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4. God’s Divine Law: The Scriptural Founts of Conciliar Theory in Jean Gerson
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4 God’s Divine Law TheScripturalFountsof ConciliarTheoryinJeanGerson } DaviD ZaChariah flanagin [If] the pope were not subject to the divine or evangelical law, which was proclaimed by Christ to all without any exception, in Matthew 18[:15–18], when he spoke directly to Peter (as the church teaches and the facts of the text indicate well enough), saying, “If your brother sins against you ..... tell it to the church ......,” then Paul would have acted against divine and human law when he resisted Peter to his face, i.e., publicly and before the congregation of the church, as is found in Galatians 2. For this resistance was less a minor provocation between Paul and Peter than it was an appeal to the church....... For this reason, if indeed Peter had refused to desist, he would have had to be condemned by the church. And it is the case that Peter was pope and was confirmed in faith and grace after Pentecost, according to the doctors. They [i.e., the doctors] say that Peter was not errant in faith nor guilty of heresy, but he was only acting rather falsely about the observance of legal matters. Therefore, Paul said that he was not walking rightly according to the truth of the gospel, and that he needed to be rebuked.For this reason,it is clearly deduced that a supreme pontiff,who succeeds Peter in the apostolate, can be rebuked publicly by a doctor of theology, who succeeds Paul in the office of preaching, even when he [i.e., the pope] is not guilty of heresy or an error in faith.1 Jean Gerson,WhetherItIsLicittoAppealfromaPopeinMattersof Faith? (1418) One of the issues central to understanding the conciliarist heritage is the question of origins and sources: where, exactly, did the conciliar theory come from? In what could perhaps be called the “tradi101 I would like to acknowledge the Faculty Development Fund of Saint Mary’s College of California ,whose generous support contributed to the completion of this essay. 1.“papa non subjiceretur legi divinae vel evangelicae quae generaliter absque omni exceptione tional view,”the answer was clear.Conciliarism was a heresy that,like all heresies, sprang from a depraved will and a corruption of the central tenets of the Christian faith—in this case, that central tenet was absolute papal monarchy, which would best be expressed in the First Vatican Council’s declaration of papal infallibility .2 While such an answer made a great deal of sense from the vantage point of a later orthodoxy,it failed to do justice to the immense complexity and variety of ecclesiological thought that was present in the Middle Ages, particularly during the crisis of the Great Western Schism.Attempting to rectify the situation,twentieth -century historians returned to the sources of late medieval conciliarism to ask the question again—and what they discovered was remarkable. Instead of a malicious corruption from the outside, intent on destroying the time-honored monolith of papal supremacy,conciliarism was a natural outgrowth of traditions inherent within the medieval church, finding new expression in the time of pontifical crisis. In the most classical exposition of this thesis, Brian Tierney posited that these traditions could be traced back to the discussions of the canon lawyers, particularly with regard to two important questions: papal heresy and the rights of corporations.3 While this widely accepted interpretation of conciliarism has had the admirable result of redeeming the conciliar thinkers of the later Middle Ages from the hinterlands of heterodoxy, it has also created a somewhat skewed picture of conciliarism as a whole and the sources from which it drew its lifeblood . The deficiency of this picture stems from the fact that it tends to see all conciliarism through the lens of the jurists. Yet, even a cursory examination of conpromulgata est a Christo, Matth. xviii, dum loqueretur ad personam Petri, sicut tradit Ecclesia et circumstantia textus satis indicat: si peccaverit in te frater tuus, etc.; sequitur: dic Ecclesiae....... Paulus egisset contra ius divinum et humanum dum restitit Petro in faciem,hoc est publice et coram Ecclesiae congregatione,sicut habetur ad Gal.ii.Haec enim resistentia non fuit minor provocatio Pauli contra Petrum quam fuisset appellatio ad Ecclesiam....... Unde et si Petrus desistere noluisset, fuisset ab Ecclesia condemnandus. Constat autem quod Petrus erat Summus Pontifex et secundum doctores confirmatus in fide et gratia post Pentecosten. Propterea dicunt quod Petrus non errabat in fide nec haereticabat,sed tantummodo nimis dissimulanter se habebat circa observationem legalium. Dicebat ideo Paulus quod...