At some point people who do enough deplorable things might be reasonably considered deplorable themselves.
Now, Eddie is moving to absolve the bible and church fathers from any responsibility for the deplorable doctrines because they didn’t specifically support slavery based on race, just slavery in general.
I’m not sure that the two can be separated so easily. From the above CT article in my addendum’s list of “key reasons advanced by southern church leaders”:
Slavery is God’s means of protecting and providing for an inferior race (suffering the “curse of Ham” in Gen. 9:25 or even the punishment of Cain in Gen. 4:12).
Once again. Please take this outside this thread. I’m getting tired of repeating myself.
Clearly, @John_Harshman did precisely that. It is clear that the rules that govern claims about orthodoxy are quite slippery. Given the clouds of squid ink omitted in response to his straightforward questions, it appears that the rules only have significant utility in the practice of sophistry.
Why don’t the people here who introduced the Southern Baptist view on slavery start a brand-new topic, called “The Justification of Black Slavery in Pre-Civil-War American Writing”, or something like that? That would achieve the separation Joshua clearly wants, and then there would be no more chastisements to those who want to discuss the topic.
Jon Garvey and Daniel Ang have provided historical information to the contrary. I grant that orthodoxy, unorthodoxy, heresy, etc. may not be defined with Euclidean precision, but they are clear enough for most purposes. It’s quite clear that traditional Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran, Presbyterian, etc. believers held a large core of common beliefs about God and his attributes, the Trinity, etc. Thus everybody held that God was omnipotent, sovereign, knew all future events, etc. Nobody in the modern world is forced by torture or other means to be orthodox, or profess orthodoxy, but it’s disingenuous to claim that the main points of orthodox teaching weren’t widely held for the first 1700 years of the Church’s existence.
You had a perfectly good reason to drop the topic, and I backed you on it. Then you proceed to answer what you said you couldn’t answer instead of leaving it alone. Sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all.
Joshua asked me to stop talking about black slavery and Southern Baptists and the like, and stick to the topic of orthodoxy. I thought that was what I was doing. Do you want me to stop talking about orthodoxy as well?
Let me put the matter in a fresh way, and tell me whether this is “on topic” in your view:
John Harshman keeps pressing the same point. It’s as if he thinks the whole concept of orthodoxy is invalid because some people in some churches have said things that differ from the opinions of other people in other churches. But the existence of orthodoxy is compatible with some churches and some individuals who are Christian making statements that are not historically orthodox.
One could call the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Christadelphians or the Christian Science organization “churches”, but they aren’t historically orthodox. There’s no reason to assume that just because a statement comes from people in a church – even if it’s an official statement of a particular denomination – that it’s orthodox. “This comes from a church, therefore it must be orthodox Christian doctrine” is not a sound argument. So why does John Harshman seem to be making it?
One of the issues that keeps going through my mind is the momentum of history. Are certain beliefs orthodox simply because they became popular early in Christian history?
I will say that the first couple of generations after Jesus of Nazareth do hold importance within Christian orthodoxy. They had direct access and knowledge of the founders of Christianity, so there is a good reason why they hold a special place. However, does a theologian who lived 200 or 300 after Jesus of Nazareth hold more sway than a theologian from the present day? Is a theology orthodox simply because it came first? If the theologians from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD had the scientific knowledge we have now, what would they have said differently?
That’s a good question @T_aquaticus . I do think there is a hierarchy of authority, and a longer historical conversation and debate within which present day positions are framed.
For example, Paul’s statements in Romans 5 hold very high authority for most Christians, much higher than any interpretation of those statements. Humans generis is a papal statement (perhaps @PdotdQ can correct me) on the right interpretation of Romans 5, which certainly has some authority too.
But even Catholics would and should not put Humanis generis in higher authority than Paul, and in that sense it is subject to more debate and disagreement. There is even the possibility that the Catholic Church could change their position in how to interpret Romans 5. Obviously, Paul is not going to change the text of Romans 5 at this point. Likewise, protestants can certainly dispute whether Humanis generis is actually correct; maybe it isn’t.
None of this is meant to be an argument that the tradition is correct, can’t be questioned, or is always easy to discern.
Honestly, I see a lot of parallels to how we discuss and ascertain “the scientific consensus.” I wonder how deep the analogy goes, and in this case the analogy might go quite deep:
First of all, it is believed that there was ongoing instruction from Jesus through the first disciples to subsequent generations of disciples. So the theologians of the second, third and fourth centuries, who systematized Christian teaching, were in a chain of master-disciple relationships stretching back to the time of Jesus.
Second, when the doctrine was systematized, the people doing the systematizing weren’t a bunch of hillbillies who’d hardly ever read a book besides the King James Bible. They were people who had studied the earlier theological writings (e.g, Apostolic Fathers) and who had spent a lot of time reading Greek and Latin philosophical texts, and thought a great deal about the meanings of terms such as “person” and “substance” and “being” and “created” and “proceeded” and so on. So when they put together a systematic view of what the Church taught, they were employing a very advanced conceptual framework. The arguments and discussions were thus sophisticated and often very precise and technical. It was not an activity for people without much theoretical talent.
If we compare this with the way doctrine has been arrived at in some American congregations and sects and denominations, with most of the participants having very little training in how to read or interpret literature of any kind, very little training in philosophy or general reasoning, ignorant of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and mostly never having even heard the names of most of the Fathers, let alone having read them, it seems very likely that a more informed, intelligent, consistent, and solid result would be reached by the ancient Bishops in conference than by a group of zealous and well-meaning but intellectually unskilled local yokels.
The fact that Calvin and Luther, who had every political motivation to attack all things upheld by the Roman Church, did not reject the classical doctrinal formulations of the Fathers, but only the misuse (in their view) to which the Fathers had been put by Rome, indicates that the Fathers did a reasonably competent job.
Can orthodox theology ever change? Yes, but it should change slowly and organically, after long deliberation by the most learned, not by blanket rejection or revolution. I have nothing against modification of theological ideas if the people doing the modifying have mastered the tradition they want to modify. Otherwise, they will just be mucking about blindly, altering things which might seem to them merely decorative or optional but are in fact cornerstones. It’s not a job for dilettantes, but for scholars of a high order.
These remarks are general, but they would hold for specific sorts of theological change related to scientific discovery.
I totally agree. According to church history, Paul was in communication with the other apostles and was instrumental in constructing the theology of the first churches. It only makes sense that Paul’s authority holds a lot of weight.
That occurred to me as well.
I think we have all played the game of telephone. With that said, what authority do oral traditions hold in relation to canonical scriptures?
Couldn’t modern theologians do the same thing?
I can totally agree with that. It only makes sense to accept the authority of the founders of Christianity, Paul being the most obvious.
That’s a big question, with no simple answer. One thing we know for sure: the “New Testament” did not exist in its complete form until the end of the first century, and the earliest of the books are generally conceded not to have been written until 15-20 years after the death of Jesus. So the Church survived for the better part of a century without possessing what we call “The New Testament”. The oral tradition, passed down from Jesus and the disciples to the next two or three generations, would have been crucial in the formation of the character and doctrines of the early Church.
In the Eastern and Roman Catholic communions, Tradition is a very important component of the faith, equal or nearly equal in importance to Scripture. It is taken for granted that God revealed himself not only in Scripture, but in his continuing inspiration of his Church, through the writings of the Holy Fathers, the Creeds and Councils, etc. In contrast, Protestants nominally acknowledge the Bible alone as a reliable source of Christian doctrine. Even there, however, the great founders of Protestantism had immense respect for theological tradition and studied it in high volumes. If you compare medieval Catholic theology, the writings of Calvin, and the sort of theology produced by, say, Nazarenes, you will find that though the Nazarenes are nominally on the Bible-only side with Calvin, Calvin researches, argues, and thinks more in the style of a Catholic scholar. The best of the Reformers saw themselves as part of the historical church with its orthodox theology, not as freelance Bible interpreters emoting their way through the Bible in the “me and my conscience and my Bible” sort of way that is unfortunately so large a part of the American religious landscape.
Yes, they could, and to some extent still do, in the Roman and Eastern Churches. Less so in most Protestant churches, especially in their American branches. And even less so in the kind of churches that BioLogos leaders tend to frequent, where the focus (there are a few exceptions) is much more on Bible and much less on theological tradition.
I’m glad we can wrap this up on a note of agreement, though of course John Harshman might well choose to argue about who exactly are “the founders of Christianity.” From the point of view of historical orthodoxy, not only Jesus and Paul but the theologians who formulated the Creeds and early council decisions would also count as “founders of Christianity”; the doctrine of Trinity, for example, is central to Christianity in both East and West, and the fully formulated doctrine of Trinity is not directly from Jesus or Paul or the first disciples, but is the product of a few centuries of sophisticated debate and discussion within the Church. Once it was settled, the teaching about Jesus (as understood in Trinitarian doctrine) because just as important a part of core Christianity as the teaching of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels. I strongly suspect that at least one person here (I’m not referring to you, or even to Harshman) would like to completely get rid of “the teaching about Jesus” and limit Christianity to “the teaching of Jesus”, but whatever the religious or spiritual merits of that proposal might be, such a move would not be in line with orthodox Christian teaching, and would amount to a radical reshaping of the Christian religion as it has been historically known.
I would define that as the Apostles. We could expand a bit outside of that group to those who directly worked with the Apostles, but I wouldn’t go much farther than that. Beyond that point and we are playing a game of telephone.
I would think that the same debate could be had today, but people would need some really good arguments if they came to a different conclusion.
The apostles were the founders of Christianity in the sociological sense that they were the first community of Christians. They weren’t the founders of orthodox, systematic Christian theology. That came later.
Agreed. And “really good arguments” regarding anything to do with Christian theology (whether historical or systematic) have been noticeably absent at BioLogos.
You’re correct; Humani Generis is a papal encyclical (a format of publication issued by the Vatican), and while it comes from the highest teaching authority in the Catholic Church, is not infallible and can err. The bible (including Romans), on the other hand, is considered inerrant by the Catholic Church.
What examples of papal encyclicals are there that were eventually determined to be in error? In part, of course, not necessarily in total error.
I am not well versed with Church history enough to answer that question, but some theologians claimed that part of Humani Generis is supplanted by the later papal encyclical Veritatis Splendor. From wikipedia’s entry on the former:
One effect of Humani generis was “a freezing of systematic theology into a Thomist orthodoxy”, The “freeze” was later ameliorated by Pope John Paul II’s 1993 Veritatis splendor