Ok, one more:
“When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”—G. K. Chesterton
Chesterton makes something of the same point from a different angle in his short novel Manalive, and now you know where the name of this blog comes from.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Having Two Legs
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Grace before Everything
“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”—G. K. Chesterton
HT: Justin Taylor @between2worlds
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
Slave Populations
Sarna again:
"Modern scholars cautiously estimate a population of between four and five million in the ancient period [in Egypt]. The point is that the Israelites would have constitued an extraordinary high percentage of the population of Egypt. Such, indeed, is the impression conveyed by the above-cited biblical passages. But then the question may be posed as to how a minority of such considerable proportions could have allowed itself to have been enslaved and to have remained in that condition for so long. In this case however, the history of slavery belies the implication of the query. At the end of the fifth century B.C.E. in Athens, slaves constituted 30 percent of the populatation, and in Italy at the of the Republic the proportion of slaves was 35 percent. In 1860 the slaves comprised 33 percent of the population of the southern states of the U.S.A."
Exploring Exodus, 97.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Gold receiving Gold
Guroian citing Chrysostom again:
"How do they become one flesh? As if she were gold receiving purest gold, the woman receives the man's seed with rich pleasure, and within her it is nourished, cherished, and refined. It is mingled with her own substance and she then returns it as a child!"
Portraits of the King
Vigen Guroian cites John Chrysostom on parenting:
"Let us bring them [our children] up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Great will be the reward in store for us, for if artists who make statues and paint portraits of kings are held in high esteem, will not God bless ten thousand times more those who reveal and beautify His royal image (for man is the image of God)? When we teach our children to be good, to be gentle, to be forgiving (all these are attributes of God), to be generous, to love their fellow men, to regard this present age as nothing, we instill virtue in their souls, and reveal the image of God within them."
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Real Humanity in Deepest Hell
Algis Valiunas writes in an article entitled "Starlight in Hell" in First Things:
"In the Gulag archipelago, souls are made or saved, as well as broken or lost. Solzhenitsyn remembers a group of intellectuals at the Samarka camp in 1946, dying of hunger, cold, and exhaustion from relentless labor:
Foreseeing the approach of death in days rather than weeks, here is how they spent their last sleepless leisure, sitting up against the wall: Timofeyev-Ressovsky gathered them into a 'seminar,' and they hastened to share with one another what one of them knew and the others did not - they delivered their last lectures to each other. Father Savely - spoke of 'unshameful death,' a priest academician - about patristics, one of the Uniate fathers - about something in the area of dogmatics and canonical writings, an electrical engineer - on the principles of the energetics of the future, and a Leningrad economist - on how the effort to create principles of Soviet economics had failed for lack of new ideas.
Death took some of the participants from one session to the next, but the vocation for learning could not be extinguished - and enforced suffering made better men of those whom it did not ravage utterly: 'Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgments. You have come to realize your own weakness - and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another's strength. And wish to possess it yourself. The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending.' Humanity - real, individual humanity - glimmers in the deepest hell."
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Solzhenitsyn on Conservatism
"Western thinking as become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost, there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development. But one must be blind in order not to see that oceans no longer belong to the West, while land under its domination keeps shrinking. The two so-called world wars (they were by far not on a world scale, not yet) have meant internal self-destruction of the small, progressive West which has thus prepared its own end. The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever."
Sozhenitsyn's Criticisms of the West
Also from his 1978 Harvard address:
Solzhenitsyn criticizes the West's blindness to its own weaknesses: "But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction... The real picture of our planets development is quite different."
"A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations...And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists. Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?"
"But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive... A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Easter Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training for in advance of Wester experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those produced by standardized Western well-being. Therefore if our society were transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores."
Solzhenitsyn: the Great Split and the Real Disease
From Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard address:
"The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception... The truth is that the split is a much profounder and more alienating one, that the rifts a are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a Kingdom -- in this case, our Earth -- divided against itself cannot stand."
Solzhenitsyn goes on to show that the fundamental divide is between humanistic materialism found in both East and West and virtuous self government in submission to God. In this sense, communism, socialism, and humanism are all near relatives and tend to feed off one another. Solzhenitsyn quotes Marx who said: 'communism is naturalized humanism.'
He concludes: "The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive and victorious, because it is more consistent. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition... I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness. To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects... We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections."
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Educating for Worship
[Originally posted back in 2006, the following is an excerpt from a chapter I wrote for Veritas Press' Omnibus III Textbook. This excerpt was published in VP's "epistula" e-newsletter in September 2006.]
