POPE BONIFACE AND FAKE NAMES
A VERY BIG HISTORICAL GAP
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
I had a call from Dun & Bradstreet. A representative wanted to verify information the company had about Catholic Answers. She asked me to confirm the names of the members of our board of directors.
"Karl Keating?" Yes, I said.
"Philip Lenahan?" Yes again.
"Henry G. Graham?" Henry G. Graham? No. He was the author of "Where We Got the Bible," a book published by Catholic Answers. Bishop Graham died in 1959, long before Catholic Answers was established.
"John Chrysostom?" John Chrysostom! No, not him either. That saint was the archbishop of Constantinople and died earlier still, in 407.
Dun & Bradstreet sells reports on businesses. Prices range from $9.99 to $139.99. I do hope this phone call was not indicative of the reliability of the information found in those reports.
WELL, BONIFACE DID LIVE IN GERMANY
In last week's E-Letter I wrote about Fundamentalist minister John MacArthur. Later that same day James White, head of Alpha and Omega Ministries, came to MacArthur's defense. At his blog (http://www.aomin.org) he published a piece titled "John MacArthur, Pope Boniface, and Karl Keating."
That's right: "Pope Boniface."
White used the name not just in the bolded title but twice in the body of the piece. This was caught by Catholic blogs, where participants had some fun at White's expense. After all, said one, it takes some effort to get wrong the name of what may be the world's most famous man.
White engaged in partial damage control. He changed "Boniface" to "Benedict" in the title of his piece, but he left "Boniface" in the body. Maybe that oversight will have been fixed by the time you read this. (I'm unable to verify that because I'm out backpacking today; this E-Letter was written last week.)
In a second posting, put up last Thursday, White said, "Ignoring the substance of what I wrote and focusing solely upon mixing two artificial names (shall we just call him Joseph Ratzinger and stop the pretension of the papacy and its naming policy?), some have jumped on this as if it has some kind of meaning." He went on to call "Benedict" a "fake name."
No, it is not fake. It is his real name. It is no more fake than is the surname of White's wife. Upon marrying him she dropped her maiden name and took his family name. This is an almost universal custom in this country. It is done chiefly to signify the unity of the husband and wife. If the Pope's name is "fake," so are the names of most married women in America.
When a newly-elected pope takes a new name, he is doing a couple of things. He is setting aside his own identity because now he is Peter for the Church. He also is honoring the saint whose name he takes or a previous pope who used that name. (These twin reasons were cited by Joseph Ratzinger when he chose "Benedict"; he referred to the original St. Benedict and also to Pope Benedict XV.)
The practice of popes taking new names started with a pope whose given name was Mercury. He thought it would be awkward for a pope to sport the name of a pagan god, so he changed his name to John. The practice stuck.
FOURTEEN MISSING CENTURIES
In his original complaint about last week's E-Letter, White said, "Tell us, Karl--can you name a single member of the Council of Nicaea who believed and professed what you believe about the papacy, Mary, purgatory, indulgences, transubstantiation, etc.?"
Take the last item, transubstantiation. Not a single member of that Council (held in 325) ever used the term, for two reasons: The Council proceedings were in Greek, not Latin, and the Latin-derived "transubstantiation" was not a theological word of art until the Middle Ages. No one in the fourth century, at the Council or anywhere else, ever put on paper the word "transubstantiation."
But the Council fathers believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. All Christians did--and had, from the beginning. To see what the Fathers said about the Real Presence, go to:
www.catholic.com/library/Real_Presence.asp
It was not until the Middle Ages that some began to write in opposition to the Real Presence. To defend the historical understanding, the bishops at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) used the term "transubstantiation" to describe what happens at the Consecration. Other terms had been proposed, but only this term eliminated heretical understandings.
Here was the imposition of a new, precise theological term, used to clarify what the Church always had believed. That the term was not used at Nicaea is immaterial, just as it is immaterial that the words "Trinity" and "Incarnation" nowhere appear in Scripture.
James White knows this much. His petulant challenge to me camouflaged a more important matter. Catholics admit, rightly, that the terminology about some of their beliefs has undergone development over the centuries; even the beliefs themselves have developed, in John Henry Newman's sense of becoming better understood, more technically expressed, more thought-through.
But as Newman realized and wrote (particularly in his "Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine"), there is a straight line connecting today's expression of a doctrine and the primitive expression of it. This cannot be said for Protestant distinctives.
Calvinism did not exist before Calvin, and Lutheranism did not exist before Luther--not just as movements but as theological principles. The beliefs by which Protestants distinguish themselves from Catholics were not held by Christians prior to the Reformation.
Double predestination in Calvin's sense? While predestination was much written about in the early centuries, Christians did not hold Calvin's understanding.
Sola scriptura? There is no evidence in antiquity or the Middle Ages for the "Bible only" position.
An invisible church? This idea was quite foreign to Christian writers living before the sixteenth century.
The list could be extended. The Reformers introduced novelties into Christianity. They dropped historical beliefs with which they disagreed, and into the vacancies they intruded new ideas of their own. This is denied by Fundamentalist controversialists, who say that what they teach today was taught by the apostles, by the New Testament, and even by the Fathers of the Church.
Just as one can find in Scripture warrant for almost any belief, if Scripture is chopped up sufficiently, so one can find warrant in the Fathers, if one slices and dices.
I always have found it amusing that Augustine, say, is quoted in support of some Fundamentalist doctrine but never in support of Fundamentalist ecclesiology.
Augustine was a bishop and knew himself to be a bishop. He believed the Church to be structured as today's Catholics believe it to be structured: pope, bishops, priests, deacons, religious, laymen. He believed in the magisterium of the Church and knew he was part of that magisterium. For him, everything fit together. The structure of the Church was as much of divine institution as were the beliefs about salvation and Scripture.
Catholics accept the whole of Augustine. Fundamentalists accept only fragments. How can they be comfortable quoting as an authority a man who rejected any notion of an invisible Church, who believed in sacraments, who practiced obedience to popes?
There is a deep and wide gap in Fundamentalist self-understanding. It runs from the end of the first century to the beginning of the sixteenth. Two-thirds of Christian history is terra incognita for them. "There be dragons here," say their maps.
p.s., If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' discussion forums at
http://forums.catholic.com
where you may post your comment in the forum dedicated to the E-Letter. You will find a thread devoted to this issue of the E-Letter. Feel free to add your comment in the form of a reply to that thread.
|
C A T H O L I C A N S W E R S :
[TOP]
of
Discuss
Index
Prior issue
Next issue
Sign up