Motives of Credibility: Stability

In 1934 German theologian Walter Bauer published what would become an influential work of scholarship on early Christianity, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Bauer argues that there was no single, unified “orthodox” version of the faith in the first two centuries of Christianity but a variety of regional movements existing simultaneously. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “certain manifestations of Christian life…renounce[d] as heresies originally had not been such at all, but, at least here and there, were the only form of the new religion.”

In the following decades many scholars would expand on Bauer’s thesis, perhaps no one more successfully (and notoriously) than Bart D. Ehrman, an evangelical turned atheist. In Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (2003) Ehrman argues that there were many self-identifying Christian movements — Ebionites, Marcionites, Gnostics, and adoptionists, among others — that claimed apostolic authority. The “proto-orthodox” Christians, he says, were the forerunners of those who would become the most dominant of Christian groups, Catholics. “When this group later acquired more converts than any of the others and stifled its opposition,” he writes in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (2nd ed., 2000), “it claimed that its views had always been the majority position and that its rivals were, and always had been, ‘heretics,’ who willfully ‘chose’ (the Greek root of the word ‘eresy’) to reject the ‘true belief’ (the literal meaning of ‘orthodoxy’).”

Ehrman and other scholars — including Rudolf Bultmann, James M. Robinson, Elaine Pagels, Karen L. King, and David Brakke — insist that various factors, such as episcopal succession, large urban churches, strong institutional networks, and broad geographic connections, enabled the “proto-orthodox” to eclipse the other groups. Perhaps most importantly, the “proto-orthodox” came to enjoy the political patronage of Roman emperors, giving them a decisive advantage over their competitors.

If true, this would profoundly undermine the claim of the Catholic Church to be, and always to have been, “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” Sure, the detractors might say, the Catholic Church today is in a sense “one,” and she certainly professes to be apostolic, with succession lists of bishops purportedly going back to the earliest centuries, but all this is a result not of divine approbation or some historico-spiritual inevitability but a confluence of social and political factors that enabled one group to emerge victorious over the others. Why Catholicism is today the most populous and dominant version of Christianity, they might argue, is no different than why Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War, why Muslim armies expelled crusaders from the Levant, or why Britain lost its African colonies. There are political, economic, and military reasons these events happened, but there’s no reason to think they have anything to do with God.

When the Catechism of the Catholic Church lists “stability” as the last motive of credibility (cf. no. 156), it refers to the Church’s unity, regarding both her organization and her faith. The Church of the 21st century is, in this view, the one Christ Himself founded and bequeathed to His Apostles, who were succeeded by bishops. Though the Church has grown and developed over time (there are not 12 bishops today but 5,525), she is the same institution, analogous to how the United States has grown from 13 states to 50, and from 65 representatives in the U.S. Congress to 435, while remaining the same political and constitutional entity. And the Church professes the same faith, though her doctrines incorporate not only Holy Scripture but ecumenical councils, magisterial documents, and Holy Tradition, encompassing oral traditions of the faith and the consensus of the Church Fathers. All these sources of teaching, so the Church claims, are in perfect conformity with divine revelation found in the Holy Bible and thus represent a doctrinal union from the last book of the New Testament (likely written around the turn of the first century) through the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).

Given the expansive quality of these claims, this motive of credibility is probably the most complicated to demonstrate.

Separate but Unequal Early Christianities

Were the “proto-orthodox” just one among many Christian groups, with no more legitimate claim to the apostolic faith than any other? Evidence from various scriptures of the early Christians, both those that comprise the New Testament and the so-called apocryphal books (e.g., the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, and the Gospel of Judas) seems to undermine Bauer and Ehrman’s thesis. Though the books of the New Testament differ in emphasis, they share many common themes, including belief in one creator God; Jesus’ incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection; salvation through Christ; apostolic authority; baptism; the Eucharist; and the expectation of Christ’s return. The Gnostic “gospels,” in contrast, differ much more from the New Testament than the New Testament books differ from one other. Indeed, there is no evidence that the “alternative Christianities” predate the “proto-orthodox.” St. John’s epistles condemn gnostic (or, at least, proto-gnostic) teachings, but the earliest canonical texts (Galatians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, the Gospel of Mark) make no mention of such heretical teachings, which they would if they were those of competitors. The earliest Gnostic Christian text, the Gospel of Thomas, likely wasn’t written until the second century. The concept of apostolic succession is also an early development. St. Clement of Rome, likely writing before the end of the first century, says the Apostles “appointed” and “approved men [who] should succeed them in their ministry.” St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the first decade of the second century, describes bishops who act in the place of Christ and the Apostles. Writing toward the end of the second century, St. Hegesippus states that apostolic succession could be found “in every city.”

Long before Emperor Constantine legitimized the “proto-orthodox” in the early fourth century, their churches recognized bishops, shared liturgical and sacramental practices, circulated identical Scriptures, and appealed to the same apostolic traditions. St. Irenaeus, in the second century, records that important religious disputes were settled by “the most ancient Churches with which the apostles held constant intercourse,” in order to “learn from them what is certain and clear regarding the present question.”