For many, Adolph Hitler was the conservative, “family values” politician. Hitler passionately cared about the German family. He argued vehemently for rights of common workers, he spoke out against the so-called “liberation of women” from their callings in the home, and he encouraged a community culture that welcomed children and large families. Nazi papers, movies and educational curriculum consistently encouraged sexual fidelity and chastity, and they honored the responsibilities of mothers and wives in the raising of children and supporting their husbands. Hitler furthered his claims of defending the sanctity of the family through his suppression and execution of homosexuals throughout the war. Gypsies were another people group generally known for their immorality and less-than-orthodox lifestyles. These Hitler likewise suppressed and persecuted in various ways, gaining respect from the average German family. When Hitler came to power, his economic policies dramatically improved the nation almost overnight. Jobs were created largely through efforts to mobilize Germany for Hitler’s plans of expansion. Highway systems spread through the country to enable quick transportation of troops and supplies. Factories and technological plants sprang up in months, producing weapons, supplies, food, clothing and, of course, all the Nazi literature and media central to educating the masses in the Nazi program. The famous Volkswagen Beetle also appeared on German roads at this time, encouraging and allowing the common German man the freedom of economical travel. While Hitler outlawed all trade unions and every other political party, he silenced a great deal of dissidence with prosperity. German workers were given holidays and vacation time, plenty of work produced plenty of income, wives were encouraged to be home-centered, new schools and educational programs revitalized education and gave many opportunities to the children and youth of Germany. These family values, this sort of successful conservative progress, looked to many like a new Christian Germany emerging from the ashes of the liberalism of the previous fifty years. Hitler was also outspoken against communism, the atheistic political program of the Soviet Union. Hitler claimed to have a high regard for the right of private property and many basic, everyday freedoms. Hitler and the Nazi Party seemed to Germany to present the way of progress and rebirth. Ever since the First World War, Germany had suffered terribly from economic depression, political indecision and infighting; here at last, Hitler and the Nazis presented a unified and confident alternative to liberalism and socialism.
Recognizing all of these supposed “blessings” of Adolph Hitler as ruler is important for pointing out how the Christian faith dramatically diverges from Hitler. As we have seen, Hitler’s plans were larger than just some idea of “struggle.” Hitler believed that in, addition to pure blood, the next most necessary provision for progress and evolution was Lebensraum or “living space.” In order to win the fight, to prevail in the struggle, Germans needed bigger backyards. This necessity justified the expansion of German borders. It was the greater good of progress and freedom for the Aryan race that warranted the invasion of France, the annexation of Austria and the lightening warfare (or Blitzkrieg) that conquered a number of other eastern European countries within days. It is important to point out that the Scriptures also teach that the Kingdom of God will expand. In fact Jesus sent his disciples into the whole world, to every land and people, to make disciples by baptizing them and teaching them how to live like Christ. In other words, King Jesus has sent His people on a mission of world conquest. But the significant differences between this world conquest and what Hitler imagined are in the method of conquest and the reason for conquest. Where Hitler believed that a pure race of Aryan peoples would subjugate all the inferior races of the world and use them as slaves, like so many cattle, the Great Commission of Jesus sends His people into the world to declare the good news of salvation to every land and race. In fact, faithful ministers of the gospel are declaring that there is only one pure-blooded man, and His name is Jesus, and He shed his blood for all the nations of the earth to make them pure and blameless before God. Where Hitler lifted up Aryan blood and condemned the nations of the world, we lift up the perfect blood of Christ and proclaim the salvation of the world.
This story of Hitler’s “wooing” of Germany also serves as a solemn warning to American evangelical Christians. Given that Christians are some of the most enthusiastic supporters of “family values” and “conservative politics,” we must recognize the slippery slope of following strategies like voting for the “lesser of two evils.” One of the most important ways we must protect ourselves and our descendants from the temptation of seeing politics as our savior must be the determination that all reformation begins in the Church. Faithful worship results in honest, joyful living before the face of God, and honest, joyful living is what results (eventually) in economic blessing, political stability and peace. Germany bought the lie that they were completely backed into a corner; they believed that Hitler really was the only way out. But Christ has promised that we are part of a Kingdom against which the gates of Hades will not prevail (Matt. 16:18).
