The Protestant's Dilemma (4 page)

They also accept the second ecumenical council, held in Constantinople in the year 381, which dogmatically affirmed the truth of the Holy Spirit’s divinity, condemning the heresy of Macedonius. The second half of the Creed was drawn up at this council, and the vast majority of Protestants proudly recite it as a profession of their most fundamental beliefs.

The First Council of Ephesus in the year 431 was the third ecumenical council, which condemned Nestorius’s belief that Mary was the mother only of Christ’s human nature. Such a notion would have mortally wounded the true theology of the Incarnation, making it impossible to say that “God died on the cross for our sins.” The fourth ecumenical council occurred in Chalcedon in the year 451, rejecting monophysitism—the belief that Christ had only one nature—and affirming that Jesus had two natures in one person.

These councils establish the basis for Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy that is followed by almost all Protestants. In fact, Protestants believe that anyone who rejects these truths puts himself outside of Christianity (a major reason why they consider Mormons non-Christians). Thus Protestants desire to affirm these councils as authoritative. Yet the council in Ephesus also taught that Mary was the mother of God, a title that makes most Protestants uneasy. We’ll tackle that issue in a later chapter, but the material point here is that these councils both defined orthodoxy and, in the eyes of Protestants, somehow also contained erroneous or questionable decrees.

More problems remain for Protestants who seek to accept the first four councils while rejecting others. The fifth ecumenical council, Constantinople II, declared that Mary remained a virgin her whole life, a belief strenuously rejected by most Protestants. Yet the next one, held in the seventh century, condemned the monothelite belief that Christ had only one will. It decreed that Christ had two wills—one divine and one human—a truth that Protestants believe as another essential component to Christological orthodoxy.

Answering the Protestant Objections

Does it make sense, as Protestants argue, that ecumenical councils are authoritative only insofar as they accurately represent scriptural truth? When we look at the Council of Jerusalem, we see that the Church settled the matter in question by reference to the
apostles’ God-given authority within the Church
and not by reliance on the Old Testament (which was the only “Scripture” in existence at the time, with only a few epistles having been written to date and a settled canon still many years away
¹⁰
). Indeed, the Old Testament was at best unclear on the matter, both requiring circumcision
¹¹
and foreshadowing Gentile salvation.
¹²
So the claim that councils are authoritative only when they agree with Scripture—by which the Reformers meant both Old and New Testaments—makes little sense when applied to this prototypical council.

But there’s a second problem with this theory. Who has the authority to accurately interpret the scriptures (and therefore rule whether a council affirms or contradicts their truths)? Luther believed that
he
did. Other Protestants claimed that Luther erred and that
they
had the correct key to Scripture’s meaning. The problem of varying Protestant interpretations of biblical truth persists to this day. Without a standard for interpreting Scripture, then, according to this test it’s impossible to say with certainty whether a given council teaches authoritatively.

What about the five-patriarch theory (also known as the “pentarchy”): that the presence of the major patriarchs was the necessary criterion for an ecumenical council? The Emperor Justinian I favored this model of the governance of Christendom, where the five patriarchs of the major sees would all belong to one empire. In the late 600s, the council of Trullo (which has never been accepted as authoritative by the Catholic Church) attempted to lend credence to the pentarchy theory by ranking the five patriarchal sees.

But using this theory as a criterion for recognizing the first ecumenical councils is problematic. For starters, there was no patriarch of Constantinople in the year 325 during the first Nicene council, so the theory is disproven from the outset. Further, the ecumenical council in Ephesus in the year 431 condemned Nestorius, who
was
the patriarch of Constantinople. Similarly, the ecumenical council in Chalcedon in the year 451 condemned Dioscorus, the patriarch of Alexandria, as a heretic. But Dioscorus rejected the excommunication and is recognized by the Coptic Church as a pope. When patriarchs break in schism, the pentarchy theory does not provide a rule for knowing which side is orthodox and which is schismatic.

In truth, this theory was a historical convenience invented by the Byzantine emperor in the hopes of keeping order in his empire. Modern Protestants have taken up the theory as an objective way of identifying authoritative councils; but, as we have seen, it simply doesn’t work.

The Catholic Criterion for an Ecumenical Council

If none of the Protestant theories makes sense, what makes a council ecumenical and thus authoritative? Quite simply: the pope.

The bishop of Rome is the successor of Peter, to whom Christ gave the “keys to the kingdom of heaven” as well as the authority to bind and loose (cf. Matt. 16:18–19). Accordingly, during these early councils we find the other patriarchs showing great deference to the pope. For instance, leading up to the Council of Chalcedon in 451—which established Christ as both fully God and fully human—Flavian, the patriarch of Constantinople, wrote the pope about the extremity of the current religious-political conflict and called for his intervention:

When I began to appeal to the throne of the Apostolic See of Peter, the Prince of the apostles, and to the whole sacred synod, which is obedient to Your Holiness, at once a crowd of soldiers surrounded me and barred my way when I wished to take refuge at the holy altar. . . . Therefore, I beseech Your Holiness not to permit these things to be treated with indifference . . . but to rise up first on behalf of the cause of our orthodox Faith, now destroyed by unlawful acts. . . . Further to issue an authoritative instruction . . . so that a like faith may everywhere be preached by the assembly of a united synod of fathers, both Eastern and Western. Thus the laws of the fathers may prevail and all that has been done amiss be rendered null and void. Bring healing to this ghastly wound.
¹³

The acts of the council of Chalcedon likewise speak forcefully for Pope Leo’s primacy and authority:

Wherefore the most holy and blessed Leo, archbishop of the great and elder Rome, through us, and through this present most holy synod together with the thrice-blessed and all-glorious Peter the Apostle, who is the Rock and foundation of the Catholic Church, and the foundation of the orthodox faith, hath stripped him [Dioscorus, Patriarch of Alexandria] of his episcopate, and hath alienated from him all hieratic worthiness.
¹⁴

The bishop of Rome is, by God’s grace, the final guarantor of orthodoxy. Even when the bishops of the other major sees fell into heresy (for example, during the Arian crisis in the third and fourth centuries), the pope did not. The only criterion for a council to be considered ecumenical that makes historical sense is the approval of the pope. Even in the council of Jerusalem in the book of Acts, we see that Peter is the first to speak and declare the orthodox belief, a foreshadowing of the role of the bishops of Rome in later councils.

The Catholic Church is the only Christian Church or community that still holds ecumenical councils today. No other group dares to claim that it has held one, which makes sense when you realize that no other group is led by the bishop of Rome.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

Protestants claim they unquestioningly accept the authority of the first four ecumenical councils, which declared the foundational truths of Christianity. Yet they reject certain decrees even of those councils and accept certain decrees from
later
councils while rejecting others. And they do not have a rule for determining why the first four are ecumenical but later ones are not. Assuming the Catholic Church is wrong about what makes a council ecumenical, why did God design his Church such that, for centuries, these councils were the primary way in which vitally important matters of the Faith were discerned and authoritatively proclaimed, but then remove his authority from them such that they could no longer be trustworthy?

4: THE FOUR MARKS OF THE CHURCH

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

The meaning of the four marks of the Church fundamentally changed during the Reformation.

Based upon the promises made by Christ, the four marks
¹⁵
of the Church are encapsulated in the fourth-century Nicene Creed: “We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” The Protestant Reformers found themselves in the awkward position of having to affirm this ancient creed—understood as the measure of Christian ecclesiology—while still maintaining their new conception of the Church. The only way Protestantism can reconcile the two is to assert that the four marks no longer mean what they used to.

Protestantism’s Interpretation of the Four Marks

Protestants understand the Church to be “one” only in the sense that the collections of Christians that make up the invisible Church all form one group. Since the Holy Spirit dwells within every Christian, together they form the one group of true believers. In this way, the Church is not a unified, visible body but an invisible collection of disconnected parts (though Protestants do look ahead to a future unification of the body upon Christ’s return).

Regarding the second mark—that the Church is holy—traditional Protestant doctrine states that holiness comes from Christ’s
imputing
his righteousness to the Christian. Thus the Father legally declares a Christian to be holy on behalf of Christ’s righteousness, but he is not actually made holy. This Protestant understanding of holiness for the individual Christian is then applied to the Church in general: through Christ, the Church is
declared
holy because his righteousness is imputed to it collectively.

Martin Luther reveals the Protestant conception of the first two marks when discussing his interpretation of the parallel passage found in the Apostles’ Creed:

If these words had been used in the Creed: “I believe that there is a holy Christian people,” it would have been easy to avoid all the misery that has come in with this blind, obscure word “church”; for the term “Christian, holy people” would have brought along with it, clearly and powerfully, both understanding and the judgment on the question “What is and what is not a church?” One who heard the words “Christian, holy people” would have been able to decide off-hand, “The pope is not a people, still less a holy Christian people.” So, too, the bishops, priests, and monks are not a holy Christian people, for they do not believe in Christ, do not lead holy lives, and are the devil’s wicked, shameful people.
¹⁶

Luther shows his disdain for the traditional conception of the Church and offers his own opinion as preferable: The Church is merely the people who believe in Jesus, and so they are holy because of their faith.

At first blush, it would seem that affirming that the Church is “catholic” would be exceedingly difficult for Protestants. But actually this mark is explained easily under the Protestant paradigm. Since, they say, the root meaning of
catholic
is “universal,” and since they believe that Christ’s Church is universal in scope—open to every person in the world—they can happily proclaim that they believe the Church is catholic with a lowercase “c.”

For the fourth mark, many Protestant communities claim to be apostolic in that they teach the same truth that God gave to the apostles in the first century. Because (they say) their community’s interpretation of the Bible is the same as the apostles’, their church is “apostolic.”

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

The four marks of the Church have the same meaning today as they did when the early Christians formulated the Creed.

The first mark, that the Church is
one
, means that it is visibly unified and professes the same faith. Your body is a visible unity, more than just a mere collection of parts stuck together, and so is Christ’s. St. Paul exhorts us to this unity in his letter to the Ephesians: