Here’s the second posting of the same content, originally put on the “I Love the Orthodox too much to be Orthodox” thread.

Your ecclesiastical “problem of the criteria” seems to resemble some skeptical arguments and skeptical though-experiments. It reminds me of the problem of how to distinguish between different physical objects. We all have a relatively good idea of what the difference is between one object and another; but this isn’t because we have formulated perfectly general criteria for what constitutes one physical object as different from another before we start looking at the world. Instead we start with an awareness of the differences between physical objects. We can immediately identify many particular cases of physical objects. And then we can formulate plausible criteria that capture most of the cases. But criteria have their limits, and there are always some counterexamples, or apparent counterexamples, or potential counterexamples (on this point, and the suggestion that follows, I am partly indebted to the excellent book “Reason in the Absence of Rules”). But we can get past these counterexamples by developing in our own awareness of physical objects. We learn when the criteria apply and when they don’t by developing our intellectual and sensory abilities in an intellectually virtuous way. This also involves interaction with people that are more intellectually virtuous than we are, and imitation of them in an attempt to learn the requisite intellectual skills. As always, a healthy dose of particularism can cure skepticism; methodism is a placebo.

I think the same thing goes for how we identify institutions and how we identify an institution’s official teachings. The fact that there’s not universal agreement on what precisely the criteria are for identifying the teaching of the Church doesn’t seem to have any effect on whether we can in fact identify the teaching in a way similar to how we identify the teaching of any institution. We start with some particular obvious cases of people in an institution, and then build criteria that seem to roughly capture our idea of how we identified these people as members. Then we increase in our familiarity of that institution so as to know how to apply the rules correctly and catch the exceptions to those rules. Its not hard to figure out some of the basic things that Orthodoxy teaches and who some of its adherents are. And you can go from there and get quite a ways without running into constant ambiguity (even if there are some isolate cases where you’re not 95% sure who’s in and who’s out).

I don’t think a Roman Catholic is in any better of a situation either, because one must use common sense to identify the fact that the criteria given by the Pope in Vatican I and elsewhere are indeed official teaching. This can be brought out by the question, “Why think that the Pope, instead of some council held in South America, is the formal official teacher of the Roman Church?” Consider someone named Bob who has never met a Roman Catholic before, or heard what Rome’s stance on any issue is. This person meets two Catholic theologians—Hans and Joseph—walking in a park, who begin to tell him about Rome’s teachings. Hans is a bizarre heterodox Catholic, who says that Councils can trump the Pope in a way incompatible with Vatican I’s decree. Joseph is theologically conservative and tells the standard teaching of Vatican I as is. How does Bob figure out if Hans or Joseph is right? It might seem like the answer is “by checking what the Pope says in Vatican I”; but remember that Bob doesn’t know that the Pope is the official teacher of Rome yet. How would Bob get over the conflicting sources of information that tell him divergent things? I think its by the same process of institution-familiarization that I am talking about above. It would be no problem to figure out what’s going on, because he can simply go check what the vast majority of Rome’s previous documents and teachers—especially the ones that present themselves as official and foundational—say about the subject, and who they recognize as the official spokesperson. One will be able to detect a kind of deference to papal authority. And with enough familiarization with the various people that acknowledge papal authority, you can figure out that these guys are not the exception to the rule, but that they correctly perceive the actual teachings of the Roman Church.

And a similar Bob problem can be made for how to identify the existence of the Roman Church. Suppose Bob meets two people, both claiming to be Roman Catholic priests. But they are not in communion with each other. One claims that his group (which is actually schismatic) is the Roman Church; the other (who is not schismatic) is in the Roman Church. Both present various arguments, and Bob can’t immediately tell the difference between them. Does this mean Bob can’t ultimately figure out what the Roman Church is? No, it just means he needs common sense and experience of the institutions and documents in question to discern real from apparent instances of the Roman Church. He would need to look for a time in history when the Roman Church’s identity was easy to locate, and then trace a continuity of structure and aim to one of several competing claimants among present day hierarchies.

