Roman Catholics place implicit trust in the Roman communion, in its synods, its councils, its popes, and in an alleged unwritten Apostolic tradition to get things exactly right. Newman claimed that it was his study of church history that drove him to Rome. As a church historian, I doubt his conclusions and his methods. After all, there is not a scintilla of evidence for the Roman papacy in the 1st or 2nd or even 3rd centuries. The five sacraments added by the Roman church were unknown as late as the 9th century. 

As I was running errands this past Saturday I listened to a podcast in the Ricochet network hosted by Mark Bauerlein, himself a convert to Rome from atheism, in which he interviewed a convert to Rome (from evangelicalism) about the impending canonization of John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801–90), who was a moderately evangelical Anglican who helped to found and foster the Oxford Movement in the Church of England. Newman eventually became dissatisfied even with that movement (which sought to reconnect the Church of England with the ancient and medieval church while simultaneously disconnecting it from its Reformation heritage) and converted to Rome. For his trouble he was made a Cardinal (member of the papal electoral college). In recent years there has been renewed interest in Newman and some Romanists have invoked him in prayer and they are claiming that he has performed miracles sufficient to warrant his elevation to the status of saint. There is even a Wikipedia page devoted to the campaign. He was declared “venerable” in 1991. He was “beatified” in 2010 and is scheduled to be canonized this autumn by Pope Francis. As the two discussed Newman and the process of his canonization I was struck by the similarities between that process and that of an American Presidential nomination and election.

I was also impressed by reality of implicit faith (fides implicita or the implicit trust that we place in authorities outside ourselves). No one can know everything. We all must trust someone else’s testimony about things we have not experienced. No one reading this article knows with ontological certainty that Henry VIII ruled England in the 16th century. No one reading this was alive then. No one has seen him or hear him. We all trust the historical record that he succeeded Henry VII. That is a reasonable thing to do but it does require a degree of implicit faith in that record and in the record keepers.

Roman Catholics place implicit trust in the Roman communion, in its synods, its councils, its popes, and in an alleged unwritten Apostolic tradition to get things exactly right. Newman claimed that it was his study of church history that drove him to Rome. As a church historian, I doubt his conclusions and his methods. After all, there is not a scintilla of evidence for the Roman papacy in the 1st or 2nd or even 3rd centuries. The five sacraments added by the Roman church were unknown as late as the 9th century. Indeed, the doctrine of transubstantiation was not formulated until the 9th century. Much of what we know today as Roman Catholicism did was not formalized until the 13th century. In other words, the Roman communion is a medieval church and what is not medieval is Tridentine, i.e., rooted in the sixteent-century anti-Reformation Council of Trent (1545–63).

Newman tacitly acknowledged this rather significant problem by arguing that whatever Rome concluded later (e.g., at Trent) must have been present seminally in the earlier periods. It takes a fair bit of implicit faith, however, to see the Roman dogma of the alleged assumption of the Blessed Virgin (a Roman dogma promulgated in 1950 on the authority of Pius XII) in the early church. Indeed, the status of the Blessed Virgin was disputed for centuries, well into the Middle Ages.

We Protestants have implicit faith too, but we place it in God’s Word written, Holy Scripture. Calvin wrote:

We certainly admit that so long as we dwell as strangers in the world there is such a thing as implicit faith; not only because many things are as yet hidden from us, but because surrounded by many clouds of errors we do not comprehend everything. The height of wisdom for the most perfect is to go forward and, quietly and humbly, to strive still further. Therefore Paul exhorts believers that, if some disagree with others in any matter, they should wait for revelation [Phil. 3:15]. Experience obviously teaches that until we put off the flesh we attain less than we should like. And in our daily reading of Scripture we come upon many obscure passages that convict us of ignorance. With this bridle God keeps us within bounds, assigning to each his “measure of faith” [Rom. 12:3] so that even the best teacher may be ready to learn.

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