If Christ has promised to abide with His Church in such a way that she is protected from definitively teaching error in matters of faith and morals until His return, then indeed “Caths are right and Prots are wrong.” But your question is, essentially: Does it all boil down to infallibility/ecclesial deism? That’s an interesting question. The infallibility issue is fundamental, I agree. But a Protestant can affirm that the gates of Hades will not prevail against Christ’s Church, that Christ will be with the Church to the end of the age, that the Spirit will guide the Church into all truth, and that the Church is the pillar and ground of truth. A Protestant can affirm all that by referring these promises to the visible catholic Church, and/or to the invisible catholic Church (i.e. the set of all the elect). However, in my other recent post, “Why Protestantism has no “visible catholic Church”, I show that within Protestantism there is no visible catholic Church. Therefore, Protestants cannot apply these promises to that entity, because Protestant ecclesiology does not have such a thing, references to it not withstanding.

But Protestants can apply these promises to the invisible Church. In my ecclesial deism article (or at least in the comments there) I pointed out that my argument presupposed recognizing that Christ founded a visible Church. So another key point of difference here, between Catholics and Protestants, concerns the nature of the Church Christ founded. Did He found a visible catholic Church, or did He found only an invisible catholic Church? Because if He founded only an invisible catholic Church, then the visible one that we find in the fathers of the first three or four centuries is a man-made counterfeit, an earthly substitute for a spiritual entity, and in that case there is absolutely no reason to expect that man-made abomination to be teaching orthodoxy at all, let alone be protected from error. But if Christ founded a visible catholic Church, then the promises regarding the Church attach to it. In that case it is that visible catholic Church that will remain and prevail through the rest of the age, until Christ returns, and that is the pillar and ground of truth, and so forth. And in order for the visible catholic Church to be that sort of thing, until Christ returns, it needs to be protected from falling into heresy or apostasy. And that means that her teaching office needs to be protected in this way. It also means that her authority must derive in an organic way from Christ, and hence a visible catholic Church requires apostolic succession, otherwise, there is no divinely authorized teaching office (apart from miracle-working prophets showing up from time to time).

So, I agree with you that the infallibility/ecclesial deism difference is fundamental, but I also think that the respective ecclesiologies are playing a role as well, as well as the respective ground of ecclesial authority whether through apostolic succession or through apostolic doctrine as determined by our own interpretation of Scripture. If we [Catholics] had no good reason to trust the teaching office of the Church, then it seems like our position and practice would by default be like that of Protestants. We would subject every teaching and declaration of the Church to the judgment of our own interpretation of Scripture, and we would congregate with other believers who taught that form of doctrine and worship which most closely matched our interpretation of Scripture, etc. It would be the anti-thesis of catholicity; it would be more like Babel. But, without trust in the Church, we would not know with certainty which books truly belonged to the canon. (And yes, I read Ridderbos’ book in seminary.) And without knowing the canon of Scripture, we could not subject the teachings of the Church to the test of our of own interpretation of Scripture. So, without trusting the Church, at least in some respect, whether ad hoc or not, we could not even be Christians.

In the peace of Christ,

- Bryan

My question is whether and, if so, how you would distinguish “the final interpretive authority of the individual within the church” from the right and duty of the individual to interpret a communication for himself. I continue to appreciate your taking the time and effort to respond.

We live in a society in which it is now common to assume that if some people do something, then all persons have a natural right to do it. Rights language is used everywhere. People think they have a natural right to marry persons of the opposite sex, or to have an abortion, or to purchase pornography, or to receive free healthcare, etc. When such claims are made, in my opinion it is important to back up, and ask how we know that we have such a right. In other words, we need to examine the basis for knowing that the practice in question is truly a right.

Interpreting any form of communication takes place in our mind. It is hard to imagine how someone could interfere with the act of interpreting, except by not allowing access to the communication, or by preventing people from acquiring the skill necessary to interpret it, or by creating a context in which thought was impossible (e.g. jackhammer outside your window, or screaming baby two doors down). But that’s not the issue here, when we are talking about final or highest interpretive authority.