In terms of having formulated criteria for how you identify the Orthodox Church, one suggestion that seems plausible is that we have an implicit criteria for knowing what the Church is in the ecclesiology of Fathers like Clement, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Hippolytus, etc. when they speak about continuity of doctrine and continuity of the episcopacy via succession. But again, our ability to recognize that there exists such a criteria depends on a kind of common-sense approach to how we identify the official teaching of a visible society. And it depends on our ability to identify the doctrine of a given institituion. With sufficient familiarity, this is no problem usually. And again, we have St. Vincent to thank for criteria for teaching-identification; and the receptivity that later theologians had to his ideas help signify that his is indeed the official view.

And if I were Bob, researching in a library, coming across competing *apparently representative, official* Roman statements about the relationship between Rome and the East couldn’t I say that Roman theologians don’t agree about whether the East is a group of real churches or not? For aren’t there probably some weird, exceptional, perhaps hyper-traditionalist or pre-Vatican II Catholics that would claim that the official teaching of Rome is that the East is in heresy and schism? I’m not saying such people are right, or likely to be right, or that we should listen to them as though they are actually representative voices. All I’m saying is it takes common sense and experience to figure out that they aren’t to be taken seriously. And similarly, it takes some common sense and experience to figure out what’s official Orthodox teaching. So I think we are at least equal on this point; I don’t think Rome has an advantage.

Also, would your above argument have been a principled reason for choosing Rome over the East pre Vatican I? And even if I’m wrong about common sense and experience putting us on even playing field, if the Orthodox formulated explicit criteria, couldn’t that change things so that we are evenly-matched?

What Tim and Ray have said is correct, but I think something needs to be added for precision’s sake. That addition will serve just as well as an answer to Caleb, who spoke of the need for “ecclesial definition.”

There actually is an enumerable set of dogmas solemnly defined by general councils and popes. Those dogmas are “irreformable” not because they admit of no improvement or clarification—many do—but in virtue of having been infallibly propounded with the Church’s full authority as truths which, commanding the assent of all the faithful, may never be gainsaid. Those definitions are exercises of what theologians call the Church’s “extraordinary magisterium” (EM). But not all truths infallibly taught by the Church have defined by the EM. In fact, the Church infallibly held and taught the entire deposit of faith, with varying degrees of clarity and explicitness, before there ever were any dogmatic definitions of the sort I’ve just described. The first were at the Council of Nicaea in 325—well over two centuries after the death of the last apostle. And given the nature of the subject matter, the EM will never manage to frame the entire deposit of faith in the form of a list of technically precise propositions we can run down and check off.

The purpose of the EM’s dogmatic definitions is to clarify and make more explicit some aspect of the Church’s faith that turns out to be unclear to many people, thus giving rise to potentially church-dividing controversies about what that aspect of the Church’s faith means. Most such definitions are formulated as responses to heresies that force the Church to be clearer about what it is she is committed to affirming (or denying). In the past, most such heresies were about articles of faith as distinct from moral tenets. Nowadays, however, most are about morality, and most of those are about sexual morality. The invention of the Pill, I think, had a great deal to do with bringing about this situation; but that is a matter for sociology, not theology. The theological point is that there is huge controversy in the Church about sexual morality partly because no moral tenet has ever been solemnly defined as a dogma. So if the Church has infallibly taught some such tenets—and Catholics as such must say that she has—that must be be because the “ordinary and universal magisterium” (OUM) of the bishops, with the pope as their heard, has so taught. And the same goes, of course, for truths of faith not so defined.

Now the criterion for identifying infallibly defined dogmas, and the application of that criterion, are reasonably clear and consensual. There is also a magisterially stated criterion for identifying a doctrine as having been infallibly set forth by the OUM. But the criteria for applying it are not nearly so clear.

Vatican II said:

Although the individual bishops do not enjoy the prerogative of infallibility, they nevertheless proclaim Christ’s doctrine infallibly whenever, even though dispersed through the world, but still maintaining the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter, and authentically teaching matters of faith and morals, they are in agreement on one position as definitively to be held.

There is disagreement among Catholic theologians about precisely how to apply that criterion. Some doctrines clearly satisfy it, such as the doctrine that the death-and-resurrection of Christ won grace “sufficient” for the salvation of each and every human person (whether every person accepts that grace is of course another matter). The Apostles’ Creed is another example of a set of affirmations infallibly held by the Church as a whole and infallibly taught by the OUM. But many are controversial: e.g., that the direct, voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral, or that certain sorts of sexual acts are always gravely immoral. Indeed, the only time that Rome has explicitly applied the stated criterion was to defend the the doctrine that the Church has no authority to confer priestly ordination on women, enunciated in that form by John Paul II in 1994. The following year, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, speaking for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, asserted that said doctrine had been “infallibly set forth” by the OUM because it was “founded on the written word of God, and constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church.” In saying that, Ratzinger explicitly cited and applied the criterion I’ve quoted from Vatican II above. Needless to say, some theologians demur.

