirche was first published]. The Benedictine father Benedict Bauer writes: “Precisely this most glorious assumption of the Virgin Mary is veiled in the secrecy of silence. Scripture knows nothing of it.” (Petitiones de Assumptione Corporea V. Mariae II, p. 422, Rome, Vatican City, 1942): not only that, but—”History has been silent for more than 500 years.” F. Blanke rightly says, and to him I owe this reference: “Catholic theologians are therefore convinced that the bodily assumption of Mary was a historical fact, but they teach that no man ever saw this happening.” (Die leibliche Himmelfahrt der Jungfrau Maria, Zurich, 1950).