I would not bother responding to valiant, he is an eccentric: Valiant world has nothing to do with the real one! His idea that rome broke out of the Eastern Church . HOW RIDICULOUS.
So you think the Encyclopaedia Britannica is ridiculous, to say nothing of Abbe Guette? It figures. Everyone is wrong but you LOL
The Papacy was not organized until the second half of the 8th century. It broke away from the Eastern Church under Pippin III (in the Ency. Brit., 13th Ed., vol. 21, page 636; and see also The Papacy, by Abbe Guette."
Even the east - the council of constantinople, which is certainly East of Rome (one of the councils that formalised the nicene creed for example) acknowledged in Canon 3
Disaffected easterns who don't like authority have tried to pick nits to say that "honour" is not the same as "authority" And in Valiant you have just the same.
True as you have seen LOL
IT IS NOT THE SAME. The Eastern church never genuinely accepted the authority of the Pope.
## But who else screamed heresy about the self declaration of authority by the popes of that time
the Celtic church? The Russian church? The Eastern Orthodox church? The other Orthodox churches? Need I go on?
- they were already pointing at "keys of the kingdom"
A bit late after 700 AD. The early fathers did not see Rome as having the keys.
For the Son of thunder, the beloved of Christ, the pillar of the Churches throughout the world, who holds the keys of heaven...(Philip Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), Volume XIV, Saint Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homily 1.1, p. 1).
Inconvenient these early fathers, aren't they?
Try to find the mass of ECF that speak out against that, and the silence is DEAFENING!.
well it would be. THEY DID NOT KNOW ABOUT ANY PAPACY. It did not exist in their time. They were not prophets.
Lets see what a Roman Catholic historian says about it shall we?
Dollinger taught Church history as a Roman Catholic for 47 years in the 19th century and was one of the greatest and most influential historians in the Church of his day. He sums up the Eastern and Western understanding of Matthew 16 in the patristic period:In the first three centuries, St. Irenaeus is the only writer who connects the superiority of the Roman Church with doctrine; but he places this superiority, rightly understood, only in its antiquity, its double apostolical origin, and in the circumstance of the pure tradition being guarded and maintained there through the constant concourse of the faithful from all countries. Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, know nothing of special Papal prerogative, or of any higher or supreme right of deciding in matter of doctrine. In the writings of the Greek doctors, Eusebius, St. Athanasius, St. Basil the Great, the two Gregories, and St. Epiphanius, there is not one word of any prerogatives of the Roman bishop. The most copious of the Greek Fathers, St. Chrysostom, is wholly silent on the subject, and so are the two Cyrils; equally silent are the Latins, Hilary, Pacian, Zeno, Lucifer, Sulpicius, and St. Ambrose.
St. Augustine has written more on the Church, its unity and authority, than all the other Fathers put together. Yet, from all his numerous works, filling ten folios, only one sentence, in one letter, can be quoted, where he says that the principality of the Apostolic Chair has always been in Rome—which could, of course, be said then with equal truth of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. Any reader of his Pastoral Letter to the separated Donatists on the Unity of the Church, must find it inexplicable...that in these seventy–five chapters there is not a single word on the necessity of communion with Rome as the centre of unity. He urges all sorts of arguments to show that the Donatists are bound to return to the Church, but of the Papal Chair, as one of them, he says not a word.
We have a copious literature on the Christian sects and heresies of the first six centuries—Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Epiphanius, Philastrius, St. Augustine, and, later, Leontius and Timotheus—have left us accounts of them to the number of eighty, but not a single one is reproached with rejecting the Pope’s authority in matters of faith.
All this is intelligible enough, if we look at the patristic interpretation of the words of Christ to St. Peter. Of all the Fathers who interpret these passages in the Gospels (Matt. xvi.18, John xxi.17), not a single one applies them to the Roman bishops as Peter’s successors. How many Fathers have busied themselves with these texts, yet not one of them whose commentaries we possess—Origen, Chrysostom, Hilary, Augustine, Cyril, Theodoret, and those whose interpretations are collected in catenas—has dropped the faintest hint that the primacy of Rome is the consequence of the commission and promise to Peter! Not one of them has explained the rock or foundation on which Christ would build His Church of the office given to Peter to be transmitted to his successors, but they understood by it either Christ Himself, or Peter’s confession of faith in Christ; often both together. Or else they thought Peter was the foundation equally with all the other Apostles, the twelve being together the foundation–stones of the Church (Apoc. xxi.14). The Fathers could the less recognize in the power of the keys, and the power of binding and loosing, any special prerogative or lordship of the Roman bishop, inasmuch as—what is obvious to any one at first sight—they did not regard a power first given to Peter, and afterwards conferred in precisely the same words on all the Apostles, as anything peculiar to him, or hereditary in the line of Roman bishops, and they held the symbol of the keys as meaning just the same as the figurative expression of binding and loosing (Janus (Johann Joseph Ignaz von Dollinger), The Pope and the Council (Boston: Roberts, 1869), pp. 70-74).
A few disaffected cuckoos like valiant, but hey, they come with the territory. Make the world more colorful. Happy to believe in opposite things with equal conviction most of such people.
I wonder if Dollinger KNEW he was a cuckoo? And did the early fathers know that they were? Dollinger should have known. Anyone who is in the Roman Catholic church is cuckoo.
His reasoning is wonderful The "upon this rock" speech HAS to be Greek in his reckoning, it cannot be the language they all actually used, because that is the ONLY way he can even pretend a small crack in what Jesus actually said which was Thou art Peter and upon this Peter I will build my church. And that is what it means in aramaic and the same in Greek unless you twist it. The point is all these people have vivid imagination. They could not care what it means, so long as it does not mean the obvious!
well the majority of the early fathers seemingly split fine hairs with the Greek (and they were Greek speaking) for they too believed that the Rock (petra) was the statement and confession of Peter, and that the foundation of the church was Jesus Christ.
And no wonder. Let us think for a moment of the situation. Jesus took His disciples to Caesarea Philippi because He wanted to broach one important question, WHO WAS HE? He led His disciples question by question, and then said, 'who do YOU say that I am?' There was no doubt a pregnant pause before Peter (who else?) blurted out, 'YOU ARE THE CHRIST, THE SON OF THE LIVING GOD.'
Such a statement had never been made on earth before. That a man on earth was the Living God. The disciples would have held their breath. Would He confirm it or not? It was also the moment for which Jesus had Himself waited. At last His disciples were beginning to understand. Surely He had to say SOMETHING. Are we really to believe that to the disciples who had heard the most astounding revelation of all time HE MADE NO ANSWER concerning the matter but simply turned all the attention on Peter, ignoring the anticipation of the disciples? It is absurd.
Of course He made answer. 'You are petros, and on THIS PETRA (this truth that you have proclaimed ABOUT ME), I will build My congregation. The context DEMANDS this explanation. The other Gospel writers saw this and omitted reference to Peter that all the glory might be on Christ. It was Jesus way of accepting what Peter had said and making clear to the disciples that what Peter had said was TRUE.
It is inconceivable that having led His disciples up to this amazing revelation and realising how astounded they must be, He should ignore them and turn all His attention on Peter. It was the words of Jesus that had to be rammed home, not the future of Peter.