The main conceptual difficulty making continued controversy possible is that the Church can never fully enunciate how to apply the stated criterion for the infallibility of the OUM. If she could, then the Magisterium would be superfluous: all and only the “infallible” doctrines could be formulated and identified as such by the right software working on the agreed data-set. But the Magisterium is by no means superfluous: its authority is charismatic, not mechanical or academic. And that, as Tim and Ray have pointed out in their own ways, is just as the nature of the subject matter calls for.

Best,
Mike

I think your question is quite reasonable from your vantage point. A Catholic, however, doesn’t need to ask such a question (I’ll explain) except in the hair-splitting advanced theological inquiry I mentioned above regarding potential degrees of magisterial authority. But this isn’t the proper place or set of persons for such an inquiry. The question at hand is more fundamental.

Has a list been made up of “Infallible Things the Catholic Church has Said”?

I’m sure there have been some such lists. Denzinger has a compendium of Catholic Dogma up through Pope Pius XII, and some more modern compendiums exist. Debate (of the more advanced kind I mean) can and does occur regarding which documents and to what degree are considered infallible. But all of that is aside from our basic concern.

The question you asked is not a Catholic one because it assumes from the outset a sort of Protestant framework re: the nature of revelation – that revealed truth is a set of propositions that can be put on display in a Church history museum or taken into the theology lab for testing. (Imagery) Ray S. had some insightful things to say along these lines in this post. I highly recommend his comments 19 & 26.

The living Church faithfully delivers the Word of God to her children. The proper Catholic attitude is one of active faith in Jesus Christ through obedience to the Church and an on-going self sacrifice of the intellect. This is a sacrifice not of man’s right to reason, but of man’s “right” to reason apart from the mind of the Church – i.e. apart from Christ. This sacrifice is what Paul speaks of – “bringing every thought captive to Christ.” We do so by an active submission to the magisterium of the Church.

Now I’m not saying that you have any faulty intent in your approach; it is quite logical given your theology. But it doesn’t work for Catholics; we can’t give a solid Catholic answer to an inherently Protestant question. To look for a list of all inerrant statements from the magisterium to take and hold in your hand is something like looking for a way to retain sola scriptura and just consider the magisterial voice as a sort of an appendix to scripture.

In asking this question, it feels to me like we want to take God’s Word, lay it on a table, and conquer it (by making it our own). This is not the Catholic way. Rather, we lay ourselves (heart, mind, body and soul) at the feet of Christ’s altar (which is found in the Church) and submit our judgment to be conquered by God’s Word.

Does that make sense? I think if you’re really looking for the nuts and bolts – it will require a much more technical answer.

Thanks so much for your prompt response. No, that didn’t muddy the waters at all, in fact, it helped out a bunch, thanks.

You know, I actually realized something new (well, new for me) based on your response and that is the necessity of ecclesial definition. That is, in the case of defining and proclaiming truth, a church as understood as the sum total of an egalitarian laity could not escape this “truth” being based on a mere majority consensus under which they couldn’t submit and follow in the literal senses of the words.

Hm.

Well, you all have a great weekend.

I have finals to study for.

-Caleb

Welcome to CtC. :-) Hope to see you around as we all seek after
God’s truth. (Well, to be perfectly honest, I’m seeking after God’s truth
and some lunch right about now too…) ;-)

Tim,

Can you help a Protestant out a wee bit? Has a list been made up
of “Infallible Things the Catholic Church has Said”? I know church
council and Ex Cathedra pronouncements are infallible, but are there
any other infallible church proclamations? (Fr’instance, are papal bulls
infallible too?)

I guess I’ve got a decent idea behind what infallibility is, its entailments,
etc…I’m just trying to figure out which pronouncements are infallible, or
how one tells whether a given pronouncement is infallible. Any
help would be appreciated, and much thanks :-)

Sincerely,
Benjamin =)

Thanks for visiting CTC and I hope to see you around here more often. I’ve read several of your blog posts – excellent!

So this magisterium business.

First let’s just clarify that a statement is either true or false and is not properly called fallible or infallible except by virtue of a reference to the agent from which that statement originated. I could say “Turn the other cheek” is an infallible statement only in reference to its source (Scripture/Christ). If I considered the statement only, I can only say that it’s true (or reject it and say that it’s false). I’m sure you already knew that- just clarifying.

The question here is: when and how does it go from being a statement (that could be wrong) to a statement that we are required to affirm de fide because it is received from an infallible source? The magisterium is the sacred teaching authority of the Church. It is the voice of the Church as Church . On a fundamental level, this is simpler than we often make it out to be (although there can be legitimate questions of magisterial grades of authority and possibly even infallibility, but I believe that is something far beyond the question at hand).

So a doctrine becomes “infallible” (in the sense mentioned above) when it is affirmed by the magisterium. What does that look like? It looks like the Church speaking as Church. The biblical model of this is the Jerusalem council of Acts 15. The bishops (apostles) of the universal Church gather in union with St. Peter to definitely bind the conscience of the entire Church – this is the fullness of the magisterial act.

We say that the magisterium is infallible by virtue of it being the sacred teaching authority of the Church because the Church is infallible. We don’t need to look for a complicated, invisible, nuanced network of persons or offices to find the magisterium; we just need to look at the (visible) Church.

A PCA pastor says, “Infants shouldn’t be baptized.” Joe takes it that the PCA rejects infant baptism. You say, “Wait Joe, he might be a pastor but he doesn’t speak for the PCA.” You’re correct about this and you know how to find the voice of the PCA. So you have pointed to the ‘magisterium’ of the PCA as the authentic voice of the denomination and there’s relatively little ambiguity there. In the case of the PCA, this is not an affirmation on your part that the doctrine of infant baptism is infallible because you do not believe that the PCA is infallible. But on our part, since we believe the Church herself (as herself) is infallible, it follows that when the Church speaks as herself (i.e. using her magisterial voice) then those statements are infallible.

St. Athanasius’s doctrines became ‘infallible’ when and insofar as the Church (qua Church) affirmed them. (Of course they had always been true.)

Does this help clarify our position or does it muddy the water? :-)

So this is my first comment here at CTC and as Reformed PCA-er who has been becoming rather restless as of late, the various resources here have indeed brought me some clarification. So thank you. I have had this question and I guess this is the best article on which to ask it.

Basically, I have understood the conceptual definition of the Church’s Magisterium but have found myself desiring to know what it really is. How does the Church define her Magisterium?

Secondly, and related to that question, you all have said that the infallibility of the Church does not entail that every theologian/bishop/etc. is necessarily exempt from error. That being said, when do certain doctrines that have been elaborated by the graceful illumination of the Doctors of the Church, fallible in and of themselves, become something other than their own theories by acquiring a place within the Magisterium? In other words, when did the insights of St. Athanasius (a fallible individual) on Christ’s Incarnation become not just the theories of a brilliant scholar, but infallibly a part of the Church’s Living Tradition?

Thanks,

Pax Christi,

Caleb Roberts

This (Jewish) article throws an interesting wrench into the discussion. Here are the opening lines:

There is a review in the new issue of First Things of a book by a Protestant scholar on papal infallibility (link – subscription required). To my surprise, mainly due to my ignorance of Catholic history, there are a number of thought-provoking similarities between papal infallibility and Da’as Torah.

(Emphasis added)

I realize that the lion’s share of the argument in this thread (Tradition and Lexicon) has centered around the philosophical dilemma within a Protestant paradigm regarding the distinction between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. In the end (with a substantial amount of additional argumentation), we Catholics believe that an infallible magisterium (in fact, the Catholic Magisterium) answers to this philosophical dilemma.

Of course, Catholics have many other (one might say more concrete) reasons for our faith in the Magiseterium such as NT biblical exegesis, the patristic witness, etc. Naturally, establishing the relation of an infallible magisterium in the New Covenant (NC) to the authority figures of the Old Covenant (OC), is something we can expect our separated brethren to inquire about. In fact, elucidating this relation is quite helpful when employing meta-historical terms such as “the family of God” or “the people of God” as used in the lead article (Tradition and Lexicon). .

Thus, as per your suggestion, I read carefully your excellent exchange with professor White within the Solo/Sola thread; discussing the continuities/discontinuities between the OC and NC understanding of authority / infallibility etc. If I may, I would like to highlight a few posts from your exchange with a view toward summarizing a concern derived from the same:

Dr. Liccione:

”To be sure, there were always legitimate, duly recognized authorities in the OC, which is why Jesus preached (Matt 23): “The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice.” That such authorities were not preserved from error, and did not think of themselves as so preserved, when they pronounced on disputed matters of doctrine, was not a flaw of the OC

Andrew Presslar:

”Perhaps you have already discussed this, but allow me to wonder out loud whether the ongoing possibility of further revelation to ancient Israel obviated the need for an infallible Magisterium. That is, if those who had been endowed with the OT magisterium did attempt to bind the people of God in a definitive way to doctrinal error, God could raise up a prophet with new revelation to correct course. This is indeed what happened”

Professor White:

”To this point, I’ve learned that there are continuities and discontinuities between the pre-NC era and the NC era. Among those discontinuities is the absence of an infallible Magisterium from the pre-NC era. To my mind, this yields a hermeneutical situation indistinguishable from the lead article’s description of sola scriptura, and so I sought confirmation of that observation”

Question summary:
The fact that the OC authorities may not have understood themselves to possess any infallible charism does not imply that they, in fact, were not protected from error. In fact, one might argue that many of the OC authorities, such as Moses and the Prophets, DID know that their teaching was free from error due to the dramatic and direct way in which God communicated His revelation to them (burning bush / stone tablets / direct visions / etc.). Nonetheless, whether they, subjectively, had such an awareness is beside the point. It appeared to me, as I read through the exchange, that both you and Andrew P. believe that nothing akin to infallibility (or protection from error) actually accompanied the OT authorities. But I am not convinced that this is true based on the contents of the exchange. When we make the careful distinction between infallibility and impeccability (as we do in the case of the NC Magisterium), and then apply this distinction to the authority figures of the OC; it seems to me that something like infallibility remains standing – and even stands out. You stated in the exchange that the Jews could assess when their leaders were failing to live up to the OC law – but this only amounts to a lack of impeccability. Andrew P. states that “God could raise up a prophet with new revelation to correct course. This indeed happened”. Clearly, the prophets corrected the behavior of Israel and its authorities (showcasing their lack of impeccability), but is there a single case where they “corrected” some errant teaching of Moses and the law, or some prior “teaching” of a Patriarch, Judge, or Prophet? Surely, the entire OT is a showcase concerning God’s efforts to call His people back to fidelity to the covenant – but I do not see any of the OC authorities teaching error; that is “teaching” something that subsequently faced correction and revision. I think of how closely God seems to identify the teaching of Moses with His own teaching. At times, it is difficult, when reading through the Pentateuch, to distinguish between Moses’ teaching and God’s – they appear, for all practical purposes, to have been received by the people as equivalent.

Further, Jesus statement (in the first post above) concerning the chair of Moses looks VERY MUCH like an affirmation of something akin to infallibility – while clearly pointing out the lack of impeccability. The Gospels also give us Caiaphas the high priest (clearly not impeccable) prophesying truly precisely BECAUSE he held the office of high priest. My bottom line is that I still do not see where a single OC authority corrected or revised any prior TEACHING of an OC authority – the correction seems always to rest on the side of praxis. IF, and this is a big if, I am correct in this assessment; we would have strong grounds for showing a powerful CONTUINITY, rather than discontinuity, between authority figures in the OC and NC in relation to teaching authority. Such a continuity, along with all the other proto-catholic continuities, might have significant apologetic value. Thus, I am hesitant to concede that which the data might not lead us to concede: namely the reflexive assumption that God managed the transmission of revelation in the OC through authorities who spoke fallibly with regard to matters of faith and morals. If they did not, then they did not. In such case, Dr. White’s assessment that: “Among those discontinuities is the absence of an infallible Magisterium from the pre-NC era” – would be wrong.

I am entirely prepared to acknowledge where my thinking is amiss on this issue. I only want to insure that the “fact” of fallibility in the OC is, in fact, a fact.

Pax et Bonum,

-Ray

Thanks for the discusssion – God’s blessings upon you and yours!

-Ray