Friday, December 16, 2022

Peter (and subsequent popes) being stripped temporarily of the ability to bind and loose

On the topic of Origen’s Commentary on Matthew, book 12, a recent Catholic apologetics volume noted the following:

 

Wherefore he has the keys of the kingdom of heaven, opening to those who have been loosed on earth that they may be also loosed in heaven, and free; and shutting to those who by his just judgment have been bound on earth that they also may be bound in heaven, and condemned. But when those who maintain the function of the episcopate make use of this word as Peter, and having received the keys of the kingdom of heaven from the Savior, teaching that things bound by them, that is to say, condemned, are also bound in heaven, and that those which have obtained remission by them are also loosed in heaven, we must say that they speak wholesomely if they have the way of life on account of which it was said to that Peter, You are Peter (Matthew 16:18); and if they are such that upon them the church is built by Christ, and to them with good reason this could be referred; and the gates of Hades ought to prevail against him when he wishes to bind and loose.

 

Here, Origen is entirely consonant with the Scripture: St. Peter bound and loosed when he functioned in concern with his profession of faith in Matthew 16:17, but (like the Antioch incident or denial of Jesus) when he sins or lacks virtue, this is a way of life inharmonious with Matthew 16:18 and we must infer that St. Peter and the Apostles do not bind and loose others by these actions. To secure this reading, Origen continues:

 

But if he is tightly “bound with the cords of his sins” (Proverbs 5:22), to no purpose does he bind and loose. And perhaps you can say that in the heavens which are in the wise man—that, is the virtues—the bad man is bound; and again, in these, the virtuous man is loosed and has received an indemnity for the sins which he committed before his virtue. But, as the man, who has not the cords of sins nor iniquities compared to a long rope or to the strap of the yoke of a heifer (Isaiah 5:18) not even God could bind, in like manner, no Peter, whoever he may be, and if any one who is not a Peter, and does not possess the things here spoken of, imagines as a Peter that he will so bind on earth that the things bound are bound in heaven, and will so loose on earth that the things loosed are loosed in heaven, he is puffed up, not understanding the meaning of the Scriptures, and being puffed up, has fallen into the ruin of the devil (1 Timothy 3:10).

 

This is exactly St. Paul’s point: St. Peter sinned, by example, and he lost his binding and loosing powers in the community (he was excommunicated by St. Paul) when he was sinning by disobeying the doctrine that St. Peter still professed from the Council of Jerusalem. St. Peter technically still professed: “You are Christ the Son of God,” but as Origen notes, his way of life or vice meant that he temporarily lost his binding and loosing role in a particular instance until he changed. This idea of a pope temporarily losing his binding and loosing power in the midst of sinfully trying to apply this power has been around from the New Testament until the Decretum or collection of canons by Gratian in AD 1145. The major issue for the Church, often provoking schisms, is: How do we apply this rule to pope lo Rome when he sins or errs in his administration though he have supreme jurisdiction? Some particularities of the issue have been effectively tabled by the Church councils and hierarchy since the Council of Basel )AD 1435), where the papalist who first articulated in technical terms “papal infallibility” (Juan de Torquemada, OP) defended in the Acts of the Council the principal of a “papal correction” so that a vicious or unlawfully acting pope ought to receive a correction by the Church or his brother bishops gathered in council to help correct his behavior. (Christiaan Kappes and William Albrecht, The Complete Guide to the Papacy in the Bible [Biblical Dogmatics 3; Patristic Pillars Press, 2022], 270-71)

 

Honestly: how could a faithful Roman Catholic know if a pope has lost his ability to bind and loose? Imagine if Francis committed heresy and was stripped of his ability to bind and loose, but in an act of defiance, bound people, using the criteria from Vatican 1, to, say, the Fifth Marian Dogma. According to Pastor Aeternus, “such definitions of the Roman Pontiff of themselves, but not from the consensus of the Church, are unalterable” (DS 3074). It is pretty nonsensical an approach to take if one puts on their “Catholic” hat.

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