Note, this is written in response to a post on the Christian.com blogs by Dr Robbert Veen. Dr Veen's post may also be found on his blog.

Though Karl Barth must certainly be counted among the theological giants of history--quite possible the greatest Protestant theologian ever to live--I have only passing and indirect familiarity with his works. Certainly, he has had the respect of a number of Catholic theologians, notably Popes Pius XII and Benedict XVI. With that said, I have a few comments concerning the thought of Mr Barth, as conveyed by Rev Dr Robbert Veen. That is to say, I have somewhat of a critique of Dr Veen's latest post.

First, I should note that I agree with a good deal of what he says. His section "Heresy as a Contradiction" is quite good, and I find myself in agreement with much of it.

Although heresy is a shape of Christian faith and a possibility of interpretation that arises within the life of the Church, it is in truth to be considered a contradiction to faith. A contradiction to faith that claims to be the true faith, that tries to establish itself as the legitimate way of being Church....individual believers may be wrong or unclear about the criterion of face them deviates from the common confession or may entertain points of view that our difference, contradictory or downright hostile to the contents of the Gospel. But as long as they do not consider their points of view to be of such validity that others should follow them or if they do not try to ground a church on their opinions, they themselves would not be seen as heretics and neither would their doctrines be considered heretical.
This seems to me a good working definition for heresy, on a first glance. However, there is already a problem with this definition, to be found in the last two sentences. A person may hold a private interpretation of a given doctrine which is incorrect--that is, he may misunderstand it--without being an active (that is, a dissenting) heretic, it is true. But this is only valid so long as that interpretation 1) remains private and 2) by extension receives no correction, or is changed in response to said correction.

Consider, for example, a person whom reads the Bible to himself daily, and who comes to the conclusion that Jesus Christ was neither truly God nor truly man. Perhaps he is a sort of Gnostic, believing that Christ was an angelic or super-angelic being who took on the appearance of a man without actually being a man. Is this view heretical only because said person has shared it with somebody else?

I agree with Dr Veen that heresy implies a contradiction with the Faith, but not that this contradiction must be public for the doctrine to be considered heretical. If a heretic is a person who holds to a heretical doctrine, then the person in my example is a heretic. What the person in my example is not is a dissenter (and thus an active heretic), because he is not dissenting from anything.

With that said, why should I with Dr Veen regarding his terminology? Well, because mine differs from his, and I want to try and make this difference clear, but also because I think that he mistakenly (if unintentionally) implies that there is a difference between a false belief held truly and a true belief held falsely. This will become clear in a moment.

Taking his cue from the great Karl Barth, Dr Veen suggests that there are two major heresies in the world today. With the first of these two choices, I whole-heartedly agree. Modernity (or modernism and post-modernism) is certainly the most rampant heresy of our time. It is, in so many ways, the social zeitgeist of the West, and has contaminated secular, Jew, Protestant, and Catholic alike. It is fair to ask whether this counts as a single heresy or as many, but that is not a point with which I take issue.

It is his second declaration of heresy with which I take issue, for it is here that I believe he is in error. Of course, since Dr Veen (and Karl Barth before him) writes from a "Reformed" (that is, a Protestant) view, it is fair (though not really accurate) for him to say that Catholicism is a heresy. To be fair, I make the same charge against Protestantism--again, not quibbling over whether this constitutes one heresy or several--because for all that they have in common, Catholicism and Protestantism also hold two sets of mutually exclusive doctrines which are binding upon their members. Dr Veen's specific charges are that

Roman Catholicism is the second type of heresy that Karl Barth discusses. The point of origin for this heresy is not a universal outside church, but instead the particularity of the Church. Now it is argued that the meaning of the gospel can only be established and discerned from within the life of the Church. In a way revelation is now completely bound up with the institutions of the Church. As he explains: "the being of the Church, Jesus Christ, is no longer the sovereign Lord of its existence, but is totally bound up within the existence of the Church." Revelation becomes identified with the tradition of the Church.

