Thank you very much for this post. I hope you are not about to be dragged into a fray for which you do not have time.

We certainly do not expect you to join conversation at Dr. Liccione’s blog or our own. You comments here are sufficient and appreciated.

Thank you very much for this post. I hope you are not about to be dragged into a fray for which you do not have time.

Around Christmas I finally was able to read Longergan’s Way to Nicea. What struck me was, as you put it, the “intelligible inevitability to the doctrine of the Trinity.” With this acknowledged, the orthodox trinitarianism professed by the Church need not be accepted merely on the say-so of ecclesiastical authorities. For, if so inclined, an inquirer can see for himself just how what the Church teaches is faithful to the apostolic witness.

Material sufficiency is, I have thought, a spring of difficulties for modern Catholicism. James Gaffney, SJ, said that because of it there has arisen a paradoxical aspect to Roman thought on tradition. For, if the Assumption of Mary is a dogma, then it would seem one

must be able to know that a given doctrine is somehow in Scripture without at the same time being able clearly to locate it there. The Church may be said, in such a view, to interpret Scripture, in the sense that it makes known truths which Scripture contains but does not readily yield to its readers, but it must be confessed that this is to require the word “interpret” to sustain a very special and unfamiliar nuance.

This special and unfamiliar nuance looks eerily like the spin the Gnostics put on ‘interpret’. As a commenter observed over at Conscious Faith, the textual support for the Assumption is rather like that for the Dodecad, amounting to points of departure for theological speculation. Supposedly the Gnostic teachings were also “in” scripture but could not be clearly located there. Because scripture contained them but did not readily yield them to its readers, special teachers were necessary. These teachers, having grasped the real idea of Christianity, could show how the pieces of tradition fit together to express it.

To me it has seemed Dr Liccione’s neo-catholicism flips St Irenaeus on his head. The notion that tradition cannot be “fully and reliably identified independently of what has been definitively taught by the See of Rome” is in stark contrast with what Denis Minns, OP, has written:

Irenaeus does not and cannot grant that the Church or the bishops or the teachers of the Church, as bearers of the tradition, can determine what the content of the tradition is. If a place in the apostolic succession confers authority to determine, discover or develop the tradition, then one need only claim such a place in order to be able to claim apostolic authority for whatever one teaches, which is just what the gnostics did.

To Dr Liccione’s credit, he intends to look into Minns’ book. In the meantime, there is not much for me to discuss at his blog. But as regards this topic of a latent gnostic tendency, I would be curious to learn what you think of Cardinal Newman’s revised understanding of the deposit of faith. Newman anticipated the turn Catholic thought on the nature of revelation took under the likes of De Lubac in the 20th century. In a letter written in 1868 that went unpublished for ninety years, he wrote:

I conceive then that the Depositum is in such sense committed to the Church or to the Pope, that when the Pope sits in St. Peter’s chair, or when a Council of Fathers & doctors is collected round him, it is capable of being presented to their minds with that fullness and exactness, under the operation of supernatural grace, (so far forth and in such proportion of it as the occasion requires,) with which it habitually, not occasionally, resided in the minds of the Apostles;—a vision of it, not logical, and therefore consistent with errors in reasoning & of fact in the enunciation, after the manner of an intuition or an instinct. Nor do those enunciations become logical, because theologians afterwards can reduce them to their relations to other doctrines, or given them a position in the general system of theology. To such theologians they appear as deductions from the creed or formularized deposit, but in truth they are original parts of it, communicated per modum unius to the Apostles’ minds, & brought to light to the minds of the Fathers of the Council, under the temporary illumination of Divine Grace.

Thus, from the beginning the Assumption was contained in the many-sided idea of Christianity imparted first to the apostles, and by them to succeeding generations of the faithful. The apprehension of this idea has developed over time, but the idea itself does not grow. The pope and the wider magisterium, aided on occasion and in the appropriate measure by a supernatural grace of perceiving the mind of Christ that was habitual in the apostles, can authentically determine whether a belief which has grown up in the Church is in truth part of the deposit.

Though I would like to be sympathetic, this theory looks like a novelty to me. Rather than sounding catholic, it sounds like what the opponents of Irenaeus would have loved to set against him.

I may be mistaken, though. If you have an opportunity, I would be very interested in your thoughts.

In Christ,

John

Excellent post. I concur with your assessment that:

“…the real issue of disagreement has to do with the question of the inherent intelligibility of Scripture…Such an understanding of Scripture’s inherent intelligibility presupposes that the sufficiency of Scripture is not material, but formal.”

I posted the follow excerpt from A.N.S. Lane’s essay, “Scripture, Tradition and Church: An Historical Survey” over at Sacramentum Vitae:

“The Reformers unequivocally rejected the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. This left open the question of who should interpret Scripture. The Reformation was not a struggle for the right of private judgement. The Reformers feared private judgement almost as much as did the Catholics and were not slow to attack it in its Anabaptist manifestation. The Reformation principle was not private judgement but the perspicuity of the Scriptures. Scripture was ’sui ipsius interpres’ and the simple principle of interpreting individual passages by the whole was to lead to unanimity in understanding. This came close to creating anew the infallible church…It was this belief in the clarity of Scripture that made the early disputes between Protestants so fierce. This theory seemed plausible while the majority of Protestants held to Luthern or Calvinist orthodoxy but the seventeenth century saw the beginning of the erosion of these monopolies. But even in 1530 Casper Schwenckfeld could cynically note that ‘the Papists damn the Lutherans; the Lutherans damn the Zwinglians; the Zwinglians damn the Anabaptists and the Anabaptists damn all others.’ By the end of seventeenth century many others saw that it was not possible on the basis of Scripture alone to build up a detailed orthodoxy commanding general assent.” (A.N.S. Lane, “Scripture, Tradition and Church: An Historical Survey”, Vox Evangelica, Volume IX – 1975, pp. 44, 45.)

Does not Lane’s assessment poke some serious holes in the formal sufficiency theory?

Grace and peace,

David