What I am not saying is that there were two distinct churches prior to Trent but that the Catholic Church prior to Trent and the one defined by Trent have distinct characteristics and differences worth noting. Though prior to Trent Rome was not exactly in chaos, it could be said that Rome was at least a vast umbrella of theological and liturgical strains that lived side by side under the cover of the papacy. This may be what some call chaos. Perhaps the nature of its life prior to the printing press and following Gutenberg could account for some of this but the job of Trent was not simply to respond to Protestants but to shore up many of the loose ends in the Roman Catholic Church that could have allowed or even encouraged a Luther.
Everyone knows that the monastic houses of Rome often manifested and even encouraged theological distinctions and differences which were reconciled by their uniform fealty to the Roman Pontiff. It was not simply a matter of different orders or disciplines but also different theological emphases and identities. Ask any diocesan bishop of Luther's day and he would complain not only of the indifference of monastic orders to local episcopal jurisdiction but also that they fostered a distinct theological identity -- all in competition with the local authority and, in many cases, in disdain of the local authority. Perhaps it is with reason since secular clergy, especially in rural areas, were too often ill-trained and ill-equipped except to read the mass and perform the functional rituals of the sacraments.
Liturgically there was even less unity than theologically. There was no uniformity either in the layout of missals in the Middle Ages or in their content. Some of those missals began the church year with the Christmass vigil and ended with Advent; others began with Advent and ended with the last Sunday after Trinity. Some did not even include Advent. Others lumped the sanctoral cycle in with the temporal cycle and others kept them distinct. The liturgical colors were not uniform. So the piety fostered by these differences was also different from place to place.
One of the things we should have learned from the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation is that it is impossible to look at the Roman Catholic Church today as if it were the same communion that Luther faced. It is just as true that the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church is a distinctly different church than the one Luther knew. Perhaps it could be said that the goal of Rome is to see a seamless unity between the early Church, the medieval Church, and the Roman Church both before and after Trent (as well as into the Vatican II timeframe) while the goal of Lutheranism is to mark those differences because they actually did contribute something to the story begun in 1517.
I am not at all saying that the complaints of Luther are no longer valid or that Rome's complaints of Luther have not changed over the years. Rome has a more nuanced view of Luther today and some of what people think were Luther's big points seem to have been satisfied (mass in the vernacular, is but one example). These are not exactly true. There have been many cosmetic changes in Rome but the core of Luther's complaints still stand -- even with JDDJ and its claim to have solved the justification riddle. Lutherans have forgotten much of what it means to be Lutheran and stand more on their caricatures of Lutheranism than their own Confessions. But under it all, it is simply not possible to look at Rome today and presume that this is the same church Luther faced. Trent is the major factor in this difference but not the only one. Of the Lutheran problems, well, I have written on those before in the hopes that we will recover our theological and liturgical identity more fully from the Augsburg Confession than our dreamy eyes wishing we were evangelicals.
12 comments:
So the Papacy and the RC Church in medieval times threatened the king of France with excommunication over a secular matter is not the same Papacy that fought against Garibaldi in the 19th century when he tried to unify Italy? There are so many holes in your argument it would be difficult to list them all.
The Roman Catholic Church existed prior to the Council of Trent, which was convened by the pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church exist when it split from the Eastern Church in 1054. And the Roman Catholic Church existed when it was known as the Church of Rome, headed by a pope around 500 AD. Pinning down an exact date or century earlier than that is left to the historians, but it well after the first century, despite the Roman Catholic Church lie that Peter was the first pope.
It's just semantic frivolity to pretend the Roman Catholic Church didn't exist until the mid-16th century.
