The Papacy and the Historian III: The New Ekklesia

Extract

The content of any notion of Catholicity must ultimately be referable to, and not incompatible with at the very least, Scripture. But the idea that it can be read out of Scripture as though such notions could be settled in scholarly footnotes to the text is quite mistaken. It is experiences of the development of the Church; discriminations about what went right and what went wrong, that illuminate what we read in Scripture. Now that experience and that development are continuous, so that Scriptural notions of Catholicity need to be scrutinised and refined, if not every generation, at least from time to time, but experience, both of the private and personal, and of the institutional is no more to be got easily than the truth of Scripture by a mere reading of the words on the page. The tendency is to be conservative, to interpret our experience as we have been taught to interpret it, and to accept the institutions of Christianity as we have known them. It is only occasionally, when things break down, when the fallacies we were brought up on, both in our personal experience and the nature of the institutions we have belonged to, are too manifest to be denied, that we are in a position to revalue the nature of Christian experience and particularly that experience of Catholicity that underlies our acceptance of some institutions and rejection of others. It seems to me that the age of the Fathers was very much not this kind of age.

Patristic authors have been scrutinised almost as meticulously as the text of Scripture itself for justifications or condemnations of the papal version of the Petrine succession. Many such scholars have found their papalism confirmed—or their anti-papalism or even their indifference—because what you get out of the Fathers on this topic is very much what you took in in the first place. Of course, the Fathers as the interpreters of Scripture in the first instance, as the setters of the style of such interpretations, have and deserve special authority.