Contra Bauer and Ehrman, diversity does not necessarily imply legitimacy. In other words, just because many people claimed to be the true followers of Christ and the Apostles does not mean their claims were as strong as those whose writings and religious institutions predated them or presented a more coherent, universal witness.

Catholic & Also Roman

Were the “proto-orthodox” necessarily Roman in the sense of recognizing the bishop of Rome as possessing a unique, unparalleled authority that derived from St. Peter himself? The evidence for this is strong. English priest and scholar Adrian Fortescue, for example, argues that four “rights” of the papacy are visible in the pre-Nicene Church: (1) the pope is the chief bishop, primate, and leader of the Church of Christ on Earth; (2) the pope has episcopal jurisdiction over all members of the Church; (3) to be a member of the Church, you must be in communion with the pope; and (4) the providential guidance of God will see to it that the pope shall never commit the Church to error in any matter of religion (The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451, 2008).

St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing around the turn of the first century, refers to the Roman Church as holding “the presidency in the country of the land of the Romans, worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of blessing, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy in its holiness, and preeminent in love.” St. Irenaeus writes that the Church was “founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul,” and “because of its superior origin, all Churches must agree, that is, all the faithful in the whole world; and it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the Apostolic Tradition.”

The first instance of Rome exhibiting jurisdiction over other churches is contemporaneous to, or may even predate, the Book of Revelation. In response to the church in Corinth deposing its bishops, the Roman bishop Clement (who is likely cited in Phil. 4:3) writes, “You therefore, who laid the foundation of the sedition, submit to the presbyters, and receive the correction of repentance.” He appears to equate his command with a decree from God Himself: “If someone be disobedient to the words which have been spoken by him [Christ] through us, let them know that they will entangle themselves in transgression and no little danger.” Pope Benedict XVI argues that Clement’s letter is “a first exercise of the Roman primacy after St. Peter’s death.”

The earliest explicit example that membership in the Church requires communion with the bishop of Rome is from Victor I (d. 199), the Roman bishop who excommunicated a group of Asian Christians over a disagreement about the celebration of Easter. Victor “understood that excommunication from himself meant excommunication from the whole Church,” writes Fortescue.

That God prevents the Roman bishop from falling into religious error is the least attested of Fortescue’s four theses in the pre-Nicene period. Yet even here St. Irenaeus provides an early example. He asserts, “Those who have the succession from the Apostles have received a sure gift of truth, according to the will of the Father…. Where the gifts of the Lord are placed, there we must learn the truth, namely, from those who have the succession of the Church from the Apostles…these preserve our faith.” As Irenaeus cites Rome as having the most authoritative apostolic succession, stemming from its origin in Peter and Paul, it follows that the Roman see, above all others, preserves the Catholic faith, a “sure gift of truth” that presumably cannot fail. St. Cyprian also provides a pre-Nicene authority on Rome’s “infallibility” when he declares, “The Romans are those whose faith is praised by the apostle, to whom perfidy cannot have access.”

The Consistency of Catholic Doctrine

In many respects, the claim of the Catholic Church that she has always taught the same thing is not controversial. Even her detractors admit that she has never wavered from the doctrinal commitments of the early councils that focused on Christology, affirmed in such doctrinal statements as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. Rather, the accusation of doctrinal innovation is typically leveled at the Church’s teachings on the papacy, soteriology, and Mariology. Many Protestants have suggested that although the Catholic Church originally taught an “Augustinian” doctrine of salvation that prioritized God’s grace — for example, in the Second Council of Orange (A.D. 529), which affirmed faith as a gift of God’s grace through the “illumination and inspiration of the Holy Spirit” — over the course of the Middle Ages she embraced a “semi-Pelagianism” that obscured God’s grace at the expense of human cooperation. Reformed theologians B.B. Warfield and Louis Berkhof argue that the medieval Church embraced a “synergistic” view of salvation, emphasizing sacraments and human works, that ultimately provoked the Protestant Reformers to recover St. Augustine’s doctrine of grace.

There are two problems with this assertion. One has to do with interpretation of St. Augustine, who did not affirm sola fide, the Protestant doctrine that man is saved by grace through faith alone. The second is that the Church has continued to reject Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism. The “Decree on Justification” from the Council of Trent (1545-1563), for example, reads:

The beginning of justification is to be derived from the prevenient grace of God through Jesus Christ, that is to say, from His vocation, whereby, without any merits existing on their parts, they are called…so that they, who by sins were alienated from God, may be disposed through His quickening and assisting grace to convert themselves to their own justification, by freely assenting to and cooperating with that said grace.

The Catechism summarizes the Church’s teaching: “Our justification comes from the grace of God,” and “the preparation of man for the reception of grace is already a work of grace” (nos. 1996, 2001).

