I continue to read through the quasi-creedal document, with attached affirmations and denials, issued by R. C. Sproul’s personal publishing brand Ligonier, and proposed for global rollout with a clear view to adoption as “a common confession around which believers from different churches can rally for mission together,” that is, “not a replacement for the church’s historic creeds and confessions but a supplement that articulates their collective teaching.” With that disclaimer, it is hard to argue that the statement, which is generally quite orthodox when it is making affirmations about Christology proper, is wrongheaded; I would just argue that it is manifestly inferior to the Nicene Creed, and therefore likely to dilute rather than clarify the doctrine of Christ where it is adopted.
If that were my only concern, I would just say, “Bad idea–why not reaffirm the Nicene Creed with a nice commentary?” The statement, however, does not limit itself to Christology; it swerves out of its way to press incoherent and, in at least one case, frankly heretical negations and disjunctions into its teaching, ramming Presbyterian soteriology into the Christology shared by all the faithful. In so doing, this statement risks denying the Gospel itself, and in any case teaches a spiritually harmful view of Jesus’ work that is a real danger to souls. There are good reasons that ecumenical councils have condemned some of these tenets that a few Protestants insist on making the sine qua non of their teaching, even though almost all practical Christians have long since realized that certain features of God’s work overflow the bounds of such calculations.
It is important to notice that there is no reason one needs to see this as an immediate either/or, because it is definitely possible to be an American conservative evangelical Protestant who is quite faithful and doctrinally well-formed, and still avoid the extremes into which this statement swerves in its effort to avoid agreeing with the Church to whom Jesus entrusted the Gospel, a Church whose dissenters have yet joined in affirming the Nicene Creed and a common Baptism in the Triune Name. We recognize the difference between Christian communities and the likes of the Latter Day Saints or Jehovah’s Witnesses precisely in this, that they have pursued various heresies apart from the Nicene faith, the faith of Christ and the Apostles, of the New Testament and the Fathers.
When we understand ourselves in this connectedness–this solidarity which mourns our separation and seeks to discover the unity of the faith in the Scriptures and the confession of all the faithful, including especially those milestones laid down by the Apostles and the fathers of the early church, who marked the boundaries where others had strayed–we are in a good position to understand our differences and remain faithful to Christ. When anyone attempts to make common cause with heretics in order to avoid any risk of admitting solidarity with the Church herself, that is, with the Catholic faith, however, there is almost no boundary to the evils that can result. Over the years, many have found themselves piling heresy on heresy in the effort to defeat the continuity of the faith, but their efforts never survive a quick survey of the history of Christian doctrine–or a test of spiritual fruit.
A result of Ligonier’s effort to use the affirmations and denials to press their Christology into the service of an arch Protestantism–both in the sense of treating solidarity with the Catholic faith as something to be avoided, even at cost of incoherence, and in the sense of insisting that one specific element of personal salvation is not only necessary, but necessarily demands the negation of all other elements–is that the affirmations and denials are often quite mismatched, and that Presbyterian particularities and anti-Catholic assertions sometimes eclipse any connected account of Christology. Article 18 is a good example of this lack of connection and perspective:
It would be facile to discuss how particularly Presbyterian the expression “session” is, and therefore how oddly it fits an effort to make common cause among various confessional groups. Nonetheless, as is so often the case, there is little enough to disagree with in the affirmation; shift the nuances of the vocabulary a bit, and this could be a Catholic or a Baptist statement. The denials, however, are once again a swerve into anti-Catholicism, and in this case are best characterized as just “oddly defensive.”
Why, I ask, should it be thought necessary to mention this at all in a statement on Christology? After all, it does not follow directly from solidarity with the Catholic faith in its robust defense and development of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the key elements of Christology proper, that one should recognize or not the authority of the Bishop of Rome, the servus servorum dei. Surely, many of us do recognize in the Biblical teaching of Apostolic authority and succession, and of the authority of Sacred Tradition, and of the primacy of Peter among the Apostolic College, the foundation on which the Nicene Creed and other outgrowths of the Spirit’s work in the Church are built. But those who have been taught to regard highly certain elements of that foundation, and certain rooms in that building, and as it were forbidden by their teachers to enter others, are not therefore automatically excluded from the whole! But this is the divisive and defensive nature of the Ligonier statement: Having affirmed the Catholic faith with regard to Christ, it then swerves into an unnecessary and useless effort to deny the solidarity with the Church that its authors have just affirmed.
In so doing, the authors repeat the error in the serpent’s dialogue with Eve, in which the command not to eat the fruit of one tree passes through the misleading question “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” and comes out garbled as “but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it.’” Posed a misleading question by the confusions and deceptions still lively from the past, these authors overstate their effort to correct it, leading to fresh errors and indicating vulnerability to deception.
It’s no part of my current project to defend at length the idea that the Bishop of Rome is the “vicar of Christ,” but suffice to say that such a role can only be conceived by those who believe that Jesus ordained the Apostles, and Peter first among them, to make such decisions. If you understand this denial to mean that the Bishop of Rome cannot be what the Church has understood him to be since St. Peter’s last days in that city, then you prove too much–for the Apostles themselves, through whom the New Testament was given and among whom the Church was born, clearly spoke in the Lord’s name and claimed that their tradition was the tradition of Christ, and that deviation from that tradition was self-destructive.
Now, if you say, “I agree that there is nothing about the Person of Christ that makes it necessary to reject Apostolic Succession or Petrine Primacy, only I don’t happen to believe those teachings reflect His actions,” then I understand–and you should ask yourself, why is this in a Christology statement? It is, of course, defensive; it is a way of avoiding the admission that to confess orthodox Christology is to express solidarity with the Catholic faith.
The same, then, goes for Article 21, which inserts a denial (in confused language) of the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist into an affirmation of Jesus’ role as Priest and Victim in the “once for all” sacrifice at Calvary, and His continuing priesthood:
It is hard to know what to do with this other than to point out the paucity and sterility of such a view, the needless reduction beneath what Scripture and Tradition alike teach us is the wholeness and fulness and richness of Christ’s work, by comparison to the Catholic faith–as, for example, expressed at Trent:
God, the Father of mercies, so ordaining, that another priest should rise, according to the order of Melchisedech, our Lord Jesus Christ, who might consummate, and lead to what is perfect, as many as were to be sanctified. He, therefore, our God and Lord, though He was about to offer Himself once on the altar of the cross unto God the Father, by means of his death, there to operate an eternal redemption; nevertheless, because that His priesthood was not to be extinguished by His death, in the last supper, on the night in which He was betrayed,–that He might leave, to His own beloved Spouse the Church, a visible sacrifice, such as the nature of man requires, whereby that bloody sacrifice, once to be accomplished on the cross, might be represented, and the memory thereof remain even unto the end of the world, and its salutary virtue be applied to the remission of those sins which we daily commit,–declaring Himself constituted a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchisedech, He offered up to God the Father His own body and blood under the species of bread and wine; and, under the symbols of those same things, He delivered (His own body and blood) to be received by His apostles, whom He then constituted priests of the New Testament; and by those words, Do this in commemoration of me, He commanded them and their successors in the priesthood, to offer (them); even as the Catholic Church has always understood and taught.
(source: CT022)
Surely nothing must detract from the “once for all” nature of Christ’s sacrifice, but it is a hobbled understanding that avoids connecting so many Biblical dots (see here for more discussion), that makes so little of the unbroken tradition from the earliest days of the Church that understands the Eucharist as a direct and actual participation in that one sacrifice, a participation made possible by Christ’s continuing to be our High Priest and the Lamb of God, “slain from the foundation of the world,” who offers Body and Blood to us as food, as (unbloody) partaking by grace in the sacrificial meal shared by priest and penitent, so that for us this gift makes present here and now the fact–a fact more than empirically verified, not less–of our participation in that one bloody Sacrifice on Calvary. In fact, our participation becomes so real that we can be called on to be partakers in the very sufferings of Christ, to be “living sacrifices” just as the one who “died for all” is alive and lives as the Lamb slain until the last “Consummatum est” is spoken.
So it is more than ever, I think, important that we adhere to our common Nicene heritage and to whatever we have received from Sacred Scripture and the Tradition within which is has been delivered to us, always seeking more and better light from our Father. And it is abundantly clear to me that Sproul et al are a hindrance, at this point, in our efforts to do so. Let us do better than this.