Do you believe that the historical/external evidence calls into question the inspiration of 2 Peter in the same way and to the same degree that it calls into question the inspiration/ divine establishment of apostolic succession?
Considerably more so. I think there are much better arguments for apostolic succession than for the apostolicity of 2 Peter. The historical objections to apostolic succession are to specific features like a monarchical episcopate in Rome. But the principle survives quite well in the absence of these features. The best explanation of the strong hierarchy that emerged in the early 2nd century is that these leaders really were known to have been appointed by the apostles. There are plenty of nuances one needs to make to this theory, and contemporary scholars have an ideological bias against it, but it seems to me that (taken in its essentials) there are good arguments for it and no reasonable ones against it. (The scholars who pooh-pooh it have no evidence except the mere existence of other groups claiming to be Christian.)
You don’t seem to be saying that if one accepts one conclusion of the early Church, then one must accept all conclusions of the early Church made up to that time.
No indeed. What I am saying is that if you not only accept but make absolutely central and foundational to your faith one particular complex, lengthy, and contentious decision-making process of the early Church, you need to come up with some very strong arguments indeed for why you don’t start in general by giving the benefit of the doubt to the principles and methods of the early “Catholic” Church, including points such as apostolic succession, baptismal regeneration, the necessity of church unity, the possibility of losing one’s faith after baptism, and so on. If one starts from that starting point, most of the distinctive Protestant arguments don’t look very cogent. Classical Protestants claim to treat the authority of the early Church with respect, but in fact what they do is run it through the lens of the Reformation. The conclusions of the Reformers (or, for more radical Protestants, certain particular conclusions taken out of their sixteenth-century context) are taken for granted, and the Fathers are accepted insofar as they agree. Once Protestants start doing things the other way round, Protestantism as a distinctive form of Christianity, with clear doctrinal differences from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, cannot survive.
On the other hand, you seem to be suggesting that if one accepts one conclusion of the early Church (the canonicity of 2 Peter), then one should accept all conclusions of the early Church (to that point in time?) that were contested less virgorously (apostolic succession). That too is a flawed assertion. The presence of divine inspiration is determined by what God did/is doing and not by how much men did or did not argue about the thing.
But this assumes that we have some independent access to divine inspiration apart from the historic testimony of the Church. I am
not saying that we accept that testimony blindly. Rather, we “think with it”–we put ourselves within it and see if it makes sense. If certain bits of it don’t make sense, we see if we can tweak it without the whole thing collapsing. If the whole thing collapses, I don’t think we have anything that can be called Christianity in any sense that Mormonism, say, can’t.
This process of thinking with the historic Church is not something against which divine inspiration can be placed, because our access to divine inspiration is not independent of that process–it’s part of the process (including, possibly, part of the process of thinking critically about and “tweaking” it).
Further, the external evidence is not the same with respect to the the canonicity of 2 Peter and the doctrine of apostolic succession.
As I said, that’s indeed the case–the arguments for the latter are stronger
One could easily understand the latter to have developed because the Church was growing within the Roman empire and therefore it adopted Roman style governance and ideas regarding the succession of authority. On that basis it could be seen as an uninspired development.
If you reject something as “uninspired” if it makes cultural sense, then I think you will wind up with not much that is inspired. Jesus makes a lot of sense as a Second Temple Jew–does that mean that He wasn’t the Son of God? Actually I’m not at all sure that I can think of any particularly Roman idea that links up with apostolic succession. Romans were certainly concerned with order, and I suppose one could say that the method of succession used by the “five good emperors,” who reigned during most of the second century, looks a lot like the method the second-century Catholic Christians claimed the apostles had used. But one could also argue that it looks similar because it’s a commonsense way of handing on authority–find someone trustworthy and give them authority. There really isn’t any more to apostolic succession, at its core, than that.
I think the hidden assumption in your argument is really that an “inspired” model would have looked more like our cultural model (i.e., democracy) and less like a model appropriate for the culture in which Christianity began. I reject that assumption. Furthermore, in fact bishops
were elected by the people in the early Church. If you want to argue that later Catholics have unreasonably rejected
that part of the early Christian model while keeping the more authoritarian parts, I’m with you! (Though I’m not willing to make election a criterion of validity.)
On the other hand, one could conclude that Peter definitely did not have a hand in the writing of 2 Peter based on textual criticism
It’s not really textual criticism, but yes, based on normal historical methods of analyzing texts (the most solid argument being the parallel with Jude). No reductionistic cultural assumptions such as the ones you seem to be using above are necessarily operating (though some come into play nonetheless).
Given the difference it is easy to envision that error could arise in one area without arising in the other…or said another way, it is easy to see how God could have his hand on one area without having his hand also on the other area.
God could do a lot of things. The question is what God *did do.
*If you start with Protestant assumptions, then it makes sense that God would care more about the canon than about church government. But those were clearly not the assumptions of the early Church. And the Protestant assumptions themselves (to use your argument above) have some pretty obvious cultural roots: medieval scholasticism (itself influenced to some degree by Islam, arguably), Renaissance humanism, and the political agenda of undercutting church hierarchy in order to facilitate the rise of the early modern state as a consolidated, unified center of power with no effective rivals.
In other words, we either start with the assumptions of people 1500 years after Christianity began, or we start with the assumptions of the early Christians (or we start with our own cultural assumptions, which is a bad idea because those will influence us more than is appropriate even if we don’t consciously give them any role whatsoever).
To me the latter seems the obvious choice. It’s not about blindly following everything the early Christians said, or mechanically finding some formula for determining which things we follow blindly–it’s about starting with their starting point instead of that of sixteenth-century would-be Reformers for whom the centrality of a fixed text was culturally obvious.
Finally, as the centuries pass (and more and more doctrine is added), I think it becomes easier to find external evidence that challenges Assumption C
Or that confirms it. There’s plenty of both, as in any such matter (the inspiration of Scripture, for instance, or even the resurrection of Jesus). But I would say that the past twenty centuries have done more to confirm than to challenge the proposition that Jesus established an authoritative, unified Church. The fact that recent Popes have been such eloquent proclaimers of the Gospel, 500 years after it seemed obvious to many devout and learned people that the Papacy had decisively abandoned the Gospel, is one of the most powerful confirmations for me. But I’m a scholar of the Reformation, so that’s naturally my focus. . . . .
Edwin