The exercise of interpretive authority by the Magisterium, say at an ecumenical council, does not prevent believers from interpreting Scripture or any other communication. Nor does it withhold from them the skill by which to interpret Sacred revelation. On the contrary, the exercise of this teaching and interpretive authority provides a supernatural light by which the believer ought to interpret Scripture. We ignore or disregard that interpretive authority at our peril, because it is God-given authority, for our good (Heb 13:17).

We do have a duty to learn Scripture. But we have no duty to interpret Scripture-apart-from-the-guidance-of-the-Church or to interpret Scripture in defiance of the guidance of the Church. Instead, our duty in interpreting and understanding Scripture is to approach it very much as we approach the Eucharist offered to us by the Church: in humility and gratitude, and with a recognition that Christ, through the instrument of His Church, is giving this gift-of-Self to me, not so that I can do my own thing, but so that I can participate in something His Body is already doing, and has been doing for almost two-thousand years. For this reason, the responsibility of the student of Scripture should not be seen as in tension with the divinely-established interpretive authority of the Church, just as the responsibility of the Ethiopian eunuch to seek to understand the book of Isaiah was not in tension with the interpretive authority of Philip the deacon. The eunuch would have been acting against his responsibility had he ignored Philip or insisted that he knew better how to interpret Scripture than did the apostles and deacons. It was precisely the eunuch’s obligation to seek to understand Scripture that called him to receive in humble submission the guidance and instruction of those whom Christ had authorized (through ordination) to teach in His Name. And so it is for us today. Tertullian’s words are relevant here:

“Our appeal [in debating with the heretics], therefore, must not be made to the Scriptures; nor must controversy be admitted on points in which victory will either be impossible, or uncertain, or not certain enough. For a resort to the Scriptures would but result in placing both parties on equal footing, whereas the natural order of procedure requires one question to be asked first, which is the only one now that should be discussed: “With whom lies that very faith to which the Scriptures belong? From what and through whom, and when, and to whom, has been handed down that rule by which men become Christians? For wherever it shall be manifest that the true Christian rule and faith shall be, there will likewise be the true Scriptures and expositions thereof, and all the Christian traditions” (Tertullian, On Prescription against the Heretics, 19)

“Since this is the case, in order that the truth may be adjudged to belong to us, ‘as many as walk according to the rule,’ which the church has handed down from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God, the reason of our position is clear, when it determines that heretics ought not to be allowed to challenge an appeal to the Scriptures, since we, without the scriptures, prove that they have nothing to do with the Scriptures. For as they are heretics, they cannot be true Christians, because it is not from Christ that they get that which they pursue of their own mere choice, and from the pursuit incur and admit the name of heretics. Thus not being Christians, they have acquired no right to the Christian Scriptures; and it may be very fairly said to them, ‘Who are you?’” (Tertullian, On Prescription against the Heretics, 37)

The reason the heretic does not have the “right” to the Christian Scriptures, is that these Scriptures were not entrusted to him. The heretic is, in a sense, trespassing on someone else’s territory when he deigns to say what Scripture means. According to Tertullian, to acquire the ‘right’ to Scripture, one must be a Christian. Who then, was a Christian? St. Augustine explains:

Ask a man, Are you a Christian? His answer to you is, I am not, if he is a pagan or a Jew. But if he says, I am; you inquire again of him, Are you a catechumen or a believer? If he reply, A catechumen; he has been anointed, but not yet washed. (Tractates on the Gospel of John, 44)

In other words, to acquire the right to Scripture, one must be either in the Church, or at least a Catechumen (in preparation for baptism). And that meant recognizing the teaching and interpretive authority of those bishops who had received the Scriptures and the apostolic tradition from their predecessors, back to the Apostles themselves.

In the peace of Christ,

- Bryan

So in the scripture we have texts like: “..for the Father is greater than I.” (John 14:28). ‘I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30).

The Church has a boundary. Christ is not a “lesser god” or a created quasi-god nor is Christ a different “mode” of God. Arianism and modalism would be examples of going beyond interpretive boundaries, even though surface, the text might seem to agree with their interpretations.

Are there penal sanctions other than excommunication that the Church may rightfully use to enforce her laws and to coerce her offending members?

Yes. You can read about them in the section of canon law from 1311 through 1399. But none of them is as severe as excommunication, and I’m guessing that that is what you are wanting to know.

In the peace of Christ,

- Bryan