Well, leaving aside the main question, the date 1054 is more symbolic than real as that of the split between "the Eastern (Orthodox) Church" and the "Western (Catholic) Church;" it is not even the date of the schism, or rupture of communion, between Rome and Constantinople. That seems to have taken place in 1009, although the cause, or causes, were forgotten less than a hundred years later, when the Eastern Emperor Alexius I Comnenos inquired about its origins, and received from his churchmen the reply that it was due to (unspecified) "negligence" on both sides, although its name, "the schism of the two Sergii" (Pope Sergius IV of Rome, 1009-1012, and Patriarch Sergius I of C'ple, 1001-1019) was long remembered. The other Eastern patriarchates remained in communion with both Rome and C'ple for some time thereafter, Antioch and Jerusalem until the latter part of the Twelfth Century, and Alexandria until some point in the Thirteenth. Each side subsequently regarded the other as "in error" in various ways, and so alienated from one another, but on both sides there were some who regarded the "schism" as in some sense "within the Church." The Council of Florence achieved a healing of the schism, but the Russian Orthodox Church repudiated Florence almost immediately, in 1441, and the four Eastern patriarchs formally repudiated Florence in 1484, and went on to decree that thereafter "Latins" seeking communion in the Eastern Church had to repudiate "the errors of the Latins," and then be chrismated - and so to me 1484 seems at least as significant a date as 1054. Even then, however, the Metropolitanate of Kiev regarded itself as in communion with both Rome and C'ple until the late 1490s; only then, when forced by their Polish overlords to choose between them did they choose C'ple; and until the early/mid Eighteenth Century there remained a degree of partial and episodic communio in sacris between "the Latins" and "the Greeks" in the eastern Mediterranean regions, a situation explored and documented in the book Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek Church under Turkish Rule by Kallistos (Timothy) Ware, originally published in 1964 and since reprinted.
This was not, of course, the first such schism, although it was by far the longest-lasting: Rome and C'ple were out of communion with one another for some years in the 860s (the other Eastern patriarchates seem not to have been involved in this imbroglio, which is often termed "the Photian Schism") and Rome, on the one side, and C'ple, Alexandria, and Antioch, on the other (with Jerusalem attempting to dodge involvement), from 484 to 519 ("the Acacian Schism").
Christians, and particularly Lutherans, should use the label, "Roman Church" when referring to the religious body of which the Bishop of Rome, as the pope, claims to be the head. This is to distinguish it from the "(C/c)atholic Church" which, as a (Lutheran) child seven years old should know, consists of all true believers, and not those who follow the Antichrist.
JDDJ?? What is this?
JDDJ = Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (I think)
Let me google that for you.
I think it was Diocletian who, in the later half of the 3rd century, reorganized the administration of the Roman Empire by establishing 4 capitals for his tetrarchy. Two in the west, Mediolanum (Milan in northern Italy) and Trier in Germania, and two in the east, Sirmium in Pannonia (Serbia) and Nicomedia (near the Bosphorus in Anatolia). Old Rome became by 300 AD a symbol of past glory. When Constantine established a new capital at New Rome on the Bosphorus (most people called it Constantinople), it had been well established that there was no real political or military power left at Old Rome. It was functionally a regional metropolis. New Rome was the capital of an Empire. All that to preface my idea that the church of Old Rome is the church of the Metropolis of Rome, and that the church of New Rome is the church of the Roman Empire and the Roman Emperors. It's a wobbly idea with short legs, but there's some mileage in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian
"What I am not saying is that there were two distinct churches prior to Trent but that the Catholic Church prior to Trent and the one defined by Trent have distinct characteristics and differences worth noting. "
Just sayin'.
"What I am not saying is that there were two distinct churches prior to Trent but that the Catholic Church prior to Trent and the one defined by Trent have distinct characteristics and differences worth noting."
Substitute for "Trent" the words "Nicaea," or "Chalcedon," or "Lateran IV," and the statement would be no less true, but also no more true.
you wrote:
Substitute for "Trent" the words "Nicaea," or "Chalcedon," or "Lateran IV," and the statement would be no less true, but also no more true.
Yes, but the Church of Nicaea and Chalcedon was shaped by doctrine whereas Trent was not only doctrinal but secured the Roman form of the mass and Roman jurisdiction over the essential life of the parishes in communion with Rome in an unchanged way for 500 years -- neither Nicaea nor Chalcedon effected the same kind of change (even though more profoundly doctrinal). I think Pastor Peters is essentially correct.
I agree with your opening sentence. I thought many Lutherans viewed history the same way. IOW, which confession ("Lutheran" Augsburg/Apology or "Roman" Trent) represents best the prior Western Church. Even "Catechetical Helps" by Erwin Kurth (CPH 1997 p.m 130) has an illustration of the "Tree of the Church" (under the Third Article) in which the branch "Roman Catholic Church" is coming after the "Reformation."
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