I’ve taken a little time off from obsessive coverage of things Catholic since the invitation to argument (that sounds better than “declaration of war,” right?) I issued to certain Catholic academics and my First Things lecture on conservative Catholicism’s Francis-era crisis. But now that we’re in the New Year I want to respond to one of the most in-depth rejoinders to my forays, which was supplied by John W. Martens of the University of Saint Thomas, writing for America Magazine.

In the course of his essay — and my summary won’t do it justice, so please do read the piece in full — Professor Martens offers a broad premise about the importance of avoiding “fundamentalism” in the interpretation of New Testament passages like Jesus’s prohibition on divorce and remarriage, whose application was the central issue in the last two synods on the family in Rome (and the root of my modest disagreement with portions of the American Catholic academy). Then he proceeds to offer his own interpretation of what Jesus’s rule assumed and why it might not apply in a literal way to the present Catholic situation. And then finally he advances two models for evaluating developments in Catholic doctrine — one drawn from the New Testament, from the Council of Jerusalem’s decision not to require Gentile converts to adhere to the full Mosaic codes (a case of legalism overcome, he implies, with clear relevance to current Catholic debates), and one drawn from the arguments of a certain Joseph Ratzinger (perhaps you’ve heard of him), who argued that a Catholic reading of the gospel message and the New Testament needed to distinguish the “core” elements from the “husk,” to determine what ideas were essential and which were more adaptable or dispensable when the times seemed to demand it.

I think that these two models are quite rich; I also think that neither one offers a strong justification for adopting the proposals on communion for the divorced and remarried tacitly supported by Pope Francis and debated rather hotly by Catholic scribblers. But the models do provide a context, at least, in which Professor Martens and I could have an argument from shared premises, even if we ultimately disagree.

Unfortunately in other ways I fear the professor and I lack some of the common ground that co-religionists should share, and that his essay is illustrative of the real chasm separating the sides of the current Catholic controversy, and the difficulties involved in trying to dialogue across such a wide expanse.

This absence of common ground manifests itself in two ways. First, in discussing how we might assess biblical texts and their implications, Professor Martens seems to skip rather quickly from 50 A.D. to the 20th century, from the first apostles to the most recent pope. By which I mean that while his two models, Jerusalemite and Ratzingerian, are illuminating and important, he largely leaves out what seems like the most traditionally Catholic criteria for determining what is and isn’t “fundamentalism,” what counts as “legalism” as opposed to just fidelity, and how and whether doctrine can develop, namely: What the church has already taught on the matter.

Citing the case of the Council of Jerusalem, he proposes a kind of spiritual/sociological model for discernment of development, involving prayer, dialogue, the experience of mission work and more; citing Ratzinger, he proposes an intellectual model for discernment of development, with particular tests that might be reasonably applied. But these models, for all their potential wisdom, are also ones that any start-up Christian communion might adopt. Whereas part of the point of being Catholic — or so one might hazard — is that the church also has two thousand-odd years of prior argument, prior interpretation, and yes, prior rulings to tell us where the rough boundaries of our tradition lie.

Where matters are clearly unsettled, in other words, Martens is offering reasonable criteria to guide the church. But by only emphasizing those criteria, he seems to imply that no question is ever permanently settled, that one interpretation simply succeeds another as the church’s history unfolds.

Martens does not say this outright. The issue is one of omission: There is simply no sustained reference in his essay to the idea, running from Vincent of Lerins to John Henry Newman, that consistency of teaching and non-contradiction are important criteria for discerning when and whether doctrine can develop. Instead, the strong implication is that in every generation the Catholic Church is in roughly the same position as the nascent church of the 1st century, confronting crucial questions anew and reading the signs of the times afresh, and that the positions and teachings of the past are always up for revision when some combination of dialogue, prayer, experience and theological innovation suggests that the time has come to change.

Consider, for instance, Martens’ initial comments on why we should reject — or at least be open to rejecting — the most straightforward reading of Jesus’s words on divorce and remarriage:

Scripture is not self-interpreting … it requires the believing church. The positions taken by the Roman Catholic Church on divorce, remarriage and communion are not self-evident, but the product of numerous interpretive moves … For instance, the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches have interpreted Jesus’ teaching differently in one significant practical matter. Mark Silk points out that the Orthodox Church does allow second and even third marriages, but that a penitential path has to be followed prior to a second marriage, and this is the case even if the person seeking a second marriage is a widow or a widower, since one, indissoluble marriage is the ideal. On the other hand, in the Catholic Church, if a spouse dies, one can marry again with no questions and no problems. But given Catholicism’s understanding of the indissolubility of marriage, why should this be? Why should the death of one spouse end this marriage? There are arguments to be made for both Orthodox and Catholic positions, but that is the point: arguments and interpretations of the evidence must be advanced and different churches, neither of whom consider the other to be heretical, have taken different positions.

Now this is all true so far as it goes. But it seems to imply that today’s Catholics should approach the Catholic and Orthodox positions without giving special weight or privilege to the fact that one is actually, you know, Catholic, rooted in centuries of prior debate and controversy and decision in the “believing church” that is Roman Catholicism, while the other one is not. (And yes, the Catholic Church’s rulings on What Jesus Meant About Divorce really have been quite consistent — consistent when it was a Catholic-Orthodox difference, consistent when it became a Catholic-Protestant difference, and consistent, from the 19th century through John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio, when it became a point of tension between the church and a secularizing sexual culture.)

To write and act as if all those centuries don’t matter very much, to brush them away in favor of interpretative moves that start again at the very beginning without regard for what the church has taught in the intervening two thousand years, is to imply a vision of the church as a permanent debating society, an ongoing conversation in which no teaching is definitive so long as a reasonable and sincere Christian can make a case for the opposing view. And I do mean no teaching: After all, if the Roman Catholic view of marriage is the result of a number of interpretive moves, then so is the Roman Catholic view of purgatory, the Roman Catholic view of the priesthood, the Roman Catholic view of papal authority, the Roman Catholic view of transubstantiation, the Roman Catholic view of Mary’s assumption and her immaculate conception, and so on down a very long list. That is to say, almost every Catholic distinctive — the list that distinguishes Catholicism from Orthodoxy, the longer list that distinguishes Catholicism from the Reformed churches, the still-longer list that distinguishes Catholicism from Mormonism or Seventh-Day Adventism or Christian Science, etc. — proceeds from an argument and an interpretation of the evidence. How could it not?

And again: part of the point of being Catholic, I would have thought, is that we don’t have to keep having these arguments anew in every generation, like a megachurch in the midst of a succession crisis or coping with a superstar pastor’s theological drift; rather, we can treat past teaching as essentially reliable, and indeed treating past teaching as reliable is essential to what being Catholic means.

Now yes, not every question can be settled by precedents, the church must sometimes think and act anew, and other criteria, likes the ones that Martens invokes, can matter for present-day debates.

But the point that conservative Catholics keep pressing in the current moment, without a satisfactory response, is that when the precedents line up the way they do in the case of marriage and divorce, there is a very heavy burden of moral-theological proof resting on the innovators, one that can’t just be answered with appeals to the signs of the times and the movement of the spirit.

Otherwise Catholicism would basically be left in a perpetual year zero, in which just about any change would be possible … and, for that matter, any past development could be simply undeveloped when the time seemed ripe.

(For instance, borrowing from Martens’ own example: if a group of theologians were to come up with a clever-enough argument for why the Council of Jerusalem badly misinterpreted things, and then someone else were to come up with clever-enough argument for why asking Catholics to keep kosher and circumcise their sons will help put the Holocaust behind us and unite with our Jewish elder brothers, why shouldn’t those questions be re-opened, and the last nineteen hundred years briskly set aside? If the early church got marriage and divorce wrong, in other words, why are we so confident it got its dietary rules right?)

Some variation on this “year zero” ambition seems to be inherent in a great deal of liberal Catholic commentary these days, and to be honest I’m not quite sure how to answer it. Even read charitably, it seems shot through with an envy of the Anglican communion’s longstanding attempt at letting seemingly contradictory propositions jostle semi-permanently under the same ecclesiastical roof. And since the Anglican experiment has come to grief recently over precisely the kind of issues that liberal Catholics want to open up to present-day debate, I’m confused about their confidence that they can have their way and have the Catholic unity that they righteously invoke whenever conservatives like me worry about schisss … well, you know.

Especially since the problems involved inevitably run deeper than just sexual ethics or sacramental theology. The lack of common ground I feel reading Professor Martens only starts with his implied attitude toward the role of precedent and past authority in the development of doctrine; the deeper issue is with his interpretation of, well, Jesus. By which I mean that before he even gets to models for development of doctrine, he strongly implies that the core reason for doubting the modern applicability of Jesus’s words on divorce is that Jesus was simply wrong — or at least that he was limited by his own eschatological expectations and didn’t really expect the world in which we live to ever come to be.

Again, Martens doesn’t explicitly use the word “limited,” let alone a fraught word like “wrong.” But the thrust is clear enough:

For Jesus, the situation is not normal, as he understands the Torah “at this moment being made new…appointed and reserved for the end-time,” radicalizing even a foundational institution like marriage. Underlying Jesus’ radicalizing of marriage is that as Messiah, he will bring about the eschaton which will create the human perfection necessary to follow this new Torah. … Jesus proclaims the end of divorce because God’s kingdom is on the verge of breaking through and will soon be here. The eschatological orientation makes sense of the teaching on marriage, for now people will be able to fulfill their vows perfectly, in large part because marriage itself will soon come to an end. [emphasis mine — RD] For Jesus also says that there is no marriage in the Endzeit (Mk 12:18-25; Mt 22: 23-30; Lk 20:27-36). In reply to a question from the Sadducees regarding Levirate marriage in the world to come, Jesus rebuffs his questioners: “For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mk. 12:25; cf. Mt.22:30). This would seem to be the earliest strata of the Jesus logion and the import of it is that in God’s kingdom marriage is not required since human beings are asexual and do not reproduce. Since people live eternally, the need for procreation, the prime purpose of marriage, has come to an end. And since the question concerns those who have been married to each other, it also indicates that marriages which were contracted here on earth have also come to an end. Why bring a marriage to an end through divorce when the eschaton will soon bring the institution of marriage itself to an end?

For a scholarly response to this view of what Jesus had in mind (and other points raised by Professor Martens), I recommend reading this two-parter from Leroy Huizenga. Speaking as a layman, I would offer a simpler (cruder?) thought: If Jesus based his moral teaching about marriage on his assumption that the eschaton would arrive in the 1st century A.D. — which it rather conspicuously did not — then surely that tells us something pretty important, not just about marriage and morals, but about whether we should believe that he was actually the messiah. Indeed, the question of whether remarried Catholics can take communion is pretty small beer compared to all the other issues, moral and theological and Christological, raised by the idea that Jesus’s entire moral message is rooted in an overzealous misreading of the signs of the 1st century times. And that idea is hard to square, to put it mildly, with what Catholics and the Orthodox and confessing Protestants believe about exactly Who Jesus was and why he’s worth following in the first place.

To be clear, I am not saying that you can’t be a Christian if you believe that Jesus got important things wrong, that his human nature exposed him to errors and mistakes and misapprehensions that found their way into his teaching. I have a certain respect, indeed, for contemporary writers who are willing to grasp that nettle: I didn’t write on it when it came out, but I admired this piece by Brandon Ambrosino last year for the forthright way it dealt with the “what would Jesus think about homosexuality” question by simply arguing that not only Paul but Jesus himself had a contingent and limited-by-his-times view of sexual ethics, and that contemporary believers need to transcend the limitations imposed by Jesus’s human side — because Jesus’s divine side would want us to.

But can you be an orthodox Christian if you believe that Jesus’s teaching was shaped and stamped by all-too-human limitations? Can you be a Roman Catholic Christian?

However they answer the first question, clearly a number of Catholic theologians think the answer to the second question should be “yes.” But then it’s hard not to see the “Roman Catholicism” being envisioned as something that’s basically Anglican except more so, in which you have your semi-Arian or Deist wing over here and your high-Christology wing over there and everybody just assumes that unity matters more than orthodoxy and agrees to muddle through.

Except, again, that Anglicanism isn’t muddling through anymore, and except that a great many Catholics, living as well as dead, would look at the above description and say “that ain’t no Catholicism, bruv.”

And of course I’m one of them. Which is why, as I said in my lecture for First Things, it’s been illuminating in the Francis era for conservatives like myself to see how, well, liberal liberal Catholicism really is — how quickly partisans of reform turn revolutionary, how quickly they move from issues that really are just about discipline, to issues that touch on doctrine, to issues that go to the heart of Catholic tradition and identity, to issues that go to the heart of Jesus’s identity. And by the end of all that movement, a Catholic center that I once thought existed often seems to be crumbling away:

[What’s] been genuinely revelatory about the Francis era, however … is how weak the Catholic center remains, how quickly consensus falls apart, and how much space actually separates the center-left and center-right within the Church. Until recently I thought of myself as part of that center-right, and from that vantage point, it seemed like there was a great deal of room for Pope Francis to tack center-leftward without opening up major doctrinal debates—tackling divorce and remarriage by streamlining the annulment process and making it more available in poorer countries, stressing the social gospel a little more and the culture war a little less, appointing women to run Vatican dicasteries, even reopening debates over female deacons and married priests. On some of these fronts conservatives would have doubted, questioned, or opposed, but the debates wouldn’t have led so quickly to fears of heresy and schism. But instead, as Francis has pushed into more divisive territory, what I had thought of as the Catholic center-left has not only welcomed that push but written and spoken in ways that suggest they want to push further still—toward understandings of the sacraments, ecclesiology, and moral theology that seem less center-left than simply “left,” the purest vintage of the year of our Lord 1968 or 1975. Which perhaps reveals that I’ve actually been further “right” all along, but either way suggests a hollowness at the Catholic center, a striking lack of common ground.

Which is basically how I’m left feeling reading Professor Martens’s learned, sincere, respectful response to my columns. We clearly have some religious common ground, but in other ways the professor and I just seem to occupy very different belief structures, very different places on the continuum of Christianity — and the distance is great enough that our differences can feel less like an intra-Catholic argument and more like a kind of inter-denominational dispute.

Thus my sudden fears for the church’s unity, in the years of Francis and under papacies to come. Divisions there will always be, but these divisions are simply deeper than I had (fondly? naively?) imagined. And nothing in Catholic history suggests that the church is exempt from Jesus’s warning about a house divided, or from the consequences when those divisions can no longer be denied.