And so here you are in high school in the 21st century. Why are you in school? Why are you reading this page? Why are you reading Mein Kampf? You may be wondering these very things yourself; or perhaps you are quite sure it was your teacher’s fault or that your mom or dad “made you do it.” But let me offer you an even more meaningful reason. You are studying and reading this book because you are training to be a faithful worshiper of the Triune God. Hitler was absolutely right: education’s central purpose is to train young men and women to be the most useful subjects of the kingdom. However, he was terribly wrong for believing that any amount of struggle–however heroic–would amount to anything in the blender of Fate. He was terribly wrong to believe that Germany, a plot of land in central Europe, was the pinnacle of civilization. In the end, all his dramatic posturing is like watching a small child wrestling in a sandbox with his eyes closed pretending to be doing deadly battle with some unseen foe. God looks down from heaven and laughs; He holds in scorn all those who set themselves against His Anointed. But we do well to consider: What is the chief end of man? What is the greatest calling of every subject of the Kingdom of God? Your central purpose from beginning to end, first to last, your greatest task and privilege is the worship and glory of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This being the case, the central purpose of education is the training of Christian worshipers. The reason you are reading this essay is so that you might chant, sing, clap, pray, kneel, raise hands, listen, eat, drink and shout with understanding, reverence and joy to the end that the God of heaven and earth will send justice like summer rain and mercy like a downpour on the earth. The reason you study math, science and art is so that your imagination will be filled with wonder and awe at the Creator of the most mind blowing project ever: the world. And whether you are learning to read music or playing an instrument, whether your hand is holding a pencil or gesturing in the theater, you are training yourself for the warfare of worship. You are teaching your body gratitude; you are teaching your soul thanksgiving. There is hardly an adequate evaluation of your progress, but the best grade you can receive is the outworking of a thankful heart. If you have truly learned Algebra, if you have mastered the story of Western Civilization, if you can tell me the names of the constellations that whirl about our heads, then you will do it with laughter in your voice, you will do it with joy in your heart and gratitude in your bones. Worship is the point of learning because worship is the point of life. And worship is the point of life both because this is the chief honor of every faithful subject in the Kingdom of God and because it is the head of many waters, the council chambers of the King of all the earth. From the world gathered at the table of the Lord issues the great judgments of the King.
Hitler’s world is the story of eternal collision, unending struggle and violence. In that world blood and genes are the fundamentals of life, and pure Aryan blood is Hitler’s absolute best. But the Christian story scoffs at the small-mindedness of German nationalism even as it scoffs at American imperialism. The Lord of Heaven derides Hitler’s arrogant racism and sickening genocide as much as He abhors the slaughter of the unborn in our own country. But this is all the inevitable end of evolutionary thought. If the world is a galactic mosh pit, then bigger is better, might does make right. However, history tells the story better. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. But blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God. And the sons of God are welcome at His table. The gospel declares the pure and undefiled blood of Jesus Christ, whose blood purifies every nation of the world. Hitler was right: pure blood will conquer the world. But ironically (for Hitler) that blood is the blood that was shed by an innocent Jewish man two thousand years ago. The sons and daughters of the Most High are family through the blood of Christ and are therefore invited to the family meetings. The Christian faith encompasses all of life, visible and invisible. Forgiveness cleanses the soul, and fruit proceeds out of the heart. In a mystery, the visible and invisible mingle and mix. In a wonderful glory God adopts us into His family with water and faith, He feeds us with His word and bread and wine. And we bless one another with words and smiles and hugs. Joy makes bones strong, and wisdom gives long life. We live in the world that God made, a world where heaven and earth touch, for we have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God. In Christian worship we ascend into the throne room in heaven to ask the Father for His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Fate speaks, destiny beckons and all of the scrapings of Hitler are like sand in the wind. But the Lord speaks, the Triune God beckons and the prayer of the righteous man avails much.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Contrary to Nature
John Starke quotes from a letter Bonhoeffer wrote his brother in a new biography:
"If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands. This is not according to our nature at all, it is entirely contrary to it. But this is the message of the Bible, not only in the New Testament but also in the Old Testament."
Monday, February 08, 2010
Brokenhearted Christians
"A truly Christian love, either to God or men, is a humble brokenhearted love. The desires of the saints, however earnest, are humble desires: their hope is a humble hope; and their joy, even when it is unspeakable, and full of glory, is a humble, brokenhearted joy, and leaves the Christian more poor in spirit, and more like a little child, and more disposed to a universal lowliness of behavior." - Jonathan Edwards (cited in Brothers, We are Not Professionals by John Piper, 117)
Monday, February 01, 2010
Burned Over
Some of you may know that upstate New York became known as the "Burned Over District" after the rivivalism of Charles Finney had worked the land over.
