The Blessed Redundancy of the Advocate

Scripture

The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Heb 4:12)

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. (Col 3:16a)

You are strong and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one. (I John 2:14b)

It is written, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Mt 4:4, quoting Dt 8:3)

Scripture is not an oracle; God’s word is more than a message of rules or prophecy conveyed by chosen scribes. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the words of Scripture become God’s active presence with those who belong to the truth (cf. John 18:37). God not only speaks to us in Scriptures, but actually dwells with us, feeds us, and forms us by them.

Scripture is a codified history of God’s work among His chosen people, from the dawn of history until the death of Jesus’s first apostles. It is full of poetry, heroic legend, tragedy, wisdom, rules, recorded dialog of God-made-man with man, and discussion of the struggles of the first generation of Christians. It is inspired and inspiring.

But because it is a closed book embedded in specific temporal and cultural contexts, it is not always self-evident how to apply Scripture’s lessons to today. Nor is it always self-evident what lessons should be drawn from narratives developed in a cultural context that is foreign to, and little understood by, our own. In fact, how do we even know what belongs in the book of Scripture? To answer that question, we must turn to an authority that supersedes the Bible itself; namely, the succession of authority given by Jesus to Peter and the other Apostles.

Apostolic and Petrine Authority

“I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Mt 16:18-19)

Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” (Mt 19:28)

Peter stood up among the believers (together the crowd numbered about one hundred twenty persons) and said, … “one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us—one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.” Then they prayed and said, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place.” And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he was added to the eleven apostles. (Acts 1:15, 21-22, 24-26)

After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, “My brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news and become believers. And God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us….”

The whole assembly kept silence, and listened to Barnabas and Paul as they told of all the signs and wonders that God had done through them among the Gentiles. After they finished speaking, James replied, “My brothers, listen to me. Simeon has related how God first looked favorably on the Gentiles, to take from among them a people for his name. This agrees with the words of the prophets….”

Then the apostles and the elders, with the consent of the whole church, decided to [send] the following letter: “The brothers, both the apostles and the elders, to the believers of Gentile origin … Since we have heard that certain persons who have gone out from us, though with no instructions from us, have said things to disturb you and have unsettled your minds, we have decided unanimously to choose representatives and send them to you, along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul…. For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from [porneias]. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.” (Acts 15:7-9, 12-15, 22-29)

The Gospels and Acts recount numerous times that “The Twelve” are given special authority to make judgment calls for the good of the Church, deciding what should be bound or prohibited, and what should be forgiven or permitted, independent from the Jewish legal tradition in which they had been raised. And among the Twelve, Peter holds a place of primacy designated by Jesus.

An organization can have perpetual existence only when there is a structure of decision-making authority and a method of succession for those offices of authority when the holders of the office leave over the years for various reasons. Not to be too crass, but Jesus establishes a “corporation” we call the Church—that is, a body, a non-natural person, that is at once sustained by natural persons who hold offices and lesser roles, and at the same time is far greater than the sum of these parts could ever be without the “corporate body” He endowed them with.

Without apostolic authority, we would not know what writings deserved to be treated as Scripture. Without apostolic authority, we would not have definition of liturgical celebration of the Sacraments. Without apostolic authority, it can be difficult to distinguish Christian communities living out self-sacrificial love from dangerous cults.

At the same time, the successors to the apostles sometimes structure the institutional Church in ways that enable and breed abuse. They are called to always be self-reflective regarding their institutional weakness, sin, and need to reform. They are called to serve with humility, as holders of weighty divine responsibility, not divine right. They are not always faithful to this call.

Mary, Miracles, and the Communion of Saints

Jesus’s earthly ministry was full of miraculous healings and other signs and wonders, and after the Ascension and Pentecost, the Twelve (plus those they ordained, such as Paul and Barnabas) continued performing similar miracles. They helped the lame walk, they spoke to people in foreign tongues, their chains broke open and they could be transported in body to other locations, they restored the dead to life.

The New Testament does not record the specifics of any other disciples performing such miracles, though it alludes to others having gifts of healing and tongues. But in later generations of Christianity, we have testimony and records of a wide variety of saints working great miracles. The history of the Christian Church (Tradition) recounts manifold miracles performed by disciples who are not ordained successors to the Twelve; indeed ordination to the episcopate and miraculous gifts seem to rarely overlap. Perhaps this is by design of the Holy Spirit, to temper the pride of those in organizational authority, to give greater charisms to the lowly who are not chosen by human will.

Jesus’s mother, Mary, is not recorded as having performed any miracles during her lifetime, though her prayers feature prominently in calling them forth from her Son and the Holy Spirit. After her departure from this world, however, Mary is first among the Saints who bring messages and miracles to a needy world in these latter days. Marian apparitions such as Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Lourdes provide indispensable fountains of hope and healing to millions of Catholics, spanning centuries. They are the foundation of “popular piety” that reaches many who have little knowledge of Scriptures or magisterial teachings.

Mary is not alone, though, in conveying the healing gifts of God in miraculous, tangible form to a hurting world. Indeed, the Church today requires proof of miracles through the intercession of a deceased person who led a holy life in order to recognize them in the canon of Saints. The working of miracles during their lifetime is not required, for this isn’t the charism of every holy member of the Church on earth, but there certainly have been many Christians throughout the ages graced with miraculous lifetime gifts. In every age, God’s signs and wonders continue through the mediation of His chosen ones, calling forth the declaration of faith of erstwhile skeptics, “my Lord and my God!”

Necessary Redundancy of Grace

Each of these mediums of the Holy Spirit teach the world about its erroneous assumptions. They teach us that sin cannot be overcome except through entrusting ourselves to a gracious and forgiving God. They teach us God’s justice does not look like the world’s justice, but like Jesus’s ultimate self-sacrifice. They teach us that God has pronounced eternal judgment against the forceful judgments of worldly rulers. They teach us to love one another, to be prepared for opposition from the world, and yet to live with joy. None of this is possible without God’s active presence through the Spirit, without supernatural grace. Each of these means of the Spirit’s tangible and active presence in this age reinforces and testifies to each other.

The difficult reality, however, is that when the Holy Spirit incarnates God’s presence through any of these forms, the embodiment becomes subject to the weaknesses of human flesh. Sacraments may be unavailable to some people because they do not have access to priests, or they encounter other barriers, such as canonical rules that do not accommodate the limitations of their lived reality. Some places may have priests to perform the Sacraments but the fellowship of believers is sorely lacking, and may even be actively impeded by those same priests. Until the invention of the printing press, personal access to Scripture and literacy to understand it was restricted to a small class. Even today, it can be hard to experience God actively speaking to us through Scripture when it has been poorly translated or excerpted, or we don’t have the contextual knowledge to perceive key metaphors and themes. The Pope and Bishops are fallible men, who can and do at times speak or act with poor human judgment instead of the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. And Marian and other miraculous interventions are sometimes faked or distorted to serve interests against the Spirit.

An important practice in modern enterprise management is to deliberately build redundancy into a system, so that if one component fails, a redundant component can keep mission-critical systems running. The enterprise may be somewhat slower and weaker when one part isn’t working, but the whole system doesn’t fail.

Long before these jargony words were ever conceived, God built gracious redundancy into this messy system of God becoming human, and then working through humans to convey His salvation to all the world, that we call Christianity. God can come to a man without any communion of believers around him through the Scriptures, and even offer the Sacraments miraculously, as He did by sending Phillip to the Ethiopian eunuch. He can speak to the heart of vast nations of people who could not read Scripture, and who were oppressed by the very worst elements of corrupt Christendom, through the miraculous intervention of His Blessed Mother, as He did through Our Lady of Guadalupe. He can recall His Church to its more egalitarian forms and Scriptural roots when its rulers have become dangerously proud and controlling, as the Spirit did in the Second Vatican Council. And secret and fervent fellowships of believers even have persisted in places remote and/or persecuted for generations without the benefit of any formal celebration of some or all of the Sacraments.

I admit I often get frustrated, dejected, and even cynical when I see some of the means of God’s presence flailing and seemingly even failing around me. But then I take heart when I see how He provided the means to fulfill His promise—that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church and no one given to Christ will be lost—yet without negating our free will. When one system fails, He providentially places other means that are more faithful to the Spirit to pick up the slack. We may be disappointed in the Church, but we are never abandoned.