The Need For Retrieval - Introductory Remarks - Conley Owens

Retrieving the Doctrine of Simony

Well, I would like to open with giving some reasons that we need to retrieve a doctrine of simony. Simony is any kind of commerce and spiritual things. The more formal definition is it is an earnest desire to buy or sell something spiritual or something annexed to a spiritual thing.

Hopefully that definition will be clear over the course of the next day and a half if it is not already something that is clear to you if you have not looked into it before. It is something that is very forgotten.

There was in 1700 a book that was a form of retrieval of the doctrine of simony. There was a review that was written of this book that began this way. There is hardly one sin in the world whose nature is less known and whose heinousness is less considered than the sin of simony.

That is true today even more so than it was back then. So how did we get here? How did simony, specifically the doctrine of it, rise and fall? I would like to give you a brief overview of that so that you understand how we got where we are today.

Early Church Teaching That Spiritual Things Must Be Freely Given

So first of all, the fact that the Word of God must go forward freely is something that the church has recognized from the very beginning. You see it in the Didache, which is very likely first century.

You see it in the Shepherd of Hermas, which is second century. In the third century, Cyprian of Carthage wrote about how the grace of God ought to be without price and he listed five verses. Acts 8 20, Peter's rebuke of Simon Magus.

Matthew 10 8, freely you have received, freely give. John 2 16, Christ's denunciation of the merchants in the temple. Isaiah 55 1, the call to come and buy without money. Revelation 21 6, the promise of that water of life, freely given.

And then after that in councils, this matter was addressed. The Synod of Elvira in 305 forbade that any minister permit someone upon being baptized to throw coins into the basin. Apparently this was a practice back then.

And in Chalcedon, the very famous council where it was established that Christ has two natures united in his one person. That same council had a canon that threatened deposition of anyone who was ordained for money.

How Private Church Ownership Enabled the Sale of Church Offices

So how did simony itself spread? Well, first of all, the word simony did not come about until the 11th century. But the word simoniacal, the adjective, came about at the end of the 6th century through Gregory the Great, who is the Bishop of Rome.

And he addressed this because it was a growing issue, but it especially grew in the next century as Christianity began expanding from the cities and going to the countrysides. As Christianity went to the countrysides, more frequently you would have nobles building churches.

And when a noble builds a church rather than the church working together to build a church, that noble would want some kind of control over the church to ensure that it didn't go astray. Now this in some ways is very reasonable.

If you imagine you use a lot of your wealth to build a church, you don't want just anything happening at that church. You want to have some control to make sure that it's sound. So those nobles who had churches, who had built churches on their private property, would have the ability to choose who would be the pastor.

And this, giving that control to laymen, or at least the ability to present someone who would be a first pick, gave the means by which bishoprics, by which pastorates, could be bought and sold. Now after that, in the 8th century, the majority of church buildings in Western Europe were private property that were controlled by laymen.

And this intensified in the 9th century with the death of Charlemagne and the rise of what is known as feudalism. There's some debate about whether or not that's the right term. I'm not really that interested in that.

But what you see is that many people, because there is less stability at that time, they feel the need to cede all the control they have over their property to lords in order to have protection. So those churches that were just controlled by the church, many of them, almost all of them in the countryside, ceded their property rights over to lords, which then gave those lords the standard right of being able to choose who would be pastor there, or at least who would be the first pick as a pastor.

That's known as the right of presentation, to present a man to be a first choice. In the 10th century, Simoni was endemic. Bishoprics were routinely bought and sold like anything else, and then when a bishop had purchased that status, he would then sell other things in order to recoup the cost.

You know, selling sacraments, selling blessings, ordinations. In the 11th century, there was what is known as the investiture controversy. If you've ever studied church history, you may have come across this.

I knew that I did, but then kind of went through, went into one ear and out the other because I didn't really have a reason to hang on to any of this stuff. Lay investiture was the practice where a king or a lord would grant a bishop a ring and a staff to demonstrate that he was investing him with the power to do his job.

But what that means is that authority is coming from secular authority and then going to a church authority. So this establishes state over the church. In the midst of this controversy, in 1076, we have the first recorded use of the word Simoni as a noun itself.

This was finally ended in 1122 at the Concordat of Worms when the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V conceded and renounced the practice of investiture. And at that point, because so many people were concerned about this practice of investiture and how it had made Simoni much more possible because you could just say, well, since I have to invest you with the ring and the staff, you have to pay me, etc.

There was so much concern to to correct this corruption that there was a great momentum to write lots of these canon laws all together in large compilations. Gratian's Decretum, which is one of the greatest compilations of canon law, if not the greatest one, has as its first section, as its first causa, as it's known, a whole section on Simoni that is very long just addressing all the ways that Simoni should be considered, should be addressed.

It's more concerned with practical matters than theological matters, but my point is just that there was a great interest in this and then that interest increased in the universities and other things.

The Reformation Began With the Sale of Indulgences

But then the doctrine of Simoni declined. How did it decline? First of all, it's important to recognize that the Reformation began over Simoni. Indulgences spread and the sale of indulgences spread. There are several aspects of that doctrine that we could walk through.

Just how it changed from being a way that you could commute penance from one kind of good act to another when you had done something wrong and you were demonstrating repentance, instead to being something that you would purchase for someone else and then you could purchase it for the dead and eventually, you might be familiar with the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, which is what led to the Reformation most directly.

Martin Luther addressing that in 1517 and then the rest is history. But then you would expect, you would expect if the whole Reformation began around Simoni, Martin Luther identifying the sale of indulgences at Simoni, you would expect that the Reformation would give us a hardened doctrine of Simoni, but it didn't.

Five Reasons the Doctrine of Simony Declined

The doctrine of Simoni ended up fading away. Why is that? Why is that? I want to give you five reasons that it faded. First, there's the decline of the actual practice of Simoni. The Reformation addressed Simoni so well even the Counter-Reformation, even the Roman Catholics ended up addressing it in their own ranks to a good degree, that it declined in practice such that people were not as interested in addressing it.

The Decline of Formal Confession

Second, the decline of formal confession. In Protestantism, of course, we believe in confessing our sins to one another, but it's not a formal thing that needs to happen with a priest. One of the ways that Simoni was, the doctrine of Simoni had advanced was informal confessor manuals, right?

The Decline of Canon Law

There were these manuals that catalog sins and what kind of repentance was needed for each one. And so they would teach about Simoni, but you no longer had these kinds of books being written. And then there was the decline of canon law.

The Decline of a Tradition-Centered Theology

Less and less people were concerned about papal decrees and they were more concerned about what the Bible had to say. But the doctrine of Simoni was largely contained in papal decrees. And then, the decline of a tradition-centered approach to theology.

During the Middle Ages, the standard textbook on theology was called the Sentences, and the Sentences just were the opinions of church fathers all catalogued and harmonized as you might a systematic theology of Scripture.

But since, in the Reformation, people switched away from looking so much at tradition and instead making Scripture primary, since they are no longer studying the Sentences, which had a heading for Simoni, instead, there was not the same reason to continue that study.

And, if you know about how the study of systematic theology changed, it switched to, during the Reformation, what's known as the loci communes, right, the different commonplaces. So, Turretin and others, their systematic theologies are addressing certain heads of theology that are, that were different than the sets that were addressed before by tradition with the Sentences.

Before, there was a specific heading for Simoni, and then later, just restarting fresh, picking what the primary topics were that needed to be addressed, Simoni just didn't come out in them, and so the standard place where you would address it just didn't exist anymore.

The Decline of Latin

And then there was the decline of Latin. Instead of all theology being done in Latin, theology is done in vernacular languages, and because it's just being done in the common tongue of any people, you're no longer reading all the Latin texts that have addressed the doctrine of Simoni.

Recovering the Wisdom of Earlier Generations

So, these are the various reasons that the doctrine of Simoni declined. These are not bad reasons, many of them are good reasons. It's kind of like if you were to have a house, and you want to tear out the rot of the house, you're going to take some good timber with that rot.

And so, if you're going to have a ground-up Reformation, there are going to be some doctrinal casualties along the way, and Simoni was one of them. And so, at this time, it needs to be retrieved. Moses said to Israel in Deuteronomy 32 7, Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations.

Ask your father, and he will show you your elders, and they will tell you. Bildad said to Job, For inquire, please, of bygone eras, or bygone ages, and consider what the fathers have searched out. For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing.

For our days on earth are a shadow. Will they not teach you, and tell you, and utter words out of their understanding? We need to go to those of old to find how we should think about the sale of spiritual things.

Learning From Earlier Church Sources

I want to give you a couple of comments on the sources from which I will be giving a lot of the material. A lot of them come from a tradition that might seem uncertain to Protestants. Right before the Reformation, you know, a lot of us are comfortable with the Church Fathers, Augustine, but then there's that middle section.

Can we really trust that? Martin Luther pointed out that you can trust, you can draw many good things from that era of history. He described it like Christ not tossing all of the Pharisees' theology just because many of them were corrupt.

Just because they had abuses doesn't mean that all their theology was wrong. Under the papacy, he said, there is much that is Christian and good. Indeed, all Christian good exists there and has come down to us from there.

Henry Burton’s Defense of Consulting Pre-Reformation Sources

I can give you an example from the Puritans, too. There's a man named Henry Burton who was a Puritan. He suffered incredible things on the account of his opposition of Roman Catholicism and its intrusion into the Anglican Church.

Specifically, he referred to the Pope as the Antichrist, and he opposed Arminianism, and these are things that could not be stood for by the Anglican Church at that time. In 1637, he was pilloried and had his ears cut off very deeply so that it cut an artery, and he was in very bad condition.

He was fined for more than he was worth. He was put in prison for a very long time without access to his family. He was not allowed to have pen or ink or paper. All these things had to be smuggled. He took goose wings that he got out of the window of his cell and used dust to make ink to write letters and smuggle them out.

He was kept in a dark room that had boards that were so wide, on a second floor, that were so wide that you could not safely walk on the boards. All of this for opposing Roman Catholicism, yet he wrote a book called A Censure of Simony, some years before all these incidents, where he explained why it was right to appeal to Roman Catholic councils prior to the Reformation, to appeal to papal decrees even.

He said, we must put a great difference between the now Church of Rome and that which it hath been formerly, and that even within these three or four hundred years. Even though he opposed Roman Catholicism in a greater, more sacrificial way than almost anybody has, he recognized that it was right to go to these documents that address simony in order to understand a theology of simony.

Restoring a Moral Framework for Simony

In 1984, a legal historian observed that neither bribery nor its subspecies simony have today the consistency, the stability, the extingency of a true moral concept. The problem is not that simony has completely gone away.

It is that the framework has lapsed, but there's no need for it to stay that way. If the first Reformation, if the the Reformation, the great Protestant Reformation, started over the sale of spiritual things, if we address the sale of spiritual things today, what Reformation awaits?

What good things awaits God's church as she addresses that issue? Amen.