And out of that fertile waste arose such groups as the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, spiritualists, Millerites, a number of weird dietary cults (like Mr. Kellogg -- who was enamored with enemas and having "pure bowels" -- and yes, he was the original Kellogg who came up with the Corn Flakes), and a pile of people predicting the end of the world.
Anyway, on a recent exam, when asked to name three groups that arose out of upstate New York after the ministry of Charles Finney, one student named "Baptists" and "Lutherans." And no, he didn't get the question right.
It's the little things that keep teachers like me pushing through piles of papers to grade.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Off to a Good Start
Ignatius writes: "Since God has answered my prayer to see you godly people, I have proceeded to ask for more. I mean, it is as a prisoner for Christ Jesus that I hope to greet you, if indeed it be [God's] will that I should deserve to meet my end. Things are off to a good start. May I have the good fortune to meet my fate without interference!"
Friday, November 13, 2009
The Life Span of a City
Just a got a copy of Douglas Wilson's new book: Five Cities that Ruled the World (Thanks, Doug!).
He writes in the introduction: Cities, like the men and women who live in them, have life spans, and that life span is approximately 250 years. John Glubb pointed to this seemingly obvious truth, but one that is still routinely missed: "Any regime which attains great wealth and power seems with remarkable regularity to decay and fall apart in some ten generations." (Introduction, xviii)
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Jacques Ellul: Not Radical Enough
Just started Jacques Ellul's Subversion of Christianity which I am told is vaguely reminiscent of Leithart's Against Christianity. We'll see where he goes, but the early returns are that he follows the anti-constantianism routine, in some fashion, suspicious that the Church sold out in the third and fourth centuries, a victim of its own success. While I'm open to being critical of the history of the Church, I'm generally a little dubious when these sorts of critiques romantically long for the simplicity and radical nature of the gospel, the teachings of Christ, and the tradition of the apostles and then immediately fail to take their own advice. Case and point here: frequently, it's claimed that one of the marks of this devolution in the Church is the transition from a fairly elaborate process of catechizing, testing, and proving of individuals leading up to baptism to a more haphazard, popularizing of entry into the church.
Ellul writes: "In the primitive church personal conversion brought entry and presupposed preparatory training. When the church became an affair of the masses, it became impossible to be sure of the authenticity of each convert. The process reversed itself. People entered the church first and then received the religious instruction that would guarantee the seriousness of their faith. Entry into the church was followed by spiritual training and the acquiring of knowledge. The net had to be cast wide so as to bring in as many as possible. But success put Christianity on a slippery slope. For fundamentally, why wait for deliberate entry into the church?" (30)
The problem with this is that this is actually a place where the movement is toward greater faithfulness to the New Testament and not less. Where Ellul is suspicious of the Church growing soft and trendy (which very well may be true is some ways during this era), the fact is that in the New Testament, all the incidents of baptism that we have present baptism as entry into the church with catechism to follow. In fact, in some of the instances, it's so rushed as to seem a little strange. Why does Paul baptize the Philippian jailer and his family in the middle of the night, for instance? Surely spiritual training would have to follow the baptism in this case. The Ethiopian eunuch is also a pretty short affair, and where Ellul is suspicious of mass baptisms, Pentecost is the great New Testament example of this very thing. A huge crowd hears one sermon, and Peter invites them to baptism. No catechumens, no waiting period, just baptize them. And they did, three thousand of them in one day. If mass conversions and baptisms is a slippery slope, we've got it starting on the birthday of the Church, the day of Pentecost itself.
Talk about radical. And here's where Ellul and folks like him seem to miss one of the most radical aspects of the Christian faith. God welcomes people who don't understand into His family. He welcomes everyone to join his family, and insists that it be full of babies, infants. And God claims His children by sprinkling a little bit of water on people who confess that Jesus is Lord. And when whole cities, tribes, and nations confess the faith, that will sometimes mean gloriously massive baptismal services. And yes that means that the church will quickly fill up with lots of immature, baby Christians who don't know a lick of the Bible or basic morality. But apparently that's part of the Church growing up into a mature man and being conformed to the image of Christ. In fact, that's how we must come to Christ, like little children hungry for the milk of the word, crying, inarticulate, and completely dependent.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The Red Virgin
Francis Schaeffer points to Fouquet's painting The Red Virgin as an example of autonomous humanism developing in the fifteenth century. The painting is titled to be seen as a Madonna and Child, but the woman's exposed breast is crass and Schaeffer points out that the face of Mary is actually the face of the French King's mistress, Agnes Sorel. Shaeffer says, "Was this the Madonna about to feed her baby? No, the painting might be titled The Red Virgin, but the girl was the king's mistress; and when one looked at the painting one could see what the king's mistress's breast looked like." Shaeffer applauds the general movement toward realism, but here he says the meaning has been lost.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Finney on Seminary Education
When Charles Finney was encouraged to attend Princeton Seminary to get a deeper theological training (he was a laywer before his conversion), he declined. When someone offered to pay his way he declined again, explaining, "I plainly told them that I would not put myself under such influence as they had been under. I was confident that they had been wrongly educated and were not ministers that met my ideal of what a minister of Christ should be." (47)
Later, discussing the criticisms that many of his fellow Presbyterian ministers leveled at his ministry and preaching style, he says that he remained unconvinced of their criticisms given the fruit he saw from their ministries compared with his own. "I am still solemnly impressed with the conviction that the schools are to a great extent spoiling the ministers." (72)
He goes on: "Ministers in these days have great facilities for obtaining information on all theological questions, and are vastly more learned, so far as theological, historical, and Bible learning is concerned, than they perhaps have ever been in any age of the world. Yet with all their learning they do not know how to use it. They are, after all, to a great extent like David in Saul's armor." (73)
This last point is clearly even more true today than in his day. Given the wealth, the vast resources of the American Church, the relatively high level of education, etc., the state of our nation does not reveal a great benefit for all that.
Finney's Feeling of Justification
Charles Finney (1792-1875) on experiencing justification by faith:
"I arose upon my knees in the bed and wept aloud with joy, and remained for some time too much overwhelmed with the baptism of the Spirit to do anything but pour out my soul to God... In this state I was taught the doctrine of justification by faith as a present experience. That doctrine had never taken possession of my mind. I had never viewed it distinctly as a fundamental doctrine of the Gospel... I could see that the moment I believed, while up in the woods, all sense of condemnation had entirely dropped out of my mind, and that from that moment, I could not feel a sense of guilt or condemnation by any effort I could make. My sense of guilt was gone, my sins were gone, and I do not think I felt any more sense of guilt than if I never had sinned. This was just the revelation I needed. I felt myself justified by faith, and, so far as I could see, I was in a state in which I did not sin. Instead of feeling that I was sinning all the time, my heart was so full of love that it overflowed. My cup ran over with blessing and with love. I could not feel that I was sinning against God, nor could I recover the least sense of guilt for my past sins. Of this experience of justification I said nothing to anybody at the time." (The Autobiography of Charles G. Finney, 24-25)
Without completely dismissing the tremendous emotional relief of forgiveness and reconciliation with God, it's hard to miss the foundational role of feelings, senses, experience, emotion, etc. One wonders if he ever *felt* unjustified later.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Serious Problems
Just got catholic theologian Francis Sullivan's book From Apostles to Bishops, and here are a few excerpts from the introduction and first chapter to wet your appetite.
"[Christian scholars both catholic and protestant] agree, rather, that the historic episcopate was the result of a development in the post-New Testament period, from the local leadership of a college of presbyters, who were sometimes also called bishops (episkopoi), to the leadership of a single bishop... Scholars differ on details, such as how soon the church of Rome was led by a single bishop, but hardly any doubt that the church of Rome was still led by a group of presbyters for at least a part of the second century." (viii)
Distinguishing between the catholic and protestant views of the development of the episcopacy in the early church, Sullivan writes: "The 'catholic' view, on the contrary, will see some developments in the early Church as so evidently guided by the Holy Spirit that they can rightly be recognized as of divine institution." (7) Sullivan rightly recognizes that the Protestant view is that outside of the New Testament whatever helpful and wise developments may occur remain nevertheless human and subject to correction or alteration in accordance with Scripture.
"Admittedly the Catholic position, that bishops are the successors of the apostles by divine institution, remains far from easy to establish. It is unfortunate, I believe, that some presentations of Catholic belief in this matter have given a very different impression... To speak of "an unbroken line of episcopal ordination from Christ through the apostles" suggests that Christ ordained the apostles as bishops, and that the apostles in turn ordained a bishop for each of the churches they founded, so that by the time the apostles died, each Christian church was being led by a bishop as successor to an apostle. There are serious problems with such a theory of the link between apostles and bishops." (13)
All for now.
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