I say charges, because there are several packed into this short paragraph. The first charge of heresy is in the particularity of the Church, the second that Christ is not Lord of the Church but rather is subordinate to her, existing only as she exists, and the third is that Revelation is synonymous only with the Church's Tradition.

This last charge can be taken as true (though not heretical, because the thing charged is literally true), at least, in the sense of public revelation. Since Scripture (that is, the Bible) may be regarded as the written Tradition of the Church, Dr Veen must argue one of two things: 1) there exists some things which are revealed but not included in Scripture, or 2) Scripture is not a part of the Tradition of the Church. This latter charge is obviously false, unless Dr Veen wishes to deny the Church the ability to determine her own Tradition!

Moreover, it was the Church who not only assembled the Bible as such, but also preserved it for 1500 years until the first Protestant reformers arrived on the scene. As to the first option, both Scripture and the Church agree that there are things publicly revealed and yet not written in Scripture, such as the oral teachings of Christ, and of His apostles. However, these are what is generally meant by "Sacred Tradition," which was also preserved by the Church. Thus, this first option leads to two more options: 1) accept that public Revelation really is contained within (though not necessarily synonymous with) the Church's Tradition, or 2) hold that there exists a hidden revelation, somewhat akin to gnostic belief.

The second charge is one which I'm not so familiar with, but it seems to me to be false. The Church understands herself to be the Mystical Body of Christ, and has Christ as her head. Thus, it is through the Church that Christ may most actively work in the world (short of the Second Coming). The Church was established by Christ, and so exists because He instituted her. This is about all I have to say about this point, for now, but if Dr Veen clarifies further in his next post, then I may have more to add.

The final charge is that the Church is that the Church's particularity is cause for her heresy. I note here that he singles out specifically the Catholic Church and not for example, the Orthodox Churches (though if true the charge would be equally applicable to them). I also note that he does so by effectively tailoring his definition for heresy so that it could include the Catholic Church and yet exclude the myriad Protestant communities. He did this by implying that a heresy involves holding as true a false doctrine, and at the same time not holding as false a true doctrine.

Since many of the Reformed Protestant doctrines consists primarily of a denial of Catholic doctrines, and not of a insistence upon any new doctrines, Dr Veen has effectively attempted to insulate the Protestant communities from the charge of heresy. What I mean is this: the Church makes a unique claim to be the true "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church" of which we speak in the Nicene creed. Others are members of this Church to the extent that they participate in her faith and in her life. Thus, for example, Catholics recognize as valid any baptism done "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," provided also that it is done with water. Those people who have received such baptisms have been baptized into the Church (that is, the Catholic Church), whether or not they acknowledge this fact.

However, the totality of public revelation is contained within the Church, that is, in her Traditions (written and oral). She therefore affirms or rejects the teachings of any theologian, preacher, pastor, individual, or community based on whether or not they agree with or contradict Scripture and Tradition. She alone is guided by the Holy Spirit to correctly interpret these--meaning that she alone can have certainty that her doctrines are without error--and so these twin pillars of revelation are the measuring sticks against which any doctrine or teaching must be compared. In addition, the Church--and she alone--is active in discerning true doctrine through false by her magisterium, through which body the Holy Spirit leads all men to the truth.

These are the unique claims made by the Catholic Church, and if they are right then she is right; if they are wrong, then these are heresy. But the claims made by each individual Protestant, not to mention each particular denomination, community, or other sect within Christianity must be judged heretical or orthodox by the same standards. To be fair, there are some Protestant sects founded on doctrines which may be judged heretical even by the criterion laid out by Dr Veen; as an example, take the "perspicuous Bible" doctrine upon which many Protestant communities insist. It is a patently false theory: otherwise, there would be no disagreement between these communities on matters of doctrine, and thus no need for 33,000 different denominations and sects--many with their own unique sets of doctrines--to be founded. It also represents a"deviation [from] traditional faith, that is grounded upon a long Christian principle of understanding and seeks to refute and replace traditional face and ventures to base a separate church on it," which is the shorter definition of heresy used by Dr Veen.

However, a great many other things could be spared from the "heresy" charge, not because they are doctrinally correct, but rather because they are a denial of a true doctrine rather than the assertion of a false one. As an example, I take Luther's Sola Scriptura. Obvious, if this doctrine is true then it does not fit any good definition of a heresy. But what if it's false? The Church condemns it as false, and so defines it as a heresy; however, by working from the implicit assumption in Dr Veen's definition of heresy, Sola Scriptura couldn't be defined as a heresy even if it was false. This is because Sola Scriptura is not so much the assertion of a new doctrine as the denial of an old one: namely, the denial that Tradition contains any public revelation. It is also a denial of the Church's power to discern true doctrine, and of her authority to teach the Faith. Since both Catholics and Protestants believe that the Bible contains the inspired word of God, the reliance on Scripture is held commonly between them; since not all Protestants also accept Tradition as containing a part of public revelation, this insistence on the authority of Scripture is heretical, according to Dr Veen's definitions; or, at the very least, the rejection of Tradition is not heretical.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, most Protestant doctrines involve a denial of certain Catholic doctrines. This means that the Protestants may share a great deal of commonly affirmed doctrines with the Church, and by Dr Veen's definition these doctrines are not heretical. It is only because the Church makes additional claims--many of which are shared with individual Protestant denominations--which are rejected by some number of Protestants, that she is to be considered the "odd Church out," the lone Christian denomination which will be considered heretics. In other words, the deck is stacked against the Church from the outset.

That having been said, Dr Veen has another task left to him, which he will presumably undertake in one or more of his future posts. That task is to define what the bare minimum is which must be held true to be "orthodox;" because, indeed, without doing this, he has not really presented a good case for orthodoxy at all, other than to allow that the least common denominator is the most orthodox. He charges that modernity is a heresy--I charge with which I am in complete agreement--but has only done so by arguing that modernity holds Christianity to be, as one colloquialism puts it, "one path amongst many."

At one point he argues that the definition of heresy is "Any deviation of traditional faith, that is grounded upon a long Christian principle of understanding and seeks to refute and replace traditional face and ventures to base a separate church on it." However, if this is the definition of heresy, then it is Protestantism, and not Catholicism, which fits the bill, for it was the Protestant reformers who deviated from and attempted to refute and overturn the traditional understanding of the Faith. For though the Church's understanding has grown and developed, it has not changed so as to refute totally Tradition, or the Scriptures.

Every doctrine and dogma held definitively as a part of the Faith by the Church can be found, at least in a germinal stage, in either Scripture of Tradition, and none of these doctrines can be absolutely refuted by either appeals to the Bible or to Tradition. A case may be made against some of these doctrines, it is true, but the case is never airtight, and a case may be made for these doctrines as well; similarly can a case be made, both from Scriptures and from Tradition, against a great many Protestant doctrines, including some which are held to be "absolutely binding" by those denominations which cling to them. The Church's understanding is rooted in a Tradition--written and oral--which has grown and unfolded as new questions are posed to her demanding more precise answers. It is a Tradition which stretches back to the time of Christ and the apostles--longer, even, since the Old Testament predates these--and has been preserved by a long and unbroken chain of the successors to the apostles. Against this longstanding Tradition, Protestantism appears not so much a reform as a rebellion, for it represents a clear break from any traditional understanding of the Church.

In closing, I should say that I am not writing this to attack Dr Veen, nor Protestants in general. I rather enjoyed this post which I am critiquing, and look forward to reading (and possibly responding to) the next one. I do in all honesty desire the reunion of all Christians into one Church. But this reunion must be into a Church which embraces a faith which is true, neither admitting falsehoods nor rejecting a part of the truth. I believe that Church to be the Catholic Church.
____