Fr. Matthew Lamb, professor of theology and the chair of the Theology Department at Ave Maria University, offers some excellent observations in a recent comment on this blog:
In any discussion between Catholics and Protestants on authority, it is important to realize that the Catholic understanding of authority is very different from modern approaches. There is a stark contrast between authority and authoritarianism.
The difference between authority and authoritarianism is similar to the difference between love and rape. Indeed, authoritarianism not only contradicts authority, it seeks to destroy genuine authority. To equate authoritarianism with authority would be as unintelligent and irresponsible as equating rape with love. Can the traditions of secularist liberalism provide a clear and compelling differentiation of authority and authoritarianism?
My argument will be that modern liberal cultures are in a bind insofar as they shifted the basic framework for understanding authority from a context in which wisdom and virtue provided the norms for legitimate authority to a context in which dominative power became normative and legitimacy was defined only extrinsically. Such a shift has hampered moderns from being able to discern the difference between a power that is legitimate because it is exercised wisely and virtuously, and the illegitimate use of power springing from intellectual and/or moral vice. It is not that modern and postmodern cultures do not have criteria for legitimacy; it is that those criteria are always extrinsic and purely procedural, as Michael Sandel has illustrated in his Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy.
Authoritarianism is usually defined in modern dictionaries and encyclopedias as “absolute or blind obedience to authority as opposed to individual freedom”. Thus an “authoritarian political system” is opposed to “a democratic political system.” So it would appear as if the cure for authoritarianism is democracy. Yet the histories of democracies, ancient and contemporary, are replete with injustices stemming from blind bias and majority oppression of minorities. The question of authority in democracy is a fundamental and difficult one, as is clear in such works as Pierre Manent’s Modern Liberty and Its Discontents and in works that see authority as management procedural techniques in, e.g., Christopher McMahon, Authority and Democracy: A General Theory of Government and Management.
Classical philosophy provided norms for judging those in authority by appealing to the intellectual virtues of wisdom and prudence. Socrates warns Alcibiades: “You have not therefore to obtain power or authority for yourself to do anything you like, nor has the state for itself; you must both get justice and wisdom.” Discussing how ignorance and license brings on various misfortunes, Socrates continues: “And in like manner, in a state, and wherever there is any power and authority which is wanting in virtue, will not misfortune, in like manner, ensue?” In Aristotle’s ethics and politics one finds as well reflections on how laws and constitutions are inadequate if political authority is severed from the wisdom and justice of intellectual and moral excellence.
This concern for normative judgments to guide those in authority was heightened in Judaism and Christianity. The normative judgments are to be guided, not only by human wisdom, prudence, and virtue, but also by the Divine judgment. God is no respecter of the powerful and mighty. Indeed, God enters into covenant with an enslaved and impoverished people. The covenant with Israel reveals how only the Lord can fully redeem the suffering and injustice of the chosen people. The New Covenant in Christ Jesus reveals how God’s covenant and redemption is open to all peoples through the continuing mission of the Son and Spirit in the apostolic mission of the church.
Fr. James Burtchaell’s From Synagogue to Church: Public Services and Offices in the Earliest Christian Communities indicates the shift in patterns of ecclesial authority that came in with Luther and is so prevalent in the modern period. It is this shift that has to be factored into any discussion of authority between Catholics and Protestants. One has to be careful about using modern categories such as “referee”, or “representative bodies” or “heads of state” in such discussions. The Catholic teaching on authority is bound up with the authority of Jesus Christ who sent his apostles and their successors to continue His visible and invisible mission from the Father. The revealed authority of the apostles and their successors in the Church is not one of “blind submission” but a supernatural authority that perfects and redeems genuine human authority as in the service of wisdom, virtue, and holiness. There are many resources in the Greek, Latin, and monastic theologians on the discernment and judgment required to exercise authority properly. Genuine authority is not authoritarian. It seeks to foster, not blind submission to arbitrary commands, but is a diakonia or service to foster moral, intellectual, and theological excellence or virtue in the faithful.
A key question for Catholics and Protestants will be to explore the resources of genuine apostolic and human authority and how reform of any arbitrary use of authority in the Church is overcome without severing the unity of the apostolic mission of the Church and without rejecting the Petrine ministry of the successors of Peter. Of course the revealed resource for this discernment is the inspired examples of St. Paul and St. Peter
Fr. Lamb's remarks were made in response to comments made by Fr. Robert Barron about Protestantism, the papacy, and authority. Go to the original post to join the conversation.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Links/Articles:
• Church Authority and the Petrine Element | Hans Urs von Balthasar
• Authority and Dissent in the Catholic
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• Vatican II and the Ecclesiology of Joseph Ratzinger |
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• Motherhood of the Entire Church | Henri de Lubac, S.J.
• On the Papacy, John Paul II, and the Nature of the Church |
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• Peter and Succession |
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• "Primacy in Love": The Chair Altar of Saint Peter's in Rome | Joseph
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• Understanding The Hierarchy of Truths | Douglas Bushman
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