ABSTRACT
Since Newman wrote the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, the idea of historical development has become a cliché of dogmatic theology. But clichés have a tendency to backfire. The idea of development could be safely applied to the great Christological definitions of the early councils, and on occasion it could be usefully employed as a blunderbuss in face of Protestant objections, but the application of scientific history to ecclesiology was another matter. History is a language of explanation. As such, it has generally been mistrusted by the Roman Church in modern times. Roman authority has always feared the possible solvent effects of historical criticism on the established structures of the Church. Church history has, of course, been taught, but of a sort that has isolated it from the study of Scripture and dogma. Apologetics took their stand on the ground of continuity in a changeless tradition mediated by an unchanging Church, whose hierarchical structure was determined from the beginning. The application of scientific history to the study of ecclesiology has exploded the
image of an immutable Church, and there is growing awareness of the fact. The fuse was, in fact, lit by the Second Vatican Council, which vindicated Newman’s understanding of development in both doctrine and ecclesiastical structure. In its constitution on Divine Revelation, the Council declared that ‘This tradition, which comes from the Apostles, progresses [my italics] with the assistance of the Holy Spirit in the Church, in so far as the understanding both of events and of the words transmitted grows…’. It seems, then, that the doctrine of historical development has been officially received by the Church. Many people, disturbed by the changes made in their generation, have been
further perplexed by recent Roman pronouncements which appear to have scant regard for historical criticism. For many, the principle of spiritual authority, as they have hitherto understood it, has collapsed. Answers are being sought to fundamental questions: what is the character and function of office in the Christian community? How can formal office be related to the gifts of the Spirit, which are given freely to all God’s people? How can hierocratic government be reconciled with the responsibility of all the baptised for the life and mission of the Church? In what follows an attempt has been made to suggest a historical answer to the first of these questions. As pointed out above, the historian’s task is the
humble one of explanation. The second and third questions are therefore beyond the scope of my inquiry. In a recent lecture on the papacy,1 my colleague, Eamon Duffy, referred to the
problem posed for the Church by ‘the burden of history’. While accepting the burden, I should like to claim for it the compensatory gift of mental liberation. With institutions, as with individuals, it is the forgotten past that enslaves the mind. The only obstacle to this liberation is an inveterate tendency to re-create the past in our own image. Since Vatican II, Catholic publicists have tended to blame much of our present predicament on the weight of our medieval inheritance. But it would be unfortunate if Catholics were to exchange the sentimental medievalism of yesterday for an equally unrealistic cult of the primitive. This would be to substitute one kind of illusion for another. When we put to the Church of the first three centuries the questions asked
above, we find evidence of the same tensions that exist today: there was the difficulty of reconciling charismata – the gifts of the Spirit – with ecclesiastical office, and the problem of securing the responsibility of office-holders to the whole Christian community. Our earliest document outside the New Testament canon, the Epistle of Clement of Rome, is taken up with a dispute between the lay congregation of Corinth and its presbyters, whom they have refused to obey. In Cyprian of Carthage we find a sharp dichotomy between ordained ministers and laity and many of the hierocratic assumptions that are being questioned today. The growth of professional clericalism and the stifling of spiritual initiative among the congregations was probably one of the factors that led to the withdrawal of lay ascetics to the desert in the third century. Early Christian monasticism was a lay movement. Significantly St Anthony, patriarch of the Desert Fathers, advised his disciples to ‘flee women and bishops’. Evidently the tension between authority embodied in formal office and the spiritual aspirations of the Christian community is not a discovery of the late twentieth century. It seems to be something endemic in the earthly fabric of the Church. In examining the historical development of governance in the Church, I have
found it useful to adopt the first of several headings proposed by Yves Congar in his study Jalons pour une théologie du laicat: ‘election and provision to ecclesiastical offices’.2 The organization of offices and the way in which they are filled plays a vital part in determining the character of any community. In this case, the role of the ecclesial community in choosing its officers will be the central thread of our inquiry, especially the role of the laity. An appropriate rubric for the inquiry would be canon 328 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law which states that ‘bishops are freely designated by the Roman Pontiff’ (eos libere nominat Romanus Pontifex). It would be hard to find a better illustration than this of Fr Ombres’s observation that ‘codification tends to ignore history’ and that canon law is ‘applied ecclesiology’.3