Protestants also attack the Church’s teaching on soteriology, specifically the doctrine extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the Church there is no salvation”), arguing that what the Church has taught since the Second Vatican Council contradicts prior teaching. Though Protestant apologists typically cite Pope Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam (1302), the phrase is actually found across patristic sources. St. Cyprian, for example, declared that “he cannot have God for his Father who does not have the Church for his Mother,” and “there is no salvation outside the Church.” St. Jerome taught, “I know that the Church is built upon that rock. Whoever eats the Lamb outside this house is profane. Anyone who is not in Noah’s ark will perish when the flood prevails.” And St. Bede of England wrote in the eighth century, “The ark is a figure of the Church, outside of which no one is saved.”

The Protestant objection is that Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council’s “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” while affirming that the Church “is necessary for salvation,” states that God does not “deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His grace strive to live a good life” (no. 16). How, they ask, is this understanding consistent with patristic sources, Unam Sanctam, and the Council of Florence (1431-1445)?

Though the Church Fathers affirmed that there is no salvation outside the Church, they also taught that there exist certain circumstances in which a person not in communion with her could be saved, such as by “baptism of blood” and “baptism by desire.” St. Gregory of Nazianzus in the fourth century taught the idea of the implicit desire of faith, referring to a “fourth baptism, that by martyrdom and blood.” Similarly, his contemporary St. Ambrose wrote that though the Roman emperor Valentinian II did not receive the sacrament of baptism, “certainly, because he sought it, he received it.” Again, St. Augustine: “I find that not only suffering for the name of Christ can supply for that which is lacking by way of Baptism, but even faith and conversion of heart.” Pope Innocent III in his letter Apostolicam Sedem (1201) similarly affirmed, “Although he who has only the desire for baptism cannot be said to have received the sacrament, nevertheless he is not deprived of the grace of baptism.”

The Church’s position has always been more nuanced than simply that only the validly baptized are eligible to be saved. Thus, for the Second Vatican Council to teach that those not validly baptized could still be united to Christ and thus be saved does not contradict the patristic testimony or earlier magisterial teaching but rather develops and clarifies it. Nothing in the documents of Vatican II repudiates the doctrine that faith in Christ is necessary for salvation.

Finally, regarding Marian dogmas: Many Protestants claim that Mary’s perpetual virginity, Immaculate Conception (promulgated in 1854), and Assumption (1950) are theological “accretions,” thus demonstrating that the Church has strayed from the original, legitimate biblical and apostolic witness. But the perpetual virginity of Mary is a ubiquitous belief across the early Church, found, for example, in the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James (c. A.D. 150), which describes Mary as a “Virgin of the Lord.” Athanasius in the fourth century describes Mary as “ever-virgin,” and St. Jerome penned an entire treatise on her perpetual virginity. The doctrine also counts among its defenders Pope St. Siricius, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, Pope St. Leo the Great, and the Second Council of Constantinople (553).

The Church developed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception more slowly, though with ample scriptural evidence. For example, the angel Gabriel declares her “full of grace,” a title conferred on no one else in the New Testament. Both SS Irenaeus and Justin Martyr described Mary as the “New Eve.” In the fourth century, Origen and St. Ephrem the Syrian, respectively, called Mary “most pure,” and having “no stain.” St. Ambrose declared her “a Virgin not only undefiled but a Virgin whom grace has made inviolate, free of every stain of sin.” It is worth noting that there is little evidence that there was any significant disagreement — certainly not within the patristic sources — over Mary’s sinlessness.

The Assumption of Mary admittedly appears even later in the early Church. The first source to mention it, the Liber Requiei Mariae (“Book of Mary’s Repose”), is probably a late fourth- or early fifth-century document. Contemporaneous to this document is the Transitus Mariae (“Passing of Mary”), which describes her death and assumption. In the sixth century, St. Gregory of Tours wrote, “The Lord commanded [her] holy body to be taken up into heaven.” Similar to the Immaculate Conception, the absence of any significant disagreement in the early Church — even as it was incorporated into liturgies and the Church calendar during the fifth through seventh centuries — indicates that the early Church did not perceive the doctrine as contrary to orthodox belief.

All told, the evidence in favor of the Church’s stability is, on the whole, strong. The “proto-orthodox” Christians, far from being one of many competing branches of Christianity, were demonstrably more united and more universal than any of the heretical movements. Moreover, the claim that they succeeded only because of political patronage is undermined not only by their antiquity, universality, and cohesion but also by the fact that a prominent heretical group, the Arians, actually enjoyed significant political support. Constantius II (r. 337-361), Valens (r. 364-378), and the Germanic ruler of the western empire Theodoric (r. 493-526) all favored the Arians, while the former two Roman emperors actively persecuted the “proto-orthodox.”

Consistency of doctrine in the face of imperial persecution also points to the remarkable endurance of the faith of the Catholic Church. Certainly, over the centuries, the Church’s doctrines on Christ, salvation, Mary, and many other topics have developed. Yet the Church’s theology and ecclesial identity have remained consistent in ways that seem to defy any merely human institution, especially one as ancient and geographically diffuse as the Catholic Church. The Church is stable because she has God on her side.

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