If the early Church Fathers believed in the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, why didn’t they simply point to it? That’s the question posed by Lutheran minister, author, and professor Jordan B. Cooper in a recent YouTube video. Instead, Cooper argues, Holy Scripture was the Fathers’ pre-eminent and most common source of authority, thus proving they did not believe in the need for an ecclesial magisterial authority to resolve interpretive disputes over the meaning of Scripture.
But does Cooper’s argument hold up against the evidence?
In support of his position, Cooper cites several early Church Fathers, including Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Ambrose, though his foremost example is the Doctor of the Church Athanasius of Alexandria, that great fourth-century champion of the divinity of Christ and the author of such important works as On the Incarnation and Orations Against the Arians. “Read ‘Athanasius against the Arians,’” urges Cooper. “Go read Athanasius and ask the question, what is he using as his primary source of authority? . . . Is he appealing to the Magisterium, or is he appealing to Scripture as the highest of all authorities?”
Regardless of the particulars of St. Athanasius, Cooper’s argument is patently illogical. That a Christian writer appeals to Scripture as the highest authority does not preclude the possibility that that same Christian writer also recognizes other divinely instituted authorities as binding on the conscience. Indeed, read St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, or even the Catechism of the Catholic Church. All cite Holy Scripture more than any other source. And all three quite demonstrably also recognize the divinely originative authority of Holy Tradition and the Magisterium. As we read in Dei Verbum,
Sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God’s most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others, and that all together and each in its own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit contribute effectively to the salvation of souls.
Now let’s get specific on Athanasius. It’s true: his theological corpus is thoroughly biblical in its approach to the most contentious theological debates of the day. Yet the good bishop also appreciates the authority manifested in Tradition and in the Magisterium. In his Festal Letters, we read, “Again we write, again keeping to the apostolic traditions, we remind each other when we come together for prayer; and keeping the feast in common . . .” In the same document, he refers to “the foundations of the Faith” as having “come down to you from apostolic tradition.”
Athanasius served as the bishop of Alexandria’s secretary at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Twenty-five years later, Athanasius in his Letter Concerning the Decrees of the Council of Nicaea, defended the council as having the authority of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium. He writes, “You see, we are proving that this same opinion has been handed down from father to father. . . . For the Faith which the council confessed in writing is the Faith of the Catholic Church. In order to establish this, the blessed fathers wrote as they did, while condemning the Arian heresy.” Several years after that, in The Monk’s History of Arian Impiety, Athanasius writes, “There have been many councils in the past, and many decrees made by the Church.”
Finally, in Athanasius’s Four Letters to Serapion of Thmuis, we read,
Let us note that the very tradition, teaching, and faith of the Catholic Church from the beginning, which the Lord gave, was preached by the apostles, and was preserved by the Fathers. On this was the Church founded; and if anyone departs from this, he neither is nor any longer ought to be called a Christian.
So much for Cooper’s claim that “the Church Fathers were definitely not arguing that we need all these extra-biblical sources of authority.” Yes, Athanasius had a high opinion of Scripture. But the great defender of the Incarnation also recognized the authority of Tradition and the apostolically derived authority of the Church, and that both must inform our reading of the Bible.
There is another aspect to Cooper’s argument worthy of addressing. He asks, “If it’s really so obscure, wouldn’t the Fathers just point to the Magisterium?” There are multiple problems here. The first is that it is historically anachronistic, because it presumes that for the Catholic position to be legitimate, the Magisterium as we know it today must have existed in an identical fashion in the fourth century of Athanasius and other early Church Fathers. Such a position presumes that the Church as a living organism does not develop over time.
Yet the very fact that it took until 325 to have a Council of Nicaea is evidence that the institutional structure of the Church developed. Nicaea had canons and proclaimed a doctrinal creed. We know that Athanasius (and others) believed that those canons and that creed were binding on the faithful.
Cooper seems to think that for the Magisterium to be true, we must see early Christian writers regularly appealing to the bishop of Rome to resolve theological disagreements. That speaks more to how Cooper thinks the Magisterium must work than to how God might permit it to work in human history, especially a history in which twenty-three of the bishops of Rome were martyred prior to Nicaea. Obviously, the Roman See of the first four centuries had concerns other than resolving doctrinal disputes.
Just as Christ did not give us a Nicene explanation for the Incarnation or a Chalcedonian explanation for the Trinity as decreed by those councils—and that Christians now take for granted—it’s within his right as God to not establish from whole cloth a fully formed magisterial ecclesial structure. He may, in his divine providence, allow that institution’s self-understanding to develop over time as it deals with other matters, such as, say, surviving.
Nevertheless, there are manifold examples supporting the pre-eminent authority of the bishop of Rome in the earliest centuries of the Church. Just read the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, St. Ignatius of Antioch’s Epistle to the Romans, or the writings of St. Dionysius of Corinth, St. Irenaeus, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome, among other Christian thinkers in the early centuries.
Secondly, Cooper misinterprets the Catholic position on biblical interpretation. The position is not, and has never been, that there is no point in seeking to persuade other self-identifying Christians with arguments derived from Scripture. Rather, the Catholic position is that debates among Christians cannot be definitively resolved without recourse to an extrabiblical ecclesial authority. That is so because Scripture is not so clear that any individual Christian, even one humbly and prayerfully approaching the Bible, is competent to divine its meaning on all essential Christian doctrines.
That said, in any debate of good will, the first step is to identify common ground and seek to persuade our interlocutor based on shared premises. Thus, it is entirely fitting for Catholics to seek to persuade other Christians by appealing to Scripture, albeit with the recognition that for a variety of reasons, it may not be sufficient, and that one may need to identify and address premises that are not shared, such as the divergence between Catholics and Protestants on the relative clarity of Scripture.
Athanasius sought to persuade other Christians of his position on the Incarnation by appealing to Scripture. Yet he (and plenty of other early Church Fathers) also cited Tradition and the Magisterium to support their doctrinal positions. That the early Church Fathers did not exclusively or de facto appeal to the bishop of Rome or the Church’s nascent conception of magisterial ecclesial authority has everything to do with historical realities—and how God deigns to work through finite, historically conditioned human institutions—and not with some alleged incoherence in Catholicism.