Vincent of Lerins and Ecumenical Ecclesiology for Traditional Churches

[The Liturgist]

I'm pleased that you wouldn't consider referring to SDA as non Christian because based on their statement of faith and my experience with them they are Christians.
As for the Catholic church it's history that is really a different topic, I think Luther was a real blessing and the reformation was needed. How the Catholic church perceives protestants is of little concern to most of us protestants. Catholic church history speaks for itself.

I wouldn’t dream of denying the Christianiy of a denomination that adheres to the Nicene Creed, like the SDA or the Roman Catholic Church.

By the way, all legitimate Christian churches are Catholic, however you define legitimate; the exact qualifications for Catholicity are called ecclesiology, and there are five common models: the Papal ecclesiology which Rome adheres to, in which if you are in communion with the Pope you are Catholic; the Apostolic Succession model the Orthodox adhere to in which Apostolic Succession, as understood by St. Cyprian of Carthage and not St. Augustine and therefore including only bishops who are not schismatic or heterodox, preside over the church and this communion of bishops who can trace their ordination to the Apostles without schismatic or heterodox bishops in the mix, is the Catholic church; the Local Church model in which each local church possesses the fullness of Catholicity, this being favored especially by Baptists but also by other Congregationalists, the Invisible Church model, in which the Catholic Church consists of all Christians at all times in all places, and what I would call the Apostolic Doctrinal Succession model, in which the Catholic Church consists of all churches that follow the doctrines of the Apostles and their legitimate successors.

Each model has limitations; on occasion the Papacy has been disputed, such as the Western Schism during the Avignon Papacy, where at one time there were three rival claimants to the Diocese of Rome, and the Bishop of Rome lived not in the crumbling, frequently raided and poorly defended city, which before the Renaissance was down to just one working aqueduct, and whose population had collapsed, for under the incompetent civil administration of the Popes before the late 15th century, when the Borgias, despite their faults, began to fix things, and the Roman Renaissance began; the damage caused by the sack of Rome in 601 and subsequent occasions was not repaired, and the city became unlivable, and was avoided even by pilgrims, who preferred to go to the Holy Land or to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, home to the relics of St. James the Great and to this day, the world’s largest thurible, which burns 2,000 Euros of charcoal and incense each time it is used and requires a crew of 20 Capuchin monks to operate. Once it broke loose and flew out the rose window at the Western End of the Cathedral, during the visit of an important princess, about 600 years ago. More recently (about a century ago) the support structure gave way and it fell to the floor, spilling charcoal and incense and making a huge mess, but in neither case was anyone hurt, and the mechanism has been rebuilt and reinforced, making for a splendid site.

The Orthodox model depends on the perspective of which bishops are heretical or schismatic, which is why the schism between the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian Church of the East persists, despite pastoral intercommunion being achieved by the EO and OO churches of Antioch and Alexandria.

The local church model works reasonably well, and like the first two models, is Eucharistic, which I like, but it again depends on a question of doctrine. So I regard the Baptist denial of baptism to infants as a serious error, but under some interpretations of this ecclesiology, there is either not a question of doctrine, or there is, in which case it becomes less about the local church and more about whoever has the correct doctrine. Whereas if we say any local church possesses the fullness of the Church Catholic, we are surely in error, because the Nicene Creed has us confess a believe in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and with this ecclesiology one could run into a situation where in reality there are many churches claiming to be Catholic whose doctrine is either admittedly not apostolic, in the case of some liberal denominations, or else is of debatable Catholicity.

The fourth model and fifth model suffer from being non-Eucharistic, so communion is not central to them, and the fourth model suffers from the problem of defining who is a Christian, and it also de-emphasizes the importance of membership in the Church, however the Church is conceived, for this model provides no definition of the Church beyond this invisible, nebulous entity, which leads back to the problem of what is a Christian; it is logically untenuous because there is no clear way of joining without resorting to more specific supplementary ecclesiologies. The fifth model likewise is vulnerable to disagreements on what the doctrine of the Apostles actually was.

I believe the second model was correct until the 5th century schisms resulted in three communions which were of the same faith, but not Eucharistically united, due primarily to church politics and debates over correct Christological terminology: the Chalcedonians, the Oriental Orthodox and the Assyrians. But there were villains and actual heretics as well, whose behavior caused the schism, notably Nestorius, who denied Mary was the Theotokos and claimed that the humanity and divinity in Christ were separate, and even implied that our Lord consisted of two persons, the Word of God and the man Jesus, in a union of will, in a vain attempt to defend the doctrine of divine immutability from an incompetent theological assumption, Eutyches, who taught that the humanity of Jesus Christ dissolved into His divinity like a drop into the ocean, and whose beliefs the Oriental Orthodox were falsely accused of following, and Ibas, who lied to the Council of Chalcedon in an attempt to rehabilitate Nestorius, which had the effect of causing the Oriental Orthodox to erroneously believe the Chalcedonians were Nestorian. So this nightmare did break the church into three equally legitimate parts, of which the Chalcedonian Communion of Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics had the most members and the Assyrian Church of the East had the largest territory, stretching from the Sassanian (Persian) Empire and Mesopotamia across Central Asia to India, Tibet, China and Mongolia.

There was an indirect benefit however, and that is the Chalcedonian churches members to this day identify as Romans; if you ask an Antiochian Eastern Orthodox Christian living in Syria or Lebanon what his ethnicity is, he will tell you he is “Rum”, Arabic for Roman. Indeed among Greek and Latin speaking Christians, the word Hellenic was synonymous with Paganism and the word Roman was synonymous with Christian. Consequently, the Persians were extremely suspicious of the church, and the schism of the Assyrians and Oriental Orthodox meant that the Church of the East, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Armenian Orthodox Church could operate in their lands without suspicion. Armenia was usually an ally of the Byzantine Empire, as was Ethiopia, but not always, so these countries became Oriental Orthodox, as did Edessa, Numibia and Caucasian Albania (Numibia is now called Sudan and Caucasian Albania, not to be confused with the country of Albania on the Adriatic, is now predominantly a part of Azerbaijan).

Then, the great schism in 1054 created a situation where the Eastern Orthodox Church was fully orthodox, like the other Eastern Christians, but the Roman Church had some serious problems, although there was still good happening it, like the formation of the Carthusian order, the Cistercian and Trappist orders, which rejected the decadence of some particularly wealthy Benedictine monasteries, who failed to strictly observe the Rule of St. Benedict, and the emergence of the Friars, mendicant traveling monks supported by monastic nuns and tertiary laity, who preached the Gospel, like the Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites and Servites, or in the case of the Trinitarian Order and the Mercedarian Order, raised funds to ransom Christians who had been abducted and taken hostage by Muslim pirates (which was extremely common; pirates would lurk off the coast of Italy and take hostage people traveling on the roads, which had become extremely dangerous as a result; in fact, every coastal road in Europe was at risk from pirates).

But by the 16th century, the situation was untenable. The twin disgraces of the burning of St. Jan Hus, who was one of the many Czech Christians who wanted the vernacular liturgy and communion in both kinds the Eastern Orthodox had provided restored to them, as it was lost when Austria conquered the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and who founded what today miraculously survives as the Moravian Church, and the massacre of 15,000 Waldensian men, women and children, who were members of the first legitimate Protestant church that was not Gnostic or heretical, and the corruption of Pope Alexander VI of the Borgias and his nemesis, the “Warrior Pope” Julius II, and then of Leo X, led Luther to initiate the Reformation in an attempt to reform the Western Church. Luther and Melancthon believed, erroneously, that they were adopting the same doctrines as the Eastern churches; they came close, but there were some important differences, and in the late 16th century a dialogue of Lutheran theologians and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople failed because neither side would yield on doctrinal differences. Since then Eastern Orthodox ecumenical relations, especially with the Anglicans, have been more fruitful, but a small minority of EOs believe ecumenism itself to be a heresy.

The result of this however is that we have a large number of churches that are legitimate, including the Roman Catholic Church, which fixed the corruption issue at the Council of Trent and which has dramatically improved in other areas, despite occasional setbacks like Vatican I, and the liturgical degradations caused by Popes Pius XII and Paul VI, and a sense of moving in the wrong direction on social issues under Pope Francis, compared to the excellent work in that area of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI; the traditional Anglican churches, especially those in the Global South, the Continuing Anglicans, the ACNA, and to a lesser extent, the Church of England, and the traditional Protestant churches like the LCMS and other traditional Lutherans, the PCA and other traditional Calvinist churches of Presbyterian polity, the conservative part of the United Methodist Church, the CCCC (traditional Congregationalists), the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and the Church of the East, and the Southern Baptists, as well as some promising new denominations like the Calvary Chapel and the Polish National Catholic Church.

So what I feel is needed is an ecumenical ecclesiology that recognizes Catholicity on the basis of the Nicene Creed and makes recovery of the Apostolic faith, ideally through a doctrinal synthesis between the different Western churches and their respective doctrines, as expressed in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, the Lutheran Formulas of Concord, the various Reformed and Baptist Confessions of Faith, and works like Calvin’s Institutes and Church Dogmatics by the brilliant neo-Orthodox scholar Karl Barth, with the ancient doctrines of the three Eastern churches, which have not substantially changed since the time of Ignatius the Great, except in terms of modes of expression (the sole notable change was the rejection of Chiliasm). And alas such a formula does not exist, with the possible exception of a statement which referred to doctrinal Orthodoxy by the late fourth century theologian St. Vincent of Lerins, who said “That which has been believed by all Christians, in all places, at all times, is truly Catholic.”

This we could modify to what I would call an Nicene Ecclesiology, which would be “Those Churches that confess the Nicene Creed and believe all doctrines, observe all sacraments, pray all prayers and anathematize all heresies believed in, observed, prayed and anathematized by all Nicene Christians in all times and places are truly Catholic.”

This would I think exclude both heretical and seriously heterodox churches, such as liberal modern churches which are teaching horrible blasphemies, like the idea God and Jesus Christ are female, churches which embrace Pelagianism, and so on, while including all Orthodox churches, all traditional liturgical Protestant churches, most evangelical and Reformed Protestants, and the Roman Catholic Church in its present form.