Theopedia

Vincentian Canon

Definition

The Vincentian Canon is the test that authentic Christian teaching is what has been believed “everywhere, always, and by everyone” (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est), a formula coined by the fifth-century monk Vincent of Lerins in his Commonitorium to distinguish apostolic doctrine from novel error.1 Roman Catholic theology has used it as the criterion for authenticating church tradition alongside Scripture; Reformed theology denies that any consent of the church, however catholic, can stand alongside Scripture as a rule of faith, while still treating that consent as confirmatory evidence for what Scripture already teaches.2

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter naming Vincent of Lerins or his formula. Its opening chapter, “Of the Holy Scripture,” does address the question the canon is invoked to answer: whether the church’s consent, however widespread or ancient, can share Scripture’s authority as a rule of faith. “The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the author thereof.”3 Nothing may be added to Scripture’s teaching, “whether by new revelation of the Spirit, or traditions of men.”4

The confession does grant the church’s consent a narrower role: it can move a reader toward “an high and reverent esteem” for Scripture, one argument among several (alongside “the heavenliness of the matter” and “the consent of all the parts”) for Scripture being God’s word, even though the “full persuasion and assurance” of that word’s divine authority ultimately rests on the Holy Spirit’s inward witness, not on any external testimony.5 The Westminster Confession states the same point in nearly identical wording, confirming this as the wider Reformed family’s shared position rather than a Baptist distinctive.6

Historical Development

Vincent wrote the Commonitorium around AD 434, in the generation after Augustine’s controversy with Pelagius over grace and free will. Hodge describes him as a churchman “of a different spirit” from other semi-Pelagian writers of his day: where Augustine argued from Scripture, Vincent’s “reliance was on tradition,” and he “held the highest doctrine concerning the Church,” treating communion with her as essential to salvation.1 The Commonitorium was written, in Hodge’s description, “as a guard against heresy,” collecting what the church’s teachers had said against heretics and setting out the principle for weighing any one father’s authority: a father might individually err, but concurrence “with the general drift of ecclesiastical teaching,” that is, with tradition, was to be trusted.1 The formula functioned, in its original setting, as a tool for testing Augustine’s more distinctive claims about grace against what Vincent took to be the church’s older and wider consensus, rather than as a general theory of doctrinal authority.

The canon was later taken up by Roman Catholic theology as a formal test for tradition. The Council of Trent and Robert Bellarmine, Hodge writes, made “antiquity and catholicity” (rather than the extant church’s present testimony alone) the criterion for distinguishing genuine apostolic tradition, binding alongside Scripture, from spurious tradition, “the famous rule established by Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century.”2 Nineteenth-century Roman Catholic theology produced variations on the same appeal: Johann Adam Moehler, professor at Munich, located tradition in the church’s ongoing “consciousness” of the faith rather than in an itemized deposit of unwritten teachings, glossing this as what “Vincent of Lerins intends by the ecclesiastica intelligentia.”7 Hodge notes that even on Moehler’s more subjective reading, the canon still gives the church’s living sense of the faith an authority Protestant theology reserves for Scripture alone.7

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic. Tradition is authoritative alongside Scripture, and “antiquity and catholicity,” per Vincent’s formula, is the criterion for telling genuine apostolic tradition from spurious tradition; “on all occasions … the ultimate appeal is to the decision of the Church.”2 A more subjective strand within the same tradition, represented by Moehler, locates this same authority in the church’s continuous consciousness of the faith rather than in a fixed list of unwritten doctrines, though Hodge treats both as versions of the same underlying claim: that the church’s own consent, ancient and widespread, carries binding doctrinal weight beyond what Scripture itself states.7

Reformed/Protestant. Scripture alone is the church’s rule of faith; the consent of the church, however catholic, is evidence for what Scripture teaches, not an independent source of doctrine standing beside it.3

Objections and Responses

Rome’s criterion of “antiquity and catholicity” supplies a workable test for distinguishing authentic apostolic tradition from spurious tradition. Hodge’s Protestant reply runs in three steps. First, Protestants already grant the authority of common consent among true believers, but only for the meaning of the written word and only for essential doctrines; agreement about matters outside Scripture, however widespread, settles nothing, since “the whole Christian world, without one dissenting voice, believed for ages that the Bible taught that the sun moves round the earth.”8 Second, Rome’s appeal to common consent presupposes that Roman communion is coextensive with the whole church, which begs the very question at issue rather than answering it.8 Third, even granting that assumption, the rule’s own terms fail historically, since it requires a doctrine be held not merely ab omnibus but semper: papal supremacy, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the Mass, purgatory, and the immaculate conception of Mary “can all be historically traced in their origin, gradual development, and final adoption,” rather than having been held from the beginning.9

Even without a perfect criterion, some means is needed to identify genuine apostolic tradition not recorded in Scripture, and antiquity and universality are the best available test. Hodge’s answer denies the premise: no such tradition needs identifying, because no promise exists that God would supernaturally preserve unrecorded, oral teaching across generations in the first place. Assuming such preservation “without promise and without proof, merely to suit a purpose” is “unphilosophical and irreligious”; absent that promise, “tradition cannot be a trustworthy informant of what Christ taught,” whatever criterion is proposed for sorting it.10

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin.,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 164-165. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Charles Hodge, “Chapter V. Roman Catholic Doctrine Concerning the Rule of Faith.,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 110-111. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 4. ↩ ↩2

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 6. ↩

  5. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 5. ↩

  6. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XVI. Faith.,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 59. ↩

  7. Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 114-115. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 123. ↩ ↩2

  9. Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 123-124. ↩

  10. Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